I think the next thing we need a word for, after "benchcrafting", is "hacksationalism" (or maybe "cracksationalism" before people flame me) to cover all these media stories trying to spread panic about cracks amounting to nothing.
I can't be bothered to look it up now, but I'm almost convinced that The Times has featured a number of stories like this before, all of which indeed did lead to end of civilisation as we knew it (or maybe not...)
So what about this one, well:
"The group is using very sophisticated techniques and has been exchanging information via e-mail and internet chat," said an investigator.
Wow, malicous hackers that can use email and IRC! They have got to be a dangerous threat!
It is understood the hackers stole computer "source codes" that are critical to programming, and threatened to crash the entire system.
Now that is good journalism! Don't bother explaining that "code" has two meanings in computers, and that the "source code" has nothing to do with accessing the site (unless it was broken to begin with, but...) But then we do know how expensive it is when a hacker gets your source code, look at poor Sun who had to recode Solaris from scratch after Mitnick looked at its source (what? Didn't they? They must have since they claimed the entire cost of it in damages.)
Also, in both this and the CDUniverse case, the hackers are (apparently) trying extortion as a way of making money off their cracks. Extortion is a really, really, really, bad way of committing crimes without getting caught. Unless you happen to have serious underworld money laundering connections, you are going to get caught when you try to get your hands on the money - for sure. If these guys think they can walk a way with a suitcase of "100 thousand quid in unmarked twenties" they have watched too many movies.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The fact that encryption keys can be found in data by looking for strings with higher entropy then usual is not new. I have heard it several times, and I believe that this was how the "NSA_key" thing in the Win2K source code was discovered (remember that, MS let NSA authenticate their own crypto modules and people started screaming backdoor). If I'm not wrong, its even mentioned in 'Applied Cryptography'.
The article says "root around looking for the keys", which I read as getting root to the server (I mean, who is going to keep code that contains crypto keys globally readable?) and that isn't exactly easy to begin with. And if your hosting server gets rooted your sort of fucked anyways...
As far as the big deal over Credit Card numbers is concerned, I couldn't agree more. I don't know about you people, but I operate under the assumption that my credit card number is always in the hands of others. I mean, the security of a credit card number rests on the fact that "no one can remember 20 digits." Obscurity would be an infinite step up.
Credit card numbers can be stolen by anyone who you shop at, anyone who goes through those shops or your trash, anyone who (with a little memorization training) is able to read your card, etc ad infinum. The whole system is based on the fact that credit cards numbers can be stolen but that its cheaper for the companies to take the loss then implement a smarter system. If that doesn't fit you shoe, then there is always cash...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
With only a couple of days to go, I think that this, more than anything else, personifies and highlights the fight we have ahead of us. Nothing is such a danger to the values that ANYONE who loves the Internet and the Information age holds highly then this fight of stupidity (armed with guns) against the progress of the mind.
I'm pretty much at a lack for words right now, so I will just send my moral support to anyone targeted by this outrage. However, this is a battle we can fight on our turf and they can fight on their's. The courtroom is definitely theirs.
There was never a revolution without somebody going under wheel, and there was never a meme to go under without a fight. And there has never been a fighter like corporate society.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
it doesn't sound like anyone under 12 could begin to use them
It says "ages 12 and above" in large letters on my package:-). If one uses the Windows program for writing the code (dragging and droping puzzel pieces into a program) a smart twelve year old could definetely handle it (I know I could have, but then I was writing games in BASIC at that age...)
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Barring the device driver based hack, the situation you have with the networked game is much like a distributed computing situation. In fact, the network game could be considered to be just a large distributed computer for putting pixels on the right place on each player in the system's (game's) screen. Most of the distributed computing projects (distributed.net, seti@home etc) do suffer from the same problem of people cracking the protocol and lying to the coordinating servers about what is actually going on, and it does seem that most of them end up relying on closed protocols and source code to keep it from being a problem. Distributed.net seems to use the same tactic for spotting cheaters as I use on my local Quake server, ie "they are too good".
