One of the funnier cases of the "Language X has no word for Y" trope was a few months ago, and I think it was even here on slashdot, when someone claimed that a certain language "has no word for freedom of speech". My instant thought was "Well, neither does English; that's why we use three words to express the concept."
But I didn't post it then, since I figured that people who think that way would just be indignant (and wouldn't learn much) from such a followup, and the rest of the people didn't need the comment, because they thought of it themselves just before they laughed.
I have a pair of Apple Airport routers, and the only time they get rebooted is when I change settings and restart them.
Well, I've found that rebooting our Airport Extreme seems to "fix" a problem that pops up every few days. The problem is that we have a Mac PowerBook which occasionally shows that the wifi seems to have gone crazy. The little wifi-power icon at the upper right starts fluctuating all over the place, Internet Connect shows the same fluctuations, and most of the network apps suddenly start showing very sluggish network response.
The funny thing is that we have a few other wifi-enabled toys, including a second Powerbook, a Windows Vista laptop, and a several-years-old Treo, and two OLPC SOs, all of which will show a steady, strong wifi signal when this happens. So obviously the problem is with the first PowerBook, right? Probably not. Rebooting that PowerBook doesn't fix the problem; it comes up still showing flakey wifi. But rebooting the Airport usually does fix the problem (for a while). This points the finger right at the Airport, unless there's something more subtle going on between the two machines.
Actually, a few visitors have seen the same misbehavior. I haven't recorded what makes and models of computers they were using. And they showed the problem at the same time as our Powerbook. So the Airport apparently gets into some weird semi-functional state with some wifi cards while working fine with others, and rebooting the Airport is a temporary fix.
It doesn't appear that there's any way to diagnose and fix this problem at a price less than buying a new Airport (or some other wifi access point).
I don't know where you work, but those symptoms sound more indicative of user (or administrative) stupidity.
Yes, and that's exactly where Microsoft makes most of their sales. That's why they're the market leader.
If you design your system for intelligent users or administrators, you will always have a fringe-market product.
To make the traditional/. auto analogy, can you imagine the sales figures for an auto that was designed for smart, attentive people with a good understanding of auto mechanics?
Now, I have absolutely *no* problem with someone teaching ID in a religion class.
Perhaps, but a number of people, including a lot of religious people, have repeatedly explained why we don't want religious classes in our public schools.
A "public" school is, of course, a school run by the government. The US Constitution blocked government involvement in religion for reasons that have proved valid: If you allow a government to stick its hands into religious teaching or practice, the inevitable result will be that one specific religion (usually the local majority religion) will be the single one taught, and all others will be excluded. Look around at countries with religion-government ties; you'll have problems finding an exception.
In the current case, we can see this especially clearly with the suggestions that FSM (or IPU or whatever) theory be taught. It's obvious that, even if such laws are passed and validated by the courts, such parody "religions" would simply be ignored. But this is little different from how the schools would deal with the creation theories from other religions. Here in the US, we have local "Native American" creation myths that are still around and fun to study. We all know that there's no chance that any of them will be taught in Louisiana science classes. Only the creation myth from the Christian bible will be taught as an "alternate theory".
This is why most small religious groups in the US support church/state separation. They are well aware that, if there's going to be religious beliefs and/or practices enshrined by government agencies and schools, it's probably going to be the beliefs and practices of a major religious body. The small religious groups won't be taken any more seriously than the FSM (or Ojibwa or Navajo) supporters.
It's fairly common for religious historians to argue that it's the American exclusion of religion from government (and vice-versa) that allows such a large number of religious groups to thrive. Most of the religious leaders understand this, but unfortunately most of their congregations don't. If they did, they'd be publicly objecting to having a religious creation story forced on public-school science teachers. Such teaching doesn't belong in any public-school class; it belongs in the religious classes taught by religious groups in their own schools. That's the only way that you know your kids will be taught right. The public schools will teach someone else's religious ideas, not yours.
The word "computer" was once commonly used to refer to people who sat around adding up numbers,...
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". This was back in the 1970s, and she worked for a civil engineering firm. Her job entailed doing the calculations behind the engineering drawings. She used electronic calculators, but the electronic devices called "computers" weren't in widespread use in such firms for another decade or so.
It can be instructive to look into the history of that concept. Google for "common carrier" and "history", and buried in the zillions of hits is a lot of history.
An interesting part is the origin of the concept. Centuries ago, before electronics, messages were generally carried by messengers or couriers, typically a man on horseback. There were some serious problems with the system. Imagine a case in which prince A wants to send a message to prince B about an action (financial, legal, military, whatever) that they are planning against prince C.
One problem was that it was common to "blame the messenger for the message". If B doesn't like the message, perhaps because he's secretly cooperating with C, all too often B's response to the message would be to torture, injure, or kill the messenger. This isn't good for the courier service's business.
But the courier services had defenses against this. The obvious one was that couriers would often read their messages. If a message contained bad news for the recipient, it was likely that the courier would "lose" the message in self defense. Also, in the above case, the courier might make a copy and sell it to prince C. This sort of thing isn't good for the senders or recipients of the messages.
The "common carrier" concept arose as a solution to such problems. It was essentially an agreement that a courier wouldn't open and read messages, but would just deliver them unexamined to their recipients. In exchange, the recipients agreed to not harm the couriers (and to pay their bills even if they didn't like the messages;-). This sort of agreement, especially with the force of law behind it, was what made long-distance business and political communication possible for the first time. Without it, no communication was reliable, and people were at the mercy of the couriers (who lived in fear of their customers).
Anyway, whether or not ISPs are common carriers seems irrelevant. They are behaving as if they are not. They are reading the contents of messages, they are slowing or failing to deliver messages whose contents they don't like, and they are selling information about message contents to the sender's competitors and/or government agencies. The ISPs are making the Internet unreliable and untrustworthy. They block messages to our friends and sell our messages to our enemies, to put it in Medieval terms.
