I fail to see how the terrorist watch list is ANY different from the communist black list of the 60s. All it takes to get put on there is a neighbor that doesn't like you.
Actually, it's a lot easier than that. All it really takes is having a name that's somewhat similar to a name on the list. Lots of people with common names have learned this already. Google "no-fly-list" plus "common-name" to read lots of stories about it.
Also, having the same birthday as someone on the no-fly list can get you detained and interrogated, though by now I suppose that the list must contain all the 366 possible birth dates.
Yeah, but readers who used the picture to get an idea of what a cow looks like could be a bit misled. Cows like that one, with a map of the Earth on her side, are quite rare. This is because there are millions of other planets in the galaxy, and each cow develops a map of a random planet. I once saw one that was mostly reddish-brown, with a white splotch on top and a dark, roughly horizontal irregular streak along her side. I now realize that her map was clearly of Mars.
If I could get unlimited broadband I would need unlimited disk too. I'd have me a local cache of Wikipedia.
Heh. Actually, those are starting to appear, though probably not with all of wikipedia. It seems that one of the things the OLPC gang is doing is providing local caches of good-sized chunks of wikipedia, whatever their "field consultants" (local teachers) feel might be of interest to their kids and is available in the local language. Someone mentioned a 350MB Spanish subset, compressed to about 100MB. Of course, it would typically be installed on the local central server, to make it quickly available to all the kids. It seems that specialized single-language caches like that are now quite practical, even in the major languages with lots of wikipedia articles. And my immediate thought was that some of the local adults might well like to have a somewhat larger wikipedia cache, including most of the technical stuff in their language.
Of course, one of the challenges the OLPC project has is finding good translators for their core UI stuff, as well as for their extracts from wikipedia. Do you know anyone fluent in Quechua or Aymara who might like to volunteer?
This test is the same like those websites where you can test your download speed. They are all flawed in that they don't take your subscription into account.
They're also flawed if they test only the speed from your ISPs servers. Thus, our current service (RCN) is 5MB/s down and 0.7MB/s up. We have a home web server (which we both use for testing work stuff). If we're communicating with a colleague's site with the same service, the speed is a max of 0.7MB/s in both directions, and usually less. The ISP would of course list us as having 5MB/s service. But in each transfer, one is "up" and one is "down", and your actual speed is the minimum of those two speeds (or less).
OTOH, I guess an "up" limit that low pretty has a little bit of a protective effect against slashdotting. Folks give up pretty fast when they get nothing at all from your site.
(And we could get faster "down" speed from Verizon's FIOS, but the last I checked, they forbid any kind of server, so we couldn't use our home machines for web testing like we do. When I've asked the constant stream of Verizon sales folks about this, they have no idea what I'm talking about, or even what a "web server" or "email server" might be. Those who know those terms don't understand what HIPAA stands for or why one of us can't legally store work-related files on Verizon's servers.;-)
... well, it's not the camera that makes or breaks the photo. It's the skill of the photographer.
Well, I guess I must be pretty unskilled. I just can't find out how to make my cell phone's camera focus. Do you know where they hid the focus control? TFM doesn't seem to mention it, and if I google for either of our cameras' model names and "focus", I don't seem to find anything relevant. But if you can make them take pics that are in focus, there must be a way.
Now maybe you prefer that "soft focus" effect, and I agree that sometimes it's very artsy. But it's not the style I'm usually looking for.
One case where I've thought my cell phone's camera would be handy is for photos of funny signage, like the photos you see on sites like engrish.com or carcino.gen.nz. But in the few cases I've tried, the results weren't really focused well enough to be legible, and if you can't read the sign, the point of the photo sorta gets lost.;-)
Sounds like maybe this judge needs to think a little harder about how the Internet works.
Maybe you should think a little harder about how humans work.
And everyone, especially that judge, might think a bit about how names work.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are several hundred people in the US with my name, and probably a similar number in other English-speaking countries. It's not a common name, but it's not unusual, either. I know several of the guys that I share a name with. I've worked on a project with one of them, and I've shared a sound stage with another.
What this story made me think was: Oh great; someone with my name is arrested in New Zealand or Australia, and to protect that person, all web pages with my name are embargoed by that country's Great Firewall. This includes my own web site, and probably also pages on any employer's web site that reference any of my work.
Now, I know this isn't exactly what the judge ordered. But this is mostly due to the general lack of comprehension among legal (and managerial and political) people about how the Internet's tubes work. We can expect that, when such judges learn that such court orders have little or no effect, they'll do the minimal "investigation", and try various ways of extending a ban on "publishing" names however they can. One thing they'll find is that there are these mysterious things called ISPs and international gateways and routers that are choke points where data can be examined and dropped. They'll order that the name bans be done at such points that are within their court's jurisdiction. The result will be that packets or entire web pages with my name will be dropped at various jjurisdictional borders.
Since a fair amount of Internet traffic crosses lots of jurisdictional borders, I could very well find that something like my resume would be visible to some prospective clients, but others would find it mysteriously garbled or entirely unreadable. And it would be because of some unknown court order in some remote part of the planet that was aimed at protecting the privacy of a local arrestee whose name happens to be the same as (or similar to) mine.
