Your first sentence and the ones following it don't seem to follow each other. At first you imply that global warming doesn't really exist -- I disagree, but I understand how this could be a concern. Certainly, we wouldn't want to take any sort of drastic action before we knew what we were getting into.
But it's your second sentence that really bothers me: "We'll probably end up detonating some sort of nuclear bomb to try to counter-act the forces of nature." This sounds a lot like a sort of pastorialist, head-in-sand point of view; in fact if you replace "nature" with "God," it starts to sound downright medeival.
If we knew that some sort of disastrous climate change was imminent, and if we had the means to prevent it, don't you think we should? To hell with "nature" or 'God' or anybody else's 'plan;' if it's going to be bad for us, then surely we ought to do something to prevent it, if it be in our power to do so. In the face of an existential threat to our species, certainly any action ought to be justified if it stands a chance of preventing our demise.
I'm not saying that we should start throwing nukes down volcanos tomorrow, but I'm just saying that it seems like a refusal to "counteract nature" could easily turn us into nothing but a bunch of fossils. It's a rejection not only of technology (since what have we been doing as a species since we first discovered fire, but counteracting nature?), but of humanity in general, since what distinguishes us from animals is in large part our ability to not be ruled by nature, by our ability to choose to shape our own environment to suit ourselves.
I realize you were making a joke, but I just thought I'd point out that what I was trying to get at in my original post, is that it's impractical to carry around as much energy stored electrochemically in batteries, as you can store in the form of combustible hydrocarbons.
So if your battery runs out, it's probably not practical for you to just keep shoving new batteries in it for very long, because the energy density just isn't there. You would probably have a tough time carrying the battery equivalent of a few liters of methanol or LPG.
A person could easily carry around enough butane or methanol to keep a computer running for a long time; thus a wall socket is not necessary. And although you jest, although I've never seen a butane socket, natural gas lines are widely available in urban areas (although if you want to store it, you'd need liquefaction apparatus), and ethanol retail outlets aren't hard to find in most areas either. (Actually, in my area, they're already run by the government...)
Just for reference, the energy density of methanol is around 22 MJ/kg [1], while a good LiIon battery is around 150 Wh/kg [2], or around 540 kJ/kg; that's a difference of over 40x. So you could stray a lot further from existing infrastructure with a "portable" device powered by methanol than you could on batteries.
our current system works just fine unless you simply want shit for free and are willing to illegally distribute intellectual property over the internet.
Um, except that's exactly what people want, and that's exactly what they're doing.
I think that was always part of the "deal" with music-rental services. If they go under, or you stop paying -- if either one of you decides to terminate the arrangement, in other words -- your music becomes unplayable, just like those old Divx discs.
Now if you're talking about music that you've bought at $0.99 a song, I would think that it would keep working, but I suppose you never know. I guess if I was in your position, I'd be burning it out to Audio CDs and then re-ripping it to some lossless DRM-free format as fast as I could.
I really hope that Napster goes out with a bang, if for no other reason than to teach 500,000 people who really owns their music.
Or it could be that he moderated at one point, got bad meta-moderations (for whatever reason) and was subsequently blacklisted from moderating.
I think this is what's happened to me; I used to get points very regularly, and then all of a sudden about 18 months ago stopped getting them, and haven't had any since.
On the bright side, I spend more time reading and writing comments now than I ever did when I was moderating regularly.
Well if you have two of them at two known positions, you could probably get a direction based on the time difference between the signal's arrival at the two stations. Or maybe you could do something with measuring the signal's phase shift. I've never sat down and worked out the problem but it seems like it could be done, on paper at least.
Some Googling reveals that somebody at least has thought of the same concept (and got a patent on it already, although it was filed in 1977, so I think that means it's expired now), no idea if they've ever put it into practice: Determining azimuth of a transponder by measuring a plurality of phase shifts. Tomasi, Jean-Pierre, United States Patent 4,110,754.
I think you hit it right on the head when you said "If they were exercising proper procedures," because that's a mighty big if.
I don't think it's hard to imagine that at least at the outset of the conflict, the Israeli soldiers might have gone into the conflict with a very distorted idea of the enemy; one that was incapable of doing anything more than listening to the latest propaganda on a 20-year-old shortwave set and cleaning their AK-47.
Thus, like the Germans with their Enigma, they got lax on the procedures, and were compromised as a result.
However, unlike the Germans, I suspect that the Israelis will get another shot, and will probably not be so cavalier next time.
