... when it happens to be 72.5 at the US side of the border and 22.5 right over the border in Canada.
Too bad I used up my mod points earlier; I'd have given you a "funny".
I do wonder how many Americans would understand the joke. Probably less than 1%. For that matter, I wonder what fraction of the American readers of/. got it. I'd hope it's over 1%, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I believe the pidgeon would beat the station wagon as it doesn't have to stop signs, other driver, traffic speeds, and bad maps to follow.
OTOH, there were several interesting studies published in the past few years, in which researchers in the UK and Italy attached GPS gadgets to pigeons and recorded their flights. They found that the pigeons mostly did follow the roads, and occasionally other linear features like streams and power lines. They described pigeons reaching a rotary, flying around it several times (Whee!), and then heading off along one of the other roads. It's true that they didn't have to obey signs or signals. But they apparently did have good maps inside their tiny brains, because they were pretty good at finding an optimal road route back home from wherever they were released. In some cases, the routes were longer than necessary due to the vagaries of the local road system.
[I]f you own the plane and there are no other passengers besides yourself and immediate friends and family then you should be able to take anything you want.
Yeah, you'd think so, but there's no government in the world that would agree with you. Smuggling stuff into a country has been illegal as long as there are countries.
We could equally well argue that if it's your plane, you have a right to take those large containers of drugs home with you. Do you think that argument would be accepted by the border guards anywhere (except maybe Netherlands;-)?
You're free to feel that you have such a right. But the border guards are free to do anything they like to you, regardless of your so-called "rights". Good luck trying to get restitution from the courts.
Now you can know all that you can see with a diminished field of view. Another way to look at how technology does not equate with 'progress'.
Actually, there has been significant development of narrowly-focused search sites that clearly qualify as progress. Many of them are highly technical sites that search and index specific kinds of technical data that aren't handled well by the big-name sites.
The big sites, for obvious reasons, concentrate in natural-language searches. If you wanted to find specific information about, say, DNA sequences or astronomical objects or any of zillions of other specific topics with their own technical jargons and data formats, the big sites like google or yahoo or bing aren't very good choices. It makes a lot of sense to develop a specialized search site that understands your specialty's jargon and data formats, so that you can do searches with results that don't get buried in huge piles of results that use similar words.
For over a decade, I've run one of these that's an interesting case linguistically. It's a "music" search site, but it's the sort of "music" that you put on a music stand and read while playing your instrument, not the sort of "music" that you listen to. The big search sites do a crappy job for this specialty, because it turns out that there's no clear English terminology to distinguish this sort of "music" from musical recordings, and google searches typically turn up about 1000 ads for recordings for every hit dealing with readable musical notation (which is a phrase that also fails to filter out the recordings;-). Like most of the specialty search sites, mine has only a few thousand users per day, and indexes data on only a few hundred sites that provide readable music. And early on, I found that I had to include a clear notice that "There are no recordings of music here. If you don't understand how you can have a music site without recordings, you are probably at the wrong site." This stopped the server hits and email from confused visitors who couldn't find the recordings they were looking for and saw no clue that the musicians' jargon could be talking about anything but recorded music.
One of the ongoing problems is the confusion of many specialty searches with natural-language searches. I think the folks at google understand the distinction, though some of the others treat the specialty sites as competitors and sometimes harrass them. One of the more widely interesting cases, Wolfram Alpha, turned up a lot of confusion even here on/., where we had a long discussion that could be summarized as "Is this the next replacement for google?" Of course it isn't, and it was silly to even suggest this, since WA's purpose is something utterly different than what google is doing so well. Searching for anything online that's related to a topic or phrase is very different from finding a single or small number of technically correct answers to a precisely worded question in a specialized jargon. But not even the techies at/. seemed to be able to understand the difference.
Anyway, it shouldn't be surprising to find specialized religious search sites. This is no more surprising than sites that specialize in DNA sequences or classical Greek poetry or GIS data or perl modules or knitting or...
The "narrowness" of such sites is part of their value, not a deficiency.
(I wonder how many thousands of such sites have been developed so far. How would one get a good number for this?)
Maybe there is a god. Maybe god will send me an email one day or turn up on/. and say "you must do this".
Actually, God has been registered on/. (id #13485308) since 2005. Maybe we should be asking Him (Her? It?) to contribute to this discussion, and maybe even tell us what we must do.
Hey, God; got any comments to add here?
Interesting question for the religious folks: Do you believe that user #13485308 is or is not God? If so, why? If not, why not? Does this affect your knowledge/belief in your God? How does this apply to the claim that atheism is a religious belief?
Why is this so horrible? Several years ago, I planted some very nice dwarf irises, and they're doing well. We'd welcome the government people who want to come over and scan the cute little things when they're in full bloom. They'll be up some time in March, but of course we don't know when exactly. Maybe there's an email address we can write to about this? We'd be happy to notify them that our irises are up.
If everyone cooperated with this, and with the government's help, we could flood the country with lots of nice flower pictures over the next year or so.
... won't government agents with an agenda simply look to non-Microsoft software as an excuse for a raid?
It might mean a change in excuse by the Russian cops. After all, if you're running linux or *BSD or other free software, you have a license to run it. Just keep copies of the GPL and other appropriate licenses around to show people.
Of course, this won't really stop the raids and theft of computers. It'll just mean that "suspected software piracy" won't be the excuse it has been. The government's creative types will think up other wordings.
