I see a lot of science articles from The New York Times, especially linked to on slashdot, but when I read the articles I generally think they are awful. The reason is that reading them gives you no substantive understanding of the science that is going on. They often seem to choose subjects like string theory or loop quantum gravity, which are extremely complex, and then try to explain them at an elementary school science level. This is simply a futile endevor and they end up saying basically nothing. I am working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics and even I can't often tell from the article what the theory claims, and often I know of several theories they might be talking about and am not even sure which one it is because the coverage is so vague. I can't see how anyone could read these and getting anything of use from them. Frankly I don't know how you could explain string theory to someone at such a basic level, even in an entire book, much less a news paper article. Especially when even many physicists (myself included) don't know that much about it.
I think they should really focus on science they can explain, and make sure to explain how these things are based in fact and come from experimental evidence. This is the basis of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Bob Park, a frequent crusader against pseudoscience, hypothesises that these insubstantial, vague accounts of outlandish modern physics that are often given to laymen make science sound basically indistinguishable from pseudoscience, and thus help bolster beleif in pseudoscience. I'm not sure I beleive this, but I do think it's a possibility. A good example is an author I heard interviewed who wrote a book about how ESP could be based on quantum entanglement. This is an absurd claim if you know anything about entanglement and quantum decoherence, but does sound sort of reasonable if you just take some very vague notions about quantum mechanics (namely, it's hell-a-weird).
Does good science make interesting journalism? Well, I think a lot of it can if it's well told, because science is fundementally a mystery story, and most people like mysteries. Just look at the success of CSI. I think we must stick to work that has widely acknoledged validity, though, and to work which is experimentally grounded. We must also get through that when you read "A Breif History of Time" you are not getting the whole picture. Gernally, being ignorant of something is far less hazzardous when you're aware of your ignorance.
I will admit to knowing little about patent law, but it seems like besides disallowing overly broad patents and blocking people from patenting things that are obvious there are two rules that could help things:
Require patent holders to demonstrate they have proceeded in good faith to develop and market the idea. If they haven't it should be void.
Make a time limit after which, if they have not defended their patent, it becomes void. Meaning they can't wait until a technology is in standard use to suddenly start enforcing their claims.
Both these ideas have their problems. For one, it might be difficult for small entities to do the required litigation to defend patents this way. But it seems like this would be the direction to go. I would guess provisions similar to these already exist (especially the second), are they just not enforced?
Seriously, anyone who bitches about these sorts of restrictive policies should put their money where their mouth is and switch to a provider like Speakeasy. Not only are they geek friendly when it comes to multiple machines, but they also have a lot of other good projects including the following:
RPMFind mirror. I hear some people here are into Linux?;)
Not to mention the fact that they offer at least some Linux support (examples here and here). I don't know the extent of it, because honesty I don't ask my ISP for help with my OSs often. Also, when I got DSL they offered static IPs when most of the other providers I looked at in my area only seemed to offer dynamic for residential customers.
You might be asking yourself, "Does this guy work for Speakeasy?" No. But I am a satisfied customer, and I am afraid that good ISPs like this one will be pushed out by bigger companies (*cough*Verizon*cough*) who offer their customers a much more restricted set of options and don't give back to the interenet community (if you beleive in such a thing). All this because these other companies can offer their servies a few bucks cheaper a month or with a little better initial perks, or just because the other companies have better name recognition and more marketing dollars. That and there are many savvy users at these less friendly ISPs who know they can slip by restrictions (at least in the short term), so they opt for convenience and saving a few bucks over promoting the behavior they'd like to see and options all users can take advantage of.
So, if you're concerned by the increasing restrictiveness of ISPs, use your wallet to make a statment by switching to one of the good guys.
Here is a story from the Washington Post about how our goverment does not think it was terrorism. If they say that, it's probably the case. First, they have a lot of people working on it with more expertese and a hell of a lot more information than us. Second, in general they have been quick to suspect terrorism as a cause for incidents since 9/11 and it would probably be politically beneficial to the Bush administration, meaning they have little good reason to cover it up.
If you don't beleive the government, think about the fact that most acts of terrorism happen in places members of the public can get access to. They happen in public business establishments, marketplaces, night clubs, airports, and airplanes. They don't happen in restricted places where only authorized individuals can be. Even the bombing of the USS Cole didn't happen from within, it happened because any member of the public and operate a boat in public waters. In short, you don't just waltz on to the space shuttle like you do an airplane or an office builing. On the space shuttle is not exactly the kind of place that you can get lot in a crowd, and it is a place where every peice of cargo is tightly inventoried.
If it was terrorists, why did they wait nearly two weeks to destroy the thing? If you plant a bomb, you're not going to want to leave weeks for it to be discovered. It seems pretty much impossible that anyone could have stowed away, certainly for two weeks. Moreover, even if they had, why not blow it up more dramatically in space or crash it into a target on land?
I guess you could suggest that it was shot down. This also is pretty much impossible. News said it was at 200,000 feet and traveling 12,500 mph when it broke up. Now it seems to me that shooting down something at that speed and altitude would be basically like trying to shoot down an ICBM, something the vast monetary and technological resources of the US governement remain unable to do effectively. Of course, the space shuttle would have a much bigger radio and heat signature, but then our national missle defense program fails a good portion of th time even when targets at tagged with a transmitter or baked in an oven. Another comparison you could make is to the SR71. From numbers I've seen, the space shuttle was flighing more than twice as high and 5 times as fast as the SR71 at the time of the incident. While the SR71 was designed to have minimal radar signature, as far as I understand its speed and altitude were also designed to make it nearly impossible to shoot down (many air-to-air missles only travel about as fast). The point being, shooting down the space shuttle at that point would have been basically impossible even for "the world's only superpower", let alone a terrorist organization with limited resources and expertese.
