On the contrary, the Internet consists of a huge number of networks that are connected to each other.
That's true in a sense, but not in any sense meaningful to this discussion. There is only one Internet in terms of the 32-bit universal address space of ipv4, and there is only one internet as far as the root servers to which all of DNS ultimately must defer.
Sweden has its own networks but there's only one Internet. If you dont' believe me just try hiding all of Sweden behind a NAT box, and see how many web pages get served from Sweden. If Sweden's networks weren't part of a single global Internet, none of your servers would be addressible from outside Sweden without far more port forwarding and address translation than is technically possible.
Even if Lego cant keep the product.. it might inspire some other company to do so.
Hmm, probably not. While it's not uncommon for other, smaller (hungrier ) companies to buy the rights to a discontinued product, it seems very unlikely that Lego would go for it in this case: it's too closely linked (literally and figuratively) to their core product. They would lose control over elements of their brand and image. I doubt it'll happen.
What if instead, the voter was given a printout of the MD5 of a combination of (digesting all of) everyone they voted for and their (the voter's) social security number?
Not a chance. First of all the SSN, even if it were as difficult to obtain as you suppose (hint: it's not), this wouldn't be of help in vote-selling, as the voter would cheerfully surrender his SSN if he wanted to get paid.
As for the rest, you're radically overestimating the number of permutations an election can typically have -- a dozen yes or no decisions and one or two candidates each for a handful of offices could be permuted by any cheap desktop PC in very short order.
Historically Microsoft has made a certain amount of money from people who who didn't want their software, simply because there was no way to buy the computer they wanted (this is particularly common with laptops) without windows preinstalled.
But when the day comes, if it comes, that PCs require this sort of open-source-unfriendly BIOS in order to run windows, Linux (or whatever) users will not buy Windows-compatible PCs, and hence, won't be giving $95/unit to Bill anymore. Speed the day, if you ask me.
While you're correct that each actual instance of the systems involved needs to be auditable, this isn't your first nor your best line of defense against fraud and manipulation; arguably it's not even a good line of defense. Verification of results is.
Basically what you need is independent means of validating that what went in is what came out. If the voting machines, in addition to recording a vote electronically produced a paper ballot that was both human and machine readable, and the voter himself placed it in a separate tallying system not linked (physically OR socially) to the other system, then you'd have something. The two outcomes are compared. If there is significant deviation between the two, then we invoke your audit points to find out just exactly where the problem was introduced.
70 percent of voters in the state's November 2002 elections, which were conducted on Diebold machines, reported being very confident that their vote was accurately counted.
Leaving aside for a moment the blindingly obvious fact that public opinion about whether a thing is true has no bearing on whether or not the thing actually is true, I have to ask...
Our copyright law is rather anal. Contrary to popular belieft you can't copy something for personal use at all. No exceptions.
In other words, you can't perform a digital to analog conversion and copy it in a real-time stream in sonic wave form to an atmospheric medium... meaning, of course, that you can't actually play it?
Another grand irony of this is that it occurred at exactly the time the administration was making much of the oppression of women in Afghanistan -- including their being made to cover up completely in burkas of (what appears on television to be) exactly the same shade of blue...
According to this, a propeller on a boat works by pushing water backwards (which is why, I suppose, it's often called a "screw" rather than a propeller). A prop on a plane blows air strongly backwards as well, but I don't know if that's the chief force pushing the plane forward or if the bernoulli principle (acceleration of air passing over the forward surface of the prop creating a draw, or vacuum) is what's doing it.
I admit I was totally wrong about the buoyancy issue in my first post, BTW. Simple Archimedes displacement issue, and in an incompressible fluid, neutral buoyancy is the same at all depths. I regret the erroneous post.
Gee, I don't know, mister; ever heard of a propeller? That's a set of wings that rotate under water. Get a clue.
Thank you for the polite answer. I had supposed that a propeller might well work as much by deflection of water as the bernoulli principle, much as a household fan does.