I agree with everything you said, although I doubt that the U.S. really has many export restrictions on encryption gear to Israel, except insofar as they're worried that the gear could end up in somebody else's hands besides Israel and compromise the U.S.'s own capabilities.
This is because it's not like Israel is that far behind the U.S. in terms of mathematics, computers, or encryption, so not exporting to them wouldn't change their strategic posture much at all, and would just deny business to a U.S. corporation in favor of a homegrown one (e.g. IMI).
If there are concerns about exporting to Israel, it's probably more because folks here are afraid that the stuff will be resold and eventually make it to countries that are hostile to the U.S., not really because anyone fears Israel directly. After all, although it's never been publicly admitted, I think there's a very good chance that the U.S. has given Israel nuclear weapons -- I doubt we'd bicker about a few lines of encryption code (that they could probably replicate domestically) if they wanted to buy it.
As to the idiocy of giving away your capabilities if you've successfully broken your enemy's communication system, you're totally right (and yes, it is Singh that goes into much detail about this in his book). However, it may be that Hezbollah either doesn't have the internal safeguards to prevent this type of leak, or is more interested in the public opinion to be gained through bragging than in actual operational superiority. (Or, is so convinced of their own superiority that they don't care, i.e. they've fallen victim to their own rhetoric; this doesn't seem implausible.)
Based on the past few conflicts and the reading I've done about them, the Israelis strike me as being pretty good at doing tough self-assessments and changing the way they fight in order to avoid repeating mistakes. If there is another Israeli/Hezbollah conflict (and I have no reason to believe that there won't be), I would look for some very different tactics on the part of Israel. This is the way war works: you see the greatest changes to tactics and strategy as a result of defeat or near-defeat than you do from victory.
can you imagine plugging a butane canister into your portable?
Yes.
It makes a whole lot more sense to me than just cursing as the machine shuts down because the battery is depleted, and you're nowhere near a power outlet.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair; there are lots of systems that don't much like getting dirt in them, but that's what filters are for. Compared to a horse, an internal-combustion engine probably seems like it's really prone to problems -- after all, a horse doesn't mind if there's some dirt in its feed, but put the same amount of dirt into a tank of gas and run it directly into an engine, and you'll probably have issues. Hence, fuel and oil filters.
They're not unsolvable problems. I assume that actual production units of a micro-turbine would have various types of fuel filtering, and apart from the filters, would exist in a hermetically-sealed case.
Think about hard drives: a few specks of dust in there would result in data loss, and it gets worse all the time -- as the data density increases, the amount you could lose due to one dirt particle grows. But properly ruggedized, there's no reason why they can't be used in the field.
Once the initial technology is developed, the encapsulation into a usable consumer (or military) device is QED by comparison; there are a lot of companies who are pretty good at that sort of thing, so I really think it's the least of the problems this would encounter.
Google News doesn't republish the information with their own ads; all they do is provide you a list of links from traditional news sources' sites along with the first sentence or two of the article, so you can click on it. To read any full article on Google News, you end up looking at the publishing newspaper's advertising. (Unless you're running AdBlock, of course.)
As far as I can tell, the newspaper's complaint actually isn't even about Google News, it's about Google's cache on the regular search results page. They didn't have a robots.txt file, so Google cached the page. Now they're upset about that, but it's pretty much established procedure on the internet that unless you put up a robots.txt file, spiders can and will cache your page; this is how Google works, it's how the Internet Archive works, and I'm sure it's how lots of other search engines work.
Rather than putting up a robots.txt file like everybody else, these newspapers decided to try and go to court and squeeze some money out of Google, and as a result Google dumped them from their systems completely; the cache, regular search results, and Google News.
Personally I don't have much sympathy for the newspapers; they're hanging on to a dying business model that's rapidly becoming obsolete, and history has shown that such stances are generally not productive. They need to either find a way to work with the new ways that people want to get content, or get out of the way. It seems that intentionally or not, they're choosing the latter.
That's pretty much what the whole article and the lawsuit are about: either they're idiots, or they have some ulterior motive.
I think that they were probably hoping to use the suit and rulings as leverage in order to wring some money out of Google, and that's why they didn't take the cheap and simple way out and just use a robots.txt file, which I have to imagine even the most backwards webmaster has heard about.