A lot of us geeks have tried to make the Internet into a reliable communication medium. Meanwhile, the legal, corporate and political worlds are doing what they can to make it flakey and unreliable.
(One of my favorite examples was a few years back, when stories the basketball player Jared Prickett ran afoul of anti-porn software that converted his name to "Jared ett". Then there was the recent story of the software that converted Tyson Gay's name to "Tyson Homosexual". This sort of thing is funny, of course, but it's typical of how such name-based censorship usually works.)
"it seems that no sooner do the devs get something just about working before they get bored and move on to something new."
That describes a lot of open-source in general...
Heh. With only a slight rewording, it also applies to most commercial, proprietary stuff:
No sooner do the devs get something just about working before they find that the marketers have been selling it and delivering it in its incomplete state, complete with promises that it'll do all sorts of things that the devs have never heard about.
When the customer complaints about missing features start rolling in, the devs are ordered to work on those features instead of wasting time debugging the original software (which must be good enough, because the customers bought it, didn't they?);-)
If you don't like the camera, just don't use it. It's that simple.
No, it's not that simple. I have my second phone with a camera, and my wife is still on her first. All three that we've had have had similar misbehavior: The cameras get turned on "automatically" when the phone is in my pocket (or her purse). We get lots of pictures of the inside of my pocket (and her purse). This really runs down the batter quickly. When I ask around, it seems that nearly everyone with a camera in their phone has this problem.
In a couple of years with these phones, neither of us has kept any of its pictures. They're just crap that I'd be embarrassed to show to anyone. I've been thinking that I'll hold out on a newer phone until I can get a decent one without a camera. The FreeRunner seems like a good candidate, if I really can program a few apps of my own.
This is significant, because in the past I've had two "smart phones", a Kyocera and a Blackberry, and despite all the ad claims, I was in fact never able to produce a running app on either. After some time, I finally got the support people for each to admit that they'd locked out that capability. (The BB was especially frustrating, because it was bought with employer funds explicitly so that I could program it for a project. The telco's double-crossing us that way led to them being excluded from further consideration for our projects. But that's a different complaint.;-)
In any case, I think I'll wait a few months, see what the reports are from the field, before I decide to throw away some more money on a phone that may or may not permit me to do what I want with it. I waited a few months with the iPhone, and I'm glad I did.
But "no camera" is definitely a feature, in my mind. I'd much prefer extra battery or memory.
Until climatologists can come up with a model that'll accurately predict weather for a given region during a given month, at least six months out, or hell at least come up with a model that when run with past data points yields the same observed weather,...
Sorry; you've got the wrong specialty. You want a meteorologist, not a climatologist.
To a climatologist, date for any particular month is mostly just noise that they're trying to filter out by various statistical averaging techniques. Climatologist deal in years as the smallest time quantum, and mostly work with intervals one or more orders of magnitude larger than a year.
It's sorta like: Climatology? I think you want meteorology. That's room 12A, down the hall. [sotto voce: Stupid git!]
no scientist of any repute is saying that we're the ONLY cause of climate change
No, but politicians do.
Heh. I recall a few months back, when I made some comment about the climatologists and their models being in pretty good agreement that human activity accounted for most of the change. One wise guy replied with a pointer to a study concluding that human activity accounted for around 115% of the observed warming.;-)
But it is a bit funny to see flame wars debating whether we're responsible for 85% or 100% or 115% of the observed changes. The scientists are, as you'd expect, running a lot of models. The models don't agree, of course, and you wouldn't expect or want them to. The point isn't to claim that some model is the absolute truth or accurate to 0.1% or whatever. Rather, models were developed first to see which would "postdict" the observed rapid changes in the past few decades. Then the models were refined and are now being watched to see which (if any) do a good job of predicting future changes. This will take a while, because weather is a rather chaotic phenomenon, and it's difficult to pick the signal out of the noise.
The models that have worked best are the ones that use mostly human activity to predict changes. Anyone who has read the usual tomes on scientific theory will tell you that this doesn't necessarily mean that those models are correct. But if you have to wager, that's how you should make your bets. Maybe there's an unknown factor that has been left out of all the models that explains the observed changes. But some of the scientific models are getting good enough at "explaining" the changes that a sensible person wouldn't bet against those models. Not unless you're privy to some scientific work that has been kept a secret from the rest of the climatology community. And if you are privy to such work, you should look at it very carefully, because history says that such things are likely to be pseudo-scientific marketing ruses to deprive you (and investors and other kinds of gamblers of) money.
Meanwhile, the media and politicians are pretty good at picking little things (such as annual mean temperatures) out of the studies' data, and making a big fuss out of it. And the scientists don't say much, because they're busy feeding the data into their models and arguing about whose models are doing the best job now.
As a general rule, anything that works well in Flash would be even better as a native application.
Not necessarily. I'm typing this on a 4-year-old Mac Powerbook. If I look at sites like youtube, the videos work fine. But if I save the videos to disk (e.g. vie Downloadhelper), and run them with the SWF&FLV Player (which seems to be the only thing I've found that will run.flv files on this Mac), they are nearly unwatchable. Even if I close down all the other running apps to give SWF&FLV Player most of the !GB of memory and all the CPU, it still stumbles and skips a couple times per second. But if I view the same flash video in any of the dozen browsers I have installed, it works fine in all of them, even with other apps using 3/4 of the memory and half the cpu.
