It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $5,000 at 5% interest is about $20 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is HELL yes.
(Sorry screwed up the numbers in my first post. Should have realized they didn't make sense. Mod it down.)
It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $40,000 at 5% interest is about $170 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is probably yes.
"The Internet" is the NAME of a single computer network. There are other networks with names, like Fidonet, Bitnet, Arpanet, etc, but most of them are not around anymore. Saying that it is no more a proper noun than car, refrigerator, or restaurant is simply wrong.
If you had named your fridge "Old Whiny", your car "Betty", and your restaurant was named "The E-Coli Farm" it WOULD be correct to say:
"Old Whiny is broken and the food is bad, so let's jump in Betty and go to The E-Coli Farm." (I skipped the food because few people name individual items of food.)
That the The Internet happens to be a name in definite form does not make it any less of a name, just like The Netherlands is still the name of a country, and The Rocky Mountains is still the name of a mountain chain. (Note that "a rocky mountain" is something entirely different - just like "an internet.")
My understanding is that megabyte prices will never fall much lower than that. The reason is that the providers are scared of people using VOIP to call cheaper.
One can get a good VOIP call at 2 kB/s, which is 120 kB/minute. So if they went lower than 0.01 NOK per kB, it would suddenly be cheaper to call with voip over GPRS then making phonecalls with most plans.
Speaking of which, when will we see WML version of Slashdot? Currently I use http://slashdot.org/palm as the homepage in my cellphone, which works fine, but a true WAP page would be better.
As the (on topic) side note there is no reason for WAP to die, as it actually is pretty useful. Not only for gratuities checking slashdot and news on the cellphone, but for truly useful things. The public transport system here has a WAP page for checking timetables, which is pretty useful if you don't want to walk from the bar to the busstop only to find you have a halfhour's wait.
Several TV channels here also put out all there tele-text material on wap, which is nice because it is brief, up to date, and meant to read on a low res screen. The only thing wrong with WAP is the silly price for wireless data (2 Euro per meg!)
Sure, they should sell phones that are everything they could possibly be. They also should sell simple phones for people like me who don't want shortened battery life, slower operation, increased likelyhood of failure, to have to "update" software, to have to leave my phone everytime I enter a secure area because of the camera, more complex interface, risk of viruses or any of the other reasons there are for not wanting more complicated phones.
Here: no java, no camera, no color screen. I could find a hundred other simple phone models, and they are considerably cheaper then those with all the latest features.
I have heard the estimates and doubt them, but I don't care to argue.
If you don't believe me about the anonymity, ask somebody who does real academic work on anonymity like Goldberg or Dingledine (the author of the program this article is about) what they think about Freenet's model. Freenet offers considerably less anonymity then Crowds, which is generally considered a very weak solution.
"Thousands" (doubtful) of nodes could have been searched faster by a simple random walk and sufficient caching (all testing showed freenet needs at least 10X caching). So that is no evidence that it works.
But hey, I'm glad that the software I helped write is working out for you. I would like to warn you though that the "anonymity" of freenet is highly tenuous - it is likely not very difficult for a determined attacker to find out what you are surfing.
I can put up a single Freenet node, insert some data into it, and then request it, and then claim that Freenet "works": but that doesn't mean that it does.
Freenet is working when the network starts displaying the emergent properties that the creators (Ian Clarke, and to a later myself and the other developers) predicted, and it shows the ability to scale in the number of nodes and the amount of data like we promised. I have seen nothing to date to indicate that this has taken place, and while I am not the lead developer anymore, I do feel I have better insight into this than most.
But hey, if it does work then my time wasn't as wasted as I fear.
No, Freenet doesn't use onion routing. Never has and doesn't today. It is impossible to both onion route a query and at the same time route it through a network based on local knowledge (since with onion routing the client has to map out the exact path of message in advanced, and the whole point with Freenet is that the client doesn't know where the message is going to go).
There was discussion once upon a time about adding a couple of steps of onion routing before the Freenet routing starts - that would be equivalent to accessing Freenet through something like Tor (thus making things even slower) but leveraging the existing nodes as the mixnet.
All this is rather academic however as Freenet doesn't actually work, and probably never will. But it is nice to see how easy it is to score +5 here by sprouting uninformed nonsense nowadays.
But having read the notice on katie.com, it doesn't sound like she would've accepted (and I doubt Penguin would have offered some astronomical sum).
