This may not seem like a typical "toy", but Apple PowerBook G4 17" notebook is really fun. It's expensive, but it's got a HUGE screen, it's thin ( 1"), built-in 802.11b/g, a built-in DVD/CD burner, built-in BlueTooth, FireWire 400 and 800, light sensors that automatically adjust the backlighting on the screen/and/ and keyboard, and that's just the hardware. Software-wise, it comes with movie-creation and DVD-burning software, a nice calendar, and address book. Make a package consisting of one of these, an iPod, and a Bluetooth-enabled PDA and cell phone, and he'll be wowed. Plus it's all very pretty:)
This could seriously level the academic playing field for folks who learn better from lectures than from books. In college, I know I certainly had an easier time in many classes than my classmates because I preferred to learn from the textbooks and other reading materials rather than the lectures. Since reading isn't limited by the rate of speech of the author, you can cover more material in a given time from a book. Plus, books are random access; it's much harder to scan through a recorded lecture for something you wanted to hear. However, I know a lot of people who seem to really need the narrative provided by a lecturer to get the material. Given the speeds at which the article claims young adults are capable of comprehending spoken material, that no longer needs to be a disadvantage.
Now, all schools have to do is make lectures non-mandatory (so that students can save time by listening later at high speed, of course.:) )
The Internet (well, the web in particular) is a fine tool for quick research, and has supplanted dead-tree media for me in that regard. No longer do I have to go down to the local library to look up a quick fact, or have a huge pile of reference books next to me with well worn indices. The true strength of the web lies in search engines, which provide an index to essentially every written work on it.
Similarly, it's supplanted making phone calls or poring through paper records to get service from another party. There are no more hold times for customer service reps or having to wait for business hours to get information. The computer is there, 24 hours a day.
The one thing that it hasn't supplanted, and I doubt that it will for a while, are long writings. If I want to read a book, rather than use it as a reference, far better to have it in print form where I can carry it with me anywhere and read it on something other than a computer screen. In short, the Internet is probably the best/random-access/ media yet developed, but is lacking for long serial accesses.
I guess that's the ultimate test of a hypothesis, isn't it?:)
I've still got to think that this will have a high failure rate. GPS signals simply don't make it inside very well, and I suspect that a large proportion of the beers that are drunk in the U.S. are drunk inside.
Where are the receivers? This smells like a sham.
on
Track a Soda Can with GPS?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What on earth could Coca-Cola possibly be thinking of using for receivers? Any transmitter is going to have to be small enough to fit inside of a can of Coke, which means it's going to have a pretty darn small range. (There's a reason that Iridium phones are so bloody big.) That'd mean that receivers would have to be essentially ubiquitous. The only thing I can think of that might come close to fitting the bill would be cell towers.
Add to that the fact that both the receiving and transmitting circuitry as well as the battery would have to fit inside a small metal can, and you're not looking at much power or battery life. Also, to get a GPS signal, you pretty much have to be outside or next to a window. In short, I have no idea how this could work, and given the restrictions above, this seems like a vaporware ad campaign.
I should have been clearer: the proxy doesn't let that through. If it can't decrypt the data, it doesn't pass. The only way to circumvent this is to do further encapsulation; e.g., passing encrypted data in the bodies of HTTP requests and including encrypted data in the body of the "web page" that gets returned. For some things, this would be an effective mechanism, but the overhead would make it quite useless for others. Running an ssh session over something that has to create an HTTP request/reply for every keystroke would be pretty bloody painful, for instance.
If only I had some mod points to give to the parent and oniony's response! The proliferation of web services, served via SOAP over HTTP, is raising serious security issues that are going to have to be addressed with application-level firewalls. Unfortunately, (to my knowledge at least) no current firewall product can do this intelligently.
Anyway, the point that I wanted to address is the one about "forcing people to start using SSL." That's probably one of the easiest issues to deal with -- users can be forced to use a proxy which will unencrypt their SSL traffic, validate it, and make a new SSL request on their behalf. I believe ISA server already does this; I'm not sure about other firewalls.