Perhaps there's a program that can actually play.flv files as well as the browsers can, but I haven't been able to find it.
Funny thing is that I solved the problem of running.flv files locally by writing my own web page that takes a file://... URL and runs the local file inside the browser. That works even better than sites like youtube, because it doesn't have the occasional pause due to network delays.
Another funny thing is that I mentioned this a couple of years ago on a tech mailing list, and got several explanations why what I did is probably a violation of all sorts of licenses, trademarks, copyrights, etc. It's a funny world.
Anyone that's ever used C++ for more than the required chapter in school would probably agree that it's not a language for dabblers.
I think you've hit onto an elegant explanation for the success of perl: It is a language for dabblers. That was more or less one of its many design goals. And this is one of the main reasons that there's so much crap code in perl. Most perl code was written by dabblers.
It's not the only language like this, of course. Ease-of-entry was much of the original attraction of languages like Cobol and Basic. The result in all such cases is that the language gets the blame for all the awful, incomprehensible code produced by dabblers (including programmers who are experts in some other language, but are just dabbling in the "easy" language).
And the whole argument falls down on the old observation that it is always easy for a poor programmer to write bad code in any language. Management tends to not understand (or believe) this, making them fall for the claims that some New! Improved! language will solve all the problems of those awful old languages. So they spend a lot of money and time converting to the latest fad language. In a few years, they (or their successors) see that most of the code in the new language is incomprehensible, unmaintainable crap. They don't believe that the real reason is their management style, not the language, and they're ready to impose the next programming fad on their organization.
Well, it does make for some fun learning experiences for those of us who like learning new languages. But it'll never lead to a body of good code. For that, you need to hire (and keep) some good programmers, with software managers who actually understand how to keep it organized.
And if you do that, you're likely to find that all your software has been rewritten in LISP, so management will never go for it.;-)
No, what we we need is people who are talented at writing and editing to get involved in creating open-source textbooks.
Um, that wikibook quote has problems much deeper than talent at writing or editing. It should be rewritten by someone who has a clue about what terms like "light", "energy" and "photon" actually mean to physicists. No amount of rewriting will fix text that is fundamentally wrong at its core.
It's similar to the common problem in teaching, of teachers who "know how to teach", but are ignorant of the subject matter.
True, a good textbook requires good writing and good editing. But first (at least in scientific subjects;-) it needs factual knowledge. We don't need brilliant writing that gets the facts wrong.
To be a bit kinder, further reading of the wikibooks page makes it clear that the writer isn't a native speaker of English. It needs a thorough rewrite by someone knowledgeable in optics who is also fluent in the language. That first paragraph is hopeless, and should just be replaced in its entirety. (But the equations are fine.;-)
I went to uni in England. The lecturers wrote stuff up on the board/projector/used powerpoint and handed out a sheet of questions and some pages of notes each week. They suggested one to three suitable textbooks for a course, but that's as far as it went.
That's probably because in most of Europe, there's a tradition of official ethical guidelines that preclude profs taking kickbacks from the publishers for requiring that students purchase a specific textbook. Here in the US, such ethics rules are rarely enforced (and usually don't even exist); the schools themselves make kickback deals with publishers. They do this openly, with no shame. Once you understand this, it all makes sense.
Who is going to write these open source textbooks?
The obvious answer is to set up a wiki textbook site. If I were a prof (who isn't getting kickback to push a certain book;-), I'd look into this. And I'd give extra credit to my students who contributed to keeping it up to date.
It's also pretty obvious that you'd want to exclude anonymous updates. There are just too many people who would want to sabotage such a site, starting with the dead-tree publishers and the creationists. And it's not just the religious folks; you might be surprised (or impressed) by how many math and physics quacks there are out there. To make an online textbook attractive to someone teaching a class, you'd want some assurance that it'll won't be vandalized by "interested parties" during the course.
It's funny that TFA doesn't seem to have any mention of such an idea. But not too surprising, as most people's concept of a "textbook" is probably firmly attached to the model of one (or a small number of) specific authors who make money from the sales of their specific text. Dynamic updating of a "book" isn't really possible for the traditional publishing industry, while online publishing has the problem that it's all too easy.
It's not that they're dropping it. They're simply not routing it to anywhere... There's a big difference there.
So what's the difference? Sounds like two ways of saying the same thing.
If they're not dropping IPv6 packets, and not routing them, what are they doing with them? Putting them into a database, maybe, to be delivered when they enable IPv6? Forwarding them to the TSA or CIA?;-)
I'm actually in one of the rare areas that have more than one ISP. We have three available here. Our current ISP doesn't implement IPv6, so I can't use it. I checked with the other two. Neither of them allows IPv6, either. None of the three admits to any plans to implement it.
Most people have only one ISP, of course. What incentive does that ISP have to permit IPv6? I mean, here where we have three ISPs, none of them has an incentive to do it.
I don't see how we can ever switch to IPv6 until the ISPs stop dropping all IPv6 packets, and start forwarding them properly. And that clearly ain't gonna happen without a bit of "government regulation" ordering them to do it or else. But with the current political setup here in the US, that ain't gonna happen, either.