However, a lot of work does seem to have ben done, at least in theory, on making distributed computing truly secure, so it might provide a place to start. A quick search through Counterpane's list of crypto papers gave quite a number of hits on the subject. I doubt you could create a truely secure protocoll today (for speed reasons) but this is a problem that is only getting worse as time and technology advances...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yes, exactly. He doesn't give a damn whether you find him intelligent or not, so he says pretty much whatever he likes.
Nothing brings _less_ respect from me people so worried about how others perceive them that they walk around sounding like "Shakespearian Insult" games.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There is a big difference between using "fuck around with" and "motherfucker". The latter is used as an insult by somebody who feels cornered and lacks the capacity to a real retort, while the other is an expression used by somebody who wants to get his poitn across, and doesn't care to much what people think about his vocabulary.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
My experience with using Sparc 5s for Matlab based Scientific Computing is that they aren't very fast at that either. At least not if if matlab's "bench" is anything to go by. I very much wish my institution were buying Athlons with Linux instead of Sparcs with Solaris...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The Media Fusion thing was posted a week ago in this thread. Now that the article linked from that thread is not slashdotted anymore, go read it. The whole article is like one big joke. A couple of the thing they bring up (I forget all the points I LOLed at).
The guy is the most brilliant man ever.
He has written his own OS, so Windows will not be necessary when his system is launched. No word about how he managed to write an OS all by himself, or how he plans to overcome the problems of all other (closed) alternative OSes.
He has been nominated for the Nobel price. Actually, the Nobel Prize is not like the Academy Awards, pretty much any proffessor can nominate somebody, so it might be possible. The article goes on to say that he will probably win it (just like the hundreds of inventors of patented hacks that have done so before him.)
His invention, really just a hack that saves us time in not having to draw fiber even if it does work as stated, will change the world. The article features a guide to which companies like MS, HP, TI, and Apple will survive (FYI, MS and HP won't, Apple will "probably be more adaptable", and TI will surge getting a license to make the chips needed).
The guy is actually a philantropist. Which is why he has patented the technique, and has no plans to implement any of this himself, but only get rich off licensing.
He has figured out how to use the same technique with the earths magnetic field, to communicate over the whole world. Yes, it actually says this.
Go read the article, I'm trolling in the least. It's fucking ubelievable.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, you are wrong. A sceptical attitude towards this sort of sensationalism is very healthy, the true insult to the people who really are mentally ill is that every little depression is now being classified as a mental illness.
Anxiety, depression, stress, and even mild degrees of schizophrenia (and yes I know very well that schizophrenia is very different from the "somethines I'm Jack, sometimes I'm Jill" jokes) are normal. You do not have to be mentally ill because you are going through a bad period in life, or because you choose to seclude yourself, or because you have a bad temper. Only when we realize this can we help the people who really are sick, and yes, nuts.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I was advocating something like this before, where DNS is done away with altogether and sites are found through portals, good search engines, and bookmarks only. Say for example that the address bar in the browser would simply do a google like search if handed a generic word. It would be difficult to make analog advertisements (tv, print) for sites since you couldn't make a link (and "search for races and look a few pages down" might not be so great) but then the analog world is dying anyways.
However, someone pointed out that the REAL use of dns is not to make addresses easy to remember, but to have the address independant of the routing information (contained in the ip), so that even if I change ISP links to my site will stay intact. Given this I am prepared to let DNS live, and am optimistic about the fact that as people learn to really live with the web, the importance of the generic domain will go away in favour of having a lot of links pointed at you.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Read the post before you reply to it dumbfuck. I wrote very explicitly that there is money to made in owning a generic domain name, but it isn't much of bussiness plan in the long run.
Sure, the first time you are looking for movie info you might go to movies.com and give them a hit. But soon you'll hear about imdb.com, and then you will never hit movies.com again. That's one hit for movies.com for having an obvious domain, a hundred for IMDB for having an excellent service. You might try music.com or bands.com the first time you want music information, but its ubl.com that you will find yourself coming back to.