It is sorta funny that the Russian cops don't seem to be raiding the botnet operators and other spam operations, which seem to be headquartered in Russia in great numbers these days. I wonder why that might be?
Well, yeah, but I sorta doubt that anyone who understands that the Earth is in orbit around the sun would accept the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe. That would violate the basic concept of what it means to be a "center".
Has any actual physicist used the phrase "center of the universe"? I don't seem to recall ever seeing it in any texts that I've read.;-)
Galileo was wrong. This is not in dispute. To whit: Einstein was right. Every point of the universe is the center of the universe.
Actually, that's not quite what Einstein's theories said. They said that every point in any inertial frame is equivalent to any other (and could thus be considered a "center of the universe".
In Einsteinian terms, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, because it's not an inertial frame. It's moving in an accelerated frame in its orbit around a much heavier object (the sun). Therefore, it's not a candidate for centerhood. At the time of Galileo, the sun could have been considered an inertial frame, and therefore eligible as a center of the universe. We now know that the sun is also orbiting the galaxy, but in Galileo's time, that orbit couldn't have been measured, even if they'd known what the Milky Way is. So, to within the precision of their instruments and observation powers, the sun would have appeared to be stationary relative to the stars, and would have worked as a center of the universe.
Actually, astronomers have recently measured a slight acceleration of the Milky Way (though I've forgotten its direction). So, if your instruments are good enough, our galaxy isn't quite in an inertial frame, either, and thus is ineligible for "center of the universe" status. But not very many of us have instruments that good, so for everyday purposes we can treat the galaxy as the center of everything.
OTOH, we might note that shipping companies (including airlines) routinely treat the Earth as stationary in space, and for their purposes, this is good enough. Once we establish interplanetary trading, however, it won't be good enough, and shipping operations will have to change to a model in which the solar system is stationary while everything in it is moving in some sort of orbit.
(It turns out that this includes the sun. The barycenter of the solar system is slightly outside the sun, at the common center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. Strictly speaking, the sun is in a close orbit around this barycenter, and can't be treated as stationary relative to the rest of the solar system. Jupiter is slightly too big, and accelerates the Sun measurably. However, Galileo probably couldn't have measured this effect.)
In other words, the very case that gave us the state secrets BS that Obama is latching on to harder than Bush II, was based on a COVERUP of NEGLIGENCE, not for any actual national security reasons.
So how's this a news story? Since at least the 1950s, it's been understood by anyone who can read that "National Security" is primarily used as an excuse for coverups like this. Most people I've known from anywhere else in the world says the same about their government's secrecy.
A coverup should be the default inference whenever you read about anything being silenced for national security reasons. Yeah, there are occasional cases where there are actual security concerns. But those are relatively rare, while incompetence and malfeasance are common (in any organization, not just government). The biggest fear in any government is always that their own people will learn the details of what their government is up to. This is as true in democratic governments as in any others; they just have the additional problem of needing to maintain a public image so that people will keep voting for them.
The funniest case I remember reading about was back in the 1970s (or maybe the late 1960s), when the US DoD funded a study by several university researchers of what could be learned about US military forces from public information sources. After a few months of studies, the researchers submitted their report, and according to numerous news sources within a day or two, it was given some sort of "Secret" classification. (Which level wasn't clear from the news stories.) This was all covered by an amused press. We all got a lot of laughs out of it. Nothing much changed.
(I do wonder how much the publisher increased their print run when they realized that they could sell it all to the DoD?;-)
Obviously 8-character tab stops is the standard...
[citation needed]
Just out of curiosity, can you provide a reference to a standards doc that specifies exactly 8-char tab stops? The definitions of tab stop that I've seen have been along the lines of "whatever columns the user has listed in the tab-stops setting".
AFAIK, tab stops were invented by typewriter makers, who implemented the idea by providing a metal bar with a bunch of little "stop" widgets that you could slide to wherever you wanted them. There was no concept that the stops should be an any specific positions. In fact, the wire usually had little notches at ever char position, resting points for the "stop" widgets, further implying that the stops could and should be set at whatever positions you like.
(I suppose it's possible that this tab-stop mechanism could have predated the invention of the typewriter. Anyone know of an earlier machine that used something conceptually similar?)
... those parts of her campaign disappeared from her website... until Harry Reid posted them on *his* website, and she objected that he was distorting her positions.
She should learn the new, modern way of dealing with people quoting you accurately: Sue them for copyright infringement. I think there was a story about that recently on/. Now where did I see it ?...
Use a mixture. That way, nobody with tabs stops set different from yours will be able to make any sense of the code.
I've seen a lot of this, actually. For example, I've seen a number of cases where people leave the tab stops set to the default (typically 8, far too large), and then set their indentation to something different, usually 3 or 4, but I've also seen 2 and 5. This way, the editor will generate a mixture of tabs and spaces whenever you indent more than the first tab stop. I've questioned this in a few cases, and invariably I've gotten a red-hot flaming response from the programmer(s), telling me in no uncertain terms what an idiot I am for not seeing the importance of doing it just as they're doing it.
Actually, I think I do understand why they it. See the first paragraph of this reply.
Makes no sense at all in the reasoning for copyright, which according to the Constitution is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." However it is real useful to step on people.
Well, a number of historians have pointed out that copyright (and patent) laws have never produced such progress. Historically, they have only been used to block progress. And it's quite clear that this is usually intentional.
This is pretty much all that copyright laws can do, since "progress of science and useful arts" requires information, and the only function of copyright is to prevent distribution of information. Copyright laws never require distribution of information; they only deal with when such distribution is prohibited.