A couple of issues that don't seem to be addressed in the article:
They must have buoyancy control nearly equal to that of submarines because the amount of energy required using "flight surfaces" to maintain depth would increase hugely as a function of depth. Unlike in true flight, where it doesn't require more energy to maintain an altitude of 2000 feet than 1000, it takes incomparably more energy to maintain a depth of 2000 feet compared to 1000 if you're not using buoyancy control. I'd venture to suggest it's impossible.
Also, in flight a wing uses reduced air pressure above the curved top of the wing surface (Bernoulli's Principle) for most of its lift. Does anyone know if this effect applies in water? Intuitively it seems like it would not.
For a decade now we've heard free-market proselytes yap about how business will bring new innovations to the internet. But in practice what have we seen? The principal technologies in use are still those created largely academically and under research grants (some in partnership with very select members of the private sector, granted).
But principally what business has brought to the table is greed, squabbling and massively costly litigation, which far from encouraging innovation, increasingly inhibits it through fear and intimidation.
At the risk of overstating the case, I do think this is a further example of market forces alone being very far from the wholly benign influence they're so often touted as being.
One thing that makes great sci fi is when the story and setting can not only withstand the implications of the science, but grow naturally from it. Examples of science fiction stories that really reflect an understanding of their science are: everything by Vernor Vinge (particularly A Fire Upon the Deep, anything by Greg Egan (I particularly love Permutation City), and even the classic '50s film Forbidden Planet, whose plot is almost inevitable given its compelling techno-sociological premise.
Examples of Science Fiction that cannot withstand the implications of the science presented include Star Trek (particularly the later series) and the Star Wars franchise. Neither of them really know what they're getting themselves into with their technological advancements. Replicator technology in particular would be so transformative in reality that we would not recognize the society that resulted from its existence.
Anybody else get a kick out of the fact the Mac Freak [macfreak.org] site is running on linux [netcraft.com]?
No, not really. It would have been slightly closer to amusing if it had been hosted on IIS. Were you expecting it to be hosted on MacOS? Take a look at that netcraft survey again: how many options to host on MacOS are out there?
Re:What this story really should have been about:
on
Linux At The BBC [updated]
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I hope you wrote to the BBC to express your support for this effort, rather than just posting to Slashdot. I have it on some authority that your letters and emails on this subject are in fact read, and they are taken seriously.
Or do they go...Open Source ? Who you gonna call when stuff breaks?
Um, how about any of hundreds of enormously competent consulting firms who specialize in open source, have competitive rates, actually answer the phone and can actually fix the problem rather than tell you to wait for a service pack which may or may not do the job.
Cell companies are better placed to offer this
on
Earthlink Buys OmniSky
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As someone who used Omnisky for the first year or so of its existence, I have to say that by itself it's uneconomic for both the user and the provider. As Omnisky discovered, you can't find a reasonable price point: charge enough to cover your costs, and hardly anyone will be willing to pay it, because the services are too paltry. Charge what the service is actually worth, and you'll go broke.
Cellular providers are in a better position to offer wireless internet for PDAs than either a stand-alone company or an ISP like Earthlink. Cell providers have to provide most of that infrastructure already. And when 3G service finally rolls out, they'll have to provide pretty much everything. Wireless internet for PDAs will take off at that point: it'll be easier to find, a whole lot faster, and because of bundled savings, a whole lot cheaper.
You can transfer to another registrar without initially contacting NSI yourself. Instead, your new registrar will handle everything. If things go as they should, NSI will shortly send you an automated message asking you to approve the change. You merely reply to the message, filling in a couple of fields in the form. I've done it several times now, it only takes about 48 hours.
There are a lot of factors you haven't mentioned: will you need to reimplement the same features in multiple languages? Will you have messaging between programs that don't support identical datatypes and structures? Will you have unicode support in all the languages when you need it? How about futureproofing? Will all those languages continute to have the necessary degree of orthogonality two years from now when you need o overhaul the system to meet some new requirement or paradigm?
These are all risks that you take, and this is just off the top of my head.