Anyone have any idea how to persuade the ISPs to come around?
Any software where they won't show me the source code and/or let me compile it myself with my own tools and have it work has something to hide.
That has been one of the primary rules from the security folks right from the start. If you want even minimal security, you don't run binaries from someone else. You compile the code on your own machine, with your own compiler. And you probably use a system library that lets you produce a log of all opens and connections that each program makes. You compiled that library yourself from the source, of course. And you have some programs that scan the logs for suspicious activity.
Now I just know that someone is going to point out that most people can't possibly do such things. Yes, you're quite right. The great majority of people will never have computers with any meaningful security. I agree. But this post was in reply to a message from someone who does want to compile all the software on his/her own machine.
(And, of course, Ken Thompson has explained to us why this isn't actually quite good enough.;-)
In Flash's case, I'll grant that what it's likely hiding is umpteen million security vulnerabilities,. But it could just as easily be hiding code to spy on me or censor things because the software decides I don't have a copyright license or I'm living in China or something.
And I don't think, given the general history of software, that I'm being particularly paranoid here.
If you read any marketing or management forums or news sources, you'll decide that you're definitely not being paranoid. "Fine grained" tracking of customers' behavior is a hot topic these days. The marketing (and management) types aren't the least bit secretive about this. To them, it's what this technology was made for, and they'd be fools not to take maximum advantage of anything that will deliver any information about user behavior or preferences.
After all, why is google such a hot property now? It's because they've found a successful new source of wealth: Collecting, using and selling information about people from their web searches, email, etc. This is not exactly a secret. We've discussed it often enough here.
So don't worry about people thinking you're paranoid. Even if they're not out to get you, they definitely are out to get any info they can about you, and they're not even trying to hide the fact.
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
Lotta good that would do. Like many other linux users I know, I have a bunch of *.doubleclick.com entries in my/etc/hosts file mapping those hosts to 127.0.0.1. When I spot another doubleclick add, I add another hostname to the list. Right now there are 40 of them.
But I don't see to many doubleclick flash ads, either, or anyone else's, because I've had flashblock installed in firefox for several years. To bad it doesn't work with all browsers; not supporting flashblock just persuades me not to use that browser.
Hmmm... Maybe this is why I hadn't actually noticed that flashblock has problems on linux. Except that I have watched a bunch of youtube videos on my linux box, and I don't recall ever seeing it crash during one of them. Just to be sure, I just paused typing this, went to youtube, and played half a dozen videos on my new ubuntu 8.04 machine. It worked fine (after I unblocked yet another flash site for one of the videos;-).
Just out of curiosity, is there some reliable way to demo the problem? I don't seem to be stumbling across one.
Remember travelling was only for the rich until not so long ago. The first inter-city railway was only opened in 1830 (Liverpool to Manchester), before that most people couldn't afford the time or the money to travel further than to the nearest town.
Huh? By 1830, the British had extensive "holdings" around the world. 50 years earlier, their empire had already spun off a significant English-speaking nation several thousand miles away, across an ocean. The British Empire may have been led by the rich, but it wasn't the rich who travelled around the world to do the dirty work.
The British were hardly the first. About a decade ago, the Icelanders celebrated the 1000th anniversary of their parliament. And, of course, the Romans had a rather significant empire 1000 years before that, one that brought in so many black African slaves as to significantly affect the physical appearance of Mediterranean people (as testified by copious statuary over the Roman Empire's history).
The railroad was significant as a better way to do overland travel. But extensive water-based travel goes back thousands of years, and has never required huge riches. Humans have always lived primarily along major rivers and on the shores of large lakes and oceans. Remains of boats (and houses on stilts) go back many thousands of years.
The idea that "ordinary" people couldn't travel, intermix and interbreed before modern transportation is silly on its face, and contrary to everything we know about our history.
MBTA is hiding more than just a flawed system. They are hiding the fact that it is flawed badly and quite possibly BY DESIGN. This system is flawed both externally in the ticket handling and INTERNALLY in the money handling!!! Who benefits from these flaws? I smell a rat and it ain't at MIT!
Yeah; probably 90% of the population of Boston and environs would agree with you. But that's an even stronger reason that you shouldn't "shout it from the rooftops". It's a whole lot safer to release the information anonymously. There's a real chance that these guys won't be visited just by MBTA lawyers. I'll leave it to readers' imaginations just the sort of "persuaders" that may be paying them visits.
Of course, having gone so public with the information could give them some protection. The the way things work, since their identities are known, they could all be involved in "unfortunate accidents" over the next few years.
Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry security researchers trying to grab a few headlines.
See, this is exactly why one should always announce security problems anonymously, via one of the security lists that supply anonymity. That way, you don't get labelled publicly with such epithets. Then, when the fuss has died down and it's only the security geeks talking, you can let them know that you were the source of that "leak". That way, you get the credit (if they believe you;-), without all the usual approbation that follows being a messenger carrying bad news.
The public in general, and specifically the people in power, don't want to hear about such things, and are going to want to punish you for telling them about it. Until they come to their senses, which won't happen soon, you're much better off working anonymously, known to only a few co-workers.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see how the terrorist watch list is ANY different from the communist black list of the 60s. All it takes to get put on there is a neighbor that doesn't like you.