We do have examples like the GPL, which does require distribution of information (specifically the source code to software). But this isn't anything mentioned in copyright law; it's a license provided by the copyright owner of their own volition.
It's quite likely that the people who wrote that "promote the progress of science and useful arts" phrase into the US Constitution were aware of the inhibiting effect that copyright and patent law usually has on such progress. They tried to restrict the use of copyright and patent law in the US to only actions that would produce progress. But the legal system has pretty much ignored that phrase, and the US has copyright law that's just as anti-progress as in the rest of the world.
What is the relation of shoes to this topic at all? Discussion was not about shoes and the TS was trying to make fun of the main topic.
Exactly. And public ridicule is often a very appropriate way to deal with such "Ban it all" approaches.
A local example: Here in Massachusetts, the courthouses have installed metal detectors in the doorways over the past few years. There were news reports explaining that a huge number of weapons (over 17,000 in one report) had been confiscated from people entering the courthouses in the previous year. Some local reporters got a bit curious about this and interviewed some of the managers, who were audibly reluctant to answer questions about just what kinds of weapons people had tried to bring into the courthouses. After a while, the interviewers finally got an admission of what these weapons were: "pocket knives, of the Swiss Army type".
That's right, they were classifying pocket knives as "weapons". And when pressed to admit this, they described such knives with phrasing intended to make them sound like military weapons.
It's quite common for security folks to use this sort of PR tactic to make it sound like they're detecting huge rates of attacks from people intent on doing harm. Similarly, when we've got the details of the ongoing huge numbers of computer "hacker attacks", it has sometimes turned out that they're counting incoming pings as "attacks", probes in the same class as port scans.
When we hear or read vague language like "spy tool" to describe threats, we should always suspect that they're including normal, everyday uses of tools in this catchall classification. We should try to learn more details of what they're really talking about, and how they're planning to deal with it. Ridiculing them by pointing out that shoes are also "spy tools" is quite appropriate, to highlight the misleading nature of that phrase. Similarly, pings are "hacker tools" and pocket knives are "Army type weapons". This sort of misuse of language is a standard propaganda tool that should be exposed.
Are you a {terror,commun,islam,morning m,union}ist?
Well, I admit to being an Internet software developer for several decades. In a lot of people's minds, that makes me some sort of "hacker". And, since I also admit to being involved in open-source software development, I'm probably also classified as some sort of *ist by most of the political types.
My free, open-source stuff has been picked up by a number of people in other countries, and has made me a number of friends there. This probably doesn't exactly endear me to the politicos, either.;-)
(And I've seen some beautiful morning mists over the past week, which makes even my friends worry about my lifestyle habits when I'm getting up early enough to see such things. The Catskills were especially lovely on Monday morning around 6 or so.)
It'll get "fixed" when the countries that are complaining about that stop expecting the U.S. to make them a gift of those assets, and start spending the money to build out their own. But they'd rather we keep footing the bill. It's just easier that way, plus which they get to complain continuously and publicly, which is all it takes to make most politicians happy anyway, no matter what country you're from.
Ah, truer words have rarely been read here on/.;-)
We might note that a few other countries have contributed to the infrastructure and software that make up the Internet. True, it started life with roughly 100% US DoD funding. But the Brits got involved fairly early on, as did the Scandinavians.
I've been over in Scandinavia (mostly Finland, but also Sweden and Norway) a few times during the past couple of decades, and every time, I've been duly impressed by how "wired" those countries have been. They've been years ahead of the US and most of Europe every time I've been there to sample their status.
The UK not so much though; outside of the universities, it has lagged behind in the infrastructure about as much as the US has. This seems to have something to do with big (pseudo-private, with legal monopoly power) corporations that have little motive to install advanced technology until they are forced to by a higher power. So, as in the US, we see university students routinely using the most advanced forms of the Internet, then when they graduate, they're shocked with how crappy it all is outside the ivory tower.
It's interesting that the US corporate world can control so much of the Internet's international backbone, while providing such generally crappy service to local customers. The popular economic theories seem to ignore this, possibly because it doesn't agree with the theories' predictions about how a private "Market" will behave. There are some cynical theories that do explain and predict it, though...
US Politicians incorrectly believe that the US owns the entire internet.
Actually, there is an acknowledged problem that "American interests" (i.e., US-registered corporations) own and operate a large fraction of the world's international cables, and almost all of the intercontinental cables. So it's easy for the US government to think of at least the "Internet backbone" as US property.
The Internet might be a better place if this problem were fixed.
Of course, the corporate world is slowly becoming a truly international culture that is independent of mere governments, so maybe the problem is being fixed. Whether this is an improvement isn't clear.
Maybe what we need is to get get American law set up so that it protects local wikileaks servers that contain leaked docs from, say, Algeria or Iran or China or wherever, and deny extradition of wikileaks people to those countries. Meanwhile, we encourage those countries to set up similar laws that protect wikileaks servers in their domain from actions by the American government. Then we'd have the ideal situation, that every government could be proud of the job "our own" wikileaks subsidiary has done in exposing the evil deeds of the politicians in those other countries. And their wikileaks subsidiaries could return the favor, by telling us about the misdeeds of our politicians.
And we should all support wikileaks' ability to use the latest, strongest encryption and anonymizing software.
We just need to be quiet about this strategy, and work on convincing our local politicians that wikileaks should be supported when it leaks things that embarrass governments that we don't like.
