Informaton for display at a terminal apparatus of a computer is stored in blocks the first part of which contains the information which is actually displayed at the terminal and the second part of which contains information relating to the display and which may be used to influence the display at the time or in response to a keyboard entry signal.
Yes, but hyperlinks are written with the meta information FIRST and the text information SECOND.
As written, this would only cover hyper links
if they were written like this:
<A> text </A HREF="http://www.example.com/">
Also, the definition of "block" could be important; when this patent was originally
written, I suspect "block" was intended to refer to some fixed number of bytes, not variable
length markup. In fact, this patent sounds
suspiciously, from the abstract, like it is
a patent on the IBM 3270 terminal.
Though as someone else pointed out, that is just the abstract and not the claims.
The horse-drawn carriage association (HDCA) lobbied congress to institute legislation to prevent the sale of automobiles?
The typewriter manufacturers lobbied congress to
prevent the introduction of computers, as it would
hurt the sales of typewriters? [On the countrary, the most successful typewriter manufacturer became the largest computer manufacturer (for a while, anyway)].
Witchdoctors had lobbied congress to prevent medical science as it would hurt their business.
The recording industry itself would not exist if
local musicians had successfully lobbied congress arguing that mass produced music would cut down
on business for local musicians.
New technologies will ultimately wipe out industries that do not adapt. Deal.
Oh, and there is a reason why digital radio won't hurt the RIAA basket case industries much: Clear Channel Communications (the corporate world's answer to "dead air"). With such short playlists you could only record an hours worth of music -
and why would you want to record them anyway since they are repeated every hour, anyway. We actually had a radio station locally that as a promotion once decided to play every song in their library in alphabetical order. It was a tremendous improvement even if it only lasted a few weeks.
Normally, they played short play lists (and they were bought by clear channel). Station management explained that surveys showed the average listener only listed for about 15 minutes a day and the radio station needed to give them the most popular songs when they tuned in. Kinda becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Now, it would be interesting if someone came up with a way to make digital radio a viable distribution mechanism (particularly for
car players). Unfortunately, this would
probably require at least a light handed form
of DRM or players would be sold that would
defeat the financial viability.
For example, you have
a car radio with a built in hard drive that can
store songs and buttons that you can press to indicate if you like or don't like the songs.
The radio plays songs intersperced with commercials (as separate OGG files).
But the radio remembers which songs you have said in
the past you do or don't like so when the radio
station broadcasts one which you don't like it substitutes one which you do like which was
recorded on the hard disk. Further, the radio
learns which genres and artists you do and don't like and preferentially records those when broadcast. Eventually, your radio is mostly
ignoring the audio stream from the station while
playing songs you indicate you liked or ones it
predicts you will like. The radio mixes in
the commercials from radio channels in proportion to the percentage of songs played from those channels. Now, radio stations have an incentive
to broadcast a wide variety of music. And
the consumer could be given a choice to purchase
songs already downloaded (for a reasonable price
of, say,$0.50 each). When you played a purchased song, the player would remove the radio station
commercial tag. The radio could remain
powered on for a specified time after you turned of the ignition recording additional songs.
Also, the radio system could have more bandwidth
than needed so it could stream songs faster than
real time alowing even radios with limited storage
to excercise some degree of selection.
Each song transmitted would have a commercial
price (say 0.20 units) and a station id. Each
time a song was played the palyer would credit that price to a particular station's talley and once it reached 1.00 units the player would play a recent commercial from that station (and then deduct the price (1.00) of that commercial) from
the total. Longer commercials could have a higher price and shorter ones a smaller price, and likewise for songs. Stations (and other distributers) would kick back a portion of
the advertiser revenue to artists and artists
would kick back a portion of the song sales
revenue to the distributor.
Maybe more pop
You may find the
Mind machine FAQ
helpful. There are a lot of machines out there, some of which which cost considerably less than the novadreamer
($500 with bundled materials) and while they may not be as compact many of them are probably a lot more adjustable. I have not had the opportunity to try a mind machine as a sleep inducer but I did
try one at a spa and can confirm that they do
mess with your head and stimulate interesting
mental imagery.
Brain Wave Software
is also availble for windoze (emulator compatible)
with a 30 day trial. Note that flashing a computer screen is not as good as LED glasses which can flash over a wider range of frequencies without beating with the screen refresh frequency
or being effected by phosphor decay and also
the LED glasses work with your eyes closed.
Ok, so 5 days ago we hear that the city of Baltimore is going to delete all of its old email because
they can't afford the disk space to store it. And now they
want to add hundreds or thousands of cameras?
Any idea how much storage those will require?
Ok, they get some federal grants but doesn't
it seem like priorities are a little off here?
Maybe they should just keep all the porn spam they would otherwise be deleting and unblock voyeurweb
on the city firewalls so they don't have do go
around leering non-consensually at members of the public.
Some people pointed out the difference between public and private spaces and that we had a right
to expect privacy in private spaces and not in public spaces. However, that depends on your
income. If you have a lot of money, you live
in your own place with no housemates (except
perhaps spouse and kids) and rent hotels for affairs, so your house is private.
If you don't have a lot of
money, however, you may have 3 roomates, parents,
grandparents, etc. and you may go out in "public" (say to a park) in order to get some "privacy".
In poor neighborhoods, the cameras will be owned
by the state. In rich neighborhoods, the cameras
will be owned by the residents.
What happens when they integrate face recognition
technology and can track people everywhere? Except the ones who take the trouble to wear masks? Robbers will wear ski masks. Terrorists
will wear hollywood style identity concealing
but human looking masks.
Right now, most of the cameras are in private hands and the government has to ASK for the tapes.
And they can't run real time face recognition
networks.
And as far as detering crime, serious criminals - let alone terrorists and suicide bombers - are not dettered by cameras. A camera is not going to
run up and save your ass like an actual beat cop
might. On the other hand, it has
a chilling effect on people who engage in victimless "crimes" like smoking a joint, having a little sex behind the bushes, streaking, and pissing on a tree because you couldn't walk all the way home.
If you drive around on public roads, you have a reasonable expectation that police may see some portion of your activities. On the other hand, if a policeman rides your bumper all day long, you have serious issues of harrasment and discriminatory enforcement. Not to mention
they will make you so nervous you will become
distracted and violate some traffic reg.
A friend once demonstrated that he could induce
other drivers to drive off the road (at least he
did it on safe streatches of road) by getting
them to look in the rear view mirror by doing
things like riding their ass. And a driver
looking in the rear view mirror doesn't realize it but he is now following the car behind him. If
that car drives off the road, so will he. Excessive public surveilence is like riding
your bumper except you don't even know when you are being singled out and can't get a restraining order or take precautions. Will Driving While Black be replaced by Walking While Black?
But if you never do anything the religious right
would object to and you think your government
can always be trusted, then you can
ignore the issue. Might I suggest you spend the
time saved in such frivolous pursuits as watching a movie:
The Fugative
,
Minority Report
,
Dark Angel
,
Blade Runner
,
Brazil
;
or reading a book:
1984,
Fahrenheit 451,
or
Brave New World.
And that is all just light fiction. It is the
non-fiction that will really creep you out.
And actually, it would improve BOTH battery life and reception, since receiving a signal doesn't require any more or less power based on the antenna or incoming signal strength (excepting preamps). All other things being equal, if you decrease the transmit power, increase the antenna gain (which gives a gain for both receive and transmit), then you use less power overall, but can output an equivalent signal.
Actually, your reasoning is a little flawed here.
Yes, you would get improved tower to phone reception
even if you reduced power proportional to antenna
gain improvement but that degree of transmitter power reduction would cancel out the improvement in phone to tower reception. Since
the radio signals have to travel in both directions to make a phone call, you still have
to trade off reception vs power. However, the
cell phone will probably do that for you automatically, since cell towers command phones
to reduce power (so they don't interfere with
other phones by causing receiver distortion) if
the tower gets a signal more powerful than it needs. You will get your improved reception
and improved battery life but not necessarily
at the same time:
5X reception, 1X battery life,
1X reception, 5X battery life,
2X reception, 2.5X battery life,
etc.
I was looking into putting a linux box into my car, and make something similar. I couldn't find any good mapping programs for linux that covered the USA, and also gave driving directions. Are there any?
I replaced the sun visor in my Honda Element with an i-opener running linux. The mapping software I use is "roadmap" which uses census department maps. The i-opener has been supplemented with a rayming TN-200 USB GPS receiver, a metal box, a hard drive, rs-232 serial adapter (for future APRS use), and an infrared wireless keyboard with built in pointing device attached to the steering wheel with velcro. It doesn't do autorouting but I have not found that to be a problem in actual use.
I haven't yet implemented the referrer strings thingy, and I registered chongqed.org instead of searchenginespammers.net, but the idea is the same.
Good for you! However, it looks like your current linking strategy would just give chongqed.org a high page rank for those keywords whereas the strategy I was outlining would give a high page rank to a page that named the spammer in the title. It is
important that the spammers be readily identified
by someone reading the search results not by having to visit an anti-spam site.
Simulated search results for "viagra":
Viagra for less!
www.cheapviagra.com
Buy viagra for less! No prescription!
Half price viagra!
www.halfpriceviagra.com
Viagra only $3.29 per dose!
Official Site: VIAGRA (sildenafil citrate) - Information About...
Pfizer's official site provides information on the prescription drug Viagra.... VIAGRA is a prescription drug used to treat erectile difficulties....
www.viagra.com/ - 29k - Jun 6, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
Wiki Spammer: www.cheapviagra.com
www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi/http://www.cheapviagra.com/
www.cheapviagra.com has been spamming Wiki and Bulletin board sites to increase their page rankings for the keyword viagra...
Wiki Spammer: www.halfpriceviagra.com
www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi/http://www.halfpriceviagra.com/
www.halfpriceviagra.com has been spamming wiki's and/or bulletin boards to promote their site and/or increase their page rankings for the
keyword viagra...
Wiki spammers using keyword "viagra"
http://www.searchenginespammers.net/keywords.cgi?v iagra
This is a list of spammers who have been spamming wiki's, bulletin boards, blog comments,
and guestlogs in order to increase their search engine page rankings or get people to...
chongqed.org
chongqed.org. All your page ranks are belong to us!...