If you ever get into a domain dispute, the most important thing to do is claim that the domain is not for sale. If you mention that you are willing to sell the domain for a reasonable market value, then you will be labled a cybersquatter and they'll take you to WIPO arbitration and win. It is stupid, but that is how it works.
I think Ms. Jones mentioning that she is not rich implies that she probably wouldn't turn down a reasonable offer. (Who here wouldn't give up their homepage domain for $20-30K?)
It is clear that Google are attempting to start a single "Google account" system, which Gmail and now Groups 2 uses, but they still have a long way to go.
Did I just fall through a time-warp, or is something very wrong with this story?
Who, exactly is wondering what Burt Rutan is up to? I mean, I realize that not everybody cares about spaceflight, but I promise that anybody who knows who Burt Rutan IS could hardly have missed the 2010 recent news stories about what he is up to. I guess unless they are a slashdot editor...
Silanols: Silanes with an OH; generally being water-soluable, they are widely common in earth's oceans, and have all sorts of interesting chemical properties and bonding structures naturally. More than anything else, silanols have led to speculation that silicon-based life could be possible on other planets.
Pretty definitive proof really. I mean, who else is gonna drink them?
They are charging about $6 per car for crossing the viaduct. If enough cars are willing to pay this rather than crawling through the valley that it pays for the project (which wasn't actually that expensive, compare USD $400 million with what some bridges over water cost) then it makes economic sense to build it. What else is needed?
Perhaps, but then again, how many respected Nazi researchers believed that the allies had cracked the Enigma code?
It was not unreasonable for them to have suspected so. The integrity of Enigma relied heavily on keeping the machines and codebooks out of allied hands - had the Germans known that the allies had managed to get ahold of those things, the impressive effort of Turing & co. to go the last bit would not have been inconceivable to his German counterparts.
If the NSA can really crack any of our modern cryptographical methods, then they are at least forty fifty years ahead of the rest of world in both mathematics and computing. Is that conceivable? And if they are, then they can't really do anything with what they find anyways, since they would have to spend most of their energy keeping the secret.
Basically you are trying to score cheap points (read karma) but making a comparison that doesn't hold, but that plays on peoples emotions. It's the equivalent of responding to any comment advocating avoiding war with: "That's what Chamberlain thought."
Echelon is a monitoring system, not some magical machine from cracking conventional cryptography. No respected researcher believes that the NSA, or any other agency, has the ability to crack secure keys using conventional algorithms (say 128 bit AES combined with 2048 bit RSA).
If the Europeans wanted to really help against this, they should be encouraging the adoption of existing encrypted standards for Internet pipes (TLS, IPsec, etc), email, and especially VOIP (note that SIP is non-authenicated plaintext by default - there is no excuse for that in 2004). Quantum cryptography is a fun theory, but it is completely pointless in practice, since everything it achieves can be done better using conventional mathematical cyptography.
"Not crackable within the age of the universe" is the same as "uncrackable". Could people get over there obsession with the latter word already.
There is no option, at least not that I can find. But note that it uses ">" indentation style quotes, not "====Original Message====" so the only thing that make it top posting is where the cursor starts. And if you are doing an inline response, having the cursor start at the top actually makes more sense.
Top posting is here to stay anyways, a lot of people nowadays even seem to have trouble reading emails with inlined quotes. And frankly, while inlining is good for technical discussions, there is something to be said for the old art of writing a complete letter, for which it sucks.
It is a good thing that no google engineers read slashdot.org, and that even if they did, they would never want to mess up a competition between people who professionally abuse their service regarding who is best at it...
If I were google, I would wait until the day before the deadline and then link the top hit for nigritude ultramarine to google.com.
In fact, to help them, I suggest that everybody who thinks that "SEO pros" are a life form somewhere below pond-scum and above spammers, ought to help them. nigritude ultramarine.
The same thing could be achieved without being user hostile by allowing for the EFF's proposed owner override, implementation of which would cost the technology vendors nothing.
To my knowledge no TCPA proponent has even responded to the EFF - proving their true intentions.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $5,000 at 5% interest is about $20 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is HELL yes.
(Sorry screwed up the numbers in my first post. Should have realized they didn't make sense. Mod it down.)
It should be noted that in the eightees, a lot of people did, and those were a lot less useful then those we have now.
Note that a loan for $40,000 at 5% interest is about $170 per month. Would I pay that for a computer if I had to today on a $40K salary? The answer is probably yes.
"...it's a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people..."
Ah, well then. Your trillion dollars or mine?
