It isn't just my personal preference; it's good layout design that hasn't been followed by the existing browsers. The fact that the two add-ons I mentioned both have five star ratings and that there exist so many tab navigation add-ons for Firefox should be a clue that the default horizontal tab bar is broken for a lot of people.
I think if you actually try using a vertical tab bar you'll quickly realize that it doesn't use too much screen space; it actually saves you screen space because you can then do all your browsing in one or two windows instead of having to open new windows all the time because the horizontal tab bar becomes unnavigable. Try it.
and put the tabs above the address bar (not below)
That's a clear sign something's broken at Google. Tabs belong on the left or right edge so that once you have a number of them you can still allocate reasonable space to their title bars. Tree Style Tab and Vertigo are your friends. I have 40+ tabs open in the window I'm writing this in, and I can navigate through all of them easily. I wouldn't be able to if my tab bar were on the top of the window.
One thing you can do that isn't blindingly partisan is to volunteer as an election judge. Election staff are in short supply in many places in the country, and as new (insecure) equipment has been purchased by states, a lot of older staff have retired from the process, overwhelmed by the march of technology. Being a geek is a good fit for this problem.
More staff at the polls makes things run more smoothly, and that encourages turnout in future elections, and even in current ones when people who stayed away hear on Election Day that the line moved quickly, and decide to head in and vote after all. Bigger turnout generally favors Democrats, so if you want to help Obama this is a good thing to do.
But even if you support McCain or someone else, it's a fun, interesting experience, and you'll be helping the country express itself. A lot of staff positions at the polls require a member of each major party, so both Republicans and Democrats are needed to staff the polls sufficiently.
Voting is how we buy in to the government we end up with; even when we vote the loser, we participate in the process and that makes us stakeholders. When you become part of the election process, you facilitate this for your community.
It's high time the government simply published all SSNs. We are constantly forced to hand our SSNs over to banks, employers, phone companies, doctors, insurers, etc, and we have no way of knowing how many people have access to them. SSN is just an account number, but it's being used both as a unique identifier for individuals and as an authenticator, mostly because financial institutions are too lazy to develop their own authentication system. What's more, substantial parts of SSN are predictable with decent confidence given knowledge of a person's approximate place and time of birth. Meanwhile, SSN is next to impossible to change, so once it's compromised you're permanently screwed. It should be obvious that using SSN as an authenticator of any kind is pathologically stupid. It lacks every property good authenticators should have.
SSNs are not secret. Let's stop pretending that they are.
I should also say that if you are correct that smart predators will stalk the herd from the sunward side (rather than, say, downwind), then all the more reason the cows should line up facing away from the sun, and, hence, the predator. When the predator attacks, they'll already be pointed in the right direction for running away.
Not really. Since cows stand in herds, all most of them can see in any given direction is other cows. The relatively few cows who are on the sunward side of the herd can face sunward to watch for predators out of that direction. The rest of them might as well optimize their vision by facing away from the sun.
It also benefits herd animals all to stand in the same orientation, where possible, so that if they need to run as a herd, they don't collide.
One should also consider that Google Earth imagery is of lower resolution in rural areas. So the sampling methodology will also favor areas of the world where pasturage is colocated near urban areas. This will tend to exclude most of South America and Australia, which will skew the findings toward the northern hemisphere.
Uh, no. I did not say that. That you think I did, despite the unambiguous attribution, speaks volumes, however. All the same, the person who did say it, Jah-Wren Ryel, was not disagreeing that the quote is clear in its meaning, even though you somehow fail to understand it.
Indeed, keeping the sun out of their eyes would make it easier for them to spot a predator.
The claim that the scientists could rule out sunlight based on "huge variations" is absurd, given that they are using satellite photographs as their source and thus automatically selecting imagery where the sky is clear. The fact that they rely on Google Earth imagery even more specifically selects images outside the extremes of morning and evening when the sun is low on the horizon.
to be fair, a "series of tubes" implies a single path, rather than an interconnected network
I agree—in any technical sense, a "series" is not a generalized graph. But if that were truly the sticking point, so to speak, people would joke about the word "series" rather than the word "tubes".
Gore's bill where he supposedly "created" the Internet was put into law in 1991.
You persist in misquoting him. Again, he did not say that he "created" the Internet.
Really, go read the Wikipedia article I mentioned earlier. Read the statements by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Newt Gingrich, et al. And learn a little more history. Gore's initiative in the Senate didn't begin with the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991; it went all the way back to his work as a representative in the 1970s. Note, for example, a few tidbits from this statement from Vint Cert and Bob Kahn (you should read the whole thing):
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time... The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening... As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept...
And it goes on like that.
The facile, misquoted interpretation you are regurgitating is exactly the sort of distortion that was used to undermine Gore back in 2000.