Frankly I foresee this sort of thing becoming all too common in the near future; as people move from traditional sources of news and information (particularly newspapers) to more timely and convenient methods (the internet), you're going to see a desperate effort on the part of traditional media outlets to get a cut of the pie, lest they go out of business. In my opinion, they don't deserve a cut and should probably be allowed to wither; if their demise means that there's no content for Google to display on the news.google.com page, then Google can go out and hire journalists to discover it. Or they'll just buy it from the wire services like the newspapers did anyway, meaning that you'll finally have the system split as it always should have been: you have people dedicated to researching and reporting the news (e.g., Reuters), and then you have other people who are dedicated to packaging together that news into things that customers want to read, and delivering it to them (e.g., Google News, CNN).
The newspaper as a business model is obsolete; there is no reason why the same organization that actually has the reporters needs to or ought to be the same organization that does the publication.
Wednesday evening is traditionally Consumer Night and a highlight will be the "Political Pull" milking competition, with members of the House Agriculture Committee competing with members of the Senate Agriculture Committee to see who can produce the most milk.
I would imagine that most Senators would be experts at teat-suckling, that being their major function these days.
I'm generally as cynical about the government as anybody else here on Slashdot, but I think there are certain situations where it makes sense for the goverment to intervene.
Those cases mostly arise when the market either has already, or threatens to create a situation that prevents future competition in the market. For this reason, you have anti-trust laws and lots of other regulations; the goal of them is to create a basically level playing field on which various firms can compete for business. This is how the system is supposed to work. Let the market work when it can, but when it won't produce the desired outcome on its own (where the desired outcome is determined through the democratic process), then there's a place for regulation to step in and create the environment where it will.
Now I think we can all agree that the outcome that most users want is not one where there is nothing but a series of regional monopolies, dispensing to users your telephone, cable TV, and internet, and charging exorbitant rates to do so, far in excess of what other people in other parts of the world pay. Therefore, if this seems to be the likely result of noninterference, then the government has a mandate to inject itself and regulate.
Although the government does have a history of mucking things up where it's not needed, history does show that there are times when regulation by some sort of governing body is both necessary and in the long run, beneficial. (E.g., securities markets.*) Also, governments have been engaging in infrastructure-development projects since probably the beginning of recorded history, and in the 21st century, the Internet is as much an important economic thoroughfare as the Interstate Highways are. Allowing a small number of companies to control and manipulate our electronic "tubes," would be akin to handing over control of the highways to Ford, GM, and Chrysler in 1955, so that they could prohibit Japanese cars from driving on them.
* - For a pro-capitalist analysis of the development of the U.S. securities markets prior to regulation, I recommend reading The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street; I think most people who advocate complete deregulation aren't quite appreciative of how rough things were prior to its introduction.
there is a northern country (forgot which) who has a party, which wants to legalize sex with children. so there is the question: is the "pirate party" nearer to marxism than to a fellony?
And to put it quite bluntly, this is perfectly fine. The point of a democracy is that it responds to the will and wishes of its citizens; if they want a law changed, then they have the right (and, I would argue, the responsibility) to attempt to change it within the structure of the system, if possible.
The only difference between the Pirate Party and NAMBLA (I think that's the 'sex with children' thing you're talking about) is how personally offensive you find the behavior they want to legalize. As long as they're not doing the behavior in question while it's still illegal, they're perfectly within their rights to campaign for a change in the laws. This is why political speech is protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and why we tolerate things like the Nazi Party and the Stalinists and any number of other kooks.
For a less extreme example, consider the people who advocated for the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s; history has shown that they were probably doing the right thing, but at the time they could have easily been accused of "advocating illegal behavior."
If you didn't allow people this freedom, then democracy would be nothing but an irreversible march into an oblivion of illegality.
I used to drive a VW New Beetle TDI, which (at least in the '98 model) didn't have any badging on it at all as to whether it was diesel or gasoline.
More than once when I was filling it up, I had some helpful person, including in more than one case, the gas-station attendant, come running at me in order to stop me from "accidentally" putting diesel in my car.
I got quite used to giving a little explanation/demonstration of it, where I'd start it up and then let people listen to it and put their hand in front of the exhaust ("look, ma, no smoke!") and then look at the engine to convince them that it was actually a diesel.
Once you've been around them for a while, though, you can hear the difference in the sound of the engine from a ways off, but to a lot of people since it doesn't sound like a Mack truck, it's not a diesel.
Just as an aside, I had that car throughout several winters in Central Maine, and with regular (petroleum) diesel and standard anti-gel, I never had a problem getting it started in the winter. Its main problem, and the reason I eventually replaced it, was due to the low ground clearance and a tendency to get hung up on snowbanks and poorly-plowed parking lots. Aside from that, it was a great car, and I thought the diesel engine was a significant upgrade.