Now, I won't even begin to go into the fallacies in your bigoted statements about muslims. Suffice it to say they are even more incorrect. I hope that your message was just an insensative troll and that you don't actually feel that way.
You can find a thorough discussion of the facts here
As to the amount of the damages, if you accept the premise that McDonalds was at fault then suggesting that she got too much is foolish if you have any idea what the hell punitive damages are for. Punitive damages are not determined by what the plaintif deserves but as punishment for the defendant to deter him from such behavior. McDonalds is a huge corporation, so it would take a huge amount of money (say, hmmm, a million dollars) to make any difference to them and deter them from keeping their coffee so rediculously hot.
People would probably click ok, because they probably have little idea what SSL certs do. That doesn't make them idiots, it just makes them non-geeks maybe. I think at best most uses have some idea that "secure" sites and "encrytion" somehow hide the data so that others can't read it. I doubt they've ever given much throught to authentication or "man in the middle" attacks. Not everyone is a computer geek, but that doesn't make them stupid. People in a society largly trust things because others say they are safe, and this is a reasonable thing to do, in general. We all do it, accept it.
Before you go calling NASA a glorified jobs program, remember that NASA also has scientific missions not directly related to manned space flight. These scientific segments, such as most of the activity as NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, do a lot of scientific work that is very valuable to the scientific community, obviously especially astronomers. Projects such as the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center provide invaluable reseach tools to scientists. Another example is the Laser Interferometry Space Antenna project, which will be invaluable to physicists in testing Einstein's theory of general relativity, cosmological theories, and possibly "theories of everything".
While I think there are some valid goals for manned space flight, and I think that getting man into space can also have positive social effects, many things like the Internation Space Station have very questionable scientific value. This is clear to many inside NASA as well, but in the case of the ISS this has more to do with the fact that budget cutting in congress cut out most of the valid scientific componants of the mission as to expensive. So, first of all, don't blame all of NASA for the failing of the manned space flight program, and second don't think that many of the people within NASA aren't just as frustrated as those on the outside.
I beleive it's an allusion to comedian Yakov Smirnoff of 80s fame. Back then he had a one dimensional routine about the absurdities of the failing USSR, where many of the jokes began with what you quote. Why the latest slashdot crazy about it, I don't know, though I seem to remember it being mentioned in some post recently.
Well, I guess this isn't really the forum for testimonials and discussion of the quality of different ISPs, but you can go to Broadband Reports (aka DSL reports) to get a lot of comparisons and customer experiences. That will hopefully be a bit more representative.
Briefly, I will say that I've been a Speakeasy customer for over 2 years now and they are great. Our connection (from the DC POP) is almost never down, and we get exactly the advertised speed 608 down/128 up consistantly. Speakeasy is also a cool company, not only for the reason stated in this article, but also because they host an rpmfind server and various other services to the online community. Also, unlike many other ISPs they support multiple computers on one connection (of course you can always have this, but some ISPs at least used to not want to give more than one IP per connection, so you'd be forced to do NAT), and they support Linux as far as I know (I've never called/emailed with any Linux support questions). The only real fault I can think of is that their billing is a bit weird and there have been a mistake or two. On the other hand, they were always quickly cleared up with no trouble.
In short, Speakeasy rocks! You can choose Speakeasy and support all their geek-friendly policies and efforts, OR you can choose the local telco and support monopoly and a future of deminishing freedom and choice online.
As I said in my original post, when comparing Mozilla and Opera on my Celeron 800 Mhz laptop, I found that Opera was considerably faster, but as I also meantioned I'm not sure of the origin of the difference. Clearly you need statistical data to really make claims about which is faster for the average user (and define "faster" further than just "it seems faster"), so the difference for me might be based on some pecularity of the combination of the versions I used, the OS, etc.
I will also agree that performance is obviously going to depend on what versions you're using. When I did my comparison, I was using the the latest Windows versions of Opera (Opera 6.x) and the latest stable binary of Mozilla, downloaded from their respective websites (this was say about a month ago). I recently added RAM to my system and found that helped Mozilla quite a bit, so perhaps it was utilizing virtual memory more (or less wisely) before.
Another thing that would effect the perception of speed is how fast your connection is. Obviously if you have a slow connection you aren't going to notice the time it takes to process the info once it gets to your computer. And this doesn't just come down to bandwidth, I think, but also the latency. The point is that I have a pretty good broadband connection, myself, so when I follow a link I expect the page to pop up quite quickly. It does with Opera, it doesn't do quite as well with Mozilla. If I were on a modem I'm sure I wouldn't notice, and even on broadband with high latency I think the difference would be less noticable. But I will admit that the different is fairly small, and whether it matters is to some degree and issue of browsing habits and your tolerance level. On my older computer (a PI 233 with only 64 MB of RAM), though it was a huge difference. Opera performed respectably, whereas Mozilla was sluggish. So the difference is small with old hardware, with ancient hardware it is more noticable.
Basically, I don't have a lot of money to spend on hardware. I can usually afford my new hardware when I really need it, but I'd like to get the most out of it. So the way I see it is that I'd rather use slimmer software like Opera so that I don't need to shell out quite as soon. With computer prices these days, I imagine this is not an issue for a lot people.
This probably also depends on what you do with your computer most of the time. If you use software that is consistantly much more demanding than the latest web browswers (3D games, rendering, design, etc.), then the difference in web browser performance is immaterial. If web browsing is one of the major uses of your computer, then web browser performance is a lot more pivotal.