"The Internet" is the NAME of a single computer network. There are other networks with names, like Fidonet, Bitnet, Arpanet, etc, but most of them are not around anymore. Saying that it is no more a proper noun than car, refrigerator, or restaurant is simply wrong.
If you had named your fridge "Old Whiny", your car "Betty", and your restaurant was named "The E-Coli Farm" it WOULD be correct to say:
"Old Whiny is broken and the food is bad, so let's jump in Betty and go to The E-Coli Farm." (I skipped the food because few people name individual items of food.)
That the The Internet happens to be a name in definite form does not make it any less of a name, just like The Netherlands is still the name of a country, and The Rocky Mountains is still the name of a mountain chain. (Note that "a rocky mountain" is something entirely different - just like "an internet.")
My understanding is that megabyte prices will never fall much lower than that. The reason is that the providers are scared of people using VOIP to call cheaper.
One can get a good VOIP call at 2 kB/s, which is 120 kB/minute. So if they went lower than 0.01 NOK per kB, it would suddenly be cheaper to call with voip over GPRS then making phonecalls with most plans.
That isn't WAP, that has to do with your data connection. WAP is a standard for web browsers on mobile devices - it defines markups and alike.
In GSM networks you can run WAP over GSM data, GPRS, or 3G networks, which will give increasingly good performance.
Speaking of which, when will we see WML version of Slashdot? Currently I use http://slashdot.org/palm as the homepage in my cellphone, which works fine, but a true WAP page would be better.
As the (on topic) side note there is no reason for WAP to die, as it actually is pretty useful. Not only for gratuities checking slashdot and news on the cellphone, but for truly useful things. The public transport system here has a WAP page for checking timetables, which is pretty useful if you don't want to walk from the bar to the busstop only to find you have a halfhour's wait.
Several TV channels here also put out all there tele-text material on wap, which is nice because it is brief, up to date, and meant to read on a low res screen. The only thing wrong with WAP is the silly price for wireless data (2 Euro per meg!)
Sure, they should sell phones that are everything they could possibly be. They also should sell simple phones for people like me who don't want shortened battery life, slower operation, increased likelyhood of failure, to have to "update" software, to have to leave my phone everytime I enter a secure area because of the camera, more complex interface, risk of viruses or any of the other reasons there are for not wanting more complicated phones.
Here: no java, no camera, no color screen. I could find a hundred other simple phone models, and they are considerably cheaper then those with all the latest features.
So what are you whining about exactly?
I have heard the estimates and doubt them, but I don't care to argue.
If you don't believe me about the anonymity, ask somebody who does real academic work on anonymity like Goldberg or Dingledine (the author of the program this article is about) what they think about Freenet's model. Freenet offers considerably less anonymity then Crowds, which is generally considered a very weak solution.
"Thousands" (doubtful) of nodes could have been searched faster by a simple random walk and sufficient caching (all testing showed freenet needs at least 10X caching). So that is no evidence that it works.
But hey, I'm glad that the software I helped write is working out for you. I would like to warn you though that the "anonymity" of freenet is highly tenuous - it is likely not very difficult for a determined attacker to find out what you are surfing.
I can put up a single Freenet node, insert some data into it, and then request it, and then claim that Freenet "works": but that doesn't mean that it does.
Freenet is working when the network starts displaying the emergent properties that the creators (Ian Clarke, and to a later myself and the other developers) predicted, and it shows the ability to scale in the number of nodes and the amount of data like we promised. I have seen nothing to date to indicate that this has taken place, and while I am not the lead developer anymore, I do feel I have better insight into this than most.
But hey, if it does work then my time wasn't as wasted as I fear.
Isn't this is a four year old issue in which very little has happened recently? (Most articles I found about it were dated from 2000).
Did Slashdot force this sudden 180?
That you and I have different definitions of "works".
No, Freenet doesn't use onion routing. Never has and doesn't today. It is impossible to both onion route a query and at the same time route it through a network based on local knowledge (since with onion routing the client has to map out the exact path of message in advanced, and the whole point with Freenet is that the client doesn't know where the message is going to go).
There was discussion once upon a time about adding a couple of steps of onion routing before the Freenet routing starts - that would be equivalent to accessing Freenet through something like Tor (thus making things even slower) but leveraging the existing nodes as the mixnet.
All this is rather academic however as Freenet doesn't actually work, and probably never will. But it is nice to see how easy it is to score +5 here by sprouting uninformed nonsense nowadays.