Sure there is money in a domain name that people will be using by default, just like there are companies called AAAAAAAAAAA inc just so they can be first in the phonebook. In the long run however, you are much better off with a better product than a good name.
And as far as "built in advertising" is concerned, you are paying for the domain just like you would pay for any other form of advertising. The difference is that second hand domain names are overhyped and overpriced...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While I feel pretty sorry for the guy who got ripped off, and am not the slightest bit surprised to see N$I acting this way, I think that if he was basing the entire bussiness on the url then he had the wrong attitude to begin with.
I mean, in what other field would people base their entire bussiness plan on the NAME of the fucking company? Yes, as long as the Internet is still new to most of its users, and people still feel lost and unsure of where to go, owning a domain like buy.com or sex.com is a goldmine. But in the long run, you are on pretty thin ice if that is that is the base of your bussiness (yes, I know Wall-street doesn't agree with me).
The web is not, and will never be, a keyword based system. In fact, if you read TLBs original paper on WWW for Cern, he specifically mentions having developed the Web because keyword based systems are BAD. Hypetext provides the ultimate decentralized namespace, and no one can argue that people don't become less and less dependant on obvious domain names as they become more at home with the Web and the way it works.
Did Ebay, Yahoo, or Slashdot need obvious domains to succeed? Does the domain not being nerdnews.com detract from Slashdot's popularity and success?
I have no clue what sort of a market there actually if for the website he wanted to start, but if his bussiness-plan WAS sound, I would recommend he thinks of another name and goes on. I'm no good at this, but why not for example on-your-marks.com or theyreoff.com? For someone more creative with words there must be hundreds of race related terms not urled yet.
I really hope that someday people will realize that the domain name is not the website. If a site is good enough it can be just as successfull with some clever, easy to remember, but not generic domain, as it can if you spend millions on buying the most obvious related word you can afford...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think that the the script you are discussing is not the same as the problem with the Fox page. I experience a lot of pages that pop up telling me I need to get the flash plugin when I do have it installed and working (even Macromedia's own pages do this), but most of the time you can at least cancel and see any non-flash content.
How the fox.com script worked was discussed before, and it was just pitiful (if ! win || mac && ! netscape || ie then throw out)..
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
haha, that has to be the most stupid comment I have ever read.
Since when is the burned hand a punishment for not obeying the parents? As far as I know, when parents tell their children not to touch the hot stove, it is because the parents to do not want the child to get burned. And mind you, most parents try to physically keep the child from hurting itself if it does not know better. A parent who watches it child burn itself and then says "You had free will child" would be locked up faster than they could say "But God..."
Speeding on highways is definetely not a question of freedom of choice. We punish people who break the law because we do require blind obedience to it. You have the right to object to a law if it seems stupid (which we don't to religios morals, which are more or less all stupid), but you still have to obey it no matter what you think.
Your hypothetical Gods actions in this case are more like "I won't make you obey you, but I will punish you in the most aweful way possible if you don't" (ever even consider the reality of hell? Exactly what it means?). Since god is our superior, like a father to children, giving us the choice to hurt ourselves is equivalent to parent who watches the child put gasoline on itself and put itself on fire and then says "But I told you so". From a superior being, this action can be seen only one thing: SADISM.
On top of which, God is more or less making up these things on a whim as you say. At least from my perspective. He may have come to you one night and told which form of worship was correct, but he sure as hell has not been to see me. I could make little more than a wager as to which law actually applies.
I am a mere mortal, and yet I can find it in me to respect, and even defend peoples right to hate me and what I stand for. Yet you perfect God needs to punish us for not loving him? (There have been people in history who praticed that, Hitler, Stalin, etc, but at least all they punished those who did not love them with was death).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It's selfish and downright rediculous to expect companies to simply donate their research to the public domain.
Fuck yeah, after Amazon spent all that time researching ways to make people more prone to shopping, it is only right that they should get a patent on the fantasticly novel and difficult to invent idea of storing peoples CCN on the server! How awefully selfish of us! And my god, if that guy had not had the patent incentive for spending the millions on research it took to come up with the idea of letting the computer use common sense to know what century it was, Y2K would really have been the end of the world!