I mix languages on occasion, mainly for client-server apps where I need the server to be fully optimized and not necessarily portable, but the client must be portable and can stand to be less optimized. But you introduce a lot of risk and redundancy if you don't have very good reasons for doing everything you're doing.
Nothing you've said actually contradicts my posting. You say, "your argument goes out the window when applied to political protests". What I said was "Not everyone's purpose is to avoid detection by the US Govermnent." Clearly I wasn't talking about political protesters, whose purpose in using anonymity services almost certainly does include avoiding detection by the US government.
You don't appear to have really read my posting. That's fine, you're not obliged to. But why take the trouble to reply to a message you clearly haven't taken the trouble to read?
Quite often, this shouldn't matter. Assuming for the moment that safeweb is compromised by the CIA, that hardly eliminates its utility. Not everyone's purpose is to avoid detection by the US Govermnent. For many people the only reason to anonymize is so that the owners of the site cannot trace your visit. Generally this has nothing whatsoever to do with government.
It's still a flawed analogy
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The "bridges and buildings" analogy has been done to death; so much so I suspect this whole topic is a troll. But at any rate, here are some important differences that may help explain why software appears to be created to a lower standard:
1) Materials science changes only slowly, in small increments.
2) The working principles of structural engineering scarcely change at all.
3) The practices and processes by which bridges and houses are built evolve only slowly, and incrementally, over decades.
4) The fundamental purposes for which houses and bridges are built never really change.
Contrast that with the practice software engineering where everything, beit language, paradigms, principles, practice, materials and even purpose change radically within very short timeframes. Programmers are expected to track all these changes, and what's more, they have to deliver quickly and efficiently.
In conclusion, I would assert that if architects and structural engineers were obliged to work in the conditions and culture in which programmers do, they would not succeed in building anything at all.
Considering it will be brought to you by the same people who created the U.S. wireless phone industry, you can imagine what the results will be if this were to actually go forward: Fragmented, non-standardized, non-interoperable, overpriced, underfeatured amalgam of systems with a coverage map that looks like sparse confetti on a linoleum floor.
Fortunately the same shortsightedness and petty infighting that has resulted in America having the worst and most useless wireless telephone system in the world will prevent this quasi-initiative from getting off the ground.
It will *never* happen. The worst case is that they will confuse issues for several years, and divert vast amounts of and resources from where they'd really be useful. Oh, and possibly cause undeserved collateral damage to the reputation of the legitmate Internet.
After all, I'm sure we all remember how the invention of photocopiers, scanners, OCR software and desktop publishing systems led to wholesale copyright violations and brought about the demise of the printed book industry.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, the Internet consists of a huge number of networks that are connected to each other.
That's true in a sense, but not in any sense meaningful to this discussion. There is only one Internet in terms of the 32-bit universal address space of ipv4, and there is only one internet as far as the root servers to which all of DNS ultimately must defer.
Sweden has its own networks but there's only one Internet. If you dont' believe me just try hiding all of Sweden behind a NAT box, and see how many web pages get served from Sweden. If Sweden's networks weren't part of a single global Internet, none of your servers would be addressible from outside Sweden without far more port forwarding and address translation than is technically possible.
Even if Lego cant keep the product.. it might inspire some other company to do so.
Hmm, probably not. While it's not uncommon for other, smaller (hungrier ) companies to buy the rights to a discontinued product, it seems very unlikely that Lego would go for it in this case: it's too closely linked (literally and figuratively) to their core product. They would lose control over elements of their brand and image. I doubt it'll happen.
What if instead, the voter was given a printout of the MD5 of a combination of (digesting all of) everyone they voted for and their (the voter's) social security number?
Not a chance. First of all the SSN, even if it were as difficult to obtain as you suppose (hint: it's not), this wouldn't be of help in vote-selling, as the voter would cheerfully surrender his SSN if he wanted to get paid.
As for the rest, you're radically overestimating the number of permutations an election can typically have -- a dozen yes or no decisions and one or two candidates each for a handful of offices could be permuted by any cheap desktop PC in very short order.