Actually, it's a lot easier than that. All it really takes is having a name that's somewhat similar to a name on the list. Lots of people with common names have learned this already. Google "no-fly-list" plus "common-name" to read lots of stories about it.
Also, having the same birthday as someone on the no-fly list can get you detained and interrogated, though by now I suppose that the list must contain all the 366 possible birth dates.
Yeah, but readers who used the picture to get an idea of what a cow looks like could be a bit misled. Cows like that one, with a map of the Earth on her side, are quite rare. This is because there are millions of other planets in the galaxy, and each cow develops a map of a random planet. I once saw one that was mostly reddish-brown, with a white splotch on top and a dark, roughly horizontal irregular streak along her side. I now realize that her map was clearly of Mars.
If I could get unlimited broadband I would need unlimited disk too. I'd have me a local cache of Wikipedia.
Heh. Actually, those are starting to appear, though probably not with all of wikipedia. It seems that one of the things the OLPC gang is doing is providing local caches of good-sized chunks of wikipedia, whatever their "field consultants" (local teachers) feel might be of interest to their kids and is available in the local language. Someone mentioned a 350MB Spanish subset, compressed to about 100MB. Of course, it would typically be installed on the local central server, to make it quickly available to all the kids. It seems that specialized single-language caches like that are now quite practical, even in the major languages with lots of wikipedia articles. And my immediate thought was that some of the local adults might well like to have a somewhat larger wikipedia cache, including most of the technical stuff in their language.
Of course, one of the challenges the OLPC project has is finding good translators for their core UI stuff, as well as for their extracts from wikipedia. Do you know anyone fluent in Quechua or Aymara who might like to volunteer?
This test is the same like those websites where you can test your download speed. They are all flawed in that they don't take your subscription into account.
They're also flawed if they test only the speed from your ISPs servers. Thus, our current service (RCN) is 5MB/s down and 0.7MB/s up. We have a home web server (which we both use for testing work stuff). If we're communicating with a colleague's site with the same service, the speed is a max of 0.7MB/s in both directions, and usually less. The ISP would of course list us as having 5MB/s service. But in each transfer, one is "up" and one is "down", and your actual speed is the minimum of those two speeds (or less).
OTOH, I guess an "up" limit that low pretty has a little bit of a protective effect against slashdotting. Folks give up pretty fast when they get nothing at all from your site.
(And we could get faster "down" speed from Verizon's FIOS, but the last I checked, they forbid any kind of server, so we couldn't use our home machines for web testing like we do. When I've asked the constant stream of Verizon sales folks about this, they have no idea what I'm talking about, or even what a "web server" or "email server" might be. Those who know those terms don't understand what HIPAA stands for or why one of us can't legally store work-related files on Verizon's servers. ;-)
... well, it's not the camera that makes or breaks the photo. It's the skill of the photographer.
Well, I guess I must be pretty unskilled. I just can't find out how to make my cell phone's camera focus. Do you know where they hid the focus control? TFM doesn't seem to mention it, and if I google for either of our cameras' model names and "focus", I don't seem to find anything relevant. But if you can make them take pics that are in focus, there must be a way.
Now maybe you prefer that "soft focus" effect, and I agree that sometimes it's very artsy. But it's not the style I'm usually looking for.
One case where I've thought my cell phone's camera would be handy is for photos of funny signage, like the photos you see on sites like engrish.com or carcino.gen.nz. But in the few cases I've tried, the results weren't really focused well enough to be legible, and if you can't read the sign, the point of the photo sorta gets lost. ;-)
Those tests should be limited to those who pay for "all you can get".
But you can't get "all you can get" anywhere in the US that I know of.
(Yeah, some ISPs do advertise "unlimited" plans. They lie a lot.)
And everyone, especially that judge, might think a bit about how names work.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are several hundred people in the US with my name, and probably a similar number in other English-speaking countries. It's not a common name, but it's not unusual, either. I know several of the guys that I share a name with. I've worked on a project with one of them, and I've shared a sound stage with another.
What this story made me think was: Oh great; someone with my name is arrested in New Zealand or Australia, and to protect that person, all web pages with my name are embargoed by that country's Great Firewall. This includes my own web site, and probably also pages on any employer's web site that reference any of my work.
Now, I know this isn't exactly what the judge ordered. But this is mostly due to the general lack of comprehension among legal (and managerial and political) people about how the Internet's tubes work. We can expect that, when such judges learn that such court orders have little or no effect, they'll do the minimal "investigation", and try various ways of extending a ban on "publishing" names however they can. One thing they'll find is that there are these mysterious things called ISPs and international gateways and routers that are choke points where data can be examined and dropped. They'll order that the name bans be done at such points that are within their court's jurisdiction. The result will be that packets or entire web pages with my name will be dropped at various jjurisdictional borders.
Since a fair amount of Internet traffic crosses lots of jurisdictional borders, I could very well find that something like my resume would be visible to some prospective clients, but others would find it mysteriously garbled or entirely unreadable. And it would be because of some unknown court order in some remote part of the planet that was aimed at protecting the privacy of a local arrestee whose name happens to be the same as (or similar to) mine.
A lot of us geeks have tried to make the Internet into a reliable communication medium. Meanwhile, the legal, corporate and political worlds are doing what they can to make it flakey and unreliable.