They are seriously risking the possibility that their customers will respond by "shooting the messenger" sometime soon. But it's also possible that the ISPs might wise up, as did many Medieval princes and merchants, and realize that a "common carrier" service that provides reliable, secret communication is a business necessity.
Or maybe they won't. The analogy isn't perfect. The ISPs seem to think they have an opportunity to control all communication, which would put them at the top of the power pyramid. If this is truly what they're thinking, we might be in for some tough times ahead, as they systematically sabotage all our communications, and the business and political worlds fall into chaos as a result.
But it never hurts to understand a bit of the history of why concepts like "common carrier" arose in the past.
The "solution" seems to publish on your own computer in your own home (because there is no public space, anywhere),... But then you run into the problem that... an ISP (whose network you use) can decide to not allow their net to be used by people initiating connections to your computer.
Perhaps this is a case where the worn-out automotive analogy is relevant. In the case of travel, I own my own home, but I'm not restricted to that home. I have a car, and I can legally drive it on the roads next to our lot, and on the roads that those two roads intercept, etc. I can legally drive nearly anywhere on the road system. Why? Well, it's because those roads aren't private property. They are almost all owned by government entities (the city or state or national government), and the US Constitution says that government entities can't restrict my travel (with the obvious exception of when I've been convicted of a crime).
The current Internet is unfortunately like the road system that the private-property fanatics advocate. Imagine a road system in which every segment of road was private, and you have to have permission from every owner to drive along a road. There would be a roadblock and a toll booth at every intersection. The person there could decide to not allow you to drive on the next road segment.
This would be clearly unworkable. And it's pretty much how the commercial Internet is now organized. The ISPs are just now waking up to the power they have to "shape" traffic. They see a future in which they can collect unlimited tolls for passage along their segments of the system. They see the power to block traffic by people that they don't like, and to charge extra for access to popular places.
It might be that, in the not-very-long run, the only solution is to "nationalize" the Internet. If its various segments are, like the road system, mostly owned by government bodies, the Constitution will guarantee unrestricted passage by our packets (with the obvious exception of certain types of criminal activity).
I do have the usual suspicions about the competence and good will of our typical government agencies. But they have done a mostly good job of providing a road system that works, without having government inspectors stopping us at every intersection and blocking travel by people that the party currently in power locally doesn't like. Maybe this is the model we should be looking at for the future of the Internet. Maybe private ownership of the comm lines is ultimately just as unworkable as private ownership of the roads.
If you want freedom, at least here in the US, our laws only protect you in "public" places. In private places, you effectively have no rights to even be there, much less do as you like, unless you're the owner.
(BTW, this isn't true everywhere. For example, google for "allmansrätt" to read about the Swedish law on use of private property. Of course, a lot of the hits will be for pages in Swedish...)
That's why every website that allows you to contribute to it has a terms of service you have to agree to before they allow you access. And in that TOS (if you bother to read it) it also tells you that you have no rights to whatever you contribute to it, and that they reserve the right to remove it at their discretion whenever they choose for any reason.
Indeed. And this is the point in the discussion where someone should point out that in the US, and in most other countries with free-speech laws, the law only says that the government can't restrict your speech. Private corporations are exempt from such laws, and they can restrict your speech (when you use their equipment) any way they like.
If you want free speech on the Internet, the only way you can get it is if your connection is owned and controlled by the government. If a government agency controls the wire, the laws protect you from interference with your speech (with certain obvious limits such as libel and incitement to commit crimes). But if a private corporation controls the wire, you have no legal rights whatsoever.
Of course, most people don't want the hassle of setting up their own hosting, so the market demand for upstream is low.
How much of a hassle this is depends somewhat on what kind of computer you have. I've had several friends with Macs ask about this, and got them going with their own web site in under a minute. With a Mac, if you didn't check the "Web Server" item at startup, you can go to System Preferences, click on the Sharing choice, and you'll see a list of things including Personal Web Sharing. You check that, and your web server is running. I point them to their Sites directory, and tell them that any file there will be visible on the Web.
Of course, their ISP probably gives them a nonsensical URL, unless they're lucky enough to have one of the few ISPs that will let you choose your machine's name and then set up a yourname.yourisp.com site name for you. If they won't do that, you have to go through the hassle of finding a registrar, registering a domain name, etc.
Funny thing is that, if you compare it with the phone system, people casually accept the idea that to phone you they need to look up a long, nonsensical number and type that into their phone. It could work that way with the Internet, with every account having a fixed IP address, and everyone typing that number to contact your site. But for some reason, what is acceptable (and even easy) for everyone to deal with on the phone system somehow becomes too complicated on the Internet.
Eventually, though, ISPs will be pressured to give all their customers a not-too-insane domain name, probably with the cusomers choosing the first field. Then we'll all be able to easily put up our pictures of our kids and pets and vacations, and we won't have to send out a zillion copies of each to all our friends and relatives via email. And everyone in the family will have their own blog file.
Also, no one will see your blog postings if you're not on one of the big sites.
Huh? If this is true, why would most of the "popular" bloggers have paid good money for a personal domain name? Doing that sorta hides the hosting site from your viewers.
In fact, it's usually a bit difficult to discover where any of the big-name blogs are hosted. The bloggers don't mention this because it isn't important to their readers. A blogger's domain name is passed around among readers with shared interests, and related blogs link to each other ("blogrolling"). Sometimes a blog will switch to a different host, and it's usually just a brief blip as all the readers update their bookmarks.
I don't think I've ever gone to a site like blogspot.com and looked through their index for interesting blogs. All the blogs that I read (including slashdot) I found by following a link that was in some web page or in an email from a friend.
Banner ads? What banner ads? [link to adblockplus.org]
Funny thing is, the slashdot page that I'm typing this into illustrates how primitive our handling of this messy issue still is. There's no banner ad across the top of the page, true. But there is a huge blank area that's the size of the missing ad, and the brower doesn't have the sense to reclaim the space. Similarly, on the main/. page, the window has a 2-inch (5cm) wide strip on the right that's blank, and can't even be eliminated by shrinking the window. There's only so many pixels on my screen, and this big blanked-out ad area makes a significant part of the screen worthless.