First point: CPU cycles and memory required to render a web page probably are irrelivent if you have a Pentium 4 1-2 Ghz CPU and 512 MB or a gig of RAM, but not all of us do. Personally, I don't use IE because I don't like supporting MS (by numbers if not by money) and I don't like all the security holes so I can't compare to IE directly, but I can compare to Mozilla. On older, slower machines with less RAM Opera is a life saver. I have an older system with a Celeron 800 and 256 MB of RAM, and tried Mozilla for a couple of weeks. There were a lot of things I liked about Mozilla, but I found that pages came up more slowly and more resources were used by Mozilla, so I stuck with Opera. This can also be an issue not only if you're machine is slow, but also if you just tend to have a LOT of applications open simultaneously. On even older systems the differenece is much more pronounced. If you have an old system you want to make useful as a web terminal, your choices are basically Opera and Links.A last note on render speed: This only matters if you're on a fast connection, since on a slow one render speed is insignificant compared to load time. But if you're on a good broadband connection, this CAN matter.
Second Point: Resource usage seems to scale much better with the number of pages viewed in Opera than in Mozilla. If you're like me when you browse the web you often have 10 pages open at once, maybe more, so the browser that deals better with this situation is clearly preferable. I don't really know why this is, or if it is a percularity of the versions I'm using, but on my system Opera has this advantage.
Third point: Opera also has a lot of advantages in terms of user interface. It was out in front of Mozilla in using MDI. The extensive use of hotkeys, mouse gestures (also ahead of Mozilla), etc. contribute to an interface that is designed for ease of use and efficiency. Mozilla does have a lot of nice features, though, and I think it does compete well in this aspect.
In summary, Opera consumes less resources than Mozilla and renders pages faster. This may not make a difference if you have a top of the line computer, but it does if you have a system with fewer free resources. Mozilla does compete well in terms of features, however IE does not. Opera is also much more secure than IE, and plus it's not part of the evil empire.;)
This might be a good idea, for several reasons, mostly that it might encourage real competition in the market. And there are legitamate reasons, like security and interoperability, to persue this path, but it might have many less desirable effects.
First, imagine a government that uses software and formats that are incompatable with what 99% of the rest of people use, becuase that might well be the situation. Certainly, alternative applications make every effort to read files or data from the latest greatest MS software, but since MS is famous for keeping you guessing with the formats, effectively, the government might often not be able to read documents from the private sector (or the IE only web pages). That would add to buerocratic nightmares.
Also, though I certainly don't agree with the idea that free software is anti-business, I think we do have to ask, might not there be a lot of places where the federal government could save by making a product for themselves? But do we really want the government competing with the private sector? That hardly seems like fair competition. On the other hand, in cases like the postal service this is the status quo. So certainly there's no problem in getting other software, but we probably don't want the government in the business of writing software (for purposes where software already exists), as some people seem to be suggesting.
The biggest reason this may be a bad idea: Bill for President. I mean, hey, if the government turns on MS, then the best solution for MS would be to become one with the government. I mean, Gates has the money and the PR department.
Oh, a short addendum as far as "electrogravity" and grand unification. EM fields can cause space-time curvature (as far as I'm aware), but the energy of the field required is far beyond what this apparatus could supply. Pretty much everything having to do with grand unification has to do with high energy effects, which would not be seen in this sort of experiment. So there are very good reasons to beleive that this experiment should have nothing to do with grand unification. Again, it would require very convincing evidence to claim otherwise.
This certainly smacks of pseudoscience. It's not the fact that it claims a new effect (not previously accepted by mainstream science) that makes is pseudoscience. It's the fact that details are light, confirming independant work is non-existant, and primarly the fact that they jump to the most outlandish conclusion first. In real scientific work, you first rule out all the explainations based on previously understood phenomina before you claim you've found a new phenominon. Also, you don't try to present new, only marginally accepted (or completely unaccepted) theories as incontrivertable fact. This "build your own" site seems to give sketchy details about the science and experimental details and claims completely unaccepted theories as fact. That is why they are pseudoscientific. No reasonable effort has been made to rule out other explainations.
I'll also point out that no matter what crazy mechanism you claim for the drive, the idea of it being reactionless would violate conservation of momentum, something which NO other theory does and which goes against common sense; thus, it would require extraordinary proof, which is not provided. I mean, for one thing, they could simply have tested the thing in an air-tight enclosure set on a scale, measuring weight. If it was truely "reactionless", then when the device took off, its weight would be effectively gone and the system inside the enclosure would get lighter. They haven't shown this, and I have a good idea why. Sounds unreasonable, doesn't it?
In actuality, I think this is, as others have observed, an ion drive of a sort. The high potential between the foil and the wire on the device cause charge distribution on the foil, causing the part of the foil at the bottom of the craft to accumulate a bulk of negative charge. The fact that it's a sharp edge (thin foil), makes it easy disipate this charge by releasing ions there. There are many classroom science demos that demonstrate this with a high voltage applied to a sharp metal point. They claim it's amazing that it still works in vacuum, but it really isn't. As long as it's attached to an external power supply, the power supply feeds in charge which is used essentially as a propellant. Even without an external power supply, as long as ions of the opposite charge are also released, in order to avoid a net charge. Ion drives have been used for thrusters in space for a while now.
Now that explaination may be wrong. Explaining it isn't the point. The point is, I wouldn't beleive it's antigravity or anything similar until I'm satisfied that all mundane explainations have been ruled out. Jumping to that conclusion is just pseudoscience. Keep an open mind, but not so open that you let your brain fall out.