Please note that I am making up the names of viagra spammer sites but some real company, spammer or otherwise, has probably actually
registered those names. Yep. Both domains
are register. They might not be spammers
but they both look sleazy: domain scalpers and
a "cialis" search engine site.
Note that this is how chonged.org really appears
on google. Hardly search engine savy. The people you are trying to reach have no idea what "chonged" means and could care less about a reference to a badly translated sega video game.
If anything, you look like a sleazy search engine optimization service.
Note that it is important that the referenced page actually include the keywords being spammed or google will probably not link to them.
By the way, it wouldn't be a bad idea to talk to
someone at google and other ranking search engines about how to best implement this.
If the spammers are linking text like " " or "." to hide their activities, google will easily be able to identify those and block those sites but
then spammers will start linking words.
How about we relink any spam we find from
http://www.spamsite.com/
To: http://www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi/http://wwww.spamsite.com/
After linking, 1) click the link (or better have a program visit it with the correct referrrer string or report the link via a web form
on the cgi) and 2) move the link to your search engine accessible spam page. Actually, reporting
via a web form is better than clicking the link
if you are doing it manually because you don't increment the sites hit counters and you don't expose your computer to malware.
Of course, someone would need to register searchenginespammers.net and install a cgi there
that would basically display a page describing
the criminal practice of bulletin board/wiki spamming, and then lists all the referrer strings
that have brought it to this particular page.
This will help search engines like google identify the wiki spammers and purge their sites from their search results. In the short term, searches for the keywords they tried to drive to their site would now take them to searchenginespammers.net
and once the folks at google take action they can use it to activiate a filter mechanism. Other
sites besides google can use the information. Someone could start a PICS or DNS based blacklist
based on listings at searchenginespammers.net that people could use to prevent patronizing such sites. Email filters could use the list to help
identify spam.
Like any site that lists spam URLs, there is the possibility that people will spam other peoples URLs to discredit them, so that needs to be taken into account.
Also, this thread is a reminder that when mentioning a company we dislike (
SCO,
MPAA,
RIAA
,
Macrovision
,
Microsoft,
George W Bush,
etc. should either not link their name or link their name to a site
that describes their misconduct; we don't want to help them get better search engine rankings.
It appears that this system, by whitelisting major ISPs name servers, would unfairly permit traffic from large ISPs who didn't filter their customers outgoing email for viruses while blocking traffic from small ISPs and company mail servers which had a single infected user.
As I understand it, this looks at the IP address of the machine transmitting the virus to an ISPs inbound mail filters, which is rarely the infected machine (particularly if your mail server is using one of the blacklists to block dialup/cable/dsl users). So, unless you are trying to force ISPs to filter their outgoing mail, this is a complete failure (and if you are trying to force outbound filtering then major ISPs should definitely not be excluded from blocking).
If you want to cut the load on your virus filters, you can look at the Received: lines in the smtp headers for IP addresses and quickly lookup the ratio of good to bad mail from those addresses. If any of the "Received:" lines has a high bad to good ratio (with expiration), then you block. However, the possibility of forged "Received:" lines implicating an innocent site are a concern. Mailing lists also complicate processing of Received: lines. This could be what the system is already doing, but the descriptions here and on the virbl site are exceedingly vague. Still leaves a lot to be desired.
A much less invasive virus scanning optimization would be to program your virus scanner to try check for particular worms first based on the last worm received from each IP address in the received lines. Then check those worms which have been getting a lot of hits lately and finally check the rest of the virus database. This way, for infected messages you will only need to check less than 1% of the database.
Seriously, this kind of filtering needs to be done by ISPs on outbound traffic, not inbound. Your machine sends spam/viruses it gets quarantined restricting your net access to web access to antivirus sites and operating system vendors (for patch downloads) with other accesses redirected to a page that indicates access is blocked.
Then after such filtering becomes more common (or at least it has been announced that filtering will begin at a particular date), sites could be blacklisted for failure to filter (if abused) to encourage ISPs to be responsible wit large ISPs (with better economies of scale) being more vulnerable to blacklisting than small ISPs. Maybe you compare the number of bad messages to the square root of the total number of messages from a given netblock. The idea is to push the problem back towards people who have some influence over correcting it (the offending ISP and their customers); it isn't perfect - passively innocent people get caught in the crossfire while people who are pro-actively innocent are protected.
Every few months a plague descends on Usenet called the spelling flame. It starts out when someone posts an article correcting the spelling or grammar in some article. The immediate result seems to be for everyone on the net to turn into a 6th grade English teacher and pick apart each other's postings for a few weeks. This is not productive and tends to cause people who used to be friends to get angry with each other.
It is important to remember that we all make mistakes, and that there are many users on the net who use English as a second language. There are also a number of people who suffer from dyslexia and who have difficulty noticing their spelling mistakes. If you feel that you must make a comment on the quality of a posting, please do so by mail, not on the network.
If this really bothers you, maybe you should contribute a patch to slashdot for integrating aspell rather than wasting everyones time reading spelling flames? Or perhaps you
I seriously doubt even a single reader had
Or maybe someone else should add a bayesian filter to recognize spelling flames and cause those posts to require manual moderation.
While it would be nice to see slashdot stories receive more careful attention during editing,
I would rather see that directed towards checking the accuracy of submitted stories than spelling.
For example, a recent posting sould have said that Microsoft patented launching an application
by depressing a PDA button twice in rapid succession than saying they patented the double (mouse) click.
Disclaimer: the preceeding posting may contain confidential spelling errors. If so you should delete them unread.:-)
CAE's latest project, included a mobile DNA extraction laboratory for testing food products for possible transgenic contamination. It was this equipment which triggered the Kafkaesque chain of events.
FBI field and laboratory tests have shown that Kurtz's equipment was not used for any illegal purpose. In fact, it is not even _possible_ to use this equipment for the production or weaponization of dangerous germs. Furthermore, any person in the US may legally obtain and possess such equipment.
In a political climate where the one loses all right to due process at the mere accusation of
involvement in terrorism and with Education Secretary Rod Paige revealing the administrations definition of "terrorism" by labeling the National Educational Association a
"Terrorist Organization"
for excercising their first amendment rights to criticize Bush Regime policy
and a White House aide is quoted elsewhere in this
discussion as saying
"In this administration, you don't have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is
disagree with the President"
,
there are some things about this particular case
that should be regarded as red flags.
Educating people about the presence of unsafe GM organisms in their food could be the "terrorism"
in question. In this case, it is not the Bush Regime who is being criticised but their sponsors at Monsanto. According to the
Organic Consumer Association
the link between Monsanto and the Bush Regime is almost as bad as the Haliburton/Oil Industry Links.
Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Judge, "who put GW Bush in office", Former Monsano Lawyer
Anne Veneman, Secretary of Agriculture, Former boardmember of Monsanto subsidiary
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, former monsanto subsidiary board member
Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the top two monsanto campaign contribution recipients
in a recent election. This is the same John Ashcroft who lost to a dead man in a prior election.
other campaign recipients
I would point out, also, that genetically modified foods were approved by the FDA by revolving door
Monsanto employees and executives. The FDA Deputy Commisioner for Policy who supervised the creation of the FDA policy on GE foods was
Michael Tayler
, a lawyer who represented Monsanto before serving
as Deputy Commisioner and became a Monsanto Vice President afterwards.
Also,
Margaret Miller
, the FDA employee who approved the FDA required Monsanto report on the safety of the companies growth hormones, was the same person who had earlier written the report while working at Monsanto.
The death of Prof. Kurtz's wife combined with
the biological laboratory is legitimate reason
for at least some investigation.
But it also could be a convenient excuse for an
administration that is motivated to harrass him.
If these artists have committed a crime, it is probably bad web design (Shitwave Flush (tm) web navigation) rather than terrorism. Unless the
mutant flies and roundup-sensitizing compounds
prove to be not just consciousness raising experiments but actual intended eco-terrorism;
but I certainly don't trust the likes of John Ashcroft to make such a determination.
When the posting mentioned the mockup design was done by Frog Design, I expected a bad design and I wasn't disappointed.
"Can you hear me now?" Doesn't look like much possibility of having a microphone and a speaker simultaneously in adequate proximity to the appropriate orifices.
There has long been criticism of people who design products that fit men's hands and not women's; well, frog takes it a step further and makes a product that doesn't look like it would fit men's hands comfortably and securely either even with a screen half the size of a PDA screen - certainly not while you are attempting to type with two thumbs. Yes, you can hold it by the tips of your fingers as pictured in the photos but try pressing it up to your ear for an hour like that.
These are the kind of design flaws I expect from the company that split the backplane (thereby doubling the lengths of some of the most critical wires in the computer) on the Next cube and put the floppy on the side of the Sun sparcstation pizzaboxes. Ever try to rackmount one of those or put it on a desk next to another computer? A front mounted floppy is unlikely to be obstructed by anything more immovable than a keyboard.
And that's not even getting into how untenable the internal design is likely to be. But, hey, maybe this "designer" phone will appeal to the shallow girls who think they look oh-so-sophisticated with unpaid advertisements for "Abercrombe" or "Tommy" plastered across their chest.
The article says "The only drawback is that the petfrog doesn't really exist"; that is a feature, not a bug.
Well, I don't know about twitter's track record but his/her complaint against slate is a valid point; I, too, saw the article as being partially a shameless plug for a (horrible sounding) Microsoft product. At least they did mention their affiliation to keep themselves out of hot water. Even there, though, the wording of the disclosure bordered on advertising. Consider the difference between "But Microsoft owns Slate so you might want to take what I say with a grain of salt" vs. "LockIn(tm) is brought to you by Microsoft, the makers of Slate". A reputable journalist might have said something that resembled: "A number of companies and non-profit projects, including Microsoft (conflict of interest warning: Microsoft owns Slate), Computer Associates, and gpg.org, sell or distribute software that purports to provide protection for data in transit or to prevent the user from actually using the data they received." A criticism of the journalistic integrity of the article in question is certainly not offtopic. Nor did twitter call any slashdot poster a troll or liar in his post as you claim is the case for all of twitters posts. Nor did a sampling of twitters other posts reveal such tendancies. On the other hand, your anonymous coward post looks suspiciously like Microsoft Brand Atroturf.