Not really. If they're actually putting out fraudulent information (i.e., a signature is required to join the class action,) then why shouldn't they be enjoined from continuing to do so?
Two things stand out as bizarre about the letter from MS's lawyers, though:
1) The letter claims that the site doesn't disclose that a person must have purchased the software for use in California. The site very prominently does so on the second page.
2) It seems to me that the group that would get burned by this if the "digital signatures" things isn't legitimate is Lindows itself, not the consumer. Lindows is trying to appropriate the right to join the class action in place of the people involved and giving them something for that right. If it turns out they can't, Lindows is left in the lurch, having given out the products.
That would be a rather slippery slope, wouldn't it? At that point, we're talking about abrogating free speech rights. With an opt-out system, you're talking about people stating that they do not wish to be contacted by certain groups for certain purposes, which makes it an issue of harassment.
It's certainly pleasing to see that on at least one issue of national import, our elected reprentatives can all pull together for an effective resolution.
I'm rather disappointed by the negativity that has been heaped on Judge West for his ruling suspending enforcement of the law, though. It's the job of the judiciary to keep the executive branch (in this case, the FTC) from overstepping the bounds of their authority granted to them by the legislative branch. If there was a question as to whether or not Congress granted the FTC sufficient authority to create such a list, enforcement of it certainly should be suspended until the matter is resolved. In this case, Congress (well, the House, anyway) has made itself clear on the matter -- they have explicitly placed the creation and enforcement of the list in the mandate. Unless West does something foolish at this juncture, like continuing to try to fight the enforcement of the list, he should be commended for doing his job of keeping the government consistent.
There's a huge problem with this approach. Satisfying though it might be to punish such people, it's typically not their fault that they are ignorant. How can someone's grandma, who's still trying to figure out this "email" thing, be expected to know that she needs to purchase a firewall and install it, keep up to date with all the Windows patches/and/ all the patches for other applications that she has, and purchase a copy of an anti-virus program and a subscription to their update service? Even sometimes people who/are/ knowledgable legitimately can't get patches out on time; often rolling updates out to a production environment takes a long time, and with new patches coming out almost weekly for Microsoft OS components alone, you're simply never going to catch up.
You're looking to put the blame in wrong place, I think. Why should we have to put up with products that require patch after patch after patch? The people whose feet we should be holding to the fire are the developers who fail to adequately test their products before sending them out. It's a travesty that we permit them to disclaim all liability in a EULA; try that in any other industry and see how far you get.
It seems to me that looking at Edison's business tactics also offers a ray of hope. Edison was a huge proponent of using direct current power transmission, and as you noted, invented the electric chair, and indeed, the entire notion of electrocution via alternating current. He even went so far as to electrocute a multitude of animals, including an elephant.
All of this was done to disparage his competitor, Nikolai Tesla, who advocated transmission of power through alternating current. Despite Edison's attempts, the better way eventually won out, and it was Tesla's alternating current that lit up the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Even if not at first, people did eventually recognize that AC was the better way to go, avoiding the loss of power both in rectifying AC to DC and in transmitting DC over long distances.
As people get fed up with getting the short end of the stick due to loopholes and dishonest practice, it will become an issue for legislators. Eventually, regulations, standards, and acceptable practices will cut down on some of the "sharp business" tactics that we see now. Remember that the next time you're in the polling booth and help make this happen.
Perhaps turboing the whole thing would be an appropriate response. It sounds as though the purchasers quite thoroughly exhausted their normal avenues of support, so the next reasonable step in my mind would be start at the top and work their way down. It's worked for me before.
Your ISPs are running/mandatory/ spam filtering? That's absolutely and utterly asinine. Is that just for residential clients? What on Earth ISPs were you using?