In theory patents are a difficult issue. I happen to be against them on idealogical grounds, as I believe in the freedom of thought and information above all else, and that laws trying to controll these freedoms are not only wrong but futile and dangerous. The way my life is heading now, it looks like I'm going to towards scientific research, and I promise that I will never take a patent, and I will think long and hard before taking a job with a company that wants to patent my discoverees. Research does not have to be based on corporate gain, but could be based on the ideas of the free software movement (which oviously works, and well) instead. BUT, that does not mean I don't recognize the value of patents in encouraging a lot of the research that has made technical progress move so damn fast this century. It is not an easy issue, and getting rid of patents all together would be a very difficult change for society.
However, the way patents are practiced nowadays makes it much more simple. The stupidity of patent regristration agencies, here in the EU but mostly in the US, has made being anatagonistic towards patents so very rewarding. A lot of people don't even stop think about WHY patents are used (in order to even out DISADVANTAGE a company that makes new inventions has to others who copy them), but instead think of it as a right that inventors have, making invention a sort of lottery of being able to patent things that will be thought up by other people and used in the future. How much research time does B&N really gain by copying Amazons one-click-time thing? 17 years????? And does the McDonald-Douglas guy with the Y2K patent need to be protected from others who would want to implement an idea common in speech for many centuries (anyone who remembers life before this decade will remember history books refering to "the ninetees" and meaning the 1890s)?
If patents really are a "a necessary evil" as you put it, then how come they are not used sparingly and only in fields where they are considered necessary? How come our legislaters are looking INCREASING patent times rather than decreasing them, although the current patent length is clearly enough make companies invent things? How come we are ready to let people take patents in every new field that comes along without stopping for one second to question if it is a good idea? How come we are letting people patent things that are nothing but ideas and bussiness models? How come we allow people patent mathematical techniques, the equivalent of Newton having patented integration or Euler having patented ways of drawing the paths of differential equations? How come we allowing patents so general they next to cover an entire field, let alone just one invention? I could go on...
Patents may be able to do a lot of good for society in the short term, but the way they are praticed today they are doing a hell of a lot of bad instead. Defending the idea of patents has become as stupid as defending communism on with the defense that it would work if people were just noble and selfless. As programmers, we know when a routine is so full of holes, problems, exceptions, and spagetti code that the time has come to toss it out and rewrite it completely, even if it is a bit of an effort. That hour has struck for the patent system.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yeah, and on the Two Speed System as well. Man they must have spent a lot of time on research coming up with the concept of a machine that can move to different speeds. How completely original and innovative! (remember, only difficulty of invention, not implementation, counts for a patent).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
When way the last time you heard of a major corporation apologizing publicly to a group of individuals for having bahaved in an entirely legal manner and without any threat of legal action?
Um, how about last time a company did something that pissed off a group of customers and feared bad PR. Companies apologize left and right as soon as they have stepped on people and it gets out in the press. Apologies are cheap, especially when you are an organizationd devoid of dignity (like these companies are).
Nothing interesting has happened here until we see evidence that Sun have changed their attitude.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I couldn't agree more. It would be defendable if CNET were targeting the review only at home users who want to be able to use Linux without learning anything about it (a really bad idea in the long run, imo), but they specifically discuss enterprise users, where one can expect whoever is installing to have at least one clue or two.
I mean, look at the review of Linux Mandrake, which they say is just as good as Redhat, but the lack of a graphical installer "gives it a back seat to Red Hat for enterprise power". Since when does graphical installer == enterprise power?
The quote that best sumarizes the level of this article is from the Debian section: 'Debian's installation is the most confusing one we encountered. It requires that you understand technical jargon such as "root filesystem" and "non-free, non-US, and local Packages cd.' I am glad that "enterprise power" comes from not knowing what the root filesystem is.