Well, things like industrial espionage are apparently fairly common, and industrial sabotage is not un-heard of. Thought it may seem like a "conspiracy theory" it would not be without precedant for the RIAA to hire someone to sabotage Morpheus. They are not competing in the normal sense, but the RIAA certainly sees them as competing interests. Furthermore, it would be a very expediant way to avoid a long, expensive legal battle. Finally, it would seem that the RIAA and the MPAA are willing to use almost any means necessary to stop file sharing, mp3s, and the like, so it wouldn't seem entirely out of character. Besides, wasn't this the sort of thing they were trying to get legislation passed for? To have the right to hack into your computer to remedy infringements of their intellectual property rights.
Where in that snippet does it say that checking is no longer done client side?
Well, really the point is that it doesn't mention one way or another; thus, you have agreed to either. It would now be acceptable for the OS to upload a bunch of config info to MS.
The snippet Slashdot has reads "may automatically check the version of the Product and/or its components that you are utilizing [...]" So yes, it sounds like checking is done for the express purpose of system upgrades -- The Product and/or its components. There some other snippet you were referring to? Because that one shows you to be pretty much 100% wrong.
No, what that says is that it will only be checking the version and componants of "the Product" (presumably Windows XP plus whatever apps they decide to declare "part of the OS"), but it does NOT say anything like, "for the purpose of upgrading the system." It only says what it can check and what it can then do (download and upgrade), but it doesn't specify under what circumstances such a check can be performed. It seems there's nothing to rule out a program that contacts XP machines over the internet and gets them to send MS all sorts of info about config and componants as part of a random scan for piracy, as long as all it does is get version and componant information and download nothing but "upgrades". THAT is my point.
I try to read the EULAs on the software I use, but realistically I only probably read 10% of them. Every damned peice of software comes with one, and most are quite lengthy. Also, consider that sometimes it takes a fair knowledge of computers to even understand the potential problems certain parts of an agreement might pose. But basically it comes down to this: The EULAs are too long, too complex, and too numerous to read all of them in their entirity, for most of us anyway. And if people start finding stuff they object to in them, well companies can just start making them longer and more complex. I'd say that you should try to anticipate which programs might have troublesome EULAs and read those, but in the end, the only real protection is that someone, somewhere will read it and post any glaring problems somewhere like/. to show the rest of us.
It's my hope that, in the future, there could be legislation to force standards for EULAs that makes it possible for any user to be presented with all the vital information in a reasonable length of time. A good start would be a maximum length cap or a summary requirement. Until then, we may just have to start hacking out EULA parsing scripts in Perl.:)
Sure, this does seem to refer to the update function, but in the EULA you don't seem to agree to inspection of your computer in that specific context; thus, three years down the road, if MS decides they want to crack down on piracy, they already have you permission to scan your computer. Convenient, eh?
Now, you might say, "but how will they do that?" Well, either they already have a componant for such things in the OS (thinking ahead) or else they use one of their patented security holes. It may sound alarmist, but basically, if you give them the unconditional right to see what software is on your computer, given their concerns about piracy, don't you think they'll eventually want to use it?
It's true that for Windows Update to work, it must determine what versions of what programs are on your computer; however, in the past is explicitly said that no information was transmitted to MS in the process, presumably because all the checking was done client side. Now, obviously, if MS looked at what you downloaded they could make a guess at what you have, but such snooping could at least be said to be an invasion of privacy. Now they have made you explicitly say that such snooping is ok. Moreover, in this snippet of the agreement, at least, it does not say such snooping will always be for the express purpose of system upgrades. Finally, you always had the option of not using Windows Update, but it sounds like you have to agree to this now just to use the OS. So I think this is new, different, and shitty.
Even better than cell phones, a new way your friendly neighborhood terrorist can collect and relay real-time, first person, intelligence on security setup, procedured, and deployment. I mean, if you can afford something powerfull enough to run something with SSL, SSH, PGP, or a VPN client, then you even have an encrypted channel. This seems to be another indication, in my opinion, that all of this stuff about airport security is just for show. I wish they would take it more seriously.
I've been using Trillian for a while. It's a free (like beer) mult-medium chat client for Windows. The newest version supports 128-bit blowfish encryption for chatting over AIM and ICQ networks with other Trillian clients. This is achieved by using a key exchange method like Openssh. It is far from mature. As the newsforge article notes about other such systems, it lacks the authentication and key management aspects, so it is not really very secure yet; however, those could be achieved with relative ease, I beleive, and the general method might be a lot more viable for a transition from current insecure systems.
The point is that the way Trillian does it, all messages are encrypted into ascii-armored "messages" that are sent through preexisting messging protocols. A new protocol would probably be better, but it will be hard to get people to switch. Plus you need servers, and you will likely run into the same problems of the big companies working against interoperability. With Trillian, I can talk securely to those who care and have the client, and still talk to everybody else, and it doesn't take special servers, so we don't have to start our own or wait for AOL to finally think that security might be a good thing.
My point is not, "Hey everybody, switch to Trillian," but rather that the system of changing the client operation and leaving the protocol the same may not be as good as a completely redesigned protocol, but it may be more workable....However, if you use Windows, do check Trillian out!
I think this is a good point. I mean, legally, it could be argued that constitutional rights only apply to citizens, but ethically, wouldn't it be against all the found principles of the constitution to treat any human being with such disregard for their basic human rights. I seem to remember some other, old scrap of paper saying something like, "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable human rights..." Notice, human rights, not american. Again, this is not a legal arguement, but an ethical one. Aren't we betraying those founding principles by setting up such secret courts.