(One of my favorite examples was a few years back, when stories the basketball player Jared Prickett ran afoul of anti-porn software that converted his name to "Jared ett". Then there was the recent story of the software that converted Tyson Gay's name to "Tyson Homosexual". This sort of thing is funny, of course, but it's typical of how such name-based censorship usually works.)
Heh. With only a slight rewording, it also applies to most commercial, proprietary stuff:
No sooner do the devs get something just about working before they find that the marketers have been selling it and delivering it in its incomplete state, complete with promises that it'll do all sorts of things that the devs have never heard about.
When the customer complaints about missing features start rolling in, the devs are ordered to work on those features instead of wasting time debugging the original software (which must be good enough, because the customers bought it, didn't they?) ;-)
If you don't like the camera, just don't use it. It's that simple.
No, it's not that simple. I have my second phone with a camera, and my wife is still on her first. All three that we've had have had similar misbehavior: The cameras get turned on "automatically" when the phone is in my pocket (or her purse). We get lots of pictures of the inside of my pocket (and her purse). This really runs down the batter quickly. When I ask around, it seems that nearly everyone with a camera in their phone has this problem.
In a couple of years with these phones, neither of us has kept any of its pictures. They're just crap that I'd be embarrassed to show to anyone. I've been thinking that I'll hold out on a newer phone until I can get a decent one without a camera. The FreeRunner seems like a good candidate, if I really can program a few apps of my own.
This is significant, because in the past I've had two "smart phones", a Kyocera and a Blackberry, and despite all the ad claims, I was in fact never able to produce a running app on either. After some time, I finally got the support people for each to admit that they'd locked out that capability. (The BB was especially frustrating, because it was bought with employer funds explicitly so that I could program it for a project. The telco's double-crossing us that way led to them being excluded from further consideration for our projects. But that's a different complaint. ;-)
In any case, I think I'll wait a few months, see what the reports are from the field, before I decide to throw away some more money on a phone that may or may not permit me to do what I want with it. I waited a few months with the iPhone, and I'm glad I did.
But "no camera" is definitely a feature, in my mind. I'd much prefer extra battery or memory.
Until climatologists can come up with a model that'll accurately predict weather for a given region during a given month, at least six months out, or hell at least come up with a model that when run with past data points yields the same observed weather, ...
Sorry; you've got the wrong specialty. You want a meteorologist, not a climatologist.
To a climatologist, date for any particular month is mostly just noise that they're trying to filter out by various statistical averaging techniques. Climatologist deal in years as the smallest time quantum, and mostly work with intervals one or more orders of magnitude larger than a year.
It's sorta like: Climatology? I think you want meteorology. That's room 12A, down the hall. [sotto voce: Stupid git!]
no scientist of any repute is saying that we're the ONLY cause of climate change
No, but politicians do.
Heh. I recall a few months back, when I made some comment about the climatologists and their models being in pretty good agreement that human activity accounted for most of the change. One wise guy replied with a pointer to a study concluding that human activity accounted for around 115% of the observed warming. ;-)
But it is a bit funny to see flame wars debating whether we're responsible for 85% or 100% or 115% of the observed changes. The scientists are, as you'd expect, running a lot of models. The models don't agree, of course, and you wouldn't expect or want them to. The point isn't to claim that some model is the absolute truth or accurate to 0.1% or whatever. Rather, models were developed first to see which would "postdict" the observed rapid changes in the past few decades. Then the models were refined and are now being watched to see which (if any) do a good job of predicting future changes. This will take a while, because weather is a rather chaotic phenomenon, and it's difficult to pick the signal out of the noise.
The models that have worked best are the ones that use mostly human activity to predict changes. Anyone who has read the usual tomes on scientific theory will tell you that this doesn't necessarily mean that those models are correct. But if you have to wager, that's how you should make your bets. Maybe there's an unknown factor that has been left out of all the models that explains the observed changes. But some of the scientific models are getting good enough at "explaining" the changes that a sensible person wouldn't bet against those models. Not unless you're privy to some scientific work that has been kept a secret from the rest of the climatology community. And if you are privy to such work, you should look at it very carefully, because history says that such things are likely to be pseudo-scientific marketing ruses to deprive you (and investors and other kinds of gamblers of) money.
Meanwhile, the media and politicians are pretty good at picking little things (such as annual mean temperatures) out of the studies' data, and making a big fuss out of it. And the scientists don't say much, because they're busy feeding the data into their models and arguing about whose models are doing the best job now.
As a general rule, anything that works well in Flash would be even better as a native application.
Not necessarily. I'm typing this on a 4-year-old Mac Powerbook. If I look at sites like youtube, the videos work fine. But if I save the videos to disk (e.g. vie Downloadhelper), and run them with the SWF&FLV Player (which seems to be the only thing I've found that will run .flv files on this Mac), they are nearly unwatchable. Even if I close down all the other running apps to give SWF&FLV Player most of the !GB of memory and all the CPU, it still stumbles and skips a couple times per second. But if I view the same flash video in any of the dozen browsers I have installed, it works fine in all of them, even with other apps using 3/4 of the memory and half the cpu.
Perhaps there's a program that can actually play .flv files as well as the browsers can, but I haven't been able to find it.