Isn't a "national emergency" when we (including the government) will need the Internet the most? Intentionally shutting it down will cripple the organizations (government and otherwise) who are trying to handle the emergency.
We had an example of this back during the Katrina and Haiti disasters, when trucks full of electronics were used to provide wireless phone and internet access to the affected areas.
There was a funnier example back during Gulf Way I, when the military still had the "feature" in the GPS system that would introduce errors into the satellites' data, so that civilian GPS gadgets wouldn't know where they were. But they couldn't use it. The reason was that the US military wasn't able to get their hands on GPS equipment they needed, so the soldiers in the field had been buying civilian-grade equipment. Ordering military GPS equipment, as usual, required mounds of paperwork started months ahead of time, while they could get civilian equipment by walking into electronics stores anywhere in the world. For this and other reasons, they eventually abandoned the induced-error idea, and admitted that the military would need the "civilian" part during at times.
There was an earlier precedent of this in the us, back in the 1950s, when the first Interstate Highways were funded. If you dig up the original papers, you'll find that this was a purely military project, so that defense forces could easily move around during a "national emergency". Civilian traffic wasn't to be allowed. Of course, this struck everyone as a silly waste of good highways, and within a very few years, the new super-highways were opened to civilian traffic. This was so successful that we got funding for a lot more than the handful of highways originally envisioned, and the system has grown into our major high-speed highway system. But the law still says that the military can order all traffic off the highways during a "national emergency". This has actually been used occasionally, during major disasters, when area Interstate highways have been closed to civilian traffic, and restricted to military, emergency and highway maintenance vehicles, etc.
A more sensible approach would be to add it into the "Net Neutrality" issue, by decreeing priority to military and other emergency IP addresses during emergencies. But shutting the Internet down is as stupid as shutting down the cell-phone or interstate-highway systems would be. Anyone supporting this idea should be accused of trying to make disasters worse by blocking facilities needed by emergency personnel.
And a special-purpose "emergency use only" comm system is a stupid idea, because it would just fail when it's most needed. What makes the most sense is priority access to the civilian system that has been developed and tested for decades, and can handle the load of an emergency by moving in a few trucks or boats stuffed with electronics.
Well, it's interesting that a few people are reporting that they get the advertised speed for long periods.
Of course, this could be a case of "squeaky wheels", in which we only hear from the (apparently many) people whose ISPs don't provide the advertised service. Finally, after enough complaints, and the general consensus that it's a mess, the people actually getting good service start speaking up.
Another possibility is that the ISPs' management is slowly catching onto the idea that they've gotten a reputation much like used-car salesmen, and if they want to stay in business, maybe they should start being a bit more honest.
Also, they've probably also read the reports from South Korea and a few other parts of the world with internet speeds that put the vaunted US technical lead to shame. There are probably a lot of corporate discussion that amount to "These other guys can provide actual fast internet access; maybe we should be looking into investing in the infrastructure that supports it. They talk to their engineers, who express frustration that they've been held back for so long, and decide that maybe it's time to move into the 21st century.
There are probably a lot of other explanations for the wildly different service levels (and customer satisfaction) of various ISPs. I wonder what the other explanations might be?
(My local experience, with RCN here, is that the data from my linux firewall's port is that we sometimes get a bit better than the rated max speed, but usually only around half that during the evening busy times. We use VPNs extensively for job purposes, which has a noticable minimum traffic level, and as far as we can determine, we don't often get throttled. But I'm not convinced we have a valid test for this. In any case, the service currently meets our needs. Even when my wife is satisfying here need for old movies.;-)
I don't see how they can comply without turning over the encryption algorithms?
Um, the algorithms themselves are hardly the problem. Of course, the algorithms in question here are "proprietary" trade secrets. This in itself is a big red flag to anyone with even minimal understanding of security. A secret encryption algorithm should always be assumed to have an exploit that the comm company itself can use to read your communications. The only trustworthy encryption algorithms are the ones that are published openly (along with the code, of course), so that knowledgeable people can examine them and tell the world about exploits. If your comm company is using secret code or algorithms, the only reason you should consider is that they are reading your communications. Anything else they tell you is PR, and worthless.
The real issue is the encryption keys, which the comm company shouldn't even know. If they do, then again we must assume that all communications are compromised, and the comm company is selling your information to your competitors and enemies, (and to their government).
Comm companies everywhere are notoriously in bed with their governments, and routinely give government agencies access to any communications requested. This should always be assumed true, regardless of the company's PR. Even if their name includes the string "google".;-)
Somewhere along the way corporations convinced themselves that people do not want quality products and instead would like to pay full price for something that will definitely break prematurely.
Well, in the computer and related electronics/comm fields, the explanation for this is fairly clear: What company is the top seller of the software in the equipment on most business counters and desktops? What sort of computers to most people use at home? We all know the answer: Microsoft.
That tells us all we need to know about the quality that people want, both at home and at work.
Which is more than AT&T or Comcast will allow you to use on a residential connection of any speed. Just try using 1.5 Mbps for 24 hours straight, and see what happens to your connection speed.
It most other businesses, the advertised data rate would be called misleading advertising, or consumer fraud after you'd paid for it. But ISPs are allowed to outright lie about the "service" they supply, and limit your access if you use more than a few percent of what they sold you. And they aren't even secretive about it, because they know they won't be fined for it.
Slashdot Mirror
... when it happens to be 72.5 at the US side of the border and 22.5 right over the border in Canada.