While I agree that it is vitial that people contact their representatives with their concerns and support organizations like the ACLU and the EFF, another thing you can do to defy mass survailance efforts like Carnivore is to use encryption whenever possible online. I'm sure there are other/.ers out there who know a lot more about the subject (please speak up!), but I wanted to add what information I can for those who might not already know. Here are a few suggestions of ways I know to use encryption:
Email
You can encrypt your email communications with others who are also willing to get the right tools. Probably the easies tool is PGP (there's also an international page), or for the free software crowd GPG. PGP makes this pretty easy to use under windows with almost any program with its encrypt clipboard contents feature, but there are also plugins for verious email programs.
Terminal Sessions/Telent
Most people probably know about it, but there's ssh, openssh, and if you're using Windows check out Tera Term and its ssh extension.
Instant Messaging
My appologies to the *nix crowd, but I don't yet know much about instant messaging on those platforms (soon); however, if you use windows I have seen several instant messaging clients that support encrypted chatting. I suggest Trillian, which is awsome anyway, free, and has encryption features. As far as *nix goes, I'd check out the big ones (e.g. Jabber) and if it isn't in there by default, look for plugins.
This certainly doesn't solve all the problems. The biggest is web browsing. You can use anonymous web browsing tools such as Anonymizer, but that is admittedly kind of a pain. I don't have any good suggestions there. I'd be interested in any other ways others have found to incorperate encryption into their online communications.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of science articles from The New York Times, especially linked to on slashdot, but when I read the articles I generally think they are awful. The reason is that reading them gives you no substantive understanding of the science that is going on. They often seem to choose subjects like string theory or loop quantum gravity, which are extremely complex, and then try to explain them at an elementary school science level. This is simply a futile endevor and they end up saying basically nothing. I am working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics and even I can't often tell from the article what the theory claims, and often I know of several theories they might be talking about and am not even sure which one it is because the coverage is so vague. I can't see how anyone could read these and getting anything of use from them. Frankly I don't know how you could explain string theory to someone at such a basic level, even in an entire book, much less a news paper article. Especially when even many physicists (myself included) don't know that much about it.
I think they should really focus on science they can explain, and make sure to explain how these things are based in fact and come from experimental evidence. This is the basis of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Bob Park, a frequent crusader against pseudoscience, hypothesises that these insubstantial, vague accounts of outlandish modern physics that are often given to laymen make science sound basically indistinguishable from pseudoscience, and thus help bolster beleif in pseudoscience. I'm not sure I beleive this, but I do think it's a possibility. A good example is an author I heard interviewed who wrote a book about how ESP could be based on quantum entanglement. This is an absurd claim if you know anything about entanglement and quantum decoherence, but does sound sort of reasonable if you just take some very vague notions about quantum mechanics (namely, it's hell-a-weird).
Does good science make interesting journalism? Well, I think a lot of it can if it's well told, because science is fundementally a mystery story, and most people like mysteries. Just look at the success of CSI. I think we must stick to work that has widely acknoledged validity, though, and to work which is experimentally grounded. We must also get through that when you read "A Breif History of Time" you are not getting the whole picture. Gernally, being ignorant of something is far less hazzardous when you're aware of your ignorance.
I will admit to knowing little about patent law, but it seems like besides disallowing overly broad patents and blocking people from patenting things that are obvious there are two rules that could help things:
Both these ideas have their problems. For one, it might be difficult for small entities to do the required litigation to defend patents this way. But it seems like this would be the direction to go. I would guess provisions similar to these already exist (especially the second), are they just not enforced?
Seriously, anyone who bitches about these sorts of restrictive policies should put their money where their mouth is and switch to a provider like Speakeasy . Not only are they geek friendly when it comes to multiple machines, but they also have a lot of other good projects including the following:
Not to mention the fact that they offer at least some Linux support (examples here and here). I don't know the extent of it, because honesty I don't ask my ISP for help with my OSs often. Also, when I got DSL they offered static IPs when most of the other providers I looked at in my area only seemed to offer dynamic for residential customers.
You might be asking yourself, "Does this guy work for Speakeasy?" No. But I am a satisfied customer, and I am afraid that good ISPs like this one will be pushed out by bigger companies (*cough*Verizon*cough*) who offer their customers a much more restricted set of options and don't give back to the interenet community (if you beleive in such a thing). All this because these other companies can offer their servies a few bucks cheaper a month or with a little better initial perks, or just because the other companies have better name recognition and more marketing dollars. That and there are many savvy users at these less friendly ISPs who know they can slip by restrictions (at least in the short term), so they opt for convenience and saving a few bucks over promoting the behavior they'd like to see and options all users can take advantage of.
So, if you're concerned by the increasing restrictiveness of ISPs, use your wallet to make a statment by switching to one of the good guys.
I'll give you a few reasons:
Now, I won't even begin to go into the fallacies in your bigoted statements about muslims. Suffice it to say they are even more incorrect. I hope that your message was just an insensative troll and that you don't actually feel that way.
You can find a thorough discussion of the facts here
As to the amount of the damages, if you accept the premise that McDonalds was at fault then suggesting that she got too much is foolish if you have any idea what the hell punitive damages are for. Punitive damages are not determined by what the plaintif deserves but as punishment for the defendant to deter him from such behavior. McDonalds is a huge corporation, so it would take a huge amount of money (say, hmmm, a million dollars) to make any difference to them and deter them from keeping their coffee so rediculously hot.
People would probably click ok, because they probably have little idea what SSL certs do. That doesn't make them idiots, it just makes them non-geeks maybe. I think at best most uses have some idea that "secure" sites and "encrytion" somehow hide the data so that others can't read it. I doubt they've ever given much throught to authentication or "man in the middle" attacks. Not everyone is a computer geek, but that doesn't make them stupid. People in a society largly trust things because others say they are safe, and this is a reasonable thing to do, in general. We all do it, accept it.
NPR had a story about this on Morning Edition today (01/21). Here is a link directly to the real audio stream of the story.