Funny thing is that I solved the problem of running .flv files locally by writing my own web page that takes a file://... URL and runs the local file inside the browser. That works even better than sites like youtube, because it doesn't have the occasional pause due to network delays.
Another funny thing is that I mentioned this a couple of years ago on a tech mailing list, and got several explanations why what I did is probably a violation of all sorts of licenses, trademarks, copyrights, etc. It's a funny world.
Anyone that's ever used C++ for more than the required chapter in school would probably agree that it's not a language for dabblers.
I think you've hit onto an elegant explanation for the success of perl: It is a language for dabblers. That was more or less one of its many design goals. And this is one of the main reasons that there's so much crap code in perl. Most perl code was written by dabblers.
It's not the only language like this, of course. Ease-of-entry was much of the original attraction of languages like Cobol and Basic. The result in all such cases is that the language gets the blame for all the awful, incomprehensible code produced by dabblers (including programmers who are experts in some other language, but are just dabbling in the "easy" language).
And the whole argument falls down on the old observation that it is always easy for a poor programmer to write bad code in any language. Management tends to not understand (or believe) this, making them fall for the claims that some New! Improved! language will solve all the problems of those awful old languages. So they spend a lot of money and time converting to the latest fad language. In a few years, they (or their successors) see that most of the code in the new language is incomprehensible, unmaintainable crap. They don't believe that the real reason is their management style, not the language, and they're ready to impose the next programming fad on their organization.
Well, it does make for some fun learning experiences for those of us who like learning new languages. But it'll never lead to a body of good code. For that, you need to hire (and keep) some good programmers, with software managers who actually understand how to keep it organized.
And if you do that, you're likely to find that all your software has been rewritten in LISP, so management will never go for it. ;-)
I can't be the only one who wonders what Apple's definition of "major injuries or damage" might be.
Does it mean that nobody has yet been killed? Or maybe they have a more generous definition, such as "no loss of major limbs or sensory organs".
Anyone know?
No, what we we need is people who are talented at writing and editing to get involved in creating open-source textbooks.
Um, that wikibook quote has problems much deeper than talent at writing or editing. It should be rewritten by someone who has a clue about what terms like "light", "energy" and "photon" actually mean to physicists. No amount of rewriting will fix text that is fundamentally wrong at its core.
It's similar to the common problem in teaching, of teachers who "know how to teach", but are ignorant of the subject matter.
True, a good textbook requires good writing and good editing. But first (at least in scientific subjects ;-) it needs factual knowledge. We don't need brilliant writing that gets the facts wrong.
To be a bit kinder, further reading of the wikibooks page makes it clear that the writer isn't a native speaker of English. It needs a thorough rewrite by someone knowledgeable in optics who is also fluent in the language. That first paragraph is hopeless, and should just be replaced in its entirety. (But the equations are fine. ;-)
I went to uni in England. The lecturers wrote stuff up on the board/projector/used powerpoint and handed out a sheet of questions and some pages of notes each week. They suggested one to three suitable textbooks for a course, but that's as far as it went.
That's probably because in most of Europe, there's a tradition of official ethical guidelines that preclude profs taking kickbacks from the publishers for requiring that students purchase a specific textbook. Here in the US, such ethics rules are rarely enforced (and usually don't even exist); the schools themselves make kickback deals with publishers. They do this openly, with no shame. Once you understand this, it all makes sense.
Who is going to write these open source textbooks?
The obvious answer is to set up a wiki textbook site. If I were a prof (who isn't getting kickback to push a certain book ;-), I'd look into this. And I'd give extra credit to my students who contributed to keeping it up to date.
It's also pretty obvious that you'd want to exclude anonymous updates. There are just too many people who would want to sabotage such a site, starting with the dead-tree publishers and the creationists. And it's not just the religious folks; you might be surprised (or impressed) by how many math and physics quacks there are out there. To make an online textbook attractive to someone teaching a class, you'd want some assurance that it'll won't be vandalized by "interested parties" during the course.
It's funny that TFA doesn't seem to have any mention of such an idea. But not too surprising, as most people's concept of a "textbook" is probably firmly attached to the model of one (or a small number of) specific authors who make money from the sales of their specific text. Dynamic updating of a "book" isn't really possible for the traditional publishing industry, while online publishing has the problem that it's all too easy.
It's not that they're dropping it. They're simply not routing it to anywhere... There's a big difference there.
So what's the difference? Sounds like two ways of saying the same thing.
If they're not dropping IPv6 packets, and not routing them, what are they doing with them? Putting them into a database, maybe, to be delivered when they enable IPv6? Forwarding them to the TSA or CIA? ;-)
I'm actually in one of the rare areas that have more than one ISP. We have three available here. Our current ISP doesn't implement IPv6, so I can't use it. I checked with the other two. Neither of them allows IPv6, either. None of the three admits to any plans to implement it.
Most people have only one ISP, of course. What incentive does that ISP have to permit IPv6? I mean, here where we have three ISPs, none of them has an incentive to do it.
I don't see how we can ever switch to IPv6 until the ISPs stop dropping all IPv6 packets, and start forwarding them properly. And that clearly ain't gonna happen without a bit of "government regulation" ordering them to do it or else. But with the current political setup here in the US, that ain't gonna happen, either.
