The University of Toronto is already doing this for its 802.11b connections. However, they do payment by assigning an account to the MAC address of your wireless card, which means that you only have to authenticate once. (Are MAC addresses easy to spoof?)
Hrmm... with a few mod rewrite rules any site that doesnt wish to be linked to can redirect the request.
Whenever this subject comes up somebody suggests this solution. Does anyone in the world actually do this? And... if someone did it, does that resolve the underlying problem of whether or not it's right to deny linking?
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying.
So you're saying that a prerequisite for posting anything to the web is that it can handle a worst-case slashdotting load? If that were true, ironically the only people who could afford to be on the web are the major corporations that the article is complaining about.
I agree that the situation should not be resolved by threat of legal action, whether empty or not. I'd like to see a linking etiquette, such as: if you manage a high volume site, don't link to geocities, and if in doubt, ask the site's admin whether it will be a problem, before you take his site down and bury him in excess bandwidth costs! How hard could that be? Is a little polite behaviour too much to ask for?
Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership?:)
Who cares? It's the FSF, so just rip the card and burn your own. For added irony, you could make a point of not including "GNU/" in front of "Linux" and include free(beer)/nonfree(speech) software in your own distro.
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
That's a minor modification of Fermi's paradox. The great physicist Enrico Fermi observed that an intelligent race should be able to colonize a galaxy-sized region of space in around 1 to 10 million years, even without faster-than-light travel.
The argument runs like this: one planet sends colonies to several neighboring star systems, then each of those colonizes their neighbors, and so on. The region of colonization expands cubically with time (because the radius of colonization is directly proportional to time).
Fermi said, since 1-10 million years is very short with respect to the age of the galaxy, we should see evidence of intelligence everywhere. So, if intelligent life is common, where is everybody?
We can make all kinds of arguments like: alien intelligence leaves no trace of itself, isn't interested in us, or isn't interested in exploration. However, the one data point we have (ourselves) is very bad at cleaning up after itself, isn't shy at all about going after resources wherever they exist, and is very keen on exploration. There's no reason why other intelligence would be significantly different.
I majored in Computer Science because I liked the thoughts and perspective involved in programming, not because I was looking for the next hottest thing.
Wouldn't it be great if you could do both? Wait, you can: a lot of the great bioinformaticians are computer scientists (through fields like machine learning).
Why are you posting to slashdot when you could sell your computer and donate to a single mother? Clearly, you need to stop spending money on computers period and start spending it on HUMANS.
Get a clue. Not one person is poorer because the US went to the moon. Certainly not one person is dumber because the US went to the moon. Those who would argue that we should "solve problems here first" would have us live in a slate-grey, dead-eyed worker's paradise where nobody ever did anything inspiring or monumental for fear of wasting money. Nothing in the world galvanizes or inspires people like space flight. The Apollo program stands today and will stand for centuries alongside the greatest accomplishments of humanity, to inspire us and remind us that we can do amazing things if we put our minds to it. For however much was spent, that's a bargain.
Please try to avoid sending the FCC your comments such as, "F1RST P05T!!#@!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of unlicensed spectrum". I'm also pretty sure that the FCC is uninterested on what's happening in Soviet Russia.
See the other post; but more generally, it's in the general form of comedian Yakov Smirnoff's bit. It was a lot funnier during the cold war, when there actually was a Soviet Russia.
In a server room full of dozens of whirring fans for years at a time you aren't given hearing protection.
Really now. I suppose it's never occurred to you to spend $1.50 on earplugs at the local drug store? You know, you are allowed to take corrective action by yourself without a union or the government telling you what's safe and what isn't. And (under Canadian law at least), you have the right to refuse unsafe working conditions without punishment, union or no.
you can have them due to some deeply held beliefs with religious fervor, or you can arrive at your opinion through a process of reasoning.
It's my experience that people first tend to form their opinions based on deeply held beliefs (or otherwise) and later use reasoning to give justification to their beliefs. It is extremely rare for someone to start without preconceptions and use reasoning to develop an objective opinion. It is even rarer for someone to start with a deeply held belief and change their mind based on reasoning.
For example, do most people who share files have liberal views on intellectual property because it justifies swapping copyrighted files, or do most people who swap copyrighted files do so because it validates their predeveloped liberal views on intellectual property?
I wish people would give up on this encryption thing, it's only a matter of time when they come out with some type of code, that someone will come up with a way of defeating it. Meanwhile we suffer because we can't read each other's juicy e-mails. </facetious>
History has shown gamers that online protest can result in positive change, as exemplified in Ultima Online's 1997 naked riot demanding bug fixes and server upgrades.