Before you go calling NASA a glorified jobs program, remember that NASA also has scientific missions not directly related to manned space flight. These scientific segments, such as most of the activity as NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, do a lot of scientific work that is very valuable to the scientific community, obviously especially astronomers. Projects such as the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center provide invaluable reseach tools to scientists. Another example is the Laser Interferometry Space Antenna project, which will be invaluable to physicists in testing Einstein's theory of general relativity, cosmological theories, and possibly "theories of everything".
While I think there are some valid goals for manned space flight, and I think that getting man into space can also have positive social effects, many things like the Internation Space Station have very questionable scientific value. This is clear to many inside NASA as well, but in the case of the ISS this has more to do with the fact that budget cutting in congress cut out most of the valid scientific componants of the mission as to expensive. So, first of all, don't blame all of NASA for the failing of the manned space flight program, and second don't think that many of the people within NASA aren't just as frustrated as those on the outside.
I beleive it's an allusion to comedian Yakov Smirnoff of 80s fame. Back then he had a one dimensional routine about the absurdities of the failing USSR, where many of the jokes began with what you quote. Why the latest slashdot crazy about it, I don't know, though I seem to remember it being mentioned in some post recently.
See also
Well, I guess this isn't really the forum for testimonials and discussion of the quality of different ISPs, but you can go to Broadband Reports (aka DSL reports) to get a lot of comparisons and customer experiences. That will hopefully be a bit more representative.
Briefly, I will say that I've been a Speakeasy customer for over 2 years now and they are great. Our connection (from the DC POP) is almost never down, and we get exactly the advertised speed 608 down/128 up consistantly. Speakeasy is also a cool company, not only for the reason stated in this article, but also because they host an rpmfind server and various other services to the online community. Also, unlike many other ISPs they support multiple computers on one connection (of course you can always have this, but some ISPs at least used to not want to give more than one IP per connection, so you'd be forced to do NAT), and they support Linux as far as I know (I've never called/emailed with any Linux support questions). The only real fault I can think of is that their billing is a bit weird and there have been a mistake or two. On the other hand, they were always quickly cleared up with no trouble.
In short, Speakeasy rocks! You can choose Speakeasy and support all their geek-friendly policies and efforts, OR you can choose the local telco and support monopoly and a future of deminishing freedom and choice online.
As I said in my original post, when comparing Mozilla and Opera on my Celeron 800 Mhz laptop, I found that Opera was considerably faster, but as I also meantioned I'm not sure of the origin of the difference. Clearly you need statistical data to really make claims about which is faster for the average user (and define "faster" further than just "it seems faster"), so the difference for me might be based on some pecularity of the combination of the versions I used, the OS, etc.
I will also agree that performance is obviously going to depend on what versions you're using. When I did my comparison, I was using the the latest Windows versions of Opera (Opera 6.x) and the latest stable binary of Mozilla, downloaded from their respective websites (this was say about a month ago). I recently added RAM to my system and found that helped Mozilla quite a bit, so perhaps it was utilizing virtual memory more (or less wisely) before.
Another thing that would effect the perception of speed is how fast your connection is. Obviously if you have a slow connection you aren't going to notice the time it takes to process the info once it gets to your computer. And this doesn't just come down to bandwidth, I think, but also the latency. The point is that I have a pretty good broadband connection, myself, so when I follow a link I expect the page to pop up quite quickly. It does with Opera, it doesn't do quite as well with Mozilla. If I were on a modem I'm sure I wouldn't notice, and even on broadband with high latency I think the difference would be less noticable. But I will admit that the different is fairly small, and whether it matters is to some degree and issue of browsing habits and your tolerance level. On my older computer (a PI 233 with only 64 MB of RAM), though it was a huge difference. Opera performed respectably, whereas Mozilla was sluggish. So the difference is small with old hardware, with ancient hardware it is more noticable.
Basically, I don't have a lot of money to spend on hardware. I can usually afford my new hardware when I really need it, but I'd like to get the most out of it. So the way I see it is that I'd rather use slimmer software like Opera so that I don't need to shell out quite as soon. With computer prices these days, I imagine this is not an issue for a lot people.
This probably also depends on what you do with your computer most of the time. If you use software that is consistantly much more demanding than the latest web browswers (3D games, rendering, design, etc.), then the difference in web browser performance is immaterial. If web browsing is one of the major uses of your computer, then web browser performance is a lot more pivotal.
First point: CPU cycles and memory required to render a web page probably are irrelivent if you have a Pentium 4 1-2 Ghz CPU and 512 MB or a gig of RAM, but not all of us do. Personally, I don't use IE because I don't like supporting MS (by numbers if not by money) and I don't like all the security holes so I can't compare to IE directly, but I can compare to Mozilla. On older, slower machines with less RAM Opera is a life saver. I have an older system with a Celeron 800 and 256 MB of RAM, and tried Mozilla for a couple of weeks. There were a lot of things I liked about Mozilla, but I found that pages came up more slowly and more resources were used by Mozilla, so I stuck with Opera. This can also be an issue not only if you're machine is slow, but also if you just tend to have a LOT of applications open simultaneously. On even older systems the differenece is much more pronounced. If you have an old system you want to make useful as a web terminal, your choices are basically Opera and Links.A last note on render speed: This only matters if you're on a fast connection, since on a slow one render speed is insignificant compared to load time. But if you're on a good broadband connection, this CAN matter.
Second Point: Resource usage seems to scale much better with the number of pages viewed in Opera than in Mozilla. If you're like me when you browse the web you often have 10 pages open at once, maybe more, so the browser that deals better with this situation is clearly preferable. I don't really know why this is, or if it is a percularity of the versions I'm using, but on my system Opera has this advantage.