Now, I will point out that like twitter, I despise all things Microsoft. This distrust is based on 20 years of experience with their irresponsible and often criminal activity.
This is one of the problems with news media being owned by huge corporations whose own actions are often newsworthy events. Channel zero did an expose on GE's abuse of ownership of NBC a while back:
http://www.archive.org/download/nbc_1_/nbc_1_.mov http://www.archive.org/download/nbc_2/nbc_2.mov
According to these videos, not only did GE supress negative press about themselves, they also demanded that their lightbulbs be mentioned (advertised) on the news. GE and Microsoft are co-owners of MSNBC, Microsoft owns MSN (including Slate), and GE owns NBC.
No transmission necessary for hybrids. The entire point of running a hybrid vehicle is that you can run an engine attached to a generator at constant (optimal-efficiency) RPMs, which produces power that goes to the batteries and the electric motors driving the wheels, instead of a direct-conversion setup which requires the engine to operate through a widely-varying range as in mechanical transmissions.
Well, I always thought that was the point and that is indeed how the original mother earth news hybrid worked and how diesel locomotives have always worked (if you see a diesel locomotive, you can safely assume it is a hybrid). That and the
fact that you only need a tiny engine since you only need peak power a small percentage of the time. Call those
series hybrids: Engine drives generator, charges battery, battery drives motor.
Car makers have come up with some parallel designs that seem to forget that principle. I think the honda insight uses a parallel hybrid where the motor/generator is connected in parallel with
the engine and works in a buck/boost manner sort of like the corner cutting design of an APC UPS.
The savings of this design are that you only need half as much peak horsepower from then engine for accelleration but the engine can no longer be optimized for constant speed operation. The
Toyota Prius is even more perverse (and their
website is so horrible that you can't get a
decent explanation) but basically
falls into the same category. Parallel hybrids have been around since at least the 1970s. And maybe the advantage of running at a constant speed is significantly less with fuel injected engines than carbuerated engines.
Even the 1979 Mother Earth News hybrid car conversion design that sparked so much interest in
hybrids was flawed in that it used the original vehicle transmission and power train. It got
about 80mpg but only had a top sustainable speed
of 45mph (though it could go much faster for
short periods of time using battery power).
Now the way I would design a car (and I do have experience developing motor controllers for mining locomotives and industrial uses) would be different. There would be one motor per wheel. No transmission. No differential (that eliminates 3 on 4WD vehicles). No CV Joints. No drive shaft and U Joint. Indeed the motor would probably be directly coupled to the wheel (indeed the wheel bearings would be the motor bearings)
if the motor design can be properly matched
to the vehicles speed/torque (locomotives
have a simple reducing gear set but they
operate at much higher torque). Each motor would have a separate controller, though they
would be linked. Full 4 wheel drive. The metal,
weight, and cost you saved by eliminating all those unnecessary components (and by reducing the size of the engine) would be reinvested in motors, generators, and batteries. And I would be tempted to have two small gasoline
engines and generator instead of 1 large one.
This way, you could keep one engine shut down
when it wasn't needed and if there was an engine
or generator failure you could still drive home
but at a slower speed. The dual engine system would be great for people who wanted to experiment with alternative fuels, too, particularly with
a second gas tank. You could replace the jets
on one of the carbs for a different fuel (like ethanol) or swap out a diesel engine for a gasoline engine (bear in mind these
would be small, cheap, and even expendable lawnmower size engines). Likewise, a failure
of any of the four motors or controllers would
leave the vehicle driveable. For a fully electric
vehicle, you pop out the engine/generator modules and replace them with batteries. And of course you have regenerative braking.
A vehicle like this would probably be more expensive (and there would certainly be more up front engineering costs) but I would expect considerably more mileage. One could also
consider eliminating the steering mechanism.
With separate motors and controllers on each
wheel it is quite possible to turn the vehicl
Maybe if they improved their website they could actually make some money?
I could not find answers to simple questions with a reasonable amount of effort.
Q) What is Mandrake move vs. mandrake 10? I actually had to come back to slashdot to find a link with the answer to this one. It is a standalone live CD-ROM version of linux.
Q) How much does it cost? I actually had to click on the order link, fill in my state and country, and sort through a bunch of irrelevent products and I still didn't get an answer. I know how much it costs with a keychain USB flash memory ($70-$330) but I don't know how much it is by itself. Price needs to be listed before you hit the shopping cart.
Q) Free downloads? Well, if you click on downloads it looks like you could probably download it for free (if the ftp server wasn't/.ed) but you have to click the button that says something to the effect of "I am already a member of the mandrake club or I plan to join real soon now". So you either need to join the club (about $70/year) or promise to join the club before you can download. I don't have the slightest intention of joining their club unless I find the software useful and shouldn't be required to state otherwise. Plus it reminds me of those sleazy subscription cards for magazines: "Yes! I want to subscibe to the worlds greatest basketweaving magazine! Send me one year (12 exciting issues) of basketweaving today for just $17.97. I'll save 62% plus I'll receive the basketweaving 101 book FREE!"
A lot of ISP user agreements prohibit the provision of service to third parties. This violates that restriction, and doesn't attempt to cover it up.
Yes. I was thinking the same thing. Many ISPs
restrict resale of traffic for a number of reasons:
Conflict of Interest:
Many ISPs are telcos and want to prohibit competition. Many ISPs sell web service and
want to interfere with competition.
Overselling bandwidth: ISPs typically sell you a certain amount of bandwidth but then build
upstream networks with pipes too small to handle
the traffic if everyone used the amount of bandwidth they purchased.
They want your neighbors business: Why sell one line to two or three households when they think they can sell one to each household even though
those households may not need or want full bandwidth.
Premium accounts: they want to charge more
for "full" service you thought you were
already getting when you bought a piece of pipe.
Security and accountability: The only legitimate reason on the list. If the line is abused, who do you hold responsible for it.
There are some ways around this:
Regulate the ISPs - pipe is pipe, you can do anything you want with it subject only to legitimate and minimally invasive security/abuse restrictions.
Cut the ISPs in on the action; give the last mile ISPs a cut of voice over IP traffic and security access.
The ISPs take over. Basically, the ISPs could
offer special deals where you pay a reduced rate (or maybe even earn money) and get a free router in exchange for operating a WiFi/VoIP POP at your residence or place of business. Cell phone
companies pay people lots of money to build a tower in their back yard.
Also, nobody has posted a comment that I have seen about the specifics of the local telco's plight.
Yes, your local telco has probably pissed you off many times with their incompetence. But there is one way in which they are unfairly (except as payback for their other crimes) penalized.
At the other end of your POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line is something called a SLIC (Subscriber Line Interface Circuit). It costs
a lot of money. We will say $300. It is normally
ammortized over a long period of time (dictated partly by the IRS). Now, if the number of users of POTS lines goes down, they are still "paying" for these (bank lease or similar) unused SLICs
and since it isn't just a local phenomenon there
is no market to sell them to other telcos. Now, to make it worse, there was a "bubble" in SLIC usage when Faxes, BBSes, and The Internet became popular. For a while, many people had second lines for computer/fax usage. Now they don't;
they use DSL, cable modems, or cell phones. So, we had a bunch of capital outlays for long term assets that turned out not to be assets in the long term. Phone companies need to make their money now on last mile digital services. Their
wires (for a limited time, think fiber) and their telephone poles are their primary asset. Their chief liability is their management.
And yes, the telcos could leverage their telephone poles for WiFi VoIP and hot spots. Buy some linksys routers made with
industrial temperature spec components (and ditch
the plastic cases), stuff them in a weather tight box with a DSL modem, and put them on the tops of telephone poles themselves.
Of course, the big telecom companies (telcos and major isps) probably won't do anything until they are faced with competition from grassroots efforts. The way these things usually go:
Ignore the market before its time has come instead of at least planning
Continue to ignore the market once its time has come
Continue to ignore the market once its well past time
Interfere with those startups created to actually serve the market
Lobby for legislative favoritism (such as licensing with very heavy upfront costs that favor large players)
Let's say a police officer were to appear at my door without a warrant, wanting to search my house. If I allow him to enter, can he use anything incriminating that he finds as evidence, even though he conducted the search without a warrant?
Don't ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless.
-Lost Boys (1997)
IANAL. My comments pertain to US law.
The best option as far as preserving
your legal rights is to not consent to search
or entry. If you want to talk, you can do that outside. You can even tell them you will wait
outside with one of them while another procures
a search warrant, so you can't destroy evidence.
You could even bring the keg and electronics outside for inspection.
If you tell them they may enter but not search
that may place some limitationson them; the rooms
you invite them into are somewhat fair game but they can't enter other rooms without sufficient
probable cause.
Police can search items within "reach, lunge, or grasp" without either a warrant or permission.
And if they can see it, it is also fair game.
If you do not want them to enter, tell them
"I do not consent to your entering or searching the premises or my person; if you feel you have probable cause so compelling that you are legally entitled to enter the premises over my objections, I will not resist physically."
You can step outside in order to talk to them.
By the time they have knocked on your door, they may well have peeked in the windows (this is
particularly true if they perceive any threat
to themselves (which would be the case if
they thought you were a terrorist) or others
within the premises (in the case of a potential domestic violence call, for example).
It is recommended that you be polite (but firm) to police, do nothing that could be perceived as a threat, do consider things from their perspective,
and be cooperative to the extent that it does not
infringe your rights. "I know my rights! You <qbert>%@#%@%#$</qbert> pigs have no business coming in here!"
is a really bad idea and the police may be justified in interpretting physical motions
in their direction as assault that might not
be interpretted that way under other circumstances.
"Officer, I have been advised that by inviting you onto the premises I might inadvertantly forfiet certain legal rights. If you will permit me to step outside, perhaps we can discuss this and I can alleviate any concerns you might have."