True, it's not as annoying as a moving flash ad. But it's a serious waste of my limited screen area, and it's entirely the fault of the attempts to get ads into my field of vision. Eventually, maybe, the browser writers will figure out ways to not just blank out the ads, but also reclaim the space for actual content.
I'm reading/. with firefox 3.0. This is on my Mac Powerbook, where I have a dozen browsers installed (mostly for web-page testing purposes). All of them show the same waste of space. Oh, well, at least with FF I can blank out most of the ads. With both Adblock and NoScript installed, few of them get through. Now if we could only do something about the growing waste of screen space...
And from TFA:... you can't use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field,"
This is a nonsensical argument. Nearly everywhere, the municipalities, states, and all other levels of government always "play favorites" and create an "uneven playing field". They do this by creating and enforcing local telecom monopolies.
Where I live, the phone line leading to my house is owned by Verizon, and it's illegal for any competitor to install a competing line. This is about as much an uneven playing field as you can imagine. The town has exactly one favorite phone company, and the others aren't allowed to install their wires in this neighborhood.
Cable is similar, though our neighborhood is a bit unusual in that there are two companies that are legally permitted to install their cables. But a "duopoly" isn't all that much better than a monopoly. (And the "competition" between phone and cable companies does little to alleviate these mon/duopolies.)
Also, here in the US, and in most other companies, the phone companies have received all sorts of subsidies from the national government. If I'd tried to start my own phone company, I'd have had no access to those subsidies. And even with regulations allowing my startup to use the phone company's (copper) wires, they can charge me so much that I can't price my services competitively with theirs.
How do people get off arguing that municipalities shouldn't play favorites to create an uneven playing field, when for over a century, all levels of government have been doing exactly that to create and enforce the telecom monopolies that we see everywhere?
Of course, this has no bearing on the humor of the situation, since it would work about equally well for any porn actress that can be found online. But her (second married) name was Victoria Vogel. That gets over 2 million hits on google. There are a number of other women with the same name. But it's obvious which one gets the most, uh, coverage online.
BTW, I found that victoriavogel.com is currently "parked" at godaddy. I wonder who owned it and neglected to renew? Not that that matters, either.
The one thing fun I found from an online bio is that the porn Vicky Vogel is sometimes listed as Native American, being of mixed German/Cherokee descent. My wife's family is from roughly the same part of the country (mixed Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/Missouri), and they believe there were some Cherokees in the family tree. Actually, this was back in the late 1800s, when there were many people in that area who had good reason to keep their background somewhat mysterious, and most of the family records back then are remarkably vague. All they really know is that there's some "Indian" ancestry, and there are a few docs that imply Cherokee connections. Not too specific, and hardly anything unusual in those parts.
The "Vogel" surname simply means "bird", and isn't a rare name in Germany. But still, there's an off chance that my wife and the porn Victoria Vogel are 4th cousins or something, possibly on both sides. Her mother wasn't interested in finding out; she just enjoyed telling people to look up her name online. My wife also likes to drop the names of a few notorious relatives. The most fun for her is telling people that Eminem is a 2nd cousin. But she has never met him, and probably never will. She doesn't go to many family gatherings. He doesn't, either. There aren't many to go to, and we're over 1000 miles away from the "homeland".
I wonder what percent of American women share a name with a porn actress?
My wife's mother, who died back in 2002, looked up her own name soon after she discovered search sites. She found, to her delight, that her rather rare name was the stage name of a porn star, and there was a.com site based on that name. For the rest of her life, she was constantly telling people to check out her web site.
"you need large real-time systems running as sufficiently as possible."
Should that not be efficiently as possible?
You obviously haven't looked very closely at any of the "market leader" software lately.
Software from the Big Guys is more and more designed to sell (think forced upgrades) bigger, faster systems. You don't do this by making your software efficient.
The logic behind many software updates these days is "Will this release require sufficient resources that customers will be persuaded to upgrade to new hardware?"
The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.
Oh, I dunno about that. I do recall some years back reading a comment by an astronomer that the main source of EM signals from our solar system is Jupiter. This is due to its humongous magnetic field, which is apparently much stronger than the sun's (and Earth's). So the loudest such "screams" are probably coming from Jupiter, not the sun or Earth.
I wonder if anyone has detailed numbers on the topic? Maybe it's time to do a bit of googling...
(I also remember reading an article that claimed that, for certain parts of the spectrum, our military radar systems greatly outshine both the sun and Jupiter. Those signals would be very obviously artificial, so our military are loudly announcing our presence to every astronomer in range since military radars were invented around 60 years ago. I wonder if there's anyone inside that sphere that's listening?)
... OR is it more akin to them altering the message of the conversation, something which would clearly be illegal.
An idle thought I've had about this fuss is that the ISPs are ostensibly selling "internet access". But they don't ever seem to explain just what that means. If this phrase means anything at all, it should mean that they implement the published IP protocol, either IPv4 or IPv6. Injecting bogus packets into an IP packet stream would seem to be an outright violation of the appropriate RFCs that define the Internet Protocol(s).
So we might ask: What would the courts say about a company advertising "Internet service", but intentionally violating the official standards for the Internet Protocol that is behind the word "Internet"?
There's lots of precedent for companies being required to deliver what they sold. Thus, if I order beef, and they deliver pork or chicken or fish meat, they have clearly not delivered on the sales contract, and if this impacted the customer somehow (perhaps due to allergies or religious dietary restrictions), the courts would presumably decide for the customer with little discussion. If I order model X from an auto dealer, and they deliver a cheaper model Y, I have legitimate grounds for complain and restitution.
So is the Internet somehow exempt from such expectations? Can an ISP legally implement some protocol that's similar to but not the same as IP, and claim that they're delivering what the customer paid for?
It might be fun to see what the courts actually say about such cases.
