Normally, it is -30 degrees Celcius (-30 x 1.8 + 32 = -86F) here.
Um, what part of Canada are you from? You've got to be rather far north before -30 is typical. (You also got the temperature conversion wrong - that's -26F [-54+32, not -54-32].)
add BitTorrent to http protocol
on
Today in P2P
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As I visit yet another site to find it slashdotted, I find myself wishing that the basic http protocol included BitTorrent-like capability for basic web pages.
Then, when a low volume, private site suddenly gets its 15 minutes of fame by being mentioned on Slashdot (or some other well-read news broadcast), it would automatically enlist the horde of new requesting sites to help distribute its content. The rest of the time, both before and after the flash mobbing period, it would just serve its own pages itself in the current manner.
Since it is hard to predict which sites will be "discovered", it would be necessary for all standard servers and browsers support the http protocol extension, so this can't happen without a lot of coordinated work, I'm afraid. The protocol would have to be extended, web servers modified (Apache would e adaquate for a start), browsers modified (Mozilla/Firefox would be adequate for a start). When server was becoming overloaded it woud start by discarding requests from browsers that did not support the protocol, so that it can build up the initial seeding of helper sites. As long as there was more demand than available helpers, these old incapable browsers would continue to get ignored. Once a large enough group of capable helpers was built up to fully support itself, the group could start accepting requests from incapable browsers. That would provide incentive to upgrade older browsers.
Re:I'd love a cheap, mass produced 200 mile electr
on
230mph Electric Car
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· Score: 1
Unless you live exactly at the north/south pole. There, sunrise and sunset are each 6 months long.
If you move between the pole and the (ant)arctic circle, the period of non-stop daylight and night changes from 6 months down to days. (Exactly on the circles, at midwinter you get one day with no sunrise; while the preceeding and subsequent day each has a short period of daylight of a few minutes.) Of course, at noon on the wid-winter days the sun is close under the horizon even on the day that it doesn't appear, so it is not totally dark but more of a pre-sunrise dawn leading straight into a post-sunset dusk.
Anyhow, except for exactly at the pole, in mid-summer you can have an "overnight" that only lasts for minutes, which is considerably less than one hour. I'd have to do more calculation than I feel like to determine just how much further away from a pole than the closest (ant)arctic circle to ensure that "overnight" cannot take less than an hour.
Now the War on Drugs can stop using those bit players (i.e. the CIA and the U.S. military) and move to a much more powerful attack squad: Monsanto and the U.S. intellectual property legal lobby. Those unfortunate Colombians are going to learn what Shock and Awe really mean.
I'm not a complete continuity freak, so I can't tell if the movie violated any of Asimov's universe, but from what I can remember, it fits pretty well (if you ignore Dr. Calvin's age) and might even explain a few things.
That makes it a perfect fit, since Asimov himself was not a complete continuity freak and was not concerned if one of his stories violated incidental issues in any of his previous stories. (He quoted Emerson "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.".)
Your argument that keeping a pair plus a kicker is better than keeping just a pair is flawed. If you keep just the pair, then first card drawn might give you three of a kind. If it doesn't, then you now have a pair and a kicker, and the remaining 2 cards drawn has (more or less) the same chance of improvement as if you kept a pair and a kicker. That extra shot at getting three of a kind is pure advantage over keeping a kicker.
As far as contributory negligence, I'm willing that conceed that the pirate can be given 90% of the responsibility, while MS gets 10%. Randomly assuming that there are a million pirates involved and a billion dollars of damage, each individual pirate thus is responsible for $900 of damage, and MS is responsible for the other $100,000,000. The class action suit may find it not worth the bother of tracking down the million pirates individually to try to collect those $900 portions of the damage, but MS has all of its collective responsibility in one easily sued pot.
I think that "duty of care" applies to MS vis a vis the general public. The pirate in the middle does not remove this. MS's bug causes huge damage to the general public and it is their responsibility to mitigate that damage to the greatest extent possible.
You missed the focus point. If a virus exploits a bug in Windows and causes huge disruption to an innocent party, MS has some liability. If MS has refused to fix the bug in large numbers of systems, they have increased the disruption, and they have much greater liability. MS has a responsibility to protect society from the ramifications of failures in MS products. If a repair/recall were to fix a danger that only threatened the user of the product, then the duty of care to a non-customer might be an excuse for refusing to provide the repair/recall; but when the danger affects innocent 3rd parties, there is no excuse.