Too bad I used up my mod points earlier; I'd have given you a "funny".
I do wonder how many Americans would understand the joke. Probably less than 1%. For that matter, I wonder what fraction of the American readers of /. got it. I'd hope it's over 1%, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It's quite possible to have two independent reasons for doing something.
I believe the pidgeon would beat the station wagon as it doesn't have to stop signs, other driver, traffic speeds, and bad maps to follow.
OTOH, there were several interesting studies published in the past few years, in which researchers in the UK and Italy attached GPS gadgets to pigeons and recorded their flights. They found that the pigeons mostly did follow the roads, and occasionally other linear features like streams and power lines. They described pigeons reaching a rotary, flying around it several times (Whee!), and then heading off along one of the other roads. It's true that they didn't have to obey signs or signals. But they apparently did have good maps inside their tiny brains, because they were pretty good at finding an optimal road route back home from wherever they were released. In some cases, the routes were longer than necessary due to the vagaries of the local road system.
[I]f you own the plane and there are no other passengers besides yourself and immediate friends and family then you should be able to take anything you want.
Yeah, you'd think so, but there's no government in the world that would agree with you. Smuggling stuff into a country has been illegal as long as there are countries.
We could equally well argue that if it's your plane, you have a right to take those large containers of drugs home with you. Do you think that argument would be accepted by the border guards anywhere (except maybe Netherlands ;-)?
You're free to feel that you have such a right. But the border guards are free to do anything they like to you, regardless of your so-called "rights". Good luck trying to get restitution from the courts.
Now you can know all that you can see with a diminished field of view. Another way to look at how technology does not equate with 'progress'.
Actually, there has been significant development of narrowly-focused search sites that clearly qualify as progress. Many of them are highly technical sites that search and index specific kinds of technical data that aren't handled well by the big-name sites.
The big sites, for obvious reasons, concentrate in natural-language searches. If you wanted to find specific information about, say, DNA sequences or astronomical objects or any of zillions of other specific topics with their own technical jargons and data formats, the big sites like google or yahoo or bing aren't very good choices. It makes a lot of sense to develop a specialized search site that understands your specialty's jargon and data formats, so that you can do searches with results that don't get buried in huge piles of results that use similar words.
For over a decade, I've run one of these that's an interesting case linguistically. It's a "music" search site, but it's the sort of "music" that you put on a music stand and read while playing your instrument, not the sort of "music" that you listen to. The big search sites do a crappy job for this specialty, because it turns out that there's no clear English terminology to distinguish this sort of "music" from musical recordings, and google searches typically turn up about 1000 ads for recordings for every hit dealing with readable musical notation (which is a phrase that also fails to filter out the recordings ;-). Like most of the specialty search sites, mine has only a few thousand users per day, and indexes data on only a few hundred sites that provide readable music. And early on, I found that I had to include a clear notice that "There are no recordings of music here. If you don't understand how you can have a music site without recordings, you are probably at the wrong site." This stopped the server hits and email from confused visitors who couldn't find the recordings they were looking for and saw no clue that the musicians' jargon could be talking about anything but recorded music.
One of the ongoing problems is the confusion of many specialty searches with natural-language searches. I think the folks at google understand the distinction, though some of the others treat the specialty sites as competitors and sometimes harrass them. One of the more widely interesting cases, Wolfram Alpha, turned up a lot of confusion even here on /., where we had a long discussion that could be summarized as "Is this the next replacement for google?" Of course it isn't, and it was silly to even suggest this, since WA's purpose is something utterly different than what google is doing so well. Searching for anything online that's related to a topic or phrase is very different from finding a single or small number of technically correct answers to a precisely worded question in a specialized jargon. But not even the techies at /. seemed to be able to understand the difference.
Anyway, it shouldn't be surprising to find specialized religious search sites. This is no more surprising than sites that specialize in DNA sequences or classical Greek poetry or GIS data or perl modules or knitting or ...
The "narrowness" of such sites is part of their value, not a deficiency.
(I wonder how many thousands of such sites have been developed so far. How would one get a good number for this?)
Maybe there is a god. Maybe god will send me an email one day or turn up on /. and say "you must do this".
Actually, God has been registered on /. (id #13485308) since 2005. Maybe we should be asking Him (Her? It?) to contribute to this discussion, and maybe even tell us what we must do.
Hey, God; got any comments to add here?
Interesting question for the religious folks: Do you believe that user #13485308 is or is not God? If so, why? If not, why not? Does this affect your knowledge/belief in your God? How does this apply to the claim that atheism is a religious belief?
Why is this so horrible? Several years ago, I planted some very nice dwarf irises, and they're doing well. We'd welcome the government people who want to come over and scan the cute little things when they're in full bloom. They'll be up some time in March, but of course we don't know when exactly. Maybe there's an email address we can write to about this? We'd be happy to notify them that our irises are up.
If everyone cooperated with this, and with the government's help, we could flood the country with lots of nice flower pictures over the next year or so.
Huh? What?
... won't government agents with an agenda simply look to non-Microsoft software as an excuse for a raid?
It might mean a change in excuse by the Russian cops. After all, if you're running linux or *BSD or other free software, you have a license to run it. Just keep copies of the GPL and other appropriate licenses around to show people.
Of course, this won't really stop the raids and theft of computers. It'll just mean that "suspected software piracy" won't be the excuse it has been. The government's creative types will think up other wordings.