D) The EULA lists every possible failure scenario (plausible or not) in the interests of full disclosure and business continues as usual
Actually, IBM discovered all this decades ago. One of the ongoing jokes in IBM systems, dating at least from the 1960s, is about a customer documenting and reporting a bug, only to be pointed at page 485 in volume 17 of the documentation, where exactly that behavior is documented. And since it's documented in the manual, "It's not a bug; it's a feature" and won't be fixed.
So maybe the only effect of such a proposed law would be to increase prices by forcing all software vendors to provide copious documentation. If you've even dealt with the documentation for IBM mainframe software, you won't necessarily be made happy by the prospect. You might be horrified.
If they weren't, they would be in the program design.
"It's not a bug; it's a feature."
That old joke isn't always a joke. Some vulnerabilities are built in, because they were put there intentionally by the designers and/or developers.
This is one of the primary arguments behind Open Source: If you can't get at the code and study it, you don't have any idea what "special features" might be hidden in there. The people who built it could have provided all sorts of back doors for exploitation by themselves or by other customers who have paid them for knowledge of how to get into your system.
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), one of the names for such non-bug vulnerabilities is "DRM", which refers to hidden code that prevents you from using your system as you'd like to use it.
Consider also the recent stories about software in Vista and earlier Windows releases that does automatic updates to some system components, even when you think you've turned off automatic updates. This misfeature is there explicitly to allow Microsoft (or anyone who pays them for access) to replace parts of your system with new code. It's pretty clear that this is a "vulnerability", but it's not a "bug" or "defect", because it was intentionally designed into the product.
He wants to make a statement about the parallel between himself being censored and something from 500 years ago. But he wasn't censored and there's really no parallel.
Huh? There's an obvious parallel. 500 years ago, the church was claiming that all those things that Galileo saw out there were orbiting the Earth. The article has pictures of things out there that the author claims are orbiting the Earth.
Or, if you don't like that parallel, consider: Galileo described things in orbit around Jupiter, which religious authorities denied existed; today we're talking about things orbiting Earth which authorities deny exist.
If you don't look too closely at the details, but just look at the surface images, the parallels are obvious. And that's enough for a news story, right?
And then there are those two-way words, like prick. Sure you can can prick your finger....but don't finger your prick!!
Then there were the stories back in the mid 1990s, when people were starting to get worried about all the obscenities on the internet, and companies started introducing software to automatically censor dirty words. One of the best was the numerous reports of new stories about Jared Prickett (the basketball star) that gave his name as "Jared ett".
I never heard George Carlin do a skit on this sort of error. He must have picked up on it though? I wonder what he made of it. Probably something hilarious and very observant.
Or maybe he just thought it was to much of a cheap shot, and left it to the inferior comedians. About all you have to do is repeat the real stories, after all.
Yet nobody thinks it's ok for the government to snoop on their phone calls.
Hmmm... I seem to recall that the US Congress just voted (about 2:1) that warrantless wiretapping is just fine, and despite the laws against it, your phone company can't be prosecuted for assisting the government in such acts.
And I don't hear much of a popular outcry against this from the American population.
Of course, those with a clue have understood that this has been going on for decades. The only real difference is that now they're doing it openly, and thumbing their noses at the few people who think it's wrong.
... as I understand it security was outside of the scope of networking technology when it was first created. ARPANET was created in order to facilitate information sharing, and it started out quite small. Encryption at that point would've been counterproductive....
Well, yes and no. Note that the ARPAnet project was funded by the US Dept of Defense. There were security experts around from the beginning. But it was well understood back in the 1960s that building the security into the low-level networking code was a bad engineering design. Everyone involved pretty much understood that you got (data) security by end-to-end encryption, and doing encryption at any level below the user app was simply a waste of cpu cycles. So the network-level design goal was reliable transport on unreliable ("battlefield") hardware. The design meant that the people working on the network layer could concentrate without distraction on the job of getting the bits reproduced accurately at the other end.
The primary argument against low-level encryption has always been the same: The two endpoints have no reliable knowledge of or control over most of the data path. The history of encryption is full of stories about someone cracking someone else's encryption and reading their messages for a long time before they were found out. We must assume this can happen with any encryption scheme. This means that if a low-level link in the middle of a data path is decrypted (or even intercepted), the endpoints generally have no way of knowing it has happened, and also have no way of changing that link's encryption scheme. Low-level encnryption is thus only usable if you control every piece of hardware in the data path. This requirement would totally eliminate the wide-area networking that ARPA was trying to achieve. So if the ARPAnet was to meet its design goals, encryption of low-level data links was a pointless waste of cpu time.
End-to-end encryption at the application layer, however, is totally under the control of the endpoints. It can be changed at any time, for any reason. It eliminates dependence on the security of the low-level links that aren't controlled by the entpoints.
And there's a reasonable argument that end-to-end encryption increases security: It means that the data packets can be scattered across many different data paths, making it difficult for anyone to intercept all of the packets for a given conversation. Previous secure communication required tight control of the data path, and usually meant that there was a single data path for a given conversation. This is easy to intercept and either block or subvert, giving a copy of the conversation to an enemy. But if your packets are sprayed across all the available paths, interception and packet collection become nearly impossible.
This is, of course, a very loose, off-the-cuff summary. But it's easy enough to find the early ARPAnet docs in various Internet archives, where you can easily spent far too much time learning about the subject.
As the security folks have been telling us from the start: What's "necessary" is end-to-end encryption for all traffic.
Yes, this costs a bit of extra cpu time on both ends. But any other "solution" is bogus. Any unencrypted packet allows your ISP, and anyone else along the path between two sites, to examine your traffic and "manage" it.
To encourage this, we should be teaching everyone to always use https:// at the start of all URLs.
Maybe we could encourage the apache people to make port 443 the default, rather than 80. Or, as a stopgap, make it listen on both ports by default, with occasional helpful hints that port 80 will soon be deprecated.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the funnier cases of the "Language X has no word for Y" trope was a few months ago, and I think it was even here on slashdot, when someone claimed that a certain language "has no word for freedom of speech". My instant thought was "Well, neither does English; that's why we use three words to express the concept."