The wrench-dropping vandal is found responsible for more than just replacing the gear that was broken by the wrench, but also the consequent destruction of connected pieces of machinery, the material that is ruined because the machinery stops in the middle of an active step of the manufacturing cycle, the salaries of employees who are laid off during the repair, the salaries of repair people, lost profits for the company, etc. This might include such things as injury or manslaughter if the mechanical breakdown occurred in an unfortunate way.
The virus writer would similarly be responsible for consequent damage that came from his virus, even though they were far removed from the original act.
In either case, there is reasonable expectation of a range of damaging consequences resulting from the action, and thus responsibility attaches to taking that action.
ADD/ADHD is when you CANNOT, despite your best efforts, concentrate on anything for a long period of time.
That's slightly off the mark.
ADD/ADHD is when you cannot force yourself to choose what to concentrate on, but are capable of concentrating only upon the perceived item of greatest interest.
My son can concentrate on a video game, or a book, or television, for hours non-stop because nothing can distract him from them. However, he cannot concentrate on homework for more than a minute, unless a carefully crafted environment removes all possible distractions (and even then it has to compete with twiddling pencils and the like.) Of course, this is the case in the afternoon/evening timeframe after his Ritalin has worn off - he can manage quite well during the day at school. (The change when he started taking Ritalin was so dramatic that I was shocked to read the parent article that disbelieves in ADD. He went from being unable to function, and unable to learn basic social skills, to being able to move into the gifted program and to start catching up on the multi-year backlog of social skills. Suddenly, his teacher could finally see conclusively that he was not deliberately trying to test and oppose her, but simply was unable to function [before the Ritalin] in the way she expected all students to do. The standard teacher interaction that he had experienced for years was changed within days and has remained changed for all the subsequent years. We would get this dramatically reproved every few months when a particularly hectic morning meant that he managed to not take his Ritalin - there was certainty of problems that day.)
Paraphrased, he said "These solution won't work because people refuse to go along with them."
You say "Really, if you reduced... Wouldn't that solve those problems?" as if that is a counterargument to "people will not permit these solutions to be implemented". It's just wishful thinking unless you can come up with a way to cause those changes to actually happen!
The Nick Fury episode I reffered to was early 70's time frame, but I don't have details - this is just from memory of hearing at the time that it was the first uncoded item from one of the big comic publications. Like the Spiderman sequence you describe, the Nick Fury mag was uncoded for only that single issue. I think it actually happened before the drug use sequence, but its been over 30 years and my memory is nowhere near perfect.
Marvel Comics was the first of the mainstream comic labels to buck the Comics Code Authority.
An issue of Nick Fury was disapproved by the CCA and Marvel ran the story unchanged without the CCA sticker rather than change the story. Nobody noticed and their sales were unchanged.
What was the horrible depiction that caused the CCA to refuse approving the story, you ask? Nick and a female character decide that they have finished work for the day; then the next panel shows the working room empty, with the phone off the hook. Anyone who could figure out the subversive hidden meaning in the off-hook phone was old enough to not be influenced by it.
To all the myriad people who think that wing seals are a member of the aquatic seal family, forget it. That joke has gotten very very old, in a very short time.
Besides, you should all know that Wing Seals are the Air Force's answer to Navy Seals.
One of the clear advantages enjoyed by Open Source development projects is the luxury of time: the developers can take as long as they deem necessary to get it "right." Commercial projects rarely have this opportunity. Customer demands or competitive pressures often force aggressive schedules, and teams simply run out of time.
If a program being developed has an urgent customer demand, it applies pressure on the developers. Commercial developers can end up releasing too soon, and selling the customers an inferior product. Release early and release often means that open source developers also give the "customers" incomplete programs. But they are not selling to the customers, though, so they can clearly label this stage as Beta. If there is a genuine urgent need for the program, though, the open source developers now get an important advantage. Some of those anxiously waiting customers may decide that their itch is too big, and they stop waiting and assist the development team. They scratch their itch by sending in bug reports and possibly fixes for the parts that don't yet fill their needs, or they do whatever else they see that will help fulfill their own needs faster. The open source project starts moving faster (as long as the communication load doesn't start to get in the way).
The payment authority is PepperCoin. PepperCoin has one transaction per purchase to bill the buyer (but they can perhaps group a bunch of those together to only use a single transaction to the buyer's credit card).