CNET should simply have labeled this review for what it is: a recommendation of distros for true newbies wanting to get on the Linux boat now that its the in thing, but that are too lazy to give a it a real attempt (meaning blood, sweat, and howtos like the rest of us). Of course Corel and RH are going to beat Debian and Slackware in such reviews. In fact, they probably shouldn't even have been included since this is very obviously not their target audience.
Maybe next we will see Quake 3 get a two in a review of productivity software...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the next thing we need a word for, after "benchcrafting", is "hacksationalism" (or maybe "cracksationalism" before people flame me) to cover all these media stories trying to spread panic about cracks amounting to nothing.
I can't be bothered to look it up now, but I'm almost convinced that The Times has featured a number of stories like this before, all of which indeed did lead to end of civilisation as we knew it (or maybe not...)
So what about this one, well:
"The group is using very sophisticated techniques and has been exchanging information via e-mail and internet chat," said an investigator.
Wow, malicous hackers that can use email and IRC! They have got to be a dangerous threat!
It is understood the hackers stole computer "source codes" that are critical to programming, and threatened to crash the entire system.
Now that is good journalism! Don't bother explaining that "code" has two meanings in computers, and that the "source code" has nothing to do with accessing the site (unless it was broken to begin with, but...) But then we do know how expensive it is when a hacker gets your source code, look at poor Sun who had to recode Solaris from scratch after Mitnick looked at its source (what? Didn't they? They must have since they claimed the entire cost of it in damages.)
Also, in both this and the CDUniverse case, the hackers are (apparently) trying extortion as a way of making money off their cracks. Extortion is a really, really, really, bad way of committing crimes without getting caught. Unless you happen to have serious underworld money laundering connections, you are going to get caught when you try to get your hands on the money - for sure. If these guys think they can walk a way with a suitcase of "100 thousand quid in unmarked twenties" they have watched too many movies.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The fact that encryption keys can be found in data by looking for strings with higher entropy then usual is not new. I have heard it several times, and I believe that this was how the "NSA_key" thing in the Win2K source code was discovered (remember that, MS let NSA authenticate their own crypto modules and people started screaming backdoor). If I'm not wrong, its even mentioned in 'Applied Cryptography'.
The article says "root around looking for the keys", which I read as getting root to the server (I mean, who is going to keep code that contains crypto keys globally readable?) and that isn't exactly easy to begin with. And if your hosting server gets rooted your sort of fucked anyways...
As far as the big deal over Credit Card numbers is concerned, I couldn't agree more. I don't know about you people, but I operate under the assumption that my credit card number is always in the hands of others. I mean, the security of a credit card number rests on the fact that "no one can remember 20 digits." Obscurity would be an infinite step up.
Credit card numbers can be stolen by anyone who you shop at, anyone who goes through those shops or your trash, anyone who (with a little memorization training) is able to read your card, etc ad infinum. The whole system is based on the fact that credit cards numbers can be stolen but that its cheaper for the companies to take the loss then implement a smarter system. If that doesn't fit you shoe, then there is always cash...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Its been said a million times but I will say it again. Programmers start counting at 0.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
With only a couple of days to go, I think that this, more than anything else, personifies and highlights the fight we have ahead of us. Nothing is such a danger to the values that ANYONE who loves the Internet and the Information age holds highly then this fight of stupidity (armed with guns) against the progress of the mind.
I'm pretty much at a lack for words right now, so I will just send my moral support to anyone targeted by this outrage. However, this is a battle we can fight on our turf and they can fight on their's. The courtroom is definitely theirs.
There was never a revolution without somebody going under wheel, and there was never a meme to go under without a fight. And there has never been a fighter like corporate society.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
it doesn't sound like anyone under 12 could begin to use them
It says "ages 12 and above" in large letters on my package
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Barring the device driver based hack, the situation you have with the networked game is much like a distributed computing situation. In fact, the network game could be considered to be just a large distributed computer for putting pixels on the right place on each player in the system's (game's) screen. Most of the distributed computing projects (distributed.net, seti@home etc) do suffer from the same problem of people cracking the protocol and lying to the coordinating servers about what is actually going on, and it does seem that most of them end up relying on closed protocols and source code to keep it from being a problem. Distributed.net seems to use the same tactic for spotting cheaters as I use on my local Quake server, ie "they are too good".