I agree with you that Stevens's overall position is wrong. Nonetheless, his comparison to a "series of tubes" is not fundamentally flawed, and I think that nearly everyone who ridicules Stevens does so not because he takes the wrong position on Net neutrality—they haven't ever even listened to the entire speech—but because they saw Jon Stewart make fun of him on The Daily Show. I remember watching those clips on TDS back in 2006 and laughing at Stevens's overwrought delivery, but at the same time thinking, "All these people are laughing because they believe the Internet is not like a series of tubes. They're not network engineers; it's because of their ignorance that they're so amused." And after two years, the same people are still making the same dumb jokes. It was old for me the next day. I wish Stewart had actually delved into the content of the speech, but he was content merely to make fun of the cantankerous old man. Cheap thrills. I really don't miss The Daily Show.
You are equating "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," with "I can create an Internet whenever I want to," and "I created the Internet." This is disingenuous. Al Gore did, in fact, take the initiative in creating the Internet. So where's the joke, exactly?
And yes, I read what Al Gore actually said.
That's nice. But the person I was responding to (not you) apparently has not.
I agree that Jon Stewart's treatment was amusing the first two or three times. After five or six, it came across as a cheap shot. At this point, it's a crutch, if he's still doing it. (I wouldn't know—I stopped watching The Daily Show after they crossed the Writers' Guild picket lines.)
Stevens' speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens' argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.
"an Internet was sent by my staff"
Clearly not at his most lucid, but it's obvious that he meant "email".
As I said, I'm not a fan of Ted Stevens, and I'll go further and say I don't want him in charge of the Commerce committee. But I still fail to see why this basically sound—if ineptly and overexcitedly delivered—part of his speech is more than a simple malapropism, or why/.ers continue to find it so blindingly hilarious two years after the fact.
I'm no fan of Ted Stevens—far from it—but I just don't understand the longevity of this riff on the "tubes" thing. My guess is someone had given him the talking points using the accepted industry term "pipes", and he got it mixed up during his speech and it came out as "tubes". How was what he was saying incorrect? His point was that there is limited bandwidth and some applications end up hogging it all. Why do people still think this is funny, years later? Tubes, pipes—for your average codger, what's the difference?
Wildly off-topic here, but I'd like to point out that she actually resembles Giger's alien more than a little bit. The biggest difference is that SJP has eyes.
Retouching IS an evil which destroys the essence of photography. It's about capturing reality, not presenting an ideal.
"Reality" isn't necessarily what is directly recorded by a camera.
Retouching is only part of the issue. I spent years adjusting color in photographs of fine arts by increments as small as.005 stop, because film doesn't record most colors accurately. One must make decisions about what colors in a painting are important, and balance that with the overall impression in the photograph. Gold may be sacrificed for green, etc. This is necessary to make the image appear as "real" as possible, but much of that is subjective, and a lot of decisions have to be made in consultation with the artist.
I also spent a lot of time retouching prints to put back edges that disappeared from overexposure, fill in white spots left by grain or dust, etc. Again, this was necessary to restore "reality" to the image.
There are plenty of other techniques I used in traditional printing that distort the process in order to represent "reality" better—tilting the easel, altering contrast, burning/dodging with cardboard cutouts and colored filters, rubbing the print in the developer solution, et al.
A photograph is a flat, bandlimited model of something. It only represents a tiny fraction of the information that is there, and which fraction is the purview of the photographer. There is no simple, objective process that makes "real" photographs because reality is subjective. The reality in a photograph always depends on the photographer's intent, and no technique is "evil" if it serves that intent.
As Magada has noted, his comment in 2001 clearly outlined the vulnerability.
No, djb's comment doesn't outline the vulnerability Kaminsky identified at all. It is purely speculative on a "blind collision" attack, i.e. assuming you can find some way to effect one. There were blind collision attacks before, and perhaps there will be other blind collision attacks in the future; it's a class of attack, not a vulnerability. Kaminsky identified a new way to effect one, and all the source port randomization djbdns has done between 2001 and last month has been wasted CPU cycles. I expect it adds up to a pretty hefty energy bill if you tot it all up. Yes, djb bet that another blind collision vector would be discovered, and he was lucky—eventually, seven years later, one was. The fact that it took seven years might tell you his intuition was a little off as far as how imminent the problem was. By now, after all, we were supposed to have DNSSEC, and cache poisoning was to be a thing of the past.
Let's focus on solving the issue of cache poisoning rather than the issue of record authenticity
DNS will always be vulnerable to cache poisoning, unless it validates responses against a trusted third party. You can use DNSSEC or you can try to devise something new that accomplishes the same thing. Either way, you have the overhead of third-party key management.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't just my personal preference; it's good layout design that hasn't been followed by the existing browsers. The fact that the two add-ons I mentioned both have five star ratings and that there exist so many tab navigation add-ons for Firefox should be a clue that the default horizontal tab bar is broken for a lot of people.