It is sorta funny that the Russian cops don't seem to be raiding the botnet operators and other spam operations, which seem to be headquartered in Russia in great numbers these days. I wonder why that might be?
Well, yeah, but I sorta doubt that anyone who understands that the Earth is in orbit around the sun would accept the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe. That would violate the basic concept of what it means to be a "center".
Has any actual physicist used the phrase "center of the universe"? I don't seem to recall ever seeing it in any texts that I've read. ;-)
Galileo was wrong. This is not in dispute. To whit: Einstein was right.
Every point of the universe is the center of the universe.
Actually, that's not quite what Einstein's theories said. They said that every point in any inertial frame is equivalent to any other (and could thus be considered a "center of the universe".
In Einsteinian terms, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, because it's not an inertial frame. It's moving in an accelerated frame in its orbit around a much heavier object (the sun). Therefore, it's not a candidate for centerhood. At the time of Galileo, the sun could have been considered an inertial frame, and therefore eligible as a center of the universe. We now know that the sun is also orbiting the galaxy, but in Galileo's time, that orbit couldn't have been measured, even if they'd known what the Milky Way is. So, to within the precision of their instruments and observation powers, the sun would have appeared to be stationary relative to the stars, and would have worked as a center of the universe.
Actually, astronomers have recently measured a slight acceleration of the Milky Way (though I've forgotten its direction). So, if your instruments are good enough, our galaxy isn't quite in an inertial frame, either, and thus is ineligible for "center of the universe" status. But not very many of us have instruments that good, so for everyday purposes we can treat the galaxy as the center of everything.
OTOH, we might note that shipping companies (including airlines) routinely treat the Earth as stationary in space, and for their purposes, this is good enough. Once we establish interplanetary trading, however, it won't be good enough, and shipping operations will have to change to a model in which the solar system is stationary while everything in it is moving in some sort of orbit.
(It turns out that this includes the sun. The barycenter of the solar system is slightly outside the sun, at the common center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. Strictly speaking, the sun is in a close orbit around this barycenter, and can't be treated as stationary relative to the rest of the solar system. Jupiter is slightly too big, and accelerates the Sun measurably. However, Galileo probably couldn't have measured this effect.)
In other words, the very case that gave us the state secrets BS that Obama is latching on to harder than Bush II, was based on a COVERUP of NEGLIGENCE, not for any actual national security reasons.
So how's this a news story? Since at least the 1950s, it's been understood by anyone who can read that "National Security" is primarily used as an excuse for coverups like this. Most people I've known from anywhere else in the world says the same about their government's secrecy.
A coverup should be the default inference whenever you read about anything being silenced for national security reasons. Yeah, there are occasional cases where there are actual security concerns. But those are relatively rare, while incompetence and malfeasance are common (in any organization, not just government). The biggest fear in any government is always that their own people will learn the details of what their government is up to. This is as true in democratic governments as in any others; they just have the additional problem of needing to maintain a public image so that people will keep voting for them.
The funniest case I remember reading about was back in the 1970s (or maybe the late 1960s), when the US DoD funded a study by several university researchers of what could be learned about US military forces from public information sources. After a few months of studies, the researchers submitted their report, and according to numerous news sources within a day or two, it was given some sort of "Secret" classification. (Which level wasn't clear from the news stories.) This was all covered by an amused press. We all got a lot of laughs out of it. Nothing much changed.
(I do wonder how much the publisher increased their print run when they realized that they could sell it all to the DoD? ;-)
Obviously 8-character tab stops is the standard ...
[citation needed]
Just out of curiosity, can you provide a reference to a standards doc that specifies exactly 8-char tab stops? The definitions of tab stop that I've seen have been along the lines of "whatever columns the user has listed in the tab-stops setting".
AFAIK, tab stops were invented by typewriter makers, who implemented the idea by providing a metal bar with a bunch of little "stop" widgets that you could slide to wherever you wanted them. There was no concept that the stops should be an any specific positions. In fact, the wire usually had little notches at ever char position, resting points for the "stop" widgets, further implying that the stops could and should be set at whatever positions you like.
(I suppose it's possible that this tab-stop mechanism could have predated the invention of the typewriter. Anyone know of an earlier machine that used something conceptually similar?)
... those parts of her campaign disappeared from her website ... until Harry Reid posted them on *his* website, and she objected that he was distorting her positions.
She should learn the new, modern way of dealing with people quoting you accurately: Sue them for copyright infringement. I think there was a story about that recently on /. Now where did I see it ? ...
So the real question is tabs or spaces?
Use a mixture. That way, nobody with tabs stops set different from yours will be able to make any sense of the code.
I've seen a lot of this, actually. For example, I've seen a number of cases where people leave the tab stops set to the default (typically 8, far too large), and then set their indentation to something different, usually 3 or 4, but I've also seen 2 and 5. This way, the editor will generate a mixture of tabs and spaces whenever you indent more than the first tab stop. I've questioned this in a few cases, and invariably I've gotten a red-hot flaming response from the programmer(s), telling me in no uncertain terms what an idiot I am for not seeing the importance of doing it just as they're doing it.
Actually, I think I do understand why they it. See the first paragraph of this reply.
Makes no sense at all in the reasoning for copyright, which according to the Constitution is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." However it is real useful to step on people.
Well, a number of historians have pointed out that copyright (and patent) laws have never produced such progress. Historically, they have only been used to block progress. And it's quite clear that this is usually intentional.