But I didn't post it then, since I figured that people who think that way would just be indignant (and wouldn't learn much) from such a followup, and the rest of the people didn't need the comment, because they thought of it themselves just before they laughed.
... we're reminded of the inherent dangers of a monoculture.
Didn't there used to be an old saying about not putting all your eggs into one basket?
How many more forms of this sage advice can we come up with?
It says something about the collective intelligence of our vaunted "market" economy, no?
I have a pair of Apple Airport routers, and the only time they get rebooted is when I change settings and restart them.
Well, I've found that rebooting our Airport Extreme seems to "fix" a problem that pops up every few days. The problem is that we have a Mac PowerBook which occasionally shows that the wifi seems to have gone crazy. The little wifi-power icon at the upper right starts fluctuating all over the place, Internet Connect shows the same fluctuations, and most of the network apps suddenly start showing very sluggish network response.
The funny thing is that we have a few other wifi-enabled toys, including a second Powerbook, a Windows Vista laptop, and a several-years-old Treo, and two OLPC SOs, all of which will show a steady, strong wifi signal when this happens. So obviously the problem is with the first PowerBook, right? Probably not. Rebooting that PowerBook doesn't fix the problem; it comes up still showing flakey wifi. But rebooting the Airport usually does fix the problem (for a while). This points the finger right at the Airport, unless there's something more subtle going on between the two machines.
Actually, a few visitors have seen the same misbehavior. I haven't recorded what makes and models of computers they were using. And they showed the problem at the same time as our Powerbook. So the Airport apparently gets into some weird semi-functional state with some wifi cards while working fine with others, and rebooting the Airport is a temporary fix.
It doesn't appear that there's any way to diagnose and fix this problem at a price less than buying a new Airport (or some other wifi access point).
I don't know where you work, but those symptoms sound more indicative of user (or administrative) stupidity.
Yes, and that's exactly where Microsoft makes most of their sales. That's why they're the market leader.
If you design your system for intelligent users or administrators, you will always have a fringe-market product.
To make the traditional /. auto analogy, can you imagine the sales figures for an auto that was designed for smart, attentive people with a good understanding of auto mechanics?
Now, I have absolutely *no* problem with someone teaching ID in a religion class.
Perhaps, but a number of people, including a lot of religious people, have repeatedly explained why we don't want religious classes in our public schools.
A "public" school is, of course, a school run by the government. The US Constitution blocked government involvement in religion for reasons that have proved valid: If you allow a government to stick its hands into religious teaching or practice, the inevitable result will be that one specific religion (usually the local majority religion) will be the single one taught, and all others will be excluded. Look around at countries with religion-government ties; you'll have problems finding an exception.
In the current case, we can see this especially clearly with the suggestions that FSM (or IPU or whatever) theory be taught. It's obvious that, even if such laws are passed and validated by the courts, such parody "religions" would simply be ignored. But this is little different from how the schools would deal with the creation theories from other religions. Here in the US, we have local "Native American" creation myths that are still around and fun to study. We all know that there's no chance that any of them will be taught in Louisiana science classes. Only the creation myth from the Christian bible will be taught as an "alternate theory".
This is why most small religious groups in the US support church/state separation. They are well aware that, if there's going to be religious beliefs and/or practices enshrined by government agencies and schools, it's probably going to be the beliefs and practices of a major religious body. The small religious groups won't be taken any more seriously than the FSM (or Ojibwa or Navajo) supporters.
It's fairly common for religious historians to argue that it's the American exclusion of religion from government (and vice-versa) that allows such a large number of religious groups to thrive. Most of the religious leaders understand this, but unfortunately most of their congregations don't. If they did, they'd be publicly objecting to having a religious creation story forced on public-school science teachers. Such teaching doesn't belong in any public-school class; it belongs in the religious classes taught by religious groups in their own schools. That's the only way that you know your kids will be taught right. The public schools will teach someone else's religious ideas, not yours.
The word "computer" was once commonly used to refer to people who sat around adding up numbers, ...
My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". This was back in the 1970s, and she worked for a civil engineering firm. Her job entailed doing the calculations behind the engineering drawings. She used electronic calculators, but the electronic devices called "computers" weren't in widespread use in such firms for another decade or so.
Common carrier status.
It can be instructive to look into the history of that concept. Google for "common carrier" and "history", and buried in the zillions of hits is a lot of history.
An interesting part is the origin of the concept. Centuries ago, before electronics, messages were generally carried by messengers or couriers, typically a man on horseback. There were some serious problems with the system. Imagine a case in which prince A wants to send a message to prince B about an action (financial, legal, military, whatever) that they are planning against prince C.
One problem was that it was common to "blame the messenger for the message". If B doesn't like the message, perhaps because he's secretly cooperating with C, all too often B's response to the message would be to torture, injure, or kill the messenger. This isn't good for the courier service's business.
But the courier services had defenses against this. The obvious one was that couriers would often read their messages. If a message contained bad news for the recipient, it was likely that the courier would "lose" the message in self defense. Also, in the above case, the courier might make a copy and sell it to prince C. This sort of thing isn't good for the senders or recipients of the messages.
The "common carrier" concept arose as a solution to such problems. It was essentially an agreement that a courier wouldn't open and read messages, but would just deliver them unexamined to their recipients. In exchange, the recipients agreed to not harm the couriers (and to pay their bills even if they didn't like the messages ;-). This sort of agreement, especially with the force of law behind it, was what made long-distance business and political communication possible for the first time. Without it, no communication was reliable, and people were at the mercy of the couriers (who lived in fear of their customers).
Anyway, whether or not ISPs are common carriers seems irrelevant. They are behaving as if they are not. They are reading the contents of messages, they are slowing or failing to deliver messages whose contents they don't like, and they are selling information about message contents to the sender's competitors and/or government agencies. The ISPs are making the Internet unreliable and untrustworthy. They block messages to our friends and sell our messages to our enemies, to put it in Medieval terms.