Third point: Opera also has a lot of advantages in terms of user interface. It was out in front of Mozilla in using MDI. The extensive use of hotkeys, mouse gestures (also ahead of Mozilla), etc. contribute to an interface that is designed for ease of use and efficiency. Mozilla does have a lot of nice features, though, and I think it does compete well in this aspect.
In summary, Opera consumes less resources than Mozilla and renders pages faster. This may not make a difference if you have a top of the line computer, but it does if you have a system with fewer free resources. Mozilla does compete well in terms of features, however IE does not. Opera is also much more secure than IE, and plus it's not part of the evil empire. ;)
This might be a good idea, for several reasons, mostly that it might encourage real competition in the market. And there are legitamate reasons, like security and interoperability, to persue this path, but it might have many less desirable effects.
First, imagine a government that uses software and formats that are incompatable with what 99% of the rest of people use, becuase that might well be the situation. Certainly, alternative applications make every effort to read files or data from the latest greatest MS software, but since MS is famous for keeping you guessing with the formats, effectively, the government might often not be able to read documents from the private sector (or the IE only web pages). That would add to buerocratic nightmares.
Also, though I certainly don't agree with the idea that free software is anti-business, I think we do have to ask, might not there be a lot of places where the federal government could save by making a product for themselves? But do we really want the government competing with the private sector? That hardly seems like fair competition. On the other hand, in cases like the postal service this is the status quo. So certainly there's no problem in getting other software, but we probably don't want the government in the business of writing software (for purposes where software already exists), as some people seem to be suggesting.
The biggest reason this may be a bad idea: Bill for President. I mean, hey, if the government turns on MS, then the best solution for MS would be to become one with the government. I mean, Gates has the money and the PR department.
...yeah the last part of was a joke...mostly.
Oh, a short addendum as far as "electrogravity" and grand unification. EM fields can cause space-time curvature (as far as I'm aware), but the energy of the field required is far beyond what this apparatus could supply. Pretty much everything having to do with grand unification has to do with high energy effects, which would not be seen in this sort of experiment. So there are very good reasons to beleive that this experiment should have nothing to do with grand unification. Again, it would require very convincing evidence to claim otherwise.
This certainly smacks of pseudoscience. It's not the fact that it claims a new effect (not previously accepted by mainstream science) that makes is pseudoscience. It's the fact that details are light, confirming independant work is non-existant, and primarly the fact that they jump to the most outlandish conclusion first. In real scientific work, you first rule out all the explainations based on previously understood phenomina before you claim you've found a new phenominon. Also, you don't try to present new, only marginally accepted (or completely unaccepted) theories as incontrivertable fact. This "build your own" site seems to give sketchy details about the science and experimental details and claims completely unaccepted theories as fact. That is why they are pseudoscientific. No reasonable effort has been made to rule out other explainations.
I'll also point out that no matter what crazy mechanism you claim for the drive, the idea of it being reactionless would violate conservation of momentum, something which NO other theory does and which goes against common sense; thus, it would require extraordinary proof, which is not provided. I mean, for one thing, they could simply have tested the thing in an air-tight enclosure set on a scale, measuring weight. If it was truely "reactionless", then when the device took off, its weight would be effectively gone and the system inside the enclosure would get lighter. They haven't shown this, and I have a good idea why. Sounds unreasonable, doesn't it?
In actuality, I think this is, as others have observed, an ion drive of a sort. The high potential between the foil and the wire on the device cause charge distribution on the foil, causing the part of the foil at the bottom of the craft to accumulate a bulk of negative charge. The fact that it's a sharp edge (thin foil), makes it easy disipate this charge by releasing ions there. There are many classroom science demos that demonstrate this with a high voltage applied to a sharp metal point. They claim it's amazing that it still works in vacuum, but it really isn't. As long as it's attached to an external power supply, the power supply feeds in charge which is used essentially as a propellant. Even without an external power supply, as long as ions of the opposite charge are also released, in order to avoid a net charge. Ion drives have been used for thrusters in space for a while now.
Now that explaination may be wrong. Explaining it isn't the point. The point is, I wouldn't beleive it's antigravity or anything similar until I'm satisfied that all mundane explainations have been ruled out. Jumping to that conclusion is just pseudoscience. Keep an open mind, but not so open that you let your brain fall out.
Well, things like industrial espionage are apparently fairly common, and industrial sabotage is not un-heard of. Thought it may seem like a "conspiracy theory" it would not be without precedant for the RIAA to hire someone to sabotage Morpheus. They are not competing in the normal sense, but the RIAA certainly sees them as competing interests. Furthermore, it would be a very expediant way to avoid a long, expensive legal battle. Finally, it would seem that the RIAA and the MPAA are willing to use almost any means necessary to stop file sharing, mp3s, and the like, so it wouldn't seem entirely out of character. Besides, wasn't this the sort of thing they were trying to get legislation passed for? To have the right to hack into your computer to remedy infringements of their intellectual property rights.
Where in that snippet does it say that checking is no longer done client side?
Well, really the point is that it doesn't mention one way or another; thus, you have agreed to either. It would now be acceptable for the OS to upload a bunch of config info to MS.
The snippet Slashdot has reads "may automatically check the version of the Product and/or its components that you are utilizing [...]" So yes, it sounds like checking is done for the express purpose of system upgrades -- The Product and/or its components. There some other snippet you were referring to? Because that one shows you to be pretty much 100% wrong.