However, a lot of work does seem to have ben done, at least in theory, on making distributed computing truly secure, so it might provide a place to start. A quick search through Counterpane's list of crypto papers gave quite a number of hits on the subject. I doubt you could create a truely secure protocoll today (for speed reasons) but this is a problem that is only getting worse as time and technology advances...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yes, exactly. He doesn't give a damn whether you find him intelligent or not, so he says pretty much whatever he likes.
Nothing brings _less_ respect from me people so worried about how others perceive them that they walk around sounding like "Shakespearian Insult" games.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is off-topic but:
There is a big difference between using "fuck around with" and "motherfucker". The latter is used as an insult by somebody who feels cornered and lacks the capacity to a real retort, while the other is an expression used by somebody who wants to get his poitn across, and doesn't care to much what people think about his vocabulary.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The computers I use are very much Ultras, I didn't know there was a SparcStation5 to confuse it with...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
My experience with using Sparc 5s for Matlab based Scientific Computing is that they aren't very fast at that either. At least not if if matlab's "bench" is anything to go by. I very much wish my institution were buying Athlons with Linux instead of Sparcs with Solaris...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Now, don't you feel stupid that you didn't patent it and use it to kill Microsoft and get the Nobel price
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Go read the article, I'm trolling in the least. It's fucking ubelievable.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, you are wrong. A sceptical attitude towards this sort of sensationalism is very healthy, the true insult to the people who really are mentally ill is that every little depression is now being classified as a mental illness.
Anxiety, depression, stress, and even mild degrees of schizophrenia (and yes I know very well that schizophrenia is very different from the "somethines I'm Jack, sometimes I'm Jill" jokes) are normal. You do not have to be mentally ill because you are going through a bad period in life, or because you choose to seclude yourself, or because you have a bad temper. Only when we realize this can we help the people who really are sick, and yes, nuts.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I was advocating something like this before, where DNS is done away with altogether and sites are found through portals, good search engines, and bookmarks only. Say for example that the address bar in the browser would simply do a google like search if handed a generic word. It would be difficult to make analog advertisements (tv, print) for sites since you couldn't make a link (and "search for races and look a few pages down" might not be so great) but then the analog world is dying anyways.
However, someone pointed out that the REAL use of dns is not to make addresses easy to remember, but to have the address independant of the routing information (contained in the ip), so that even if I change ISP links to my site will stay intact. Given this I am prepared to let DNS live, and am optimistic about the fact that as people learn to really live with the web, the importance of the generic domain will go away in favour of having a lot of links pointed at you.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Off topic, but not being able to put "fucking" in a story is just another sign of what has been happening to wired since it became part of Lycos.
Anyone who values free speach should say fuck at least twenty times a day
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Read the post before you reply to it dumbfuck. I wrote very explicitly that there is money to made in owning a generic domain name, but it isn't much of bussiness plan in the long run.
Sure, the first time you are looking for movie info you might go to movies.com and give them a hit. But soon you'll hear about imdb.com, and then you will never hit movies.com again. That's one hit for movies.com for having an obvious domain, a hundred for IMDB for having an excellent service. You might try music.com or bands.com the first time you want music information, but its ubl.com that you will find yourself coming back to.
Sure there is money in a domain name that people will be using by default, just like there are companies called AAAAAAAAAAA inc just so they can be first in the phonebook. In the long run however, you are much better off with a better product than a good name.
And as far as "built in advertising" is concerned, you are paying for the domain just like you would pay for any other form of advertising. The difference is that second hand domain names are overhyped and overpriced...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While I feel pretty sorry for the guy who got ripped off, and am not the slightest bit surprised to see N$I acting this way, I think that if he was basing the entire bussiness on the url then he had the wrong attitude to begin with.
I mean, in what other field would people base their entire bussiness plan on the NAME of the fucking company? Yes, as long as the Internet is still new to most of its users, and people still feel lost and unsure of where to go, owning a domain like buy.com or sex.com is a goldmine. But in the long run, you are on pretty thin ice if that is that is the base of your bussiness (yes, I know Wall-street doesn't agree with me).