I think if you actually try using a vertical tab bar you'll quickly realize that it doesn't use too much screen space; it actually saves you screen space because you can then do all your browsing in one or two windows instead of having to open new windows all the time because the horizontal tab bar becomes unnavigable. Try it.
Tabs at the sides is correct. Otherwise you end up with illegible tab titles once you pass five or six tabs. See my other comment about this.
That's a clear sign something's broken at Google. Tabs belong on the left or right edge so that once you have a number of them you can still allocate reasonable space to their title bars. Tree Style Tab and Vertigo are your friends. I have 40+ tabs open in the window I'm writing this in, and I can navigate through all of them easily. I wouldn't be able to if my tab bar were on the top of the window.
One thing you can do that isn't blindingly partisan is to volunteer as an election judge. Election staff are in short supply in many places in the country, and as new (insecure) equipment has been purchased by states, a lot of older staff have retired from the process, overwhelmed by the march of technology. Being a geek is a good fit for this problem.
More staff at the polls makes things run more smoothly, and that encourages turnout in future elections, and even in current ones when people who stayed away hear on Election Day that the line moved quickly, and decide to head in and vote after all. Bigger turnout generally favors Democrats, so if you want to help Obama this is a good thing to do.
But even if you support McCain or someone else, it's a fun, interesting experience, and you'll be helping the country express itself. A lot of staff positions at the polls require a member of each major party, so both Republicans and Democrats are needed to staff the polls sufficiently.
Voting is how we buy in to the government we end up with; even when we vote the loser, we participate in the process and that makes us stakeholders. When you become part of the election process, you facilitate this for your community.
Actually it would be substantially different, because then:
(I understand I'm preaching to the choir here. Just wanted to clarify.)
It's high time the government simply published all SSNs. We are constantly forced to hand our SSNs over to banks, employers, phone companies, doctors, insurers, etc, and we have no way of knowing how many people have access to them. SSN is just an account number, but it's being used both as a unique identifier for individuals and as an authenticator, mostly because financial institutions are too lazy to develop their own authentication system. What's more, substantial parts of SSN are predictable with decent confidence given knowledge of a person's approximate place and time of birth. Meanwhile, SSN is next to impossible to change, so once it's compromised you're permanently screwed. It should be obvious that using SSN as an authenticator of any kind is pathologically stupid. It lacks every property good authenticators should have.
SSNs are not secret. Let's stop pretending that they are.
Uh, no. He purchased a strip of land at higher than appraised value, in order to enlarge his side yard, from someone who was under investigation at the time. Rezko wasn't even indicted until nine months after the purchase.
I should also say that if you are correct that smart predators will stalk the herd from the sunward side (rather than, say, downwind), then all the more reason the cows should line up facing away from the sun, and, hence, the predator. When the predator attacks, they'll already be pointed in the right direction for running away.
Not really. Since cows stand in herds, all most of them can see in any given direction is other cows. The relatively few cows who are on the sunward side of the herd can face sunward to watch for predators out of that direction. The rest of them might as well optimize their vision by facing away from the sun.
It also benefits herd animals all to stand in the same orientation, where possible, so that if they need to run as a herd, they don't collide.
One should also consider that Google Earth imagery is of lower resolution in rural areas. So the sampling methodology will also favor areas of the world where pasturage is colocated near urban areas. This will tend to exclude most of South America and Australia, which will skew the findings toward the northern hemisphere.
Uh, no. I did not say that. That you think I did, despite the unambiguous attribution, speaks volumes, however. All the same, the person who did say it, Jah-Wren Ryel, was not disagreeing that the quote is clear in its meaning, even though you somehow fail to understand it.
You still don't get it. No one disagrees that the quote is crystal clear (when you bother to get it right, anyway). It's also true.
The only person here displaying any strong feelings about the man is you. If only Slashdot had a +/-1 Ironic...
Indeed, keeping the sun out of their eyes would make it easier for them to spot a predator.
The claim that the scientists could rule out sunlight based on "huge variations" is absurd, given that they are using satellite photographs as their source and thus automatically selecting imagery where the sky is clear. The fact that they rely on Google Earth imagery even more specifically selects images outside the extremes of morning and evening when the sun is low on the horizon.
I agree—in any technical sense, a "series" is not a generalized graph. But if that were truly the sticking point, so to speak, people would joke about the word "series" rather than the word "tubes".
You persist in misquoting him. Again, he did not say that he "created" the Internet.
Really, go read the Wikipedia article I mentioned earlier. Read the statements by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Newt Gingrich, et al. And learn a little more history. Gore's initiative in the Senate didn't begin with the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991; it went all the way back to his work as a representative in the 1970s. Note, for example, a few tidbits from this statement from Vint Cert and Bob Kahn (you should read the whole thing):
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time... The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening... As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept...