How about Katie13.com, which is still untaken, fits with the nomenclature of teen chatrooms, and gives a better idea of what the book is about...
But having read the notice on katie.com, it doesn't sound like she would've accepted (and I doubt Penguin would have offered some astronomical sum).
If you ever get into a domain dispute, the most important thing to do is claim that the domain is not for sale. If you mention that you are willing to sell the domain for a reasonable market value, then you will be labled a cybersquatter and they'll take you to WIPO arbitration and win. It is stupid, but that is how it works.
I think Ms. Jones mentioning that she is not rich implies that she probably wouldn't turn down a reasonable offer. (Who here wouldn't give up their homepage domain for $20-30K?)
Nor do Orkut accounts.
It is clear that Google are attempting to start a single "Google account" system, which Gmail and now Groups 2 uses, but they still have a long way to go.
Did I just fall through a time-warp, or is something very wrong with this story?
Who, exactly is wondering what Burt Rutan is up to? I mean, I realize that not everybody cares about spaceflight, but I promise that anybody who knows who Burt Rutan IS could hardly have missed the 2010 recent news stories about what he is up to. I guess unless they are a slashdot editor...
Oh, but wait, there are pictures of his X-Prize entry. That is amazing!
Silanols: Silanes with an OH; generally being water-soluable, they are widely common in earth's oceans, and have all sorts of interesting chemical properties and bonding structures naturally. More than anything else, silanols have led to speculation that silicon-based life could be possible on other planets.
Pretty definitive proof really. I mean, who else is gonna drink them?
They are charging about $6 per car for crossing the viaduct. If enough cars are willing to pay this rather than crawling through the valley that it pays for the project (which wasn't actually that expensive, compare USD $400 million with what some bridges over water cost) then it makes economic sense to build it. What else is needed?
Perhaps, but then again, how many respected Nazi researchers believed that the allies had cracked the Enigma code?
It was not unreasonable for them to have suspected so. The integrity of Enigma relied heavily on keeping the machines and codebooks out of allied hands - had the Germans known that the allies had managed to get ahold of those things, the impressive effort of Turing & co. to go the last bit would not have been inconceivable to his German counterparts.
If the NSA can really crack any of our modern cryptographical methods, then they are at least forty fifty years ahead of the rest of world in both mathematics and computing. Is that conceivable? And if they are, then they can't really do anything with what they find anyways, since they would have to spend most of their energy keeping the secret.
Basically you are trying to score cheap points (read karma) but making a comparison that doesn't hold, but that plays on peoples emotions. It's the equivalent of responding to any comment advocating avoiding war with: "That's what Chamberlain thought."
Echelon is a monitoring system, not some magical machine from cracking conventional cryptography. No respected researcher believes that the NSA, or any other agency, has the ability to crack secure keys using conventional algorithms (say 128 bit AES combined with 2048 bit RSA).
If the Europeans wanted to really help against this, they should be encouraging the adoption of existing encrypted standards for Internet pipes (TLS, IPsec, etc), email, and especially VOIP (note that SIP is non-authenicated plaintext by default - there is no excuse for that in 2004). Quantum cryptography is a fun theory, but it is completely pointless in practice, since everything it achieves can be done better using conventional mathematical cyptography.
"Not crackable within the age of the universe" is the same as "uncrackable". Could people get over there obsession with the latter word already.
There is no option, at least not that I can find. But note that it uses ">" indentation style quotes, not "====Original Message====" so the only thing that make it top posting is where the cursor starts. And if you are doing an inline response, having the cursor start at the top actually makes more sense.
Top posting is here to stay anyways, a lot of people nowadays even seem to have trouble reading emails with inlined quotes. And frankly, while inlining is good for technical discussions, there is something to be said for the old art of writing a complete letter, for which it sucks.
It is a good thing that no google engineers read slashdot.org, and that even if they did, they would never want to mess up a competition between people who professionally abuse their service regarding who is best at it...
If I were google, I would wait until the day before the deadline and then link the top hit for nigritude ultramarine to google.com.
In fact, to help them, I suggest that everybody who thinks that "SEO pros" are a life form somewhere below pond-scum and above spammers, ought to help them. nigritude ultramarine.
The same thing could be achieved without being user hostile by allowing for the EFF's proposed owner override, implementation of which would cost the technology vendors nothing.
To my knowledge no TCPA proponent has even responded to the EFF - proving their true intentions.