They are seriously risking the possibility that their customers will respond by "shooting the messenger" sometime soon. But it's also possible that the ISPs might wise up, as did many Medieval princes and merchants, and realize that a "common carrier" service that provides reliable, secret communication is a business necessity.
Or maybe they won't. The analogy isn't perfect. The ISPs seem to think they have an opportunity to control all communication, which would put them at the top of the power pyramid. If this is truly what they're thinking, we might be in for some tough times ahead, as they systematically sabotage all our communications, and the business and political worlds fall into chaos as a result.
But it never hurts to understand a bit of the history of why concepts like "common carrier" arose in the past.
The "solution" seems to publish on your own computer in your own home (because there is no public space, anywhere), ... But then you run into the problem that ... an ISP (whose network you use) can decide to not allow their net to be used by people initiating connections to your computer.
Perhaps this is a case where the worn-out automotive analogy is relevant. In the case of travel, I own my own home, but I'm not restricted to that home. I have a car, and I can legally drive it on the roads next to our lot, and on the roads that those two roads intercept, etc. I can legally drive nearly anywhere on the road system. Why? Well, it's because those roads aren't private property. They are almost all owned by government entities (the city or state or national government), and the US Constitution says that government entities can't restrict my travel (with the obvious exception of when I've been convicted of a crime).
The current Internet is unfortunately like the road system that the private-property fanatics advocate. Imagine a road system in which every segment of road was private, and you have to have permission from every owner to drive along a road. There would be a roadblock and a toll booth at every intersection. The person there could decide to not allow you to drive on the next road segment.
This would be clearly unworkable. And it's pretty much how the commercial Internet is now organized. The ISPs are just now waking up to the power they have to "shape" traffic. They see a future in which they can collect unlimited tolls for passage along their segments of the system. They see the power to block traffic by people that they don't like, and to charge extra for access to popular places.
It might be that, in the not-very-long run, the only solution is to "nationalize" the Internet. If its various segments are, like the road system, mostly owned by government bodies, the Constitution will guarantee unrestricted passage by our packets (with the obvious exception of certain types of criminal activity).
I do have the usual suspicions about the competence and good will of our typical government agencies. But they have done a mostly good job of providing a road system that works, without having government inspectors stopping us at every intersection and blocking travel by people that the party currently in power locally doesn't like. Maybe this is the model we should be looking at for the future of the Internet. Maybe private ownership of the comm lines is ultimately just as unworkable as private ownership of the roads.
If you want freedom, at least here in the US, our laws only protect you in "public" places. In private places, you effectively have no rights to even be there, much less do as you like, unless you're the owner.
(BTW, this isn't true everywhere. For example, google for "allmansrätt" to read about the Swedish law on use of private property. Of course, a lot of the hits will be for pages in Swedish ...)
That's why every website that allows you to contribute to it has a terms of service you have to agree to before they allow you access. And in that TOS (if you bother to read it) it also tells you that you have no rights to whatever you contribute to it, and that they reserve the right to remove it at their discretion whenever they choose for any reason.
Indeed. And this is the point in the discussion where someone should point out that in the US, and in most other countries with free-speech laws, the law only says that the government can't restrict your speech. Private corporations are exempt from such laws, and they can restrict your speech (when you use their equipment) any way they like.
If you want free speech on the Internet, the only way you can get it is if your connection is owned and controlled by the government. If a government agency controls the wire, the laws protect you from interference with your speech (with certain obvious limits such as libel and incitement to commit crimes). But if a private corporation controls the wire, you have no legal rights whatsoever.
Of course, most people don't want the hassle of setting up their own hosting, so the market demand for upstream is low.
How much of a hassle this is depends somewhat on what kind of computer you have. I've had several friends with Macs ask about this, and got them going with their own web site in under a minute. With a Mac, if you didn't check the "Web Server" item at startup, you can go to System Preferences, click on the Sharing choice, and you'll see a list of things including Personal Web Sharing. You check that, and your web server is running. I point them to their Sites directory, and tell them that any file there will be visible on the Web.
Of course, their ISP probably gives them a nonsensical URL, unless they're lucky enough to have one of the few ISPs that will let you choose your machine's name and then set up a yourname.yourisp.com site name for you. If they won't do that, you have to go through the hassle of finding a registrar, registering a domain name, etc.
Funny thing is that, if you compare it with the phone system, people casually accept the idea that to phone you they need to look up a long, nonsensical number and type that into their phone. It could work that way with the Internet, with every account having a fixed IP address, and everyone typing that number to contact your site. But for some reason, what is acceptable (and even easy) for everyone to deal with on the phone system somehow becomes too complicated on the Internet.
Eventually, though, ISPs will be pressured to give all their customers a not-too-insane domain name, probably with the cusomers choosing the first field. Then we'll all be able to easily put up our pictures of our kids and pets and vacations, and we won't have to send out a zillion copies of each to all our friends and relatives via email. And everyone in the family will have their own blog file.
Imagine how much this will improve the world ...
Also, no one will see your blog postings if you're not on one of the big sites.
Huh? If this is true, why would most of the "popular" bloggers have paid good money for a personal domain name? Doing that sorta hides the hosting site from your viewers.
In fact, it's usually a bit difficult to discover where any of the big-name blogs are hosted. The bloggers don't mention this because it isn't important to their readers. A blogger's domain name is passed around among readers with shared interests, and related blogs link to each other ("blogrolling"). Sometimes a blog will switch to a different host, and it's usually just a brief blip as all the readers update their bookmarks.
I don't think I've ever gone to a site like blogspot.com and looked through their index for interesting blogs. All the blogs that I read (including slashdot) I found by following a link that was in some web page or in an email from a friend.
Lessee; where was it that slashdot is hosted?
Banner ads? What banner ads? [link to adblockplus.org]
Funny thing is, the slashdot page that I'm typing this into illustrates how primitive our handling of this messy issue still is. There's no banner ad across the top of the page, true. But there is a huge blank area that's the size of the missing ad, and the brower doesn't have the sense to reclaim the space. Similarly, on the main /. page, the window has a 2-inch (5cm) wide strip on the right that's blank, and can't even be eliminated by shrinking the window. There's only so many pixels on my screen, and this big blanked-out ad area makes a significant part of the screen worthless.