They might save a bit by the randomizing of the seller's side of the transaction, but that is the side that already gets the higher level of aggragation, so it is far less than 50% of the overhead than can be reduced by the randomization.
They won't be able to charge one-time purchasers $10 for a 50 cent purchase - but that is the link in the chain that has the proportionally high transaction cost.
The whole business is randomly throwing the pepper coin away, or randomly redeeming it is silly.
They imply on their web site that they do not randomly bill the customer. That makes sense - if the customer buys only a $0.50 thingy, they would complain about getting a $10 bill to their credit card. So, instead of pissing off the customer, I would guess that PepperCoin hopes that most customers will make many purchases and have only a single credit card transaction for overhead, and then if a small number of customers make single purchases that credit card transaction cost can be buried. Thus, at the paying customer side of the transaction, all purchases are counted and aggragated. PepperCoin has to deal with the full number of transactions, but they only have to pay the credit card company one per-transaction charge because they aggragate them together.
So, what is the point of the random discard?
The selling companies are going to have far fewer cases with only a single transaction per month - and those companies can be billed extra. (So, if you accept PepperCoins at your garage sale, you'll pay a higher premium than an online music seller.)
If PepperCoin can afford to aggragate the transactions on the customer side, then they should have far less trouble aggragating the transactions on the vendor side. Just offer a sliding scale of service charge (maybe something like 50 cents base + 5 cents per transaction being redeemed in the aggragate collection) and let the vendor choose how often to collect their money. When a vendor only colls weekly or monthly, PepperCoin would make interest from the money already collected from the customer.
The only benefit I see for the random discard is that they can patent it.
There certainly is a great deal of value in having a secure encryption technique being used to protect the PepperCoins - and having a reputation like Rivest's behind it is very important in making it creditable.
At what particular time? The time in the email header? (You have to trust the sender for that.) The time it was received? (What time zone, how accurate is the receiver's clock set?)
When their own relay is used, they can insert an extra header that identifies the sending customer account, either directly or by including a line connection number and a timestamp that will match accurately with the time stamps kept in their logs, and maybe even a customer code too so that they don't even have to go through logs to determine it.
Note that the ISP is not just ensuring that they can identify spammers with this; it can be used for tracing other illegal activities too.
The ISP does not block port 25 for traffic coming into their customer's systems, they block it for traffic coming out of them.
Their customers must relay their outgoing email through the ISP's mailservers.
Messages relayed by the ISP's mailservers can include header info that ensures that the originating customer can be determined. Then, if a complaint is sent to the ISP, they can decide which customer to deal with.
This only has to be done for customers that use dynamic IP addresses - when fixed IP addresses are used, that is adequate to identify which customer sent the message.
Of course, this will only be done by those ISPs that believe in being a good netizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally, it is -30 degrees Celcius (-30 x 1.8 + 32 = -86F) here.
Um, what part of Canada are you from? You've got to be rather far north before -30 is typical. (You also got the temperature conversion wrong - that's -26F [-54+32, not -54-32].)
The obvious answer hasn't been mentioned yet: OS\360 (especially since it is running on an IBM processor).
So, just how HOT is your computer?
Then, when a low volume, private site suddenly gets its 15 minutes of fame by being mentioned on Slashdot (or some other well-read news broadcast), it would automatically enlist the horde of new requesting sites to help distribute its content. The rest of the time, both before and after the flash mobbing period, it would just serve its own pages itself in the current manner.
Since it is hard to predict which sites will be "discovered", it would be necessary for all standard servers and browsers support the http protocol extension, so this can't happen without a lot of coordinated work, I'm afraid. The protocol would have to be extended, web servers modified (Apache would e adaquate for a start), browsers modified (Mozilla/Firefox would be adequate for a start). When server was becoming overloaded it woud start by discarding requests from browsers that did not support the protocol, so that it can build up the initial seeding of helper sites. As long as there was more demand than available helpers, these old incapable browsers would continue to get ignored. Once a large enough group of capable helpers was built up to fully support itself, the group could start accepting requests from incapable browsers. That would provide incentive to upgrade older browsers.
If you move between the pole and the (ant)arctic circle, the period of non-stop daylight and night changes from 6 months down to days. (Exactly on the circles, at midwinter you get one day with no sunrise; while the preceeding and subsequent day each has a short period of daylight of a few minutes.) Of course, at noon on the wid-winter days the sun is close under the horizon even on the day that it doesn't appear, so it is not totally dark but more of a pre-sunrise dawn leading straight into a post-sunset dusk.