Whether or not buying a diesel (or a hybrid) makes sense for you, depends a lot on how long you think you'll keep a car. You can get a simple estimate of how many miles you need to keep it in order to pay the initial investment off, just by drawing two lines on a graph, where the y-intercept is the vehicle's cost, and the slope is the cost of fuel per mile. For the VW diesel, which cost about $1500 more, I want to say that it was around 100,000 miles to pay off. (This was using fuel prices in 2000 or so.) For me, that's only about 3-4 years of driving, so it made sense. If you sell your cars before 100k mi, you'd probably be better off not buying either a diesel or a hybrid, and just pocketing the extra money. Of course, this doesn't take into account the future price of fuels, or the time value of the money spent initially, but you could include all that if you wanted to do the math.
Not totally true. Almost all of these exploits revolve around getting the user to click on an executable file which is disguised as something else.
For example, you take an executable ("TROJAN.COM") and rename it ("FUNNY.JPG") and for reasons that have never been clear to me, the brainiacs at Microsoft designed their OS so that it will execute the latter file when you double-click on it. This seems pretty retardate; clicking on a file shouldn't imply "open or execute," it either means "open," or it means "execute," but rarely does it mean "do either one." Whether the user is trying to open the file or execute it, is pretty easy to determine from context. If the GUI is displaying "JPG" at the end of the file name, it shouldn't be executed -- period. If they really want to execute it, they can change the file name.
The best solution would just be to make the system to refuse to execute code that's not identified in the filesystem as being an executable, say with the suffix and a special icon. A MacOS-style warning the first time any executable is run would also be helpful.
On Linux, you could pretty easily create these safeguards using the execute bit, and linking that to a visible flag in the GUI on the file, and by making all files download by default with the execute-bit set off. It still wouldn't prevent PEBKAC vulnerabilities completely (because if people think there are naked pictures of Angelina Jolie inside, they're going to override any warning you give them), but it would be a big improvement.
At least part of the fault for these exploits lie squarely with Microsoft and the tendency of Windows to coddle users one instant and then throw them to the wolves the next.
I don't think what you're talking about is a solution -- the behavior that's not wanted by a lot of people, is the redirection to the search page, period.
I.e., what's desired is if you type in a bad address, you get a "domain name not found" error, not a search page.
Those search pages are called a "feature" to some, but to many people -- myself included -- they're just unwelcome advertising and an obnoxious waste of bandwidth.
I really don't see the point of having all these wikis, it's kinda stupid in my opinion. Joining the wikipedia cryptography project is much more worthwhile. It is much easier to find information and get data when everything is at one place./I>
To the second part of your comment, I agree, and never meant to imply otherwise. Information certainly is easier to access when it's all in one place. However, and what I was questioning earlier, is whether that's the best way for it to be created.
I think that information is often created when there aren't too many cooks in the same kitchen, so to speak. Perhaps the best way to get the highest-quality finished product (in Wikipedia) is to let people who are really interested in the subject matter develop the content in side projects, and then bring that information back into the main Wikipedia periodically, so that the public can access it.
Amen. Actually, I'm surprised that it took this far down in the discussion for someone to say that.
If you give an assignment that someone can complete in twenty minutes by copying and pasting out of Wikipedia, the biggest problem isn't the cheating per se, it's that the assignment was so brainless. What possible purpose could that serve? A slightly more intelligent student would just have read the WP article, and then retyped it in their own words, or changed slightly more of it so that it wasn't obvious that it was a copy/paste.
I suppose if the purpose of the class was some sort of technical writing, perhaps this would be a valid technique; however, I don't think that the intent of most classes where this is being employed, is to teach students how to regurgitate material in slightly-changed form. (Or if it is, then we have a more serious problem -- why does that class exist and what purpose does it serve?)
My opinion is that a well-written question will allow students to employ all the resources at their disposal, and still be effective as a teaching tool. In other words, it doesn't rely on artificially-induced stupidity or blinders in order to make people think (which rarely works).