No, what that says is that it will only be checking the version and componants of "the Product" (presumably Windows XP plus whatever apps they decide to declare "part of the OS"), but it does NOT say anything like, "for the purpose of upgrading the system." It only says what it can check and what it can then do (download and upgrade), but it doesn't specify under what circumstances such a check can be performed. It seems there's nothing to rule out a program that contacts XP machines over the internet and gets them to send MS all sorts of info about config and componants as part of a random scan for piracy, as long as all it does is get version and componant information and download nothing but "upgrades". THAT is my point.
I try to read the EULAs on the software I use, but realistically I only probably read 10% of them. Every damned peice of software comes with one, and most are quite lengthy. Also, consider that sometimes it takes a fair knowledge of computers to even understand the potential problems certain parts of an agreement might pose. But basically it comes down to this: The EULAs are too long, too complex, and too numerous to read all of them in their entirity, for most of us anyway. And if people start finding stuff they object to in them, well companies can just start making them longer and more complex. I'd say that you should try to anticipate which programs might have troublesome EULAs and read those, but in the end, the only real protection is that someone, somewhere will read it and post any glaring problems somewhere like /. to show the rest of us.
It's my hope that, in the future, there could be legislation to force standards for EULAs that makes it possible for any user to be presented with all the vital information in a reasonable length of time. A good start would be a maximum length cap or a summary requirement. Until then, we may just have to start hacking out EULA parsing scripts in Perl. :)
Sure, this does seem to refer to the update function, but in the EULA you don't seem to agree to inspection of your computer in that specific context; thus, three years down the road, if MS decides they want to crack down on piracy, they already have you permission to scan your computer. Convenient, eh?
Now, you might say, "but how will they do that?" Well, either they already have a componant for such things in the OS (thinking ahead) or else they use one of their patented security holes. It may sound alarmist, but basically, if you give them the unconditional right to see what software is on your computer, given their concerns about piracy, don't you think they'll eventually want to use it?
It's true that for Windows Update to work, it must determine what versions of what programs are on your computer; however, in the past is explicitly said that no information was transmitted to MS in the process, presumably because all the checking was done client side. Now, obviously, if MS looked at what you downloaded they could make a guess at what you have, but such snooping could at least be said to be an invasion of privacy. Now they have made you explicitly say that such snooping is ok. Moreover, in this snippet of the agreement, at least, it does not say such snooping will always be for the express purpose of system upgrades. Finally, you always had the option of not using Windows Update, but it sounds like you have to agree to this now just to use the OS. So I think this is new, different, and shitty.
Even better than cell phones, a new way your friendly neighborhood terrorist can collect and relay real-time, first person, intelligence on security setup, procedured, and deployment. I mean, if you can afford something powerfull enough to run something with SSL, SSH, PGP, or a VPN client, then you even have an encrypted channel. This seems to be another indication, in my opinion, that all of this stuff about airport security is just for show. I wish they would take it more seriously.
I should say, SILC sounds like a fine replacement for IRC. I was simply addressing the idea of using it for "instant messaging".
I've been using Trillian for a while. It's a free (like beer) mult-medium chat client for Windows. The newest version supports 128-bit blowfish encryption for chatting over AIM and ICQ networks with other Trillian clients. This is achieved by using a key exchange method like Openssh. It is far from mature. As the newsforge article notes about other such systems, it lacks the authentication and key management aspects, so it is not really very secure yet; however, those could be achieved with relative ease, I beleive, and the general method might be a lot more viable for a transition from current insecure systems.
The point is that the way Trillian does it, all messages are encrypted into ascii-armored "messages" that are sent through preexisting messging protocols. A new protocol would probably be better, but it will be hard to get people to switch. Plus you need servers, and you will likely run into the same problems of the big companies working against interoperability. With Trillian, I can talk securely to those who care and have the client, and still talk to everybody else, and it doesn't take special servers, so we don't have to start our own or wait for AOL to finally think that security might be a good thing.
My point is not, "Hey everybody, switch to Trillian," but rather that the system of changing the client operation and leaving the protocol the same may not be as good as a completely redesigned protocol, but it may be more workable. ...However, if you use Windows, do check Trillian out!
I think this is a good point. I mean, legally, it could be argued that constitutional rights only apply to citizens, but ethically, wouldn't it be against all the found principles of the constitution to treat any human being with such disregard for their basic human rights. I seem to remember some other, old scrap of paper saying something like, "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable human rights ..." Notice, human rights, not american. Again, this is not a legal arguement, but an ethical one. Aren't we betraying those founding principles by setting up such secret courts.
While I agree that it is vitial that people contact their representatives with their concerns and support organizations like the ACLU and the EFF, another thing you can do to defy mass survailance efforts like Carnivore is to use encryption whenever possible online. I'm sure there are other /.ers out there who know a lot more about the subject (please speak up!), but I wanted to add what information I can for those who might not already know. Here are a few suggestions of ways I know to use encryption:
You can encrypt your email communications with others who are also willing to get the right tools. Probably the easies tool is PGP (there's also an international page), or for the free software crowd GPG. PGP makes this pretty easy to use under windows with almost any program with its encrypt clipboard contents feature, but there are also plugins for verious email programs.
Most people probably know about it, but there's ssh, openssh, and if you're using Windows check out Tera Term and its ssh extension.
My appologies to the *nix crowd, but I don't yet know much about instant messaging on those platforms (soon); however, if you use windows I have seen several instant messaging clients that support encrypted chatting. I suggest Trillian, which is awsome anyway, free, and has encryption features. As far as *nix goes, I'd check out the big ones (e.g. Jabber) and if it isn't in there by default, look for plugins.
This certainly doesn't solve all the problems. The biggest is web browsing. You can use anonymous web browsing tools such as Anonymizer, but that is admittedly kind of a pain. I don't have any good suggestions there. I'd be interested in any other ways others have found to incorperate encryption into their online communications.