What is particularly insidious about this case was the threat to bring in homeland security if you
chose to stand up for your rights. Note they didn't threaten to come back with a warrant
which would be the right thing to do if they had probable cause; they threatened to bring in someone who didn't need a warrant.
You can also ask some questions of your own. "Did the repairman have any expertise in bomb making? Did the repairman have any expertise in electronic (not electrical) devices? Did you have an expert in those fields interview him to determine if there was any basis for bothering me other than this man's ignorant speculations?" These can
take some of the air out of the balloon of probable cause.
In this particular case, they may have some limited probable cause to search for a 1)bomb, 2)a surveilance device, 3) some sort of guided
weapon.
Some people say if you have nothing to hide you
have nothing to be afraid of.
Spurious searches like these can have negative consequences for people who are engaged in any
alternative lifestyle, government oversight, or
technical hobby. What if your living room
or other areas contain:
marijuana,
whips and chains,
wiccan artifacts,
a copy of the Qur'an,
"anti-government" materials (such as books and videos investigating waco, sept 11, the war on iraq),
Unfortunately, this revolutionary new technology was of not feasible for use online until on 1982-09-19 an American invented the emoticon and was restricted to use by the BBC.:-)
The British claim to have 'invented' those ideas is at least as good as the claim that the US invented computer networking.
Claiming to have invented the internet is not the same as claiming to have invented computer networking; however, the US clearly holds the claim to the internet and probably computer networking as well. The US did in fact invent
The Internet and TCP/IP.
Claiming to have invented the internet also is not the same as claiming to have invented the world wide web. The Internet was very much a thriving international network before the world wide web (a device for lowering the average IQ of the internet user by about 30 points). I was a system manager of a network of Sun Workstations for 2-3 years before the WWW was created and used the internet almost every day and I had used it a decade before
that but didn't have long term daily access (except email through compuserve) before then.
And my mail server was painstakingly configured
to correctly deliver mail to non-internet
systems including the backwards uk.ac....
domains (well actually, the us domains
are backwards).
In fact "The Internet", TCP/IP (1973), ARPANET (1969), UUCP, RSCS/BITNET, DECNET, CSNET, Ethernet (1973), packet switching, and hypertext were all US creations. RS-232 was introduced by EIA in 1960.
1960 brought us the PLATO system.
1962 J.C.R Licklider at MIT proposed a Galactic Network of globaly connected computers.
1964 brought us the online reservation system
SABRE with 2000 dumb terminals connected
to two computers and the JOSS time sharing service. The MODEM invented at bell labs in 1958. "Information Flow in Large Communications Nets", Leonard Kleinrock, MIT, 1961. "On-Line Man Computer Communication", J.C.R Licklider & W. Clark, MIT, 1963.
"On Distributed Computed Communications Networks", 1964, Paul Baran, RAND (Born in poland, moved to US at age of 2). A computer at MIT
and one in Santa Monica, CA are linked via
a dedicated 1200bps phone line; another computer
at ARPA added later. Andreis van Dam of Brown University develops first operational hypertext ssystem 1967. 1967 also saw the first meeting
of the three packet network teams (ARPA, RAND,
and NPL (england). X.25 (popular in the 70s
and 80s) apparently evolved from
Davies' work at NPL; X.25 provided permanent
virtual circuits between machines (and later
to a lesser extent switched virtual circuits)
but was basically intended to be a WAN only system whereas TCP/IP protocols worked on both LAN and WAN segments.
If non-US countries made any major contributions to computer networking (other than the reduntant invention of packet switching) prior
to 1969, we here in the US are not the only ones who have forgotten. I tried to search european sites as well as US sites.
Some notable non-US activity: The french created minitel (1982), a mainframe network with home access via dumb terminals similar to the US Compuserve (1969) and "The Source" (1978); of particular interest is the widespread deployment.
The frenchman Emile Baudot invented the 5 bit teleprinter code that carries his name; it was an improvement on morse code but was obsoleted with
by computers and the EBCDIC(1963/64) and ASCII (1964) codes.
HTTP and HTML were invented at CERN based on American Vannevar Bush's Memex (hypertext). Europeans
also made significant contributions to computing
around the time of World War II.
Arthur C Clark conceived the Communications Satelite. In 1967, NPL in Middlesex, England
crates packet switched data network, NPL Data Network; it is interesting to note the links were 768kbps. NPL was a short
distance network a small number of nodes that simply was not as well funded as ARPANET.
Donald Watts Davies (UK) apparently came up with the idea of packet s
And we Brits invented electricity, the steam engine, television and radio. So we should have the right to control them.
Well, your claims here are a bit exagerated.
Electricity:
600BC - Greece (static electricity)
250BC - Iraq (battery)
1600 William Gilbert - England
1752 Ben Frankilin, US
Faraday - England
Galvani - Italian
Volta - Italian
Ampere - French
Ohm - German
Tesla - AC Generator
Edison - Light bulb
Many more
Steam Engine:
1st century A.D. Heron of Alexandra - Greece
1679 Denis Papin - french
1698 Thomas Savery - british
1769 James Watt - Scottish
Television:
1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow: german
1874 Karl Ferdinant Braun - german (CRT)
1908 A.A. Campbell Swinton - British
1924 John Logie Baird - British
1927 Philo Taylor Farnsworth - American
(First fully electronic TV)
1927 WGY - US (First TV service)
Radio:
1893 Nikola Tesla - Serbo-American (demonstrated radio),
1898 Nathan Stubblefield - American (induction - not actually radio),
1894 Sir Oliver Lodge - British
1896 Marconi - born in italy, rx british patent
Your claims are actually way off. The Internet protocols were developed in the US, but if the Web had appeared later than it did it would probably have used the OSI stack which was largely the result of work in the UK.
Sure there are technical differences between TCP/IP and OSI, TCP/IP might even have some advantages. But to claim that there would be no computer networking without the US is simply untrue.
There is a reason we use IP and not OSI and it is one that makes me hope that ISO/ITU never gets control of the IETF. When the IETF publishes a standard (RFC), it is downloadable over the net for free. When ISO "publishes" a "standard" you have to pay for a copy. This seriously interferes with widespread adoption as well as open source and shareware projects. And not only can non-business entities use RFCs, they actually have a reasonable shot at creating them as well. You don't need deep pockets to create an IETF
standard.
I actually worked with these guys around ten years ago on somewhat similar but ground based imaging spectrophotometric instruments but I don't know the details of the instrument used in this case or the actual observations.
I suspect that the actual images have much too low a resolution to actually resolve the planet from the star (the laws of physics limit what can actually be resolved by even a perfect telescope of a given size) and instead that the presence of the planet is deduced by its spectral signature. Also, it looks like they observed not so much a planet but a cleared area of the protoplanetary disks which suggests the presence of a young planet.
The spectra themselves can be seen here: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releas es/ssc2 004-08/visuals.shtml
Also, pictures are almost always very heavily processed. The raw pictures usually have more noise than signal and are often taken at wavelengths that would be invisable to the human eye. Colors in modern astronomical pictures are often translated from other "colors" we cannot see or psuedocolored to highlight subtle changes in intensity in a monochromatic image.
NASA, whose budget is at the mercy of public perception (a largely scientifically illiterate public jaded by Hollywood special effects and advertising) is very PR conscious and tends to come up with these artist's conceptions to give the common person something to latch onto. In this case NASA had the integrity to identify the picture as an artists conception but that disclosure was not faithfuly reproduced by the press.
Yes, but those are scanning backs. A linear array (actually three for color) is swept across the field of view. Each pixel integrates only for a very small portion (under 0.025s) of the total exposure time (335s). Even if your sensor had 100% quantum efficiency, the camera would have an effective quantum efficiency of less than 0.001%. Add in the the 4 fold difference in resolution and the 4 year sky survey would take 160,000 years. During which, all the objects would have moved substantially, thereby invalidating the survey.
Also, the better light camera has trouble shooting moving objects (and over 6 minutes, trees move like Ents:-)). However, with a scanning exposure, motion tends to be captured with a lot less bluring than you would expect at the expense of distortion (you photograph objects on the left side at time t and objects on the right side where the were at time t+335); a person walking at the right speed could exhibit some very serious time dilation.
Of course, if you like taking high res digital photos, have a limited budget, and don't mind the blurring/distorting effect of motion, you could always take an ordinary flatbed scanner, rip off the lid, mount it in the back of a box 1 foot cubed, and mount a decent lens and iris on the front. Depending on the scanner optics, you might need a difuser at the focal plane. Use a scanner with tricolor CCD as opposed to one with tricolor illumination. You can't control the exposure time unless you hack the scanner, so you will have to adjust exposure using the iris or neutral density filters.
Actually, it is technically feasible to control settings on a per port basis using either RADIUS Centralized Filter Managemement (for routers that support it) or a hacked radiusd that logs in to a router and modifies the per port filter rules. Better server and router software would make things easier. Efficiency should not be an issue because all of the per user filtering rules would be placed in port specific filter rule lists and would only affect traffic on that port.
Removing default restrictions should not incur a fee but may require a justification (depending on which restriction is being removed).
Proposal for user based IP filtering
When a user logs in to a leaf node router (or is autoconnected), the radius authentication server should send back a list of account specific filtering rules for outbound traffic from that host.
Certain actions such as sending to SMTP email (port 25), would be restricted to impede spammers and spammer zombies but would be enabled (without fee) on request for those who need them.
All BLOCKs must be clearly spelled out on the ISPs website.
Many ISPs outsource the task of actually providing POPs to POP providers (who serve other ISPs as well). This is one of the reasons that ISPs don't enforce rules properly. Another is the fact that some users need fewer restrictions. However, as outlined here, the authentication server can configure filtering and monitoring on a per port basis customized to the account using that port at any given time.