Not being an Ultima fan, I'm not familiar with the reference. Can anyone enlighten me as to what happened?
[he] tells Congress that they can best help him by going back to their constituents and finding out where the public wants to draw the line between liberty and safety
This is not good enough. Because liberty is a more abstract concept than security, people tend to choose security on the principle that only criminals have something to hide... until their liberty is eroded to the extent that it causes them problems, by which time it is too late to go back.
Firstly, you will remember the scene in the movie where the antenna in Australia loses contact with Apollo 11, and in order to acquire it again, they point the antenna in the general direction of the Moon and start searching.
Secondly, automated signal tracking is not too difficult. The science was readily available at the time, for military applications such as missile radar. Even aside from this, the orbital mechanics are not too difficult -- any undergraduate physics student who has taken a relevant course could probably deduce a few of the most likely trajectories.
Thirdly, to act as a network relay, an antenna would need a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to receive data, voice, and television signals, which means a huge antenna. Although I would be surprised if the Soviets did not possess such an antenna (even if only for their own lunar program), simply to detect and track the signal from Apollo 11, without worrying about interpreting the information, would require much lower signal-to-noise, and hence a much smaller antenna. The Soviets (and any radio astronomy lab in the world) would certainly have had access to this equipment.
Fourthly, it was possible to track the spacecraft visually using a good telescope, and NASA did this (maybe out of an amateur's price range, but again, easily within a university lab's reach).
This is EXACTLY RIGHT. Anyone who believes that the moon landings were fake to "win" the space race clearly believes that the Soviets, in spite of launching the first artificial satellite and first man into space, were too stupid to notice that:
American companies that were supposedly producing lunar landing hardware were actually producing nothing, or producing equipment that could not reasonably land on the moon (what's the point of faking it if you build the real hardware?).
The Saturn rockets, once launched, did not follow a lunar trajectory. (Easy to track by telemetry.) In fact the entire path of the rocket could be easily tracked by anyone on Earth with a directional radio antenna -- including whether or not something landed on the moon (if it didn't, the signal would keep disappearing behind the moon with each orbit).
The hundreds of pounds of moon rocks, released to the scientific community for study, were of obviously terrestrial origin.
No conspiracy theory concerning the lunar landing stands up to even five minutes of skeptical thought.
Slashdot Mirror
The University of Toronto is already doing this for its 802.11b connections. However, they do payment by assigning an account to the MAC address of your wireless card, which means that you only have to authenticate once. (Are MAC addresses easy to spoof?)
Wow ... Harvey Mudd from Star Trek ...
Hrmm... with a few mod rewrite rules any site that doesnt wish to be linked to can redirect the request.
Whenever this subject comes up somebody suggests this solution. Does anyone in the world actually do this? And ... if someone did it, does that resolve the underlying problem of whether or not it's right to deny linking?
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying.
So you're saying that a prerequisite for posting anything to the web is that it can handle a worst-case slashdotting load? If that were true, ironically the only people who could afford to be on the web are the major corporations that the article is complaining about.
I agree that the situation should not be resolved by threat of legal action, whether empty or not. I'd like to see a linking etiquette, such as: if you manage a high volume site, don't link to geocities, and if in doubt, ask the site's admin whether it will be a problem, before you take his site down and bury him in excess bandwidth costs! How hard could that be? Is a little polite behaviour too much to ask for?
Is it ok to covet the card but not the membership? :)
Who cares? It's the FSF, so just rip the card and burn your own. For added irony, you could make a point of not including "GNU/" in front of "Linux" and include free(beer)/nonfree(speech) software in your own distro.
Are you also the president of the gay and lesbian alliance for some reason?
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
That's a minor modification of Fermi's paradox. The great physicist Enrico Fermi observed that an intelligent race should be able to colonize a galaxy-sized region of space in around 1 to 10 million years, even without faster-than-light travel.
The argument runs like this: one planet sends colonies to several neighboring star systems, then each of those colonizes their neighbors, and so on. The region of colonization expands cubically with time (because the radius of colonization is directly proportional to time).
Fermi said, since 1-10 million years is very short with respect to the age of the galaxy, we should see evidence of intelligence everywhere. So, if intelligent life is common, where is everybody?
We can make all kinds of arguments like: alien intelligence leaves no trace of itself, isn't interested in us, or isn't interested in exploration. However, the one data point we have (ourselves) is very bad at cleaning up after itself, isn't shy at all about going after resources wherever they exist, and is very keen on exploration. There's no reason why other intelligence would be significantly different.
Damn spoilers. Some people haven't seen it yet.
By any chance have you read this? It might answer your question.