This is pretty much all that copyright laws can do, since "progress of science and useful arts" requires information, and the only function of copyright is to prevent distribution of information. Copyright laws never require distribution of information; they only deal with when such distribution is prohibited.
We do have examples like the GPL, which does require distribution of information (specifically the source code to software). But this isn't anything mentioned in copyright law; it's a license provided by the copyright owner of their own volition.
It's quite likely that the people who wrote that "promote the progress of science and useful arts" phrase into the US Constitution were aware of the inhibiting effect that copyright and patent law usually has on such progress. They tried to restrict the use of copyright and patent law in the US to only actions that would produce progress. But the legal system has pretty much ignored that phrase, and the US has copyright law that's just as anti-progress as in the rest of the world.
What is the relation of shoes to this topic at all? Discussion was not about shoes and the TS was trying to make fun of the main topic.
Exactly. And public ridicule is often a very appropriate way to deal with such "Ban it all" approaches.
A local example: Here in Massachusetts, the courthouses have installed metal detectors in the doorways over the past few years. There were news reports explaining that a huge number of weapons (over 17,000 in one report) had been confiscated from people entering the courthouses in the previous year. Some local reporters got a bit curious about this and interviewed some of the managers, who were audibly reluctant to answer questions about just what kinds of weapons people had tried to bring into the courthouses. After a while, the interviewers finally got an admission of what these weapons were: "pocket knives, of the Swiss Army type".
That's right, they were classifying pocket knives as "weapons". And when pressed to admit this, they described such knives with phrasing intended to make them sound like military weapons.
It's quite common for security folks to use this sort of PR tactic to make it sound like they're detecting huge rates of attacks from people intent on doing harm. Similarly, when we've got the details of the ongoing huge numbers of computer "hacker attacks", it has sometimes turned out that they're counting incoming pings as "attacks", probes in the same class as port scans.
When we hear or read vague language like "spy tool" to describe threats, we should always suspect that they're including normal, everyday uses of tools in this catchall classification. We should try to learn more details of what they're really talking about, and how they're planning to deal with it. Ridiculing them by pointing out that shoes are also "spy tools" is quite appropriate, to highlight the misleading nature of that phrase. Similarly, pings are "hacker tools" and pocket knives are "Army type weapons". This sort of misuse of language is a standard propaganda tool that should be exposed.
Are you a {terror,commun,islam,morning m,union}ist?
Well, I admit to being an Internet software developer for several decades. In a lot of people's minds, that makes me some sort of "hacker". And, since I also admit to being involved in open-source software development, I'm probably also classified as some sort of *ist by most of the political types.
My free, open-source stuff has been picked up by a number of people in other countries, and has made me a number of friends there. This probably doesn't exactly endear me to the politicos, either. ;-)
(And I've seen some beautiful morning mists over the past week, which makes even my friends worry about my lifestyle habits when I'm getting up early enough to see such things. The Catskills were especially lovely on Monday morning around 6 or so.)
It'll get "fixed" when the countries that are complaining about that stop expecting the U.S. to make them a gift of those assets, and start spending the money to build out their own. But they'd rather we keep footing the bill. It's just easier that way, plus which they get to complain continuously and publicly, which is all it takes to make most politicians happy anyway, no matter what country you're from.
Ah, truer words have rarely been read here on /. ;-)
We might note that a few other countries have contributed to the infrastructure and software that make up the Internet. True, it started life with roughly 100% US DoD funding. But the Brits got involved fairly early on, as did the Scandinavians.
I've been over in Scandinavia (mostly Finland, but also Sweden and Norway) a few times during the past couple of decades, and every time, I've been duly impressed by how "wired" those countries have been. They've been years ahead of the US and most of Europe every time I've been there to sample their status.
The UK not so much though; outside of the universities, it has lagged behind in the infrastructure about as much as the US has. This seems to have something to do with big (pseudo-private, with legal monopoly power) corporations that have little motive to install advanced technology until they are forced to by a higher power. So, as in the US, we see university students routinely using the most advanced forms of the Internet, then when they graduate, they're shocked with how crappy it all is outside the ivory tower.
It's interesting that the US corporate world can control so much of the Internet's international backbone, while providing such generally crappy service to local customers. The popular economic theories seem to ignore this, possibly because it doesn't agree with the theories' predictions about how a private "Market" will behave. There are some cynical theories that do explain and predict it, though ...
US Politicians incorrectly believe that the US owns the entire internet.
Actually, there is an acknowledged problem that "American interests" (i.e., US-registered corporations) own and operate a large fraction of the world's international cables, and almost all of the intercontinental cables. So it's easy for the US government to think of at least the "Internet backbone" as US property.
The Internet might be a better place if this problem were fixed.
Of course, the corporate world is slowly becoming a truly international culture that is independent of mere governments, so maybe the problem is being fixed. Whether this is an improvement isn't clear.
Maybe what we need is to get get American law set up so that it protects local wikileaks servers that contain leaked docs from, say, Algeria or Iran or China or wherever, and deny extradition of wikileaks people to those countries. Meanwhile, we encourage those countries to set up similar laws that protect wikileaks servers in their domain from actions by the American government. Then we'd have the ideal situation, that every government could be proud of the job "our own" wikileaks subsidiary has done in exposing the evil deeds of the politicians in those other countries. And their wikileaks subsidiaries could return the favor, by telling us about the misdeeds of our politicians.
And we should all support wikileaks' ability to use the latest, strongest encryption and anonymizing software.