These rules are in a ficticious easy to read syntax
[OUTBOUND]// Unless user has SEND_RESERVED priviledge enabled:// RFC1918 + loopback network// security professionals would need this priviledge
rule action=block sourceaddr==192.168.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==10.0.0.0/9
rule action=block sourceaddr==172.31.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==127.0.0.0/8// Unless user has SEND_OTHER_IP priviledge enabled// security professionals would need this priviledge// multihomed networks with forwarding would need this priviledge
rule action=block sourceaddr!=THISPORT_SUBNET
rule action=allow// allow sending email through isp mail servers
rule action=allow destport==25 mail.isp.net// Optional, if user has configured other SMTP hosts
rule action=allow destport==25 mail.myemployer.com// Unless user has SEND_PORT_25 priviledge enabled
rule action=block destport==25// If user has SEND_PORT_25 enabled
rule action=allow snoop=snoop_server destport==25
[INBOUND]
rule action=block sourceaddr==192.168.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==10.0.0.0/9
rule action=block sourceaddr==172.31.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==127.0.0.0/8
rule action=block destaddr==THISPORT_BROADCAST// If user has DENY_INBOUND_TCP// insert exceptions here
rule action=allow protocol==tcp && established
rule action=block protocol==tcp// If user has DENY_INBOUND_UDP
rule action=allow protocol==udp dns-reply
rule action=block protocol==udb// default
rule action=allow
Cisco calls this "RADIUS Centralized Filter Management". Other router brands may have different implementations or no implementation.
Note that since each port has its own temporary ruleset, traffic is not slowed down significantly by adding rules.
Control Panel
ISPs should implement a web based control panel for downstream customers (not just WWW service customers). This control panel would allow the
Slashdot Mirror
Informaton for display at a terminal apparatus of a computer is stored in blocks the first part of which contains the information which is actually displayed at the terminal and the second part of which contains information relating to the display and which may be used to influence the display at the time or in response to a keyboard entry signal.
Yes, but hyperlinks are written with the meta information FIRST and the text information SECOND. As written, this would only cover hyper links if they were written like this:
Also, the definition of "block" could be important; when this patent was originally written, I suspect "block" was intended to refer to some fixed number of bytes, not variable length markup. In fact, this patent sounds suspiciously, from the abstract, like it is a patent on the IBM 3270 terminal. Though as someone else pointed out, that is just the abstract and not the claims.Where would we be today if:
The horse-drawn carriage association (HDCA) lobbied congress to institute legislation to prevent the sale of automobiles?
The typewriter manufacturers lobbied congress to prevent the introduction of computers, as it would hurt the sales of typewriters? [On the countrary, the most successful typewriter manufacturer became the largest computer manufacturer (for a while, anyway)].
Witchdoctors had lobbied congress to prevent medical science as it would hurt their business.
The recording industry itself would not exist if local musicians had successfully lobbied congress arguing that mass produced music would cut down on business for local musicians.
New technologies will ultimately wipe out industries that do not adapt. Deal.
Oh, and there is a reason why digital radio won't hurt the RIAA basket case industries much: Clear Channel Communications (the corporate world's answer to "dead air"). With such short playlists you could only record an hours worth of music - and why would you want to record them anyway since they are repeated every hour, anyway. We actually had a radio station locally that as a promotion once decided to play every song in their library in alphabetical order. It was a tremendous improvement even if it only lasted a few weeks. Normally, they played short play lists (and they were bought by clear channel). Station management explained that surveys showed the average listener only listed for about 15 minutes a day and the radio station needed to give them the most popular songs when they tuned in. Kinda becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Now, it would be interesting if someone came up with a way to make digital radio a viable distribution mechanism (particularly for car players). Unfortunately, this would probably require at least a light handed form of DRM or players would be sold that would defeat the financial viability. For example, you have a car radio with a built in hard drive that can store songs and buttons that you can press to indicate if you like or don't like the songs. The radio plays songs intersperced with commercials (as separate OGG files). But the radio remembers which songs you have said in the past you do or don't like so when the radio station broadcasts one which you don't like it substitutes one which you do like which was recorded on the hard disk. Further, the radio learns which genres and artists you do and don't like and preferentially records those when broadcast. Eventually, your radio is mostly ignoring the audio stream from the station while playing songs you indicate you liked or ones it predicts you will like. The radio mixes in the commercials from radio channels in proportion to the percentage of songs played from those channels. Now, radio stations have an incentive to broadcast a wide variety of music. And the consumer could be given a choice to purchase songs already downloaded (for a reasonable price of, say,$0.50 each). When you played a purchased song, the player would remove the radio station commercial tag. The radio could remain powered on for a specified time after you turned of the ignition recording additional songs. Also, the radio system could have more bandwidth than needed so it could stream songs faster than real time alowing even radios with limited storage to excercise some degree of selection. Each song transmitted would have a commercial price (say 0.20 units) and a station id. Each time a song was played the palyer would credit that price to a particular station's talley and once it reached 1.00 units the player would play a recent commercial from that station (and then deduct the price (1.00) of that commercial) from the total. Longer commercials could have a higher price and shorter ones a smaller price, and likewise for songs. Stations (and other distributers) would kick back a portion of the advertiser revenue to artists and artists would kick back a portion of the song sales revenue to the distributor. Maybe more pop
You may find the Mind machine FAQ helpful. There are a lot of machines out there, some of which which cost considerably less than the novadreamer ($500 with bundled materials) and while they may not be as compact many of them are probably a lot more adjustable. I have not had the opportunity to try a mind machine as a sleep inducer but I did try one at a spa and can confirm that they do mess with your head and stimulate interesting mental imagery. Brain Wave Software is also availble for windoze (emulator compatible) with a 30 day trial. Note that flashing a computer screen is not as good as LED glasses which can flash over a wider range of frequencies without beating with the screen refresh frequency or being effected by phosphor decay and also the LED glasses work with your eyes closed.
Ok, so 5 days ago we hear that the city of Baltimore is going to delete all of its old email because they can't afford the disk space to store it. And now they want to add hundreds or thousands of cameras? Any idea how much storage those will require? Ok, they get some federal grants but doesn't it seem like priorities are a little off here?
Maybe they should just keep all the porn spam they would otherwise be deleting and unblock voyeurweb on the city firewalls so they don't have do go around leering non-consensually at members of the public.
Some people pointed out the difference between public and private spaces and that we had a right to expect privacy in private spaces and not in public spaces. However, that depends on your income. If you have a lot of money, you live in your own place with no housemates (except perhaps spouse and kids) and rent hotels for affairs, so your house is private. If you don't have a lot of money, however, you may have 3 roomates, parents, grandparents, etc. and you may go out in "public" (say to a park) in order to get some "privacy". In poor neighborhoods, the cameras will be owned by the state. In rich neighborhoods, the cameras will be owned by the residents.
What happens when they integrate face recognition technology and can track people everywhere? Except the ones who take the trouble to wear masks? Robbers will wear ski masks. Terrorists will wear hollywood style identity concealing but human looking masks. Right now, most of the cameras are in private hands and the government has to ASK for the tapes. And they can't run real time face recognition networks.
And as far as detering crime, serious criminals - let alone terrorists and suicide bombers - are not dettered by cameras. A camera is not going to run up and save your ass like an actual beat cop might. On the other hand, it has a chilling effect on people who engage in victimless "crimes" like smoking a joint, having a little sex behind the bushes, streaking, and pissing on a tree because you couldn't walk all the way home.
If you drive around on public roads, you have a reasonable expectation that police may see some portion of your activities. On the other hand, if a policeman rides your bumper all day long, you have serious issues of harrasment and discriminatory enforcement. Not to mention they will make you so nervous you will become distracted and violate some traffic reg. A friend once demonstrated that he could induce other drivers to drive off the road (at least he did it on safe streatches of road) by getting them to look in the rear view mirror by doing things like riding their ass. And a driver looking in the rear view mirror doesn't realize it but he is now following the car behind him. If that car drives off the road, so will he. Excessive public surveilence is like riding your bumper except you don't even know when you are being singled out and can't get a restraining order or take precautions. Will Driving While Black be replaced by Walking While Black?
But if you never do anything the religious right would object to and you think your government can always be trusted, then you can ignore the issue. Might I suggest you spend the time saved in such frivolous pursuits as watching a movie: The Fugative , Minority Report , Dark Angel , Blade Runner , Brazil ; or reading a book: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or Brave New World. And that is all just light fiction. It is the non-fiction that will really creep you out.
And actually, it would improve BOTH battery life and reception, since receiving a signal doesn't require any more or less power based on the antenna or incoming signal strength (excepting preamps). All other things being equal, if you decrease the transmit power, increase the antenna gain (which gives a gain for both receive and transmit), then you use less power overall, but can output an equivalent signal.
Actually, your reasoning is a little flawed here. Yes, you would get improved tower to phone reception even if you reduced power proportional to antenna gain improvement but that degree of transmitter power reduction would cancel out the improvement in phone to tower reception. Since the radio signals have to travel in both directions to make a phone call, you still have to trade off reception vs power. However, the cell phone will probably do that for you automatically, since cell towers command phones to reduce power (so they don't interfere with other phones by causing receiver distortion) if the tower gets a signal more powerful than it needs. You will get your improved reception and improved battery life but not necessarily at the same time:
5X reception, 1X battery life,
1X reception, 5X battery life,
2X reception, 2.5X battery life,
etc.
oops. Posted in text mode instead of html. Details on the navigation system are http://www.freelabs.com/~whitis/navigator/
I was looking into putting a linux box into my car, and make something similar. I couldn't find any good mapping programs for linux that covered the USA, and also gave driving directions. Are there any?
I replaced the sun visor in my Honda Element with
an i-opener running linux. The mapping software
I use is "roadmap" which uses census department
maps. The i-opener has been supplemented with
a rayming TN-200 USB GPS receiver, a metal box,
a hard drive, rs-232 serial adapter (for future
APRS use), and an infrared wireless keyboard with built in pointing device attached to the steering wheel with velcro. It doesn't do autorouting but
I have not found that to be a problem in actual use.
For more details see:
here
I haven't yet implemented the referrer strings thingy, and I registered chongqed.org instead of searchenginespammers.net, but the idea is the same.
Good for you! However, it looks like your current linking strategy would just give chongqed.org a high page rank for those keywords whereas the strategy I was outlining would give a high page rank to a page that named the spammer in the title. It is important that the spammers be readily identified by someone reading the search results not by having to visit an anti-spam site.