Anyone have any idea how to persuade the ISPs to come around?
Any software where they won't show me the source code and/or let me compile it myself with my own tools and have it work has something to hide.
That has been one of the primary rules from the security folks right from the start. If you want even minimal security, you don't run binaries from someone else. You compile the code on your own machine, with your own compiler. And you probably use a system library that lets you produce a log of all opens and connections that each program makes. You compiled that library yourself from the source, of course. And you have some programs that scan the logs for suspicious activity.
Now I just know that someone is going to point out that most people can't possibly do such things. Yes, you're quite right. The great majority of people will never have computers with any meaningful security. I agree. But this post was in reply to a message from someone who does want to compile all the software on his/her own machine.
(And, of course, Ken Thompson has explained to us why this isn't actually quite good enough. ;-)
In Flash's case, I'll grant that what it's likely hiding is umpteen million security vulnerabilities,. But it could just as easily be hiding code to spy on me or censor things because the software decides I don't have a copyright license or I'm living in China or something.
And I don't think, given the general history of software, that I'm being particularly paranoid here.
If you read any marketing or management forums or news sources, you'll decide that you're definitely not being paranoid. "Fine grained" tracking of customers' behavior is a hot topic these days. The marketing (and management) types aren't the least bit secretive about this. To them, it's what this technology was made for, and they'd be fools not to take maximum advantage of anything that will deliver any information about user behavior or preferences.
After all, why is google such a hot property now? It's because they've found a successful new source of wealth: Collecting, using and selling information about people from their web searches, email, etc. This is not exactly a secret. We've discussed it often enough here.
So don't worry about people thinking you're paranoid. Even if they're not out to get you, they definitely are out to get any info they can about you, and they're not even trying to hide the fact.
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
Lotta good that would do. Like many other linux users I know, I have a bunch of *.doubleclick.com entries in my /etc/hosts file mapping those hosts to 127.0.0.1. When I spot another doubleclick add, I add another hostname to the list. Right now there are 40 of them.
But I don't see to many doubleclick flash ads, either, or anyone else's, because I've had flashblock installed in firefox for several years. To bad it doesn't work with all browsers; not supporting flashblock just persuades me not to use that browser.
Hmmm ... Maybe this is why I hadn't actually noticed that flashblock has problems on linux. Except that I have watched a bunch of youtube videos on my linux box, and I don't recall ever seeing it crash during one of them. Just to be sure, I just paused typing this, went to youtube, and played half a dozen videos on my new ubuntu 8.04 machine. It worked fine (after I unblocked yet another flash site for one of the videos ;-).
Just out of curiosity, is there some reliable way to demo the problem? I don't seem to be stumbling across one.
Remember travelling was only for the rich until not so long ago. The first inter-city railway was only opened in 1830 (Liverpool to Manchester), before that most people couldn't afford the time or the money to travel further than to the nearest town.
Huh? By 1830, the British had extensive "holdings" around the world. 50 years earlier, their empire had already spun off a significant English-speaking nation several thousand miles away, across an ocean. The British Empire may have been led by the rich, but it wasn't the rich who travelled around the world to do the dirty work.
The British were hardly the first. About a decade ago, the Icelanders celebrated the 1000th anniversary of their parliament. And, of course, the Romans had a rather significant empire 1000 years before that, one that brought in so many black African slaves as to significantly affect the physical appearance of Mediterranean people (as testified by copious statuary over the Roman Empire's history).
The railroad was significant as a better way to do overland travel. But extensive water-based travel goes back thousands of years, and has never required huge riches. Humans have always lived primarily along major rivers and on the shores of large lakes and oceans. Remains of boats (and houses on stilts) go back many thousands of years.
The idea that "ordinary" people couldn't travel, intermix and interbreed before modern transportation is silly on its face, and contrary to everything we know about our history.
MBTA is hiding more than just a flawed system. They are hiding the fact that it is flawed badly and quite possibly BY DESIGN. This system is flawed both externally in the ticket handling and INTERNALLY in the money handling!!! Who benefits from these flaws? I smell a rat and it ain't at MIT!
Yeah; probably 90% of the population of Boston and environs would agree with you. But that's an even stronger reason that you shouldn't "shout it from the rooftops". It's a whole lot safer to release the information anonymously. There's a real chance that these guys won't be visited just by MBTA lawyers. I'll leave it to readers' imaginations just the sort of "persuaders" that may be paying them visits.
Of course, having gone so public with the information could give them some protection. The the way things work, since their identities are known, they could all be involved in "unfortunate accidents" over the next few years.
Others, though, see the entire episode as yet another example of irresponsible, publicity-hungry security researchers trying to grab a few headlines.
See, this is exactly why one should always announce security problems anonymously, via one of the security lists that supply anonymity. That way, you don't get labelled publicly with such epithets. Then, when the fuss has died down and it's only the security geeks talking, you can let them know that you were the source of that "leak". That way, you get the credit (if they believe you ;-), without all the usual approbation that follows being a messenger carrying bad news.
The public in general, and specifically the people in power, don't want to hear about such things, and are going to want to punish you for telling them about it. Until they come to their senses, which won't happen soon, you're much better off working anonymously, known to only a few co-workers.