There are a few legitimate reasons to limit what resources can be employed on a particular task, obviously, but they're minimal. The first rule is what I refer to as the "Nuclear Flyswatter" rule. Sometimes it makes sense to give a trivial problem and require that only minimal resources are used, because you're trying to simulate a real-world situation where those resources wouldn't be available. For instance, in a geology class, you might want students to be able to identify rocks without grinding them up and putting them into a mass spectrometer, because in the field, you wouldn't have a mass spectrometer. Thus, it would be appropriate and fair to require students to identify rocks using nothing but field tools, if that's a skill that the class is meant to impart. Also, there are legitimate concerns about keeping the playing field level; it isn't particularly fair to let some students employ resources that aren't available to everyone, if they're being graded against each other on the same scale.
In real life, people use whatever resources they can get their hands on when they're trying to solve a problem. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to artificially deny their use, particularly since a better instructive and pedagogical technique would allow them to become part of the learning process, rather than working against it.
This is a free-for-all open conversation that will effectively disappear in 24 hours, not a doctoral thesis.
If by "24 hours," you mean "probably forever," sure.
Actually, I think that most Slashdot comments will probably be more widely accessible, and accessible for longer, than all but a select few doctoral theses.
I don't mean to exaggerate, but I wish more people would realize that every time they hit the "Submit" button, they're carving something into the digital equivalent of a stone tablet. Barring a nuclear war or extreme shortage of hard drive space for CmdrTaco's porn collection, it's going to be around forever.
While I am not an educator by training, Ithink I can offer a little insight into why calculators (and other computer systems) are seen as Good Things, in the teaching of mathematics and physics.
The reason to use them in a classroom is because they're prevalent in real life. It doesn't make sense for students to slave over problems that nobody does anymore, once they've learned the critical concepts involved. Instead, that time would be better spent in class, learning more advanced material. Furthermore, it would be doing students a bit of a disservice to not expose them to the tools that are standard practice in the real world, and in higher-level academia. (We can argue about whether teachers effectively use the time that's saved by powerful tools to teach more advanced material, but that's more of a commentary on our educational system generally, and not on the tools involved.)
This argument is not a new one; half a century ago, we might have had the same discussion over the appropriateness of Comptometers in a statistics class, versus using pen-and-pencil or a simpler adding machine. Using the tool instead of doing something manually necessarily implies that you will become less practiced at the manual skill: the ultimate question being, which is more valuable? The experience using the tool, or the ability of doing it manually?
There are a lot of things, where I am not sure that the ability to do them manually is valuable anymore. For example, I think we're rapidly approaching the point where long division is obsolete. There's really no point in making students practice it until they're blue in the face, except as it makes learning some related and more-important skills easier. Once you understand what division is, and how it works, bring on the machines, and start teaching more complex material.
There are some places where students shouldn't stop practicing basic skills, and those are the areas where those basic skills are direct requirements for more advanced ones. For example, I think it's a mistake to let students use a CAS in their Algebra 1 class, because it might cause them to not understand the basics of symbolic manipulation, which is the key to much higher mathematics. However, more mechanical skills can be conveniently forgotten with little consequence, provided the tools are always available.
So in general, I think that once a tool has saturated our society -- and I think at this point, that computers and graphing calculators have -- it becomes appropriate to bring them into the classroom. Except where skills have to be done unaided for pedagogical reasons, I think our default approach to teaching should use all the tools that are commonly available. That way, students have a chance to cover more material in school, and are better prepared when they move on to higher education or the workforce, because they're familar with the tools.
Either way, (My semi-educated opinion) it's not an engineering problem, it's a managerial problem about how the whole lot is being run at the moment and it obviously needs a re-think on how things are being done.
Bingo; yet again, it's an attempt to solve a policy/managerial/social problem with a technological solution. Almost any time this is attempted, failure results.
As to the OP, if you want to provide customer satisfaction, and your customers want BT, then you need to provide externally-facing IP addresses and allow as much traffic to each client as is technologically and economically feasible. The law ought to be on your side, since you'd be acting as a 'common carrier,' just like any other ISP. Provided you respond to and comply with any court orders or other legal requests for action by copyright holders, and don't attempt to shield you users from the consequences of their actions, you ought to be OK.
I think that the cost of internet access to each student should be broken out on their residence-fee bill, so they know what they're paying: if they're only paying $5/mo for it, then they can't expect even Comcast-like service and customer satisfaction. But if they're paying $75 or $80 a month for a 128kbit pipe, on top of which you layer tons of NAT and filtering, then they probably are within their rights to be pissed. I certainly would be.
You make a good point, but in this case I don't think that the other project really detracts too much from Wikipedia in the long run -- they use the same license on their content, so that they could borrow from each other.