Historically Microsoft has made a certain amount of money from people who who didn't want their software, simply because there was no way to buy the computer they wanted (this is particularly common with laptops) without windows preinstalled.
But when the day comes, if it comes, that PCs require this sort of open-source-unfriendly BIOS in order to run windows, Linux (or whatever) users will not buy Windows-compatible PCs, and hence, won't be giving $95/unit to Bill anymore. Speed the day, if you ask me.
While you're correct that each actual instance of the systems involved needs to be auditable, this isn't your first nor your best line of defense against fraud and manipulation; arguably it's not even a good line of defense. Verification of results is.
Basically what you need is independent means of validating that what went in is what came out. If the voting machines, in addition to recording a vote electronically produced a paper ballot that was both human and machine readable, and the voter himself placed it in a separate tallying system not linked (physically OR socially) to the other system, then you'd have something. The two outcomes are compared. If there is significant deviation between the two, then we invoke your audit points to find out just exactly where the problem was introduced.
70 percent of voters in the state's November 2002 elections, which were conducted on Diebold machines, reported being very confident that their vote was accurately counted.
Leaving aside for a moment the blindingly obvious fact that public opinion about whether a thing is true has no bearing on whether or not the thing actually is true, I have to ask...
Was this poll conducted on the same machines?
Our copyright law is rather anal. Contrary to popular belieft you can't copy something for personal use at all. No exceptions.
In other words, you can't perform a digital to analog conversion and copy it in a real-time stream in sonic wave form to an atmospheric medium... meaning, of course, that you can't actually play it?
Another grand irony of this is that it occurred at exactly the time the administration was making much of the oppression of women in Afghanistan -- including their being made to cover up completely in burkas of (what appears on television to be) exactly the same shade of blue...
According to this, a propeller on a boat works by pushing water backwards (which is why, I suppose, it's often called a "screw" rather than a propeller). A prop on a plane blows air strongly backwards as well, but I don't know if that's the chief force pushing the plane forward or if the bernoulli principle (acceleration of air passing over the forward surface of the prop creating a draw, or vacuum) is what's doing it.
I admit I was totally wrong about the buoyancy issue in my first post, BTW. Simple Archimedes displacement issue, and in an incompressible fluid, neutral buoyancy is the same at all depths. I regret the erroneous post.
Gee, I don't know, mister; ever heard of a propeller? That's a set of wings that rotate under water. Get a clue.
Thank you for the polite answer. I had supposed that a propeller might well work as much by deflection of water as the bernoulli principle, much as a household fan does.
A couple of issues that don't seem to be addressed in the article:
They must have buoyancy control nearly equal to that of submarines because the amount of energy required using "flight surfaces" to maintain depth would increase hugely as a function of depth. Unlike in true flight, where it doesn't require more energy to maintain an altitude of 2000 feet than 1000, it takes incomparably more energy to maintain a depth of 2000 feet compared to 1000 if you're not using buoyancy control. I'd venture to suggest it's impossible.
Also, in flight a wing uses reduced air pressure above the curved top of the wing surface (Bernoulli's Principle) for most of its lift. Does anyone know if this effect applies in water? Intuitively it seems like it would not.
For a decade now we've heard free-market proselytes yap about how business will bring new innovations to the internet. But in practice what have we seen? The principal technologies in use are still those created largely academically and under research grants (some in partnership with very select members of the private sector, granted).
But principally what business has brought to the table is greed, squabbling and massively costly litigation, which far from encouraging innovation, increasingly inhibits it through fear and intimidation.
At the risk of overstating the case, I do think this is a further example of market forces alone being very far from the wholly benign influence they're so often touted as being.
One thing that makes great sci fi is when the story and setting can not only withstand the implications of the science, but grow naturally from it. Examples of science fiction stories that really reflect an understanding of their science are: everything by Vernor Vinge (particularly A Fire Upon the Deep, anything by Greg Egan (I particularly love Permutation City), and even the classic '50s film Forbidden Planet, whose plot is almost inevitable given its compelling techno-sociological premise.