The web is not, and will never be, a keyword based system. In fact, if you read TLBs original paper on WWW for Cern, he specifically mentions having developed the Web because keyword based systems are BAD. Hypetext provides the ultimate decentralized namespace, and no one can argue that people don't become less and less dependant on obvious domain names as they become more at home with the Web and the way it works.
Did Ebay, Yahoo, or Slashdot need obvious domains to succeed? Does the domain not being nerdnews.com detract from Slashdot's popularity and success?
I have no clue what sort of a market there actually if for the website he wanted to start, but if his bussiness-plan WAS sound, I would recommend he thinks of another name and goes on. I'm no good at this, but why not for example on-your-marks.com or theyreoff.com? For someone more creative with words there must be hundreds of race related terms not urled yet.
I really hope that someday people will realize that the domain name is not the website. If a site is good enough it can be just as successfull with some clever, easy to remember, but not generic domain, as it can if you spend millions on buying the most obvious related word you can afford...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think that the the script you are discussing is not the same as the problem with the Fox page. I experience a lot of pages that pop up telling me I need to get the flash plugin when I do have it installed and working (even Macromedia's own pages do this), but most of the time you can at least cancel and see any non-flash content.
How the fox.com script worked was discussed before, and it was just pitiful (if ! win || mac && ! netscape || ie then throw out)..
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
haha, that has to be the most stupid comment I have ever read.
Since when is the burned hand a punishment for not obeying the parents? As far as I know, when parents tell their children not to touch the hot stove, it is because the parents to do not want the child to get burned. And mind you, most parents try to physically keep the child from hurting itself if it does not know better. A parent who watches it child burn itself and then says "You had free will child" would be locked up faster than they could say "But God..."
Speeding on highways is definetely not a question of freedom of choice. We punish people who break the law because we do require blind obedience to it. You have the right to object to a law if it seems stupid (which we don't to religios morals, which are more or less all stupid), but you still have to obey it no matter what you think.
Your hypothetical Gods actions in this case are more like "I won't make you obey you, but I will punish you in the most aweful way possible if you don't" (ever even consider the reality of hell? Exactly what it means?). Since god is our superior, like a father to children, giving us the choice to hurt ourselves is equivalent to parent who watches the child put gasoline on itself and put itself on fire and then says "But I told you so". From a superior being, this action can be seen only one thing: SADISM.
On top of which, God is more or less making up these things on a whim as you say. At least from my perspective. He may have come to you one night and told which form of worship was correct, but he sure as hell has not been to see me. I could make little more than a wager as to which law actually applies.
I am a mere mortal, and yet I can find it in me to respect, and even defend peoples right to hate me and what I stand for. Yet you perfect God needs to punish us for not loving him? (There have been people in history who praticed that, Hitler, Stalin, etc, but at least all they punished those who did not love them with was death).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It's selfish and downright rediculous to expect companies to simply donate their research to the public domain.
Fuck yeah, after Amazon spent all that time researching ways to make people more prone to shopping, it is only right that they should get a patent on the fantasticly novel and difficult to invent idea of storing peoples CCN on the server! How awefully selfish of us! And my god, if that guy had not had the patent incentive for spending the millions on research it took to come up with the idea of letting the computer use common sense to know what century it was, Y2K would really have been the end of the world!
In theory patents are a difficult issue. I happen to be against them on idealogical grounds, as I believe in the freedom of thought and information above all else, and that laws trying to controll these freedoms are not only wrong but futile and dangerous. The way my life is heading now, it looks like I'm going to towards scientific research, and I promise that I will never take a patent, and I will think long and hard before taking a job with a company that wants to patent my discoverees. Research does not have to be based on corporate gain, but could be based on the ideas of the free software movement (which oviously works, and well) instead. BUT, that does not mean I don't recognize the value of patents in encouraging a lot of the research that has made technical progress move so damn fast this century. It is not an easy issue, and getting rid of patents all together would be a very difficult change for society.