Simulated search results for "viagra":
- Viagra for less!
- Half price viagra!
- Official Site: VIAGRA (sildenafil citrate) - Information About
...
... VIAGRA is a prescription drug used to treat erectile difficulties. ...
-
Wiki Spammer: www.cheapviagra.com
/ /www.cheapviagra.com/
-
Wiki Spammer: www.halfpriceviagra.com
/ /www.halfpriceviagra.com/
-
Wiki spammers using keyword "viagra"
v iagra
- chongqed.org
...
Please note that I am making up the names of viagra spammer sites but some real company, spammer or otherwise, has probably actually registered those names. Yep. Both domains are register. They might not be spammers but they both look sleazy: domain scalpers and a "cialis" search engine site.www.cheapviagra.com
Buy viagra for less! No prescription!
www.halfpriceviagra.com
Viagra only $3.29 per dose!
Pfizer's official site provides information on the prescription drug Viagra.
www.viagra.com/ - 29k - Jun 6, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi/http:
www.cheapviagra.com has been spamming Wiki and Bulletin board sites to increase their page rankings for the keyword viagra...
www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi/http:
www.halfpriceviagra.com has been spamming wiki's and/or bulletin boards to promote their site and/or increase their page rankings for the keyword viagra...
http://www.searchenginespammers.net/keywords.cgi?
This is a list of spammers who have been spamming wiki's, bulletin boards, blog comments, and guestlogs in order to increase their search engine page rankings or get people to...
chongqed.org. All your page ranks are belong to us!
Note that this is how chonged.org really appears on google. Hardly search engine savy. The people you are trying to reach have no idea what "chonged" means and could care less about a reference to a badly translated sega video game. If anything, you look like a sleazy search engine optimization service.
Note that it is important that the referenced page actually include the keywords being spammed or google will probably not link to them.
By the way, it wouldn't be a bad idea to talk to someone at google and other ranking search engines about how to best implement this.
If the spammers are linking text like " " or "." to hide their activities, google will easily be able to identify those and block those sites but then spammers will start linking words.
How about we relink any spam we find from http://www.spamsite.com/ To: http://www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi /http://wwww.spamsite.com/
After linking, 1) click the link (or better have a program visit it with the correct referrrer string or report the link via a web form
on the cgi) and 2) move the link to your search engine accessible spam page. Actually, reporting
via a web form is better than clicking the link
if you are doing it manually because you don't increment the sites hit counters and you don't expose your computer to malware.
Of course, someone would need to register searchenginespammers.net and install a cgi there that would basically display a page describing the criminal practice of bulletin board/wiki spamming, and then lists all the referrer strings that have brought it to this particular page.
This will help search engines like google identify the wiki spammers and purge their sites from their search results. In the short term, searches for the keywords they tried to drive to their site would now take them to searchenginespammers.net and once the folks at google take action they can use it to activiate a filter mechanism. Other sites besides google can use the information. Someone could start a PICS or DNS based blacklist based on listings at searchenginespammers.net that people could use to prevent patronizing such sites. Email filters could use the list to help identify spam.
Like any site that lists spam URLs, there is the possibility that people will spam other peoples URLs to discredit them, so that needs to be taken into account.
Also, this thread is a reminder that when mentioning a company we dislike ( SCO, MPAA, RIAA , Macrovision , Microsoft, George W Bush, etc. should either not link their name or link their name to a site that describes their misconduct; we don't want to help them get better search engine rankings.
This could amount to prior restraint on artists like JSG Boggs who produce parody's of national currency .
In any event, it will only inconvenience law abiding citizens since forgers will have no qualms about importing illegal software.
It appears that this system, by whitelisting major ISPs name servers, would unfairly permit traffic from large ISPs who didn't filter their customers outgoing email for viruses while blocking traffic from small ISPs and company mail servers which had a single infected user.
As I understand it, this looks at the IP address of the machine transmitting the virus to an ISPs inbound mail filters, which is rarely the infected machine (particularly if your mail server is using
one of the blacklists to block dialup/cable/dsl users). So, unless you are trying to force ISPs to filter their outgoing mail, this is a complete failure (and if you are trying to force outbound filtering then major ISPs should definitely not be excluded from blocking).
If you want to cut the load on your virus filters, you can look at the Received: lines in the smtp headers for IP addresses and quickly lookup the ratio of good to bad mail from those addresses.
If any of the "Received:" lines has a high bad to good ratio (with expiration), then you block. However, the possibility of forged "Received:" lines implicating an innocent site are a concern.
Mailing lists also complicate processing of Received: lines. This could be what the
system is already doing, but the descriptions
here and on the virbl site are exceedingly vague.
Still leaves a lot to be desired.
A much less invasive virus scanning optimization would be to program your virus scanner to try check for particular worms first based on the last worm received from each IP address in the received
lines. Then check those worms which have been getting a lot of hits lately and finally check the
rest of the virus database. This way, for infected messages you will only need to check less than 1% of the database.
Seriously, this kind of filtering needs to be done by ISPs on outbound traffic, not inbound. Your machine sends spam/viruses it gets quarantined
restricting your net access to web access to antivirus sites and operating system vendors (for patch downloads) with other accesses redirected to a page that indicates access is blocked.
Then after such filtering becomes more common (or at least it has been announced that filtering will begin at a particular date), sites could be blacklisted for failure to filter (if abused) to encourage ISPs to be responsible
wit large ISPs (with better economies of scale)
being more vulnerable to blacklisting than small ISPs. Maybe you compare the number of bad messages to the square root of the total number of messages from a given netblock.
The idea is to push the problem back towards people who have some influence over correcting it (the offending ISP and their customers); it isn't perfect - passively innocent people get caught in the crossfire while people who are pro-actively innocent are protected.
The latest Dilbert cartoon is highly germane to this issue.g es/dilbert2004060174316.jpg
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ima
Or perhaps you should read any of a number of netiquette documents:
If this really bothers you, maybe you should contribute a patch to slashdot for integrating aspell rather than wasting everyones time reading spelling flames? Or perhaps you I seriously doubt even a single reader had
Or maybe someone else should add a bayesian filter to recognize spelling flames and cause those posts to require manual moderation.
While it would be nice to see slashdot stories receive more careful attention during editing, I would rather see that directed towards checking the accuracy of submitted stories than spelling. For example, a recent posting sould have said that Microsoft patented launching an application by depressing a PDA button twice in rapid succession than saying they patented the double (mouse) click.
Disclaimer: the preceeding posting may contain confidential spelling errors. If so you should delete them unread. :-)
CAE's latest project, included a mobile DNA extraction laboratory for testing food products for possible transgenic contamination. It was this equipment which triggered the Kafkaesque chain of events. FBI field and laboratory tests have shown that Kurtz's equipment was not used for any illegal purpose. In fact, it is not even _possible_ to use this equipment for the production or weaponization of dangerous germs. Furthermore, any person in the US may legally obtain and possess such equipment.
In a political climate where the one loses all right to due process at the mere accusation of involvement in terrorism and with Education Secretary Rod Paige revealing the administrations definition of "terrorism" by labeling the National Educational Association a "Terrorist Organization" for excercising their first amendment rights to criticize Bush Regime policy and a White House aide is quoted elsewhere in this discussion as saying "In this administration, you don't have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President" , there are some things about this particular case that should be regarded as red flags.
Educating people about the presence of unsafe GM organisms in their food could be the "terrorism" in question. In this case, it is not the Bush Regime who is being criticised but their sponsors at Monsanto. According to the Organic Consumer Association the link between Monsanto and the Bush Regime is almost as bad as the Haliburton/Oil Industry Links.
- Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Judge, "who put GW Bush in office", Former Monsano Lawyer
- Anne Veneman, Secretary of Agriculture, Former boardmember of Monsanto subsidiary
- Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, former monsanto subsidiary board member
- Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the top two monsanto campaign contribution recipients
in a recent election. This is the same John Ashcroft who lost to a dead man in a prior election.
- other campaign recipients
I would point out, also, that genetically modified foods were approved by the FDA by revolving door Monsanto employees and executives. The FDA Deputy Commisioner for Policy who supervised the creation of the FDA policy on GE foods was Michael Tayler , a lawyer who represented Monsanto before serving as Deputy Commisioner and became a Monsanto Vice President afterwards. Also, Margaret Miller , the FDA employee who approved the FDA required Monsanto report on the safety of the companies growth hormones, was the same person who had earlier written the report while working at Monsanto.The death of Prof. Kurtz's wife combined with the biological laboratory is legitimate reason for at least some investigation. But it also could be a convenient excuse for an administration that is motivated to harrass him. If these artists have committed a crime, it is probably bad web design (Shitwave Flush (tm) web navigation) rather than terrorism. Unless the mutant flies and roundup-sensitizing compounds prove to be not just consciousness raising experiments but actual intended eco-terrorism; but I certainly don't trust the likes of John Ashcroft to make such a determination.
When the posting mentioned the mockup design was done by Frog Design, I expected a bad design and I wasn't disappointed.
"Can you hear me now?" Doesn't look like much possibility of having a microphone and a speaker simultaneously in adequate proximity to the appropriate orifices.
There has long been criticism of people who design products that fit men's hands and not women's; well, frog takes it a step further and makes a product that doesn't look like it would fit men's hands comfortably and securely either even with a screen half the size of a PDA screen - certainly not while you are attempting to type with two thumbs. Yes, you can hold it by the tips of your fingers as pictured in the photos but try pressing it up to your ear for an hour like that.
These are the kind of design flaws I expect from the company that split the backplane (thereby doubling the lengths of some of the most critical wires in the computer) on the Next cube and put the floppy on the side of the Sun sparcstation pizzaboxes. Ever try to rackmount one of those or put it on a desk next to another computer? A front mounted floppy is unlikely to be obstructed by anything more immovable than a keyboard.
And that's not even getting into how untenable the internal design is likely to be. But, hey, maybe this "designer" phone will appeal to the shallow girls who think they look oh-so-sophisticated with unpaid advertisements for "Abercrombe" or "Tommy" plastered across their chest.