As has been pointed out in previous posts, it seems silly to say that viruses are good because they strengthen the ecosystem, when the threats are viruses. However, it seems to me that what something like Blaster really protects against are malicious individuals.
If your company gets hit with Blaster, your IT department has to spend a bunch of time cleaning up and patching the PCs that are infected, but in the end, the cost for a worm like Blaster that doesn't destroy data is only man-hours; you're not losing sensitive business data. If no one had written the Blaster worm, and the vulnerability remained unpatched, a malicious individual (maybe an ex-employee, maybe a criminal from another country, whatever) could use that same vulnerability to gain access to a few of your systems and engage in more nefarious acts, like theft or destruction of secrets and personal information about your employees.
Yes, it's difficult to stay on top of patching, when Microsoft churns out vulnerability after vulnerability. However, it must be done, and non-data-destroying worms and virii provide a nuisance that protect the ignorant and incompetent from bigger threats.
ADSL and Eldred Misconceptions
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The author of the article makes some interesting speculations, but would have been better served by doing some research before waxing philosophical.
First, at least with DSL, the main reason that it's usually asymmetric in favor of download speed is a technical one -- issues arise with crosstalk. Check out http://www.commweb.com/article/COM20011010S0005 for a more thorough discussion.
Also, the reason the Supreme Court ruled the way it did in Eldred v. Ashcroft wasn't because of confusion about what kind of right copyright is or anything so abstract. The court said that since the term of copyright enacted by the Sonny Bono CTEA was still limited, it was constitutional. It's not the court's job to decide what length of term is appropriate to protect innovation; that's why Congress was given that charge by the Constitution. If you, like most thinking human beings, don't agree with the copyright term lengths, your representatives are where you should look for relief.
In short, it seems that much of what the author is attributing to Big Media changing the notion of copyrights and the nature of the 'Net is due to technical concerns of one kind or another. Does that mean the threat isn't there? No, but we're not going to get anywhere by misunderstanding its origins.
The way you deal with this is very simple -- you talk with most or all of your fellow developers, and you refuse to work more than 8 hours a day or come in on weekends. Don't threaten to quit, refuse to work overtime. The company needs its developers to get the product out; they can't just fire you all.
Don't bother with this passive-agressive crap like "spend 4 of the hours looking at Monster.com" or "turn out shoddy code and watch the company learn!" If you go ahead and work 12/7, all the company is going to remember is that they got you to put out a project on a short deadline and can get more hours out of you for free. Even if you do have financial responsibilities (a family or whatever,) working 12 hour days is no way to live. You're looking at less than four hours a day to see your family and live your life. You're better off getting canned than working on that schedule.
The whois lookup does return the address of Spamboy's lawyer, and his email address:
Registrant:
mark felstein
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
Registered through: Go Daddy Software (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG
Created on: 16-Jan-03
Expires on: 16-Jan-05
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-03
Administrative Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575 Fax --
Technical Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575 Fax --
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK3.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK4.SECURESERVER.NET
Absolutely. Further, several of the disaster scenarios in the article are positively absurd. A particle accelerator experiment that turns the Earth into a 100-meter sphere? Please. All sorts of crazy, much-higher-energy phenomena are extant throughout the universe (e.g., in stars) and we don't observe them birthing new universes that consume ours. It strikes me as ridiculous and arrogant to think that we can so easily destroy all of existence.
There will always be risks to exploring new avenues of science, most of which we're not going to be able to predict. The best we can do is ask ourselves what we hope to achieve in an endeavor and what the risks are, based on our prior experiences. There's simply no point to worrying about things that we have no reason to think are plausible risks. The fact that the author does places considerable doubt in my mind regarding his scientific acumen.