I majored in Computer Science because I liked the thoughts and perspective involved in programming, not because I was looking for the next hottest thing.
Wouldn't it be great if you could do both? Wait, you can: a lot of the great bioinformaticians are computer scientists (through fields like machine learning).Why are you posting to slashdot when you could sell your computer and donate to a single mother? Clearly, you need to stop spending money on computers period and start spending it on HUMANS.
Get a clue. Not one person is poorer because the US went to the moon. Certainly not one person is dumber because the US went to the moon. Those who would argue that we should "solve problems here first" would have us live in a slate-grey, dead-eyed worker's paradise where nobody ever did anything inspiring or monumental for fear of wasting money. Nothing in the world galvanizes or inspires people like space flight. The Apollo program stands today and will stand for centuries alongside the greatest accomplishments of humanity, to inspire us and remind us that we can do amazing things if we put our minds to it. For however much was spent, that's a bargain.
Please try to avoid sending the FCC your comments such as, "F1RST P05T!!#@!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of unlicensed spectrum". I'm also pretty sure that the FCC is uninterested on what's happening in Soviet Russia.
See the other post; but more generally, it's in the general form of comedian Yakov Smirnoff's bit. It was a lot funnier during the cold war, when there actually was a Soviet Russia.
In a server room full of dozens of whirring fans for years at a time you aren't given hearing protection.
Really now. I suppose it's never occurred to you to spend $1.50 on earplugs at the local drug store? You know, you are allowed to take corrective action by yourself without a union or the government telling you what's safe and what isn't. And (under Canadian law at least), you have the right to refuse unsafe working conditions without punishment, union or no.
you can have them due to some deeply held beliefs with religious fervor, or you can arrive at your opinion through a process of reasoning.
It's my experience that people first tend to form their opinions based on deeply held beliefs (or otherwise) and later use reasoning to give justification to their beliefs. It is extremely rare for someone to start without preconceptions and use reasoning to develop an objective opinion. It is even rarer for someone to start with a deeply held belief and change their mind based on reasoning.
For example, do most people who share files have liberal views on intellectual property because it justifies swapping copyrighted files, or do most people who swap copyrighted files do so because it validates their predeveloped liberal views on intellectual property?
Real men use cat /var/spool/mail/$USER | more and telnet $SMTP_HOST 25
I wish people would give up on this encryption thing, it's only a matter of time when they come out with some type of code, that someone will come up with a way of defeating it. Meanwhile we suffer because we can't read each other's juicy e-mails.
</facetious>
From the article:
History has shown gamers that online protest can result in positive change, as exemplified in Ultima Online's 1997 naked riot demanding bug fixes and server upgrades.
Not being an Ultima fan, I'm not familiar with the reference. Can anyone enlighten me as to what happened?
I'm not embarassed to admit that I'm 26 years old and a fan of Harry Potter.
... said the Anonymous Coward.
[he] tells Congress that they can best help him by going back to their constituents and finding out where the public wants to draw the line between liberty and safety
This is not good enough. Because liberty is a more abstract concept than security, people tend to choose security on the principle that only criminals have something to hide ... until their liberty is eroded to the extent that it causes them problems, by which time it is too late to go back.
Firstly, you will remember the scene in the movie where the antenna in Australia loses contact with Apollo 11, and in order to acquire it again, they point the antenna in the general direction of the Moon and start searching.
Secondly, automated signal tracking is not too difficult. The science was readily available at the time, for military applications such as missile radar. Even aside from this, the orbital mechanics are not too difficult -- any undergraduate physics student who has taken a relevant course could probably deduce a few of the most likely trajectories.
Thirdly, to act as a network relay, an antenna would need a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to receive data, voice, and television signals, which means a huge antenna. Although I would be surprised if the Soviets did not possess such an antenna (even if only for their own lunar program), simply to detect and track the signal from Apollo 11, without worrying about interpreting the information, would require much lower signal-to-noise, and hence a much smaller antenna. The Soviets (and any radio astronomy lab in the world) would certainly have had access to this equipment.
Fourthly, it was possible to track the spacecraft visually using a good telescope, and NASA did this (maybe out of an amateur's price range, but again, easily within a university lab's reach).
This is EXACTLY RIGHT. Anyone who believes that the moon landings were fake to "win" the space race clearly believes that the Soviets, in spite of launching the first artificial satellite and first man into space, were too stupid to notice that:
No conspiracy theory concerning the lunar landing stands up to even five minutes of skeptical thought.
1. I've never used PayPal.
2. I've never lost any money to PayPal.
3. Profit!
Next thing you know you'll have spy wear and you can't remove it.
Yeah, like this.