The article says "The only drawback is that the petfrog doesn't really exist"; that is a feature, not a bug.
Well, I don't know about twitter's track record but his/her complaint against slate is a valid point; I, too, saw the article as being partially a shameless plug for a (horrible sounding) Microsoft product. At least they did mention their affiliation to keep themselves out of hot water. Even there, though, the wording of the disclosure bordered on advertising. Consider the difference between "But Microsoft owns Slate so you might want to take what I say with a grain of salt" vs. "LockIn(tm) is brought to you by Microsoft, the makers of Slate". A reputable journalist might have said something that resembled: "A number of companies and non-profit projects, including Microsoft (conflict of interest warning: Microsoft owns Slate), Computer Associates, and gpg.org, sell or distribute software that purports to provide protection for data in transit or to prevent the user from actually using the data they received." A criticism of the journalistic integrity of the article in question is certainly not offtopic. Nor did twitter call any slashdot poster a troll or liar in his post as you claim is the case for all of twitters posts. Nor did a sampling of twitters other posts reveal such tendancies. On the other hand, your anonymous coward post looks suspiciously like Microsoft Brand Atroturf.
Now, I will point out that like twitter, I despise all things Microsoft. This distrust is based on 20 years of experience with their irresponsible and often criminal activity.
This is one of the problems with news media being owned by huge corporations whose own actions
are often newsworthy events. Channel zero did an expose on GE's abuse of ownership of NBC a while back:
http://www.archive.org/download/nbc_1_/nbc_1_.mov http://www.archive.org/download/nbc_2/nbc_2.mov
According to these videos, not only did GE supress negative press about themselves, they also demanded that their lightbulbs be mentioned (advertised) on the news. GE and Microsoft are co-owners of MSNBC, Microsoft owns MSN (including Slate), and GE owns NBC.
No transmission necessary for hybrids. The entire point of running a hybrid vehicle is that you can run an engine attached to a generator at constant (optimal-efficiency) RPMs, which produces power that goes to the batteries and the electric motors driving the wheels, instead of a direct-conversion setup which requires the engine to operate through a widely-varying range as in mechanical transmissions.
Well, I always thought that was the point and that is indeed how the original mother earth news hybrid worked and how diesel locomotives have always worked (if you see a diesel locomotive, you can safely assume it is a hybrid). That and the fact that you only need a tiny engine since you only need peak power a small percentage of the time. Call those series hybrids: Engine drives generator, charges battery, battery drives motor. Car makers have come up with some parallel designs that seem to forget that principle. I think the honda insight uses a parallel hybrid where the motor/generator is connected in parallel with the engine and works in a buck/boost manner sort of like the corner cutting design of an APC UPS. The savings of this design are that you only need half as much peak horsepower from then engine for accelleration but the engine can no longer be optimized for constant speed operation. The Toyota Prius is even more perverse (and their website is so horrible that you can't get a decent explanation) but basically falls into the same category. Parallel hybrids have been around since at least the 1970s. And maybe the advantage of running at a constant speed is significantly less with fuel injected engines than carbuerated engines.
Even the 1979 Mother Earth News hybrid car conversion design that sparked so much interest in hybrids was flawed in that it used the original vehicle transmission and power train. It got about 80mpg but only had a top sustainable speed of 45mph (though it could go much faster for short periods of time using battery power).
Now the way I would design a car (and I do have experience developing motor controllers for mining locomotives and industrial uses) would be different. There would be one motor per wheel. No transmission. No differential (that eliminates 3 on 4WD vehicles). No CV Joints. No drive shaft and U Joint. Indeed the motor would probably be directly coupled to the wheel (indeed the wheel bearings would be the motor bearings) if the motor design can be properly matched to the vehicles speed/torque (locomotives have a simple reducing gear set but they operate at much higher torque). Each motor would have a separate controller, though they would be linked. Full 4 wheel drive. The metal, weight, and cost you saved by eliminating all those unnecessary components (and by reducing the size of the engine) would be reinvested in motors, generators, and batteries. And I would be tempted to have two small gasoline engines and generator instead of 1 large one. This way, you could keep one engine shut down when it wasn't needed and if there was an engine or generator failure you could still drive home but at a slower speed. The dual engine system would be great for people who wanted to experiment with alternative fuels, too, particularly with a second gas tank. You could replace the jets on one of the carbs for a different fuel (like ethanol) or swap out a diesel engine for a gasoline engine (bear in mind these would be small, cheap, and even expendable lawnmower size engines). Likewise, a failure of any of the four motors or controllers would leave the vehicle driveable. For a fully electric vehicle, you pop out the engine/generator modules and replace them with batteries. And of course you have regenerative braking. A vehicle like this would probably be more expensive (and there would certainly be more up front engineering costs) but I would expect considerably more mileage. One could also consider eliminating the steering mechanism. With separate motors and controllers on each wheel it is quite possible to turn the vehicl
Maybe if they improved their website they could actually make some money?
/.ed) but you have to click the button that
I could not find answers to simple questions with a reasonable amount of effort.
Q) What is Mandrake move vs. mandrake 10? I actually had to come back to slashdot to find a link with the answer to this one. It is a
standalone live CD-ROM version of linux.
Q) How much does it cost? I actually had to click on the order link, fill in my state and country,
and sort through a bunch of irrelevent products and I still didn't get an answer. I know how much it costs with a keychain USB flash memory ($70-$330) but I don't know how much it is by itself. Price needs to be listed before you hit the shopping cart.
Q) Free downloads? Well, if you click on downloads it looks like you could probably
download it for free (if the ftp server wasn't
says something to the effect of "I am already a member of the mandrake club or I plan to join real soon now". So you either need to join the club (about $70/year) or promise to join the club before you can download. I don't have the slightest intention of joining their club unless I find the software useful and shouldn't be required to state otherwise. Plus it reminds me of those sleazy subscription cards for magazines: "Yes! I want to subscibe to the worlds greatest basketweaving magazine! Send me one year (12 exciting issues) of basketweaving today for just $17.97. I'll save 62% plus I'll receive the basketweaving 101 book FREE!"
A lot of ISP user agreements prohibit the provision of service to third parties. This violates that restriction, and doesn't attempt to cover it up.
Yes. I was thinking the same thing. Many ISPs restrict resale of traffic for a number of reasons:
There are some ways around this:
Also, nobody has posted a comment that I have seen about the specifics of the local telco's plight. Yes, your local telco has probably pissed you off many times with their incompetence. But there is one way in which they are unfairly (except as payback for their other crimes) penalized. At the other end of your POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line is something called a SLIC (Subscriber Line Interface Circuit). It costs a lot of money. We will say $300. It is normally ammortized over a long period of time (dictated partly by the IRS). Now, if the number of users of POTS lines goes down, they are still "paying" for these (bank lease or similar) unused SLICs and since it isn't just a local phenomenon there is no market to sell them to other telcos. Now, to make it worse, there was a "bubble" in SLIC usage when Faxes, BBSes, and The Internet became popular. For a while, many people had second lines for computer/fax usage. Now they don't; they use DSL, cable modems, or cell phones. So, we had a bunch of capital outlays for long term assets that turned out not to be assets in the long term. Phone companies need to make their money now on last mile digital services. Their wires (for a limited time, think fiber) and their telephone poles are their primary asset. Their chief liability is their management.
And yes, the telcos could leverage their telephone poles for WiFi VoIP and hot spots. Buy some linksys routers made with industrial temperature spec components (and ditch the plastic cases), stuff them in a weather tight box with a DSL modem, and put them on the tops of telephone poles themselves.
Of course, the big telecom companies (telcos and major isps) probably won't do anything until they are faced with competition from grassroots efforts. The way these things usually go:
Let's say a police officer were to appear at my door without a warrant, wanting to search my house. If I allow him to enter, can he use anything incriminating that he finds as evidence, even though he conducted the search without a warrant?
IANAL. My comments pertain to US law. The best option as far as preserving your legal rights is to not consent to search or entry. If you want to talk, you can do that outside. You can even tell them you will wait outside with one of them while another procures a search warrant, so you can't destroy evidence. You could even bring the keg and electronics outside for inspection. If you tell them they may enter but not search that may place some limitationson them; the rooms you invite them into are somewhat fair game but they can't enter other rooms without sufficient probable cause. Police can search items within "reach, lunge, or grasp" without either a warrant or permission. And if they can see it, it is also fair game. If you do not want them to enter, tell them
You can step outside in order to talk to them. By the time they have knocked on your door, they may well have peeked in the windows (this is particularly true if they perceive any threat to themselves (which would be the case if they thought you were a terrorist) or others within the premises (in the case of a potential domestic violence call, for example).
It is recommended that you be polite (but firm) to police, do nothing that could be perceived as a threat, do consider things from their perspective, and be cooperative to the extent that it does not infringe your rights. "I know my rights! You <qbert>%@#%@%#$</qbert> pigs have no business coming in here!" is a really bad idea and the police may be justified in interpretting physical motions in their direction as assault that might not be interpretted that way under other circumstances. "Officer, I have been advised that by inviting you onto the premises I might inadvertantly forfiet certain legal rights. If you will permit me to step outside, perhaps we can discuss this and I can alleviate any concerns you might have."
What is particularly insidious about this case was the threat to bring in homeland security if you chose to stand up for your rights. Note they didn't threaten to come back with a warrant which would be the right thing to do if they had probable cause; they threatened to bring in someone who didn't need a warrant.
You can also ask some questions of your own. "Did the repairman have any expertise in bomb making? Did the repairman have any expertise in electronic (not electrical) devices? Did you have an expert in those fields interview him to determine if there was any basis for bothering me other than this man's ignorant speculations?" These can take some of the air out of the balloon of probable cause.
In this particular case, they may have some limited probable cause to search for a 1)bomb, 2)a surveilance device, 3) some sort of guided weapon.
Some people say if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to be afraid of. Spurious searches like these can have negative consequences for people who are engaged in any alternative lifestyle, government oversight, or technical hobby. What if your living room or other areas contain:
We also invented sarcasm.