Slashdot Mirror
This may not seem like a typical "toy", but Apple PowerBook G4 17" notebook is really fun. It's expensive, but it's got a HUGE screen, it's thin ( 1"), built-in 802.11b/g, a built-in DVD/CD burner, built-in BlueTooth, FireWire 400 and 800, light sensors that automatically adjust the backlighting on the screen /and/ and keyboard, and that's just the hardware. Software-wise, it comes with movie-creation and DVD-burning software, a nice calendar, and address book. Make a package consisting of one of these, an iPod, and a Bluetooth-enabled PDA and cell phone, and he'll be wowed. Plus it's all very pretty :)
This could seriously level the academic playing field for folks who learn better from lectures than from books. In college, I know I certainly had an easier time in many classes than my classmates because I preferred to learn from the textbooks and other reading materials rather than the lectures. Since reading isn't limited by the rate of speech of the author, you can cover more material in a given time from a book. Plus, books are random access; it's much harder to scan through a recorded lecture for something you wanted to hear. However, I know a lot of people who seem to really need the narrative provided by a lecturer to get the material. Given the speeds at which the article claims young adults are capable of comprehending spoken material, that no longer needs to be a disadvantage.
:) )
Now, all schools have to do is make lectures non-mandatory (so that students can save time by listening later at high speed, of course.
The Internet (well, the web in particular) is a fine tool for quick research, and has supplanted dead-tree media for me in that regard. No longer do I have to go down to the local library to look up a quick fact, or have a huge pile of reference books next to me with well worn indices. The true strength of the web lies in search engines, which provide an index to essentially every written work on it.
/random-access/ media yet developed, but is lacking for long serial accesses.
Similarly, it's supplanted making phone calls or poring through paper records to get service from another party. There are no more hold times for customer service reps or having to wait for business hours to get information. The computer is there, 24 hours a day.
The one thing that it hasn't supplanted, and I doubt that it will for a while, are long writings. If I want to read a book, rather than use it as a reference, far better to have it in print form where I can carry it with me anywhere and read it on something other than a computer screen. In short, the Internet is probably the best
I guess that's the ultimate test of a hypothesis, isn't it? :)
I've still got to think that this will have a high failure rate. GPS signals simply don't make it inside very well, and I suspect that a large proportion of the beers that are drunk in the U.S. are drunk inside.
What on earth could Coca-Cola possibly be thinking of using for receivers? Any transmitter is going to have to be small enough to fit inside of a can of Coke, which means it's going to have a pretty darn small range. (There's a reason that Iridium phones are so bloody big.) That'd mean that receivers would have to be essentially ubiquitous. The only thing I can think of that might come close to fitting the bill would be cell towers.
Add to that the fact that both the receiving and transmitting circuitry as well as the battery would have to fit inside a small metal can, and you're not looking at much power or battery life. Also, to get a GPS signal, you pretty much have to be outside or next to a window. In short, I have no idea how this could work, and given the restrictions above, this seems like a vaporware ad campaign.
I should have been clearer: the proxy doesn't let that through. If it can't decrypt the data, it doesn't pass. The only way to circumvent this is to do further encapsulation; e.g., passing encrypted data in the bodies of HTTP requests and including encrypted data in the body of the "web page" that gets returned. For some things, this would be an effective mechanism, but the overhead would make it quite useless for others. Running an ssh session over something that has to create an HTTP request/reply for every keystroke would be pretty bloody painful, for instance.
If only I had some mod points to give to the parent and oniony's response! The proliferation of web services, served via SOAP over HTTP, is raising serious security issues that are going to have to be addressed with application-level firewalls. Unfortunately, (to my knowledge at least) no current firewall product can do this intelligently.
Anyway, the point that I wanted to address is the one about "forcing people to start using SSL." That's probably one of the easiest issues to deal with -- users can be forced to use a proxy which will unencrypt their SSL traffic, validate it, and make a new SSL request on their behalf. I believe ISA server already does this; I'm not sure about other firewalls.
Not really. If they're actually putting out fraudulent information (i.e., a signature is required to join the class action,) then why shouldn't they be enjoined from continuing to do so?