True, it's not as annoying as a moving flash ad. But it's a serious waste of my limited screen area, and it's entirely the fault of the attempts to get ads into my field of vision. Eventually, maybe, the browser writers will figure out ways to not just blank out the ads, but also reclaim the space for actual content.
I'm reading /. with firefox 3.0. This is on my Mac Powerbook, where I have a dozen browsers installed (mostly for web-page testing purposes). All of them show the same waste of space. Oh, well, at least with FF I can blank out most of the ads. With both Adblock and NoScript installed, few of them get through. Now if we could only do something about the growing waste of screen space ...
They don't get to play favorites with the telcos.
And from TFA: ... you can't use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field,"
This is a nonsensical argument. Nearly everywhere, the municipalities, states, and all other levels of government always "play favorites" and create an "uneven playing field". They do this by creating and enforcing local telecom monopolies.
Where I live, the phone line leading to my house is owned by Verizon, and it's illegal for any competitor to install a competing line. This is about as much an uneven playing field as you can imagine. The town has exactly one favorite phone company, and the others aren't allowed to install their wires in this neighborhood.
Cable is similar, though our neighborhood is a bit unusual in that there are two companies that are legally permitted to install their cables. But a "duopoly" isn't all that much better than a monopoly. (And the "competition" between phone and cable companies does little to alleviate these mon/duopolies.)
Also, here in the US, and in most other companies, the phone companies have received all sorts of subsidies from the national government. If I'd tried to start my own phone company, I'd have had no access to those subsidies. And even with regulations allowing my startup to use the phone company's (copper) wires, they can charge me so much that I can't price my services competitively with theirs.
How do people get off arguing that municipalities shouldn't play favorites to create an uneven playing field, when for over a century, all levels of government have been doing exactly that to create and enforce the telecom monopolies that we see everywhere?
What was your mother-in-law's name?
Of course, this has no bearing on the humor of the situation, since it would work about equally well for any porn actress that can be found online. But her (second married) name was Victoria Vogel. That gets over 2 million hits on google. There are a number of other women with the same name. But it's obvious which one gets the most, uh, coverage online.
BTW, I found that victoriavogel.com is currently "parked" at godaddy. I wonder who owned it and neglected to renew? Not that that matters, either.
The one thing fun I found from an online bio is that the porn Vicky Vogel is sometimes listed as Native American, being of mixed German/Cherokee descent. My wife's family is from roughly the same part of the country (mixed Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/Missouri), and they believe there were some Cherokees in the family tree. Actually, this was back in the late 1800s, when there were many people in that area who had good reason to keep their background somewhat mysterious, and most of the family records back then are remarkably vague. All they really know is that there's some "Indian" ancestry, and there are a few docs that imply Cherokee connections. Not too specific, and hardly anything unusual in those parts.
The "Vogel" surname simply means "bird", and isn't a rare name in Germany. But still, there's an off chance that my wife and the porn Victoria Vogel are 4th cousins or something, possibly on both sides. Her mother wasn't interested in finding out; she just enjoyed telling people to look up her name online. My wife also likes to drop the names of a few notorious relatives. The most fun for her is telling people that Eminem is a 2nd cousin. But she has never met him, and probably never will. She doesn't go to many family gatherings. He doesn't, either. There aren't many to go to, and we're over 1000 miles away from the "homeland".
I wonder what percent of American women share a name with a porn actress?
"I was ego-surfing the other day ..."
My wife's mother, who died back in 2002, looked up her own name soon after she discovered search sites. She found, to her delight, that her rather rare name was the stage name of a porn star, and there was a .com site based on that name. For the rest of her life, she was constantly telling people to check out her web site.
"you need large real-time systems running as sufficiently as possible."
Should that not be efficiently as possible?
You obviously haven't looked very closely at any of the "market leader" software lately.
Software from the Big Guys is more and more designed to sell (think forced upgrades) bigger, faster systems. You don't do this by making your software efficient.
The logic behind many software updates these days is "Will this release require sufficient resources that customers will be persuaded to upgrade to new hardware?"
The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.
Oh, I dunno about that. I do recall some years back reading a comment by an astronomer that the main source of EM signals from our solar system is Jupiter. This is due to its humongous magnetic field, which is apparently much stronger than the sun's (and Earth's). So the loudest such "screams" are probably coming from Jupiter, not the sun or Earth.
I wonder if anyone has detailed numbers on the topic? Maybe it's time to do a bit of googling ...
(I also remember reading an article that claimed that, for certain parts of the spectrum, our military radar systems greatly outshine both the sun and Jupiter. Those signals would be very obviously artificial, so our military are loudly announcing our presence to every astronomer in range since military radars were invented around 60 years ago. I wonder if there's anyone inside that sphere that's listening?)
... OR is it more akin to them altering the message of the conversation, something which would clearly be illegal.
An idle thought I've had about this fuss is that the ISPs are ostensibly selling "internet access". But they don't ever seem to explain just what that means. If this phrase means anything at all, it should mean that they implement the published IP protocol, either IPv4 or IPv6. Injecting bogus packets into an IP packet stream would seem to be an outright violation of the appropriate RFCs that define the Internet Protocol(s).
So we might ask: What would the courts say about a company advertising "Internet service", but intentionally violating the official standards for the Internet Protocol that is behind the word "Internet"?
There's lots of precedent for companies being required to deliver what they sold. Thus, if I order beef, and they deliver pork or chicken or fish meat, they have clearly not delivered on the sales contract, and if this impacted the customer somehow (perhaps due to allergies or religious dietary restrictions), the courts would presumably decide for the customer with little discussion. If I order model X from an auto dealer, and they deliver a cheaper model Y, I have legitimate grounds for complain and restitution.
So is the Internet somehow exempt from such expectations? Can an ISP legally implement some protocol that's similar to but not the same as IP, and claim that they're delivering what the customer paid for?