Unfortunately, this revolutionary new technology was of not feasible for use online until on 1982-09-19 an American invented the emoticon and was restricted to use by the BBC. :-)
The British claim to have 'invented' those ideas is at least as good as the claim that the US invented computer networking.
Claiming to have invented the internet is not the same as claiming to have invented computer networking; however, the US clearly holds the claim to the internet and probably computer networking as well. The US did in fact invent The Internet and TCP/IP.
Claiming to have invented the internet also is not the same as claiming to have invented the world wide web. The Internet was very much a thriving international network before the world wide web (a device for lowering the average IQ of the internet user by about 30 points). I was a system manager of a network of Sun Workstations for 2-3 years before the WWW was created and used the internet almost every day and I had used it a decade before that but didn't have long term daily access (except email through compuserve) before then. And my mail server was painstakingly configured to correctly deliver mail to non-internet systems including the backwards uk.ac.... domains (well actually, the us domains are backwards).
In fact "The Internet", TCP/IP (1973), ARPANET (1969), UUCP, RSCS/BITNET, DECNET, CSNET, Ethernet (1973), packet switching, and hypertext were all US creations. RS-232 was introduced by EIA in 1960. 1960 brought us the PLATO system. 1962 J.C.R Licklider at MIT proposed a Galactic Network of globaly connected computers. 1964 brought us the online reservation system SABRE with 2000 dumb terminals connected to two computers and the JOSS time sharing service. The MODEM invented at bell labs in 1958. "Information Flow in Large Communications Nets", Leonard Kleinrock, MIT, 1961. "On-Line Man Computer Communication", J.C.R Licklider & W. Clark, MIT, 1963. "On Distributed Computed Communications Networks", 1964, Paul Baran, RAND (Born in poland, moved to US at age of 2). A computer at MIT and one in Santa Monica, CA are linked via a dedicated 1200bps phone line; another computer at ARPA added later. Andreis van Dam of Brown University develops first operational hypertext ssystem 1967. 1967 also saw the first meeting of the three packet network teams (ARPA, RAND, and NPL (england). X.25 (popular in the 70s and 80s) apparently evolved from Davies' work at NPL; X.25 provided permanent virtual circuits between machines (and later to a lesser extent switched virtual circuits) but was basically intended to be a WAN only system whereas TCP/IP protocols worked on both LAN and WAN segments.
If non-US countries made any major contributions to computer networking (other than the reduntant invention of packet switching) prior to 1969, we here in the US are not the only ones who have forgotten. I tried to search european sites as well as US sites.
Some notable non-US activity: The french created minitel (1982), a mainframe network with home access via dumb terminals similar to the US Compuserve (1969) and "The Source" (1978); of particular interest is the widespread deployment. The frenchman Emile Baudot invented the 5 bit teleprinter code that carries his name; it was an improvement on morse code but was obsoleted with by computers and the EBCDIC(1963/64) and ASCII (1964) codes. HTTP and HTML were invented at CERN based on American Vannevar Bush's Memex (hypertext). Europeans also made significant contributions to computing around the time of World War II. Arthur C Clark conceived the Communications Satelite. In 1967, NPL in Middlesex, England crates packet switched data network, NPL Data Network; it is interesting to note the links were 768kbps. NPL was a short distance network a small number of nodes that simply was not as well funded as ARPANET. Donald Watts Davies (UK) apparently came up with the idea of packet s
And we Brits invented electricity, the steam engine, television and radio. So we should have the right to control them.
Well, your claims here are a bit exagerated.
250BC - Iraq (battery)
1600 William Gilbert - England
1752 Ben Frankilin, US
Faraday - England
Galvani - Italian
Volta - Italian
Ampere - French
Ohm - German
Tesla - AC Generator
Edison - Light bulb
Many more
1679 Denis Papin - french
1698 Thomas Savery - british
1769 James Watt - Scottish
1874 Karl Ferdinant Braun - german (CRT)
1908 A.A. Campbell Swinton - British
1924 John Logie Baird - British
1927 Philo Taylor Farnsworth - American (First fully electronic TV)
1927 WGY - US (First TV service)
1898 Nathan Stubblefield - American (induction - not actually radio),
1894 Sir Oliver Lodge - British
1896 Marconi - born in italy, rx british patent
Your claims are actually way off. The Internet protocols were developed in the US, but if the Web had appeared later than it did it would probably have used the OSI stack which was largely the result of work in the UK. Sure there are technical differences between TCP/IP and OSI, TCP/IP might even have some advantages. But to claim that there would be no computer networking without the US is simply untrue.
There is a reason we use IP and not OSI and it is one that makes me hope that ISO/ITU never gets control of the IETF. When the IETF publishes a standard (RFC), it is downloadable over the net for free. When ISO "publishes" a "standard" you have to pay for a copy. This seriously interferes with widespread adoption as well as open source and shareware projects. And not only can non-business entities use RFCs, they actually have a reasonable shot at creating them as well. You don't need deep pockets to create an IETF standard.
I actually worked with these guys around ten years ago on somewhat similar but ground based imaging spectrophotometric instruments but I don't know the details of the instrument used in this case or the actual observations.
s es/ssc2 004-08/visuals.shtml
I suspect that the actual images have much too low a resolution to actually resolve the planet from the star (the laws of physics limit what can actually be resolved by even a perfect telescope of a given size) and instead that the presence of the planet is deduced by its spectral signature. Also, it looks like they observed not so much a planet but a cleared area of the protoplanetary disks which suggests the presence of a young planet.
The spectra themselves can be seen here:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/relea
Also, pictures are almost always very heavily processed. The raw pictures usually have more noise than signal and are often taken at wavelengths that would be invisable to the human eye. Colors in modern astronomical pictures are
often translated from other "colors" we cannot see or psuedocolored to highlight subtle changes in intensity in a monochromatic image.
NASA, whose budget is at the mercy of public perception (a largely scientifically illiterate public jaded by Hollywood special effects and advertising) is very PR conscious and tends to come up with these artist's conceptions to give the common person something to latch onto. In this case NASA had the integrity to identify the picture as an artists conception but that disclosure was not faithfuly reproduced by the press.
Yes, but those are scanning backs. A linear array (actually three for color) is swept across the field of view. Each pixel integrates only for a very small portion (under 0.025s) of the total exposure time (335s). Even if your sensor had 100% quantum efficiency, the camera would have an effective quantum efficiency of less than 0.001%. Add in the the 4 fold difference in resolution and the 4 year sky survey would take 160,000 years. During which, all the objects would have moved substantially, thereby invalidating the survey.
:-)). However, with a scanning exposure, motion tends to be captured with a lot less bluring than you would expect at the expense of distortion (you photograph objects on the left side at time t and objects on the right side where the were at time t+335); a person walking at the right speed could exhibit some very serious time dilation.
Also, the better light camera has trouble shooting moving objects (and over 6 minutes, trees move like Ents
Of course, if you like taking high res digital photos, have a limited budget, and don't mind the blurring/distorting effect of motion, you could always take an ordinary flatbed scanner, rip off the lid, mount it in the back of a box 1 foot cubed, and mount a decent lens and iris on the front. Depending on the scanner optics, you might need a difuser at the focal plane. Use a scanner with tricolor CCD as opposed to one with tricolor illumination. You can't control the exposure time unless you hack the scanner, so you will have to adjust exposure using the iris or neutral density filters.
settings on a per port basis using either RADIUS Centralized Filter Managemement
(for routers that support it) or a hacked
radiusd that logs in to a router and modifies
the per port filter rules. Better server
and router software would make things easier.
Efficiency should not be an issue because
all of the per user filtering rules would be
placed in port specific filter rule lists and
would only affect traffic on that port.
Removing default restrictions should not incur a fee but may require a justification (depending on
which restriction is being removed).
Proposal for user based IP filtering
When a user logs in to a leaf node router (or is autoconnected), the radius
authentication server should send back a list of account specific filtering
rules for outbound traffic from that host.
Certain actions such as sending to SMTP email (port 25), would be restricted
to impede spammers and spammer zombies but would be enabled (without fee)
on request for those who need them.
All BLOCKs must be clearly spelled out on the ISPs website.
Many ISPs outsource the task of actually providing POPs to POP
providers (who serve other ISPs as well). This is one of the
reasons that ISPs don't enforce rules properly. Another is
the fact that some users need fewer restrictions.
However, as outlined here, the authentication server can configure
filtering and monitoring on a per port basis customized to
the account using that port at any given time.
These rules are in a ficticious easy to read syntax
// Unless user has SEND_RESERVED priviledge enabled: // RFC1918 + loopback network // security professionals would need this priviledge // Unless user has SEND_OTHER_IP priviledge enabled // security professionals would need this priviledge // multihomed networks with forwarding would need this priviledge // allow sending email through isp mail servers // Optional, if user has configured other SMTP hosts // Unless user has SEND_PORT_25 priviledge enabled // If user has SEND_PORT_25 enabled
// If user has DENY_INBOUND_TCP // insert exceptions here // If user has DENY_INBOUND_UDP // default
[OUTBOUND]
rule action=block sourceaddr==192.168.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==10.0.0.0/9
rule action=block sourceaddr==172.31.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==127.0.0.0/8
rule action=block sourceaddr!=THISPORT_SUBNET
rule action=allow
rule action=allow destport==25 mail.isp.net
rule action=allow destport==25 mail.myemployer.com
rule action=block destport==25
rule action=allow snoop=snoop_server destport==25
[INBOUND]
rule action=block sourceaddr==192.168.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==10.0.0.0/9
rule action=block sourceaddr==172.31.0.0/16
rule action=block sourceaddr==127.0.0.0/8
rule action=block destaddr==THISPORT_BROADCAST
rule action=allow protocol==tcp && established
rule action=block protocol==tcp
rule action=allow protocol==udp dns-reply
rule action=block protocol==udb
rule action=allow
Cisco calls this "RADIUS Centralized Filter Management". Other router
brands may have different implementations or no implementation.
Note that since each port has its own temporary ruleset, traffic
is not slowed down significantly by adding rules.
Control Panel
ISPs should implement a web based control panel for downstream customers
(not just WWW service customers). This control panel would allow
the