Anyhow, except for exactly at the pole, in mid-summer you can have an "overnight" that only lasts for minutes, which is considerably less than one hour. I'd have to do more calculation than I feel like to determine just how much further away from a pole than the closest (ant)arctic circle to ensure that "overnight" cannot take less than an hour.
Now the War on Drugs can stop using those bit players (i.e. the CIA and the U.S. military) and move to a much more powerful attack squad: Monsanto and the U.S. intellectual property legal lobby. Those unfortunate Colombians are going to learn what Shock and Awe really mean.
That makes it a perfect fit, since Asimov himself was not a complete continuity freak and was not concerned if one of his stories violated incidental issues in any of his previous stories. (He quoted Emerson "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.".)
Your argument that keeping a pair plus a kicker is better than keeping just a pair is flawed. If you keep just the pair, then first card drawn might give you three of a kind. If it doesn't, then you now have a pair and a kicker, and the remaining 2 cards drawn has (more or less) the same chance of improvement as if you kept a pair and a kicker. That extra shot at getting three of a kind is pure advantage over keeping a kicker.
As far as contributory negligence, I'm willing that conceed that the pirate can be given 90% of the responsibility, while MS gets 10%. Randomly assuming that there are a million pirates involved and a billion dollars of damage, each individual pirate thus is responsible for $900 of damage, and MS is responsible for the other $100,000,000. The class action suit may find it not worth the bother of tracking down the million pirates individually to try to collect those $900 portions of the damage, but MS has all of its collective responsibility in one easily sued pot.
I think that "duty of care" applies to MS vis a vis the general public. The pirate in the middle does not remove this. MS's bug causes huge damage to the general public and it is their responsibility to mitigate that damage to the greatest extent possible.
You missed the focus point. If a virus exploits a bug in Windows and causes huge disruption to an innocent party, MS has some liability. If MS has refused to fix the bug in large numbers of systems, they have increased the disruption, and they have much greater liability. MS has a responsibility to protect society from the ramifications of failures in MS products. If a repair/recall were to fix a danger that only threatened the user of the product, then the duty of care to a non-customer might be an excuse for refusing to provide the repair/recall; but when the danger affects innocent 3rd parties, there is no excuse.
Just install Windows - not only will you have a bigger penis, but you'll have more balls, too; and it even cures warts. We'll extend your embrace.
The wrench-dropping vandal is found responsible for more than just replacing the gear that was broken by the wrench, but also the consequent destruction of connected pieces of machinery, the material that is ruined because the machinery stops in the middle of an active step of the manufacturing cycle, the salaries of employees who are laid off during the repair, the salaries of repair people, lost profits for the company, etc. This might include such things as injury or manslaughter if the mechanical breakdown occurred in an unfortunate way.
The virus writer would similarly be responsible for consequent damage that came from his virus, even though they were far removed from the original act.
In either case, there is reasonable expectation of a range of damaging consequences resulting from the action, and thus responsibility attaches to taking that action.
That's what I thought the title meant - using madmen to deflect meteors.
That's slightly off the mark.
ADD/ADHD is when you cannot force yourself to choose what to concentrate on, but are capable of concentrating only upon the perceived item of greatest interest.
My son can concentrate on a video game, or a book, or television, for hours non-stop because nothing can distract him from them. However, he cannot concentrate on homework for more than a minute, unless a carefully crafted environment removes all possible distractions (and even then it has to compete with twiddling pencils and the like.) Of course, this is the case in the afternoon/evening timeframe after his Ritalin has worn off - he can manage quite well during the day at school. (The change when he started taking Ritalin was so dramatic that I was shocked to read the parent article that disbelieves in ADD. He went from being unable to function, and unable to learn basic social skills, to being able to move into the gifted program and to start catching up on the multi-year backlog of social skills. Suddenly, his teacher could finally see conclusively that he was not deliberately trying to test and oppose her, but simply was unable to function [before the Ritalin] in the way she expected all students to do. The standard teacher interaction that he had experienced for years was changed within days and has remained changed for all the subsequent years. We would get this dramatically reproved every few months when a particularly hectic morning meant that he managed to not take his Ritalin - there was certainty of problems that day.)