Two things stand out as bizarre about the letter from MS's lawyers, though:
1) The letter claims that the site doesn't disclose that a person must have purchased the software for use in California. The site very prominently does so on the second page.
2) It seems to me that the group that would get burned by this if the "digital signatures" things isn't legitimate is Lindows itself, not the consumer. Lindows is trying to appropriate the right to join the class action in place of the people involved and giving them something for that right. If it turns out they can't, Lindows is left in the lurch, having given out the products.
That would be a rather slippery slope, wouldn't it? At that point, we're talking about abrogating free speech rights. With an opt-out system, you're talking about people stating that they do not wish to be contacted by certain groups for certain purposes, which makes it an issue of harassment.
It's certainly pleasing to see that on at least one issue of national import, our elected reprentatives can all pull together for an effective resolution.
I'm rather disappointed by the negativity that has been heaped on Judge West for his ruling suspending enforcement of the law, though. It's the job of the judiciary to keep the executive branch (in this case, the FTC) from overstepping the bounds of their authority granted to them by the legislative branch. If there was a question as to whether or not Congress granted the FTC sufficient authority to create such a list, enforcement of it certainly should be suspended until the matter is resolved. In this case, Congress (well, the House, anyway) has made itself clear on the matter -- they have explicitly placed the creation and enforcement of the list in the mandate. Unless West does something foolish at this juncture, like continuing to try to fight the enforcement of the list, he should be commended for doing his job of keeping the government consistent.
Uh, wouldn't marking the .net and .com tld servers as bogus have rather unfortunate consequences?
There's a huge problem with this approach. Satisfying though it might be to punish such people, it's typically not their fault that they are ignorant. How can someone's grandma, who's still trying to figure out this "email" thing, be expected to know that she needs to purchase a firewall and install it, keep up to date with all the Windows patches /and/ all the patches for other applications that she has, and purchase a copy of an anti-virus program and a subscription to their update service? Even sometimes people who /are/ knowledgable legitimately can't get patches out on time; often rolling updates out to a production environment takes a long time, and with new patches coming out almost weekly for Microsoft OS components alone, you're simply never going to catch up.
You're looking to put the blame in wrong place, I think. Why should we have to put up with products that require patch after patch after patch? The people whose feet we should be holding to the fire are the developers who fail to adequately test their products before sending them out. It's a travesty that we permit them to disclaim all liability in a EULA; try that in any other industry and see how far you get.
It seems to me that looking at Edison's business tactics also offers a ray of hope. Edison was a huge proponent of using direct current power transmission, and as you noted, invented the electric chair, and indeed, the entire notion of electrocution via alternating current. He even went so far as to electrocute a multitude of animals, including an elephant.
All of this was done to disparage his competitor, Nikolai Tesla, who advocated transmission of power through alternating current. Despite Edison's attempts, the better way eventually won out, and it was Tesla's alternating current that lit up the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Even if not at first, people did eventually recognize that AC was the better way to go, avoiding the loss of power both in rectifying AC to DC and in transmitting DC over long distances.
As people get fed up with getting the short end of the stick due to loopholes and dishonest practice, it will become an issue for legislators. Eventually, regulations, standards, and acceptable practices will cut down on some of the "sharp business" tactics that we see now. Remember that the next time you're in the polling booth and help make this happen.
Perhaps turboing the whole thing would be an appropriate response. It sounds as though the purchasers quite thoroughly exhausted their normal avenues of support, so the next reasonable step in my mind would be start at the top and work their way down. It's worked for me before.
Check out http://www.macwhiz.com/articles/art-of-turboing.ht ml for advice on how to do this successfully. It's really a shame that it seems to be such an unknown approach.
Your ISPs are running /mandatory/ spam filtering? That's absolutely and utterly asinine. Is that just for residential clients? What on Earth ISPs were you using?
No one is forcing you to use a blocklist.