However, the way patents are practiced nowadays makes it much more simple. The stupidity of patent regristration agencies, here in the EU but mostly in the US, has made being anatagonistic towards patents so very rewarding. A lot of people don't even stop think about WHY patents are used (in order to even out DISADVANTAGE a company that makes new inventions has to others who copy them), but instead think of it as a right that inventors have, making invention a sort of lottery of being able to patent things that will be thought up by other people and used in the future. How much research time does B&N really gain by copying Amazons one-click-time thing? 17 years????? And does the McDonald-Douglas guy with the Y2K patent need to be protected from others who would want to implement an idea common in speech for many centuries (anyone who remembers life before this decade will remember history books refering to "the ninetees" and meaning the 1890s)?
If patents really are a "a necessary evil" as you put it, then how come they are not used sparingly and only in fields where they are considered necessary? How come our legislaters are looking INCREASING patent times rather than decreasing them, although the current patent length is clearly enough make companies invent things? How come we are ready to let people take patents in every new field that comes along without stopping for one second to question if it is a good idea? How come we are letting people patent things that are nothing but ideas and bussiness models? How come we allow people patent mathematical techniques, the equivalent of Newton having patented integration or Euler having patented ways of drawing the paths of differential equations? How come we allowing patents so general they next to cover an entire field, let alone just one invention? I could go on...
Patents may be able to do a lot of good for society in the short term, but the way they are praticed today they are doing a hell of a lot of bad instead. Defending the idea of patents has become as stupid as defending communism on with the defense that it would work if people were just noble and selfless. As programmers, we know when a routine is so full of holes, problems, exceptions, and spagetti code that the time has come to toss it out and rewrite it completely, even if it is a bit of an effort. That hour has struck for the patent system.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
"What is worship without free will but blind obedience?"
So instead, he gives us free will, but threatens us with eternal hell-fire should we happen to choose not to worship him.
I'm damn glad he dodged that blind obedience bullet, aren't you...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yeah, and on the Two Speed System as well. Man they must have spent a lot of time on research coming up with the concept of a machine that can move to different speeds. How completely original and innovative! (remember, only difficulty of invention, not implementation, counts for a patent).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
When way the last time you heard of a major corporation apologizing publicly to a group of individuals for having bahaved in an entirely legal manner and without any threat of legal action?
Um, how about last time a company did something that pissed off a group of customers and feared bad PR. Companies apologize left and right as soon as they have stepped on people and it gets out in the press. Apologies are cheap, especially when you are an organizationd devoid of dignity (like these companies are).
Nothing interesting has happened here until we see evidence that Sun have changed their attitude.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Acording to Dictionary.com it means:
Enterprise (ntr-prz) :
A city of southeast Alabama south-southeast of Montgomery. It is a processing and manufacturing center. Population, 20,123.
:-)
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I couldn't agree more. It would be defendable if CNET were targeting the review only at home users who want to be able to use Linux without learning anything about it (a really bad idea in the long run, imo), but they specifically discuss enterprise users, where one can expect whoever is installing to have at least one clue or two.
I mean, look at the review of Linux Mandrake, which they say is just as good as Redhat, but the lack of a graphical installer "gives it a back seat to Red Hat for enterprise power". Since when does graphical installer == enterprise power?
The quote that best sumarizes the level of this article is from the Debian section: 'Debian's installation is the most confusing one we encountered. It requires that you understand technical jargon such as "root filesystem" and "non-free, non-US, and local Packages cd.' I am glad that "enterprise power" comes from not knowing what the root filesystem is.
CNET should simply have labeled this review for what it is: a recommendation of distros for true newbies wanting to get on the Linux boat now that its the in thing, but that are too lazy to give a it a real attempt (meaning blood, sweat, and howtos like the rest of us). Of course Corel and RH are going to beat Debian and Slackware in such reviews. In fact, they probably shouldn't even have been included since this is very obviously not their target audience.
Maybe next we will see Quake 3 get a two in a review of productivity software...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.