Paraphrased, he said "These solution won't work because people refuse to go along with them."
You say "Really, if you reduced... Wouldn't that solve those problems?" as if that is a counterargument to "people will not permit these solutions to be implemented". It's just wishful thinking unless you can come up with a way to cause those changes to actually happen!
TIA really means: Tanks In Advance
The Nick Fury episode I reffered to was early 70's time frame, but I don't have details - this is just from memory of hearing at the time that it was the first uncoded item from one of the big comic publications. Like the Spiderman sequence you describe, the Nick Fury mag was uncoded for only that single issue. I think it actually happened before the drug use sequence, but its been over 30 years and my memory is nowhere near perfect.
An issue of Nick Fury was disapproved by the CCA and Marvel ran the story unchanged without the CCA sticker rather than change the story. Nobody noticed and their sales were unchanged.
What was the horrible depiction that caused the CCA to refuse approving the story, you ask? Nick and a female character decide that they have finished work for the day; then the next panel shows the working room empty, with the phone off the hook. Anyone who could figure out the subversive hidden meaning in the off-hook phone was old enough to not be influenced by it.
Besides, you should all know that Wing Seals are the Air Force's answer to Navy Seals.
If a program being developed has an urgent customer demand, it applies pressure on the developers. Commercial developers can end up releasing too soon, and selling the customers an inferior product. Release early and release often means that open source developers also give the "customers" incomplete programs. But they are not selling to the customers, though, so they can clearly label this stage as Beta. If there is a genuine urgent need for the program, though, the open source developers now get an important advantage. Some of those anxiously waiting customers may decide that their itch is too big, and they stop waiting and assist the development team. They scratch their itch by sending in bug reports and possibly fixes for the parts that don't yet fill their needs, or they do whatever else they see that will help fulfill their own needs faster. The open source project starts moving faster (as long as the communication load doesn't start to get in the way).
They might save a bit by the randomizing of the seller's side of the transaction, but that is the side that already gets the higher level of aggragation, so it is far less than 50% of the overhead than can be reduced by the randomization.
They won't be able to charge one-time purchasers $10 for a 50 cent purchase - but that is the link in the chain that has the proportionally high transaction cost.
They imply on their web site that they do not randomly bill the customer. That makes sense - if the customer buys only a $0.50 thingy, they would complain about getting a $10 bill to their credit card. So, instead of pissing off the customer, I would guess that PepperCoin hopes that most customers will make many purchases and have only a single credit card transaction for overhead, and then if a small number of customers make single purchases that credit card transaction cost can be buried. Thus, at the paying customer side of the transaction, all purchases are counted and aggragated. PepperCoin has to deal with the full number of transactions, but they only have to pay the credit card company one per-transaction charge because they aggragate them together.
So, what is the point of the random discard?
The selling companies are going to have far fewer cases with only a single transaction per month - and those companies can be billed extra. (So, if you accept PepperCoins at your garage sale, you'll pay a higher premium than an online music seller.)
If PepperCoin can afford to aggragate the transactions on the customer side, then they should have far less trouble aggragating the transactions on the vendor side. Just offer a sliding scale of service charge (maybe something like 50 cents base + 5 cents per transaction being redeemed in the aggragate collection) and let the vendor choose how often to collect their money. When a vendor only colls weekly or monthly, PepperCoin would make interest from the money already collected from the customer.
The only benefit I see for the random discard is that they can patent it.
There certainly is a great deal of value in having a secure encryption technique being used to protect the PepperCoins - and having a reputation like Rivest's behind it is very important in making it creditable.
When their own relay is used, they can insert an extra header that identifies the sending customer account, either directly or by including a line connection number and a timestamp that will match accurately with the time stamps kept in their logs, and maybe even a customer code too so that they don't even have to go through logs to determine it.
Note that the ISP is not just ensuring that they can identify spammers with this; it can be used for tracing other illegal activities too.
The ISP does not block port 25 for traffic coming into their customer's systems, they block it for traffic coming out of them.
Their customers must relay their outgoing email through the ISP's mailservers.
Messages relayed by the ISP's mailservers can include header info that ensures that the originating customer can be determined. Then, if a complaint is sent to the ISP, they can decide which customer to deal with.
This only has to be done for customers that use dynamic IP addresses - when fixed IP addresses are used, that is adequate to identify which customer sent the message.
Of course, this will only be done by those ISPs that believe in being a good netizens.