As has been pointed out in previous posts, it seems silly to say that viruses are good because they strengthen the ecosystem, when the threats are viruses. However, it seems to me that what something like Blaster really protects against are malicious individuals.
If your company gets hit with Blaster, your IT department has to spend a bunch of time cleaning up and patching the PCs that are infected, but in the end, the cost for a worm like Blaster that doesn't destroy data is only man-hours; you're not losing sensitive business data. If no one had written the Blaster worm, and the vulnerability remained unpatched, a malicious individual (maybe an ex-employee, maybe a criminal from another country, whatever) could use that same vulnerability to gain access to a few of your systems and engage in more nefarious acts, like theft or destruction of secrets and personal information about your employees.
Yes, it's difficult to stay on top of patching, when Microsoft churns out vulnerability after vulnerability. However, it must be done, and non-data-destroying worms and virii provide a nuisance that protect the ignorant and incompetent from bigger threats.
The author of the article makes some interesting speculations, but would have been better served by doing some research before waxing philosophical.
First, at least with DSL, the main reason that it's usually asymmetric in favor of download speed is a technical one -- issues arise with crosstalk. Check out http://www.commweb.com/article/COM20011010S0005 for a more thorough discussion.
Also, the reason the Supreme Court ruled the way it did in Eldred v. Ashcroft wasn't because of confusion about what kind of right copyright is or anything so abstract. The court said that since the term of copyright enacted by the Sonny Bono CTEA was still limited, it was constitutional. It's not the court's job to decide what length of term is appropriate to protect innovation; that's why Congress was given that charge by the Constitution. If you, like most thinking human beings, don't agree with the copyright term lengths, your representatives are where you should look for relief.
In short, it seems that much of what the author is attributing to Big Media changing the notion of copyrights and the nature of the 'Net is due to technical concerns of one kind or another. Does that mean the threat isn't there? No, but we're not going to get anywhere by misunderstanding its origins.
The way you deal with this is very simple -- you talk with most or all of your fellow developers, and you refuse to work more than 8 hours a day or come in on weekends. Don't threaten to quit, refuse to work overtime. The company needs its developers to get the product out; they can't just fire you all.
Don't bother with this passive-agressive crap like "spend 4 of the hours looking at Monster.com" or "turn out shoddy code and watch the company learn!" If you go ahead and work 12/7, all the company is going to remember is that they got you to put out a project on a short deadline and can get more hours out of you for free. Even if you do have financial responsibilities (a family or whatever,) working 12 hour days is no way to live. You're looking at less than four hours a day to see your family and live your life. You're better off getting canned than working on that schedule.
The whois lookup does return the address of Spamboy's lawyer, and his email address:
Registrant:
mark felstein
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
Registered through: Go Daddy Software (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG
Created on: 16-Jan-03
Expires on: 16-Jan-05
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-03
Administrative Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575 Fax --
Technical Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575 Fax --
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK3.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK4.SECURESERVER.NET
Notice also that the website doesn't exist yet; the domain is currently "parked" with GoDaddy.
Absolutely. Further, several of the disaster scenarios in the article are positively absurd. A particle accelerator experiment that turns the Earth into a 100-meter sphere? Please. All sorts of crazy, much-higher-energy phenomena are extant throughout the universe (e.g., in stars) and we don't observe them birthing new universes that consume ours. It strikes me as ridiculous and arrogant to think that we can so easily destroy all of existence.
There will always be risks to exploring new avenues of science, most of which we're not going to be able to predict. The best we can do is ask ourselves what we hope to achieve in an endeavor and what the risks are, based on our prior experiences. There's simply no point to worrying about things that we have no reason to think are plausible risks. The fact that the author does places considerable doubt in my mind regarding his scientific acumen.
Why would you bother to deal with the BSA at all?
To clarify, this is not a new book. New in paperback, perhaps, but it's ©1992.
Point :)
In that case, I wonder how long it'll be before someone figures out the SDMI format enough to write a decoder that simply ignores the copying data.