It might be fun to see what the courts actually say about such cases.
D) The EULA lists every possible failure scenario (plausible or not) in the interests of full disclosure and business continues as usual
Actually, IBM discovered all this decades ago. One of the ongoing jokes in IBM systems, dating at least from the 1960s, is about a customer documenting and reporting a bug, only to be pointed at page 485 in volume 17 of the documentation, where exactly that behavior is documented. And since it's documented in the manual, "It's not a bug; it's a feature" and won't be fixed.
So maybe the only effect of such a proposed law would be to increase prices by forcing all software vendors to provide copious documentation. If you've even dealt with the documentation for IBM mainframe software, you won't necessarily be made happy by the prospect. You might be horrified.
If they weren't, they would be in the program design.
"It's not a bug; it's a feature."
That old joke isn't always a joke. Some vulnerabilities are built in, because they were put there intentionally by the designers and/or developers.
This is one of the primary arguments behind Open Source: If you can't get at the code and study it, you don't have any idea what "special features" might be hidden in there. The people who built it could have provided all sorts of back doors for exploitation by themselves or by other customers who have paid them for knowledge of how to get into your system.
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), one of the names for such non-bug vulnerabilities is "DRM", which refers to hidden code that prevents you from using your system as you'd like to use it.
Consider also the recent stories about software in Vista and earlier Windows releases that does automatic updates to some system components, even when you think you've turned off automatic updates. This misfeature is there explicitly to allow Microsoft (or anyone who pays them for access) to replace parts of your system with new code. It's pretty clear that this is a "vulnerability", but it's not a "bug" or "defect", because it was intentionally designed into the product.
He wants to make a statement about the parallel between himself being censored and something from 500 years ago. But he wasn't censored and there's really no parallel.
Huh? There's an obvious parallel. 500 years ago, the church was claiming that all those things that Galileo saw out there were orbiting the Earth. The article has pictures of things out there that the author claims are orbiting the Earth.
Or, if you don't like that parallel, consider: Galileo described things in orbit around Jupiter, which religious authorities denied existed; today we're talking about things orbiting Earth which authorities deny exist.
If you don't look too closely at the details, but just look at the surface images, the parallels are obvious. And that's enough for a news story, right?
And then there are those two-way words, like prick.
Sure you can can prick your finger....but don't finger your prick!!
Then there were the stories back in the mid 1990s, when people were starting to get worried about all the obscenities on the internet, and companies started introducing software to automatically censor dirty words. One of the best was the numerous reports of new stories about Jared Prickett (the basketball star) that gave his name as "Jared ett".
I never heard George Carlin do a skit on this sort of error. He must have picked up on it though? I wonder what he made of it. Probably something hilarious and very observant.
Or maybe he just thought it was to much of a cheap shot, and left it to the inferior comedians. About all you have to do is repeat the real stories, after all.
Yet nobody thinks it's ok for the government to snoop on their phone calls.
Hmmm ... I seem to recall that the US Congress just voted (about 2:1) that warrantless wiretapping is just fine, and despite the laws against it, your phone company can't be prosecuted for assisting the government in such acts.
And I don't hear much of a popular outcry against this from the American population.
Of course, those with a clue have understood that this has been going on for decades. The only real difference is that now they're doing it openly, and thumbing their noses at the few people who think it's wrong.
... as I understand it security was outside of the scope of networking technology when it was first created. ARPANET was created in order to facilitate information sharing, and it started out quite small. Encryption at that point would've been counterproductive. ...
Well, yes and no. Note that the ARPAnet project was funded by the US Dept of Defense. There were security experts around from the beginning. But it was well understood back in the 1960s that building the security into the low-level networking code was a bad engineering design. Everyone involved pretty much understood that you got (data) security by end-to-end encryption, and doing encryption at any level below the user app was simply a waste of cpu cycles. So the network-level design goal was reliable transport on unreliable ("battlefield") hardware. The design meant that the people working on the network layer could concentrate without distraction on the job of getting the bits reproduced accurately at the other end.
The primary argument against low-level encryption has always been the same: The two endpoints have no reliable knowledge of or control over most of the data path. The history of encryption is full of stories about someone cracking someone else's encryption and reading their messages for a long time before they were found out. We must assume this can happen with any encryption scheme. This means that if a low-level link in the middle of a data path is decrypted (or even intercepted), the endpoints generally have no way of knowing it has happened, and also have no way of changing that link's encryption scheme. Low-level encnryption is thus only usable if you control every piece of hardware in the data path. This requirement would totally eliminate the wide-area networking that ARPA was trying to achieve. So if the ARPAnet was to meet its design goals, encryption of low-level data links was a pointless waste of cpu time.
End-to-end encryption at the application layer, however, is totally under the control of the endpoints. It can be changed at any time, for any reason. It eliminates dependence on the security of the low-level links that aren't controlled by the entpoints.
And there's a reasonable argument that end-to-end encryption increases security: It means that the data packets can be scattered across many different data paths, making it difficult for anyone to intercept all of the packets for a given conversation. Previous secure communication required tight control of the data path, and usually meant that there was a single data path for a given conversation. This is easy to intercept and either block or subvert, giving a copy of the conversation to an enemy. But if your packets are sprayed across all the available paths, interception and packet collection become nearly impossible.
This is, of course, a very loose, off-the-cuff summary. But it's easy enough to find the early ARPAnet docs in various Internet archives, where you can easily spent far too much time learning about the subject.
As the security folks have been telling us from the start: What's "necessary" is end-to-end encryption for all traffic.
Yes, this costs a bit of extra cpu time on both ends. But any other "solution" is bogus. Any unencrypted packet allows your ISP, and anyone else along the path between two sites, to examine your traffic and "manage" it.
To encourage this, we should be teaching everyone to always use https:// at the start of all URLs.
Maybe we could encourage the apache people to make port 443 the default, rather than 80. Or, as a stopgap, make it listen on both ports by default, with occasional helpful hints that port 80 will soon be deprecated.