And it goes on like that.
The facile, misquoted interpretation you are regurgitating is exactly the sort of distortion that was used to undermine Gore back in 2000.
I agree with you that Stevens's overall position is wrong. Nonetheless, his comparison to a "series of tubes" is not fundamentally flawed, and I think that nearly everyone who ridicules Stevens does so not because he takes the wrong position on Net neutrality—they haven't ever even listened to the entire speech—but because they saw Jon Stewart make fun of him on The Daily Show. I remember watching those clips on TDS back in 2006 and laughing at Stevens's overwrought delivery, but at the same time thinking, "All these people are laughing because they believe the Internet is not like a series of tubes. They're not network engineers; it's because of their ignorance that they're so amused." And after two years, the same people are still making the same dumb jokes. It was old for me the next day. I wish Stewart had actually delved into the content of the speech, but he was content merely to make fun of the cantankerous old man. Cheap thrills. I really don't miss The Daily Show.
You are equating "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," with "I can create an Internet whenever I want to," and "I created the Internet." This is disingenuous. Al Gore did, in fact, take the initiative in creating the Internet. So where's the joke, exactly?
That's nice. But the person I was responding to (not you) apparently has not.
I completely disagree, but we're off topic as it is, so I'm not going to argue the point with you.
A perfect example of the same sort of superficial derision. Go read up on what Al Gore actually said.
I agree that Jon Stewart's treatment was amusing the first two or three times. After five or six, it came across as a cheap shot. At this point, it's a crutch, if he's still doing it. (I wouldn't know—I stopped watching The Daily Show after they crossed the Writers' Guild picket lines.)
You mean this part?
Stevens' speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens' argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.
Clearly not at his most lucid, but it's obvious that he meant "email".
As I said, I'm not a fan of Ted Stevens, and I'll go further and say I don't want him in charge of the Commerce committee. But I still fail to see why this basically sound—if ineptly and overexcitedly delivered—part of his speech is more than a simple malapropism, or why /.ers continue to find it so blindingly hilarious two years after the fact.
Yes, and how was he actually wrong? Did you read what I wrote? What is the difference between a "pipe" and a "tube", metaphorically?
I'm no fan of Ted Stevens—far from it—but I just don't understand the longevity of this riff on the "tubes" thing. My guess is someone had given him the talking points using the accepted industry term "pipes", and he got it mixed up during his speech and it came out as "tubes". How was what he was saying incorrect? His point was that there is limited bandwidth and some applications end up hogging it all. Why do people still think this is funny, years later? Tubes, pipes—for your average codger, what's the difference?
Wildly off-topic here, but I'd like to point out that she actually resembles Giger's alien more than a little bit. The biggest difference is that SJP has eyes.
"Reality" isn't necessarily what is directly recorded by a camera.
Retouching is only part of the issue. I spent years adjusting color in photographs of fine arts by increments as small as .005 stop, because film doesn't record most colors accurately. One must make decisions about what colors in a painting are important, and balance that with the overall impression in the photograph. Gold may be sacrificed for green, etc. This is necessary to make the image appear as "real" as possible, but much of that is subjective, and a lot of decisions have to be made in consultation with the artist.
I also spent a lot of time retouching prints to put back edges that disappeared from overexposure, fill in white spots left by grain or dust, etc. Again, this was necessary to restore "reality" to the image.
There are plenty of other techniques I used in traditional printing that distort the process in order to represent "reality" better—tilting the easel, altering contrast, burning/dodging with cardboard cutouts and colored filters, rubbing the print in the developer solution, et al.
A photograph is a flat, bandlimited model of something. It only represents a tiny fraction of the information that is there, and which fraction is the purview of the photographer. There is no simple, objective process that makes "real" photographs because reality is subjective. The reality in a photograph always depends on the photographer's intent, and no technique is "evil" if it serves that intent.
No, djb's comment doesn't outline the vulnerability Kaminsky identified at all. It is purely speculative on a "blind collision" attack, i.e. assuming you can find some way to effect one. There were blind collision attacks before, and perhaps there will be other blind collision attacks in the future; it's a class of attack, not a vulnerability. Kaminsky identified a new way to effect one, and all the source port randomization djbdns has done between 2001 and last month has been wasted CPU cycles. I expect it adds up to a pretty hefty energy bill if you tot it all up. Yes, djb bet that another blind collision vector would be discovered, and he was lucky—eventually, seven years later, one was. The fact that it took seven years might tell you his intuition was a little off as far as how imminent the problem was. By now, after all, we were supposed to have DNSSEC, and cache poisoning was to be a thing of the past.
DNS will always be vulnerable to cache poisoning, unless it validates responses against a trusted third party. You can use DNSSEC or you can try to devise something new that accomplishes the same thing. Either way, you have the overhead of third-party key management.