We just need to be quiet about this strategy, and work on convincing our local politicians that wikileaks should be supported when it leaks things that embarrass governments that we don't like.
Isn't a "national emergency" when we (including the government) will need the Internet the most? Intentionally shutting it down will cripple the organizations (government and otherwise) who are trying to handle the emergency.
We had an example of this back during the Katrina and Haiti disasters, when trucks full of electronics were used to provide wireless phone and internet access to the affected areas.
There was a funnier example back during Gulf Way I, when the military still had the "feature" in the GPS system that would introduce errors into the satellites' data, so that civilian GPS gadgets wouldn't know where they were. But they couldn't use it. The reason was that the US military wasn't able to get their hands on GPS equipment they needed, so the soldiers in the field had been buying civilian-grade equipment. Ordering military GPS equipment, as usual, required mounds of paperwork started months ahead of time, while they could get civilian equipment by walking into electronics stores anywhere in the world. For this and other reasons, they eventually abandoned the induced-error idea, and admitted that the military would need the "civilian" part during at times.
There was an earlier precedent of this in the us, back in the 1950s, when the first Interstate Highways were funded. If you dig up the original papers, you'll find that this was a purely military project, so that defense forces could easily move around during a "national emergency". Civilian traffic wasn't to be allowed. Of course, this struck everyone as a silly waste of good highways, and within a very few years, the new super-highways were opened to civilian traffic. This was so successful that we got funding for a lot more than the handful of highways originally envisioned, and the system has grown into our major high-speed highway system. But the law still says that the military can order all traffic off the highways during a "national emergency". This has actually been used occasionally, during major disasters, when area Interstate highways have been closed to civilian traffic, and restricted to military, emergency and highway maintenance vehicles, etc.
A more sensible approach would be to add it into the "Net Neutrality" issue, by decreeing priority to military and other emergency IP addresses during emergencies. But shutting the Internet down is as stupid as shutting down the cell-phone or interstate-highway systems would be. Anyone supporting this idea should be accused of trying to make disasters worse by blocking facilities needed by emergency personnel.
And a special-purpose "emergency use only" comm system is a stupid idea, because it would just fail when it's most needed. What makes the most sense is priority access to the civilian system that has been developed and tested for decades, and can handle the load of an emergency by moving in a few trucks or boats stuffed with electronics.
Well, it's interesting that a few people are reporting that they get the advertised speed for long periods.
Of course, this could be a case of "squeaky wheels", in which we only hear from the (apparently many) people whose ISPs don't provide the advertised service. Finally, after enough complaints, and the general consensus that it's a mess, the people actually getting good service start speaking up.
Another possibility is that the ISPs' management is slowly catching onto the idea that they've gotten a reputation much like used-car salesmen, and if they want to stay in business, maybe they should start being a bit more honest.
Also, they've probably also read the reports from South Korea and a few other parts of the world with internet speeds that put the vaunted US technical lead to shame. There are probably a lot of corporate discussion that amount to "These other guys can provide actual fast internet access; maybe we should be looking into investing in the infrastructure that supports it. They talk to their engineers, who express frustration that they've been held back for so long, and decide that maybe it's time to move into the 21st century.
There are probably a lot of other explanations for the wildly different service levels (and customer satisfaction) of various ISPs. I wonder what the other explanations might be?
(My local experience, with RCN here, is that the data from my linux firewall's port is that we sometimes get a bit better than the rated max speed, but usually only around half that during the evening busy times. We use VPNs extensively for job purposes, which has a noticable minimum traffic level, and as far as we can determine, we don't often get throttled. But I'm not convinced we have a valid test for this. In any case, the service currently meets our needs. Even when my wife is satisfying here need for old movies. ;-)
I don't see how they can comply without turning over the encryption algorithms?
Um, the algorithms themselves are hardly the problem. Of course, the algorithms in question here are "proprietary" trade secrets. This in itself is a big red flag to anyone with even minimal understanding of security. A secret encryption algorithm should always be assumed to have an exploit that the comm company itself can use to read your communications. The only trustworthy encryption algorithms are the ones that are published openly (along with the code, of course), so that knowledgeable people can examine them and tell the world about exploits. If your comm company is using secret code or algorithms, the only reason you should consider is that they are reading your communications. Anything else they tell you is PR, and worthless.
The real issue is the encryption keys, which the comm company shouldn't even know. If they do, then again we must assume that all communications are compromised, and the comm company is selling your information to your competitors and enemies, (and to their government).
Comm companies everywhere are notoriously in bed with their governments, and routinely give government agencies access to any communications requested. This should always be assumed true, regardless of the company's PR. Even if their name includes the string "google". ;-)
Somewhere along the way corporations convinced themselves that people do not want quality products and instead would like to pay full price for something that will definitely break prematurely.
Well, in the computer and related electronics/comm fields, the explanation for this is fairly clear: What company is the top seller of the software in the equipment on most business counters and desktops? What sort of computers to most people use at home? We all know the answer: Microsoft.
That tells us all we need to know about the quality that people want, both at home and at work.
A T1 is 1.5Mbps.
Which is more than AT&T or Comcast will allow you to use on a residential connection of any speed. Just try using 1.5 Mbps for 24 hours straight, and see what happens to your connection speed.
It most other businesses, the advertised data rate would be called misleading advertising, or consumer fraud after you'd paid for it. But ISPs are allowed to outright lie about the "service" they supply, and limit your access if you use more than a few percent of what they sold you. And they aren't even secretive about it, because they know they won't be fined for it.