Examples of Science Fiction that cannot withstand the implications of the science presented include Star Trek (particularly the later series) and the Star Wars franchise. Neither of them really know what they're getting themselves into with their technological advancements. Replicator technology in particular would be so transformative in reality that we would not recognize the society that resulted from its existence.
I hope you wrote to the BBC to express your support for this effort, rather than just posting to Slashdot. I have it on some authority that your letters and emails on this subject are in fact read, and they are taken seriously.
Or do they go...Open Source ? Who you gonna call when stuff breaks?
Um, how about any of hundreds of enormously competent consulting firms who specialize in open source, have competitive rates, actually answer the phone and can actually fix the problem rather than tell you to wait for a service pack which may or may not do the job.
As someone who used Omnisky for the first year or so of its existence, I have to say that by itself it's uneconomic for both the user and the provider. As Omnisky discovered, you can't find a reasonable price point: charge enough to cover your costs, and hardly anyone will be willing to pay it, because the services are too paltry. Charge what the service is actually worth, and you'll go broke.
Cellular providers are in a better position to offer wireless internet for PDAs than either a stand-alone company or an ISP like Earthlink. Cell providers have to provide most of that infrastructure already. And when 3G service finally rolls out, they'll have to provide pretty much everything. Wireless internet for PDAs will take off at that point: it'll be easier to find, a whole lot faster, and because of bundled savings, a whole lot cheaper.
You can transfer to another registrar without initially contacting NSI yourself. Instead, your new registrar will handle everything. If things go as they should, NSI will shortly send you an automated message asking you to approve the change. You merely reply to the message, filling in a couple of fields in the form. I've done it several times now, it only takes about 48 hours.
There are a lot of factors you haven't mentioned: will you need to reimplement the same features in multiple languages? Will you have messaging between programs that don't support identical datatypes and structures? Will you have unicode support in all the languages when you need it? How about futureproofing? Will all those languages continute to have the necessary degree of orthogonality two years from now when you need o overhaul the system to meet some new requirement or paradigm?
These are all risks that you take, and this is just off the top of my head.
I mix languages on occasion, mainly for client-server apps where I need the server to be fully optimized and not necessarily portable, but the client must be portable and can stand to be less optimized. But you introduce a lot of risk and redundancy if you don't have very good reasons for doing everything you're doing.
Clearly what's needed is a new version of English that doesn't permit grammatical errors.
You don't appear to have really read my posting. That's fine, you're not obliged to. But why take the trouble to reply to a message you clearly haven't taken the trouble to read?
Quite often, this shouldn't matter. Assuming for the moment that safeweb is compromised by the CIA, that hardly eliminates its utility. Not everyone's purpose is to avoid detection by the US Govermnent. For many people the only reason to anonymize is so that the owners of the site cannot trace your visit. Generally this has nothing whatsoever to do with government.
1) Materials science changes only slowly, in small increments.
2) The working principles of structural engineering scarcely change at all.
3) The practices and processes by which bridges and houses are built evolve only slowly, and incrementally, over decades.
4) The fundamental purposes for which houses and bridges are built never really change.
Contrast that with the practice software engineering where everything, beit language, paradigms, principles, practice, materials and even purpose change radically within very short timeframes. Programmers are expected to track all these changes, and what's more, they have to deliver quickly and efficiently.
In conclusion, I would assert that if architects and structural engineers were obliged to work in the conditions and culture in which programmers do, they would not succeed in building anything at all.
Fortunately the same shortsightedness and petty infighting that has resulted in America having the worst and most useless wireless telephone system in the world will prevent this quasi-initiative from getting off the ground.
It will *never* happen. The worst case is that they will confuse issues for several years, and divert vast amounts of and resources from where they'd really be useful. Oh, and possibly cause undeserved collateral damage to the reputation of the legitmate Internet.
After all, I'm sure we all remember how the invention of photocopiers, scanners, OCR software and desktop publishing systems led to wholesale copyright violations and brought about the demise of the printed book industry.