I would hope that the CryptoDox people would at least start by using what's been written in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians would feel free to borrow back improved content that was worked on at CryptoDox.
I think this is similar to the greater argument between a totally open, encyclopediac-style information source, and a more specialized source with slightly higher barriers to entry. (Not an 'expert system' per se, but just because it's dedicated to a particular topic, it means that only people interested in that topic will probably join.) I think there's room for both, and by using compatible licenses, both can benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first sentence and the ones following it don't seem to follow each other. At first you imply that global warming doesn't really exist -- I disagree, but I understand how this could be a concern. Certainly, we wouldn't want to take any sort of drastic action before we knew what we were getting into.
But it's your second sentence that really bothers me: "We'll probably end up detonating some sort of nuclear bomb to try to counter-act the forces of nature." This sounds a lot like a sort of pastorialist, head-in-sand point of view; in fact if you replace "nature" with "God," it starts to sound downright medeival.
If we knew that some sort of disastrous climate change was imminent, and if we had the means to prevent it, don't you think we should? To hell with "nature" or 'God' or anybody else's 'plan;' if it's going to be bad for us, then surely we ought to do something to prevent it, if it be in our power to do so. In the face of an existential threat to our species, certainly any action ought to be justified if it stands a chance of preventing our demise.
I'm not saying that we should start throwing nukes down volcanos tomorrow, but I'm just saying that it seems like a refusal to "counteract nature" could easily turn us into nothing but a bunch of fossils. It's a rejection not only of technology (since what have we been doing as a species since we first discovered fire, but counteracting nature?), but of humanity in general, since what distinguishes us from animals is in large part our ability to not be ruled by nature, by our ability to choose to shape our own environment to suit ourselves.
I realize you were making a joke, but I just thought I'd point out that what I was trying to get at in my original post, is that it's impractical to carry around as much energy stored electrochemically in batteries, as you can store in the form of combustible hydrocarbons.
l (this is for methanol in a fuel cell, its thermal energy density is probably higher)
So if your battery runs out, it's probably not practical for you to just keep shoving new batteries in it for very long, because the energy density just isn't there. You would probably have a tough time carrying the battery equivalent of a few liters of methanol or LPG.
A person could easily carry around enough butane or methanol to keep a computer running for a long time; thus a wall socket is not necessary. And although you jest, although I've never seen a butane socket, natural gas lines are widely available in urban areas (although if you want to store it, you'd need liquefaction apparatus), and ethanol retail outlets aren't hard to find in most areas either. (Actually, in my area, they're already run by the government...)
Just for reference, the energy density of methanol is around 22 MJ/kg [1], while a good LiIon battery is around 150 Wh/kg [2], or around 540 kJ/kg; that's a difference of over 40x. So you could stray a lot further from existing infrastructure with a "portable" device powered by methanol than you could on batteries.
[1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/JennyHua.shtm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
our current system works just fine unless you simply want shit for free and are willing to illegally distribute intellectual property over the internet.
... I'm in complete agreement.
Um, except that's exactly what people want, and that's exactly what they're doing.
So basically
I think that was always part of the "deal" with music-rental services. If they go under, or you stop paying -- if either one of you decides to terminate the arrangement, in other words -- your music becomes unplayable, just like those old Divx discs.
Now if you're talking about music that you've bought at $0.99 a song, I would think that it would keep working, but I suppose you never know. I guess if I was in your position, I'd be burning it out to Audio CDs and then re-ripping it to some lossless DRM-free format as fast as I could.
I really hope that Napster goes out with a bang, if for no other reason than to teach 500,000 people who really owns their music.
Or it could be that he moderated at one point, got bad meta-moderations (for whatever reason) and was subsequently blacklisted from moderating.
I think this is what's happened to me; I used to get points very regularly, and then all of a sudden about 18 months ago stopped getting them, and haven't had any since.
On the bright side, I spend more time reading and writing comments now than I ever did when I was moderating regularly.
Well if you have two of them at two known positions, you could probably get a direction based on the time difference between the signal's arrival at the two stations. Or maybe you could do something with measuring the signal's phase shift. I've never sat down and worked out the problem but it seems like it could be done, on paper at least.
Some Googling reveals that somebody at least has thought of the same concept (and got a patent on it already, although it was filed in 1977, so I think that means it's expired now), no idea if they've ever put it into practice:
Determining azimuth of a transponder by measuring a plurality of phase shifts. Tomasi, Jean-Pierre, United States Patent 4,110,754.
I think you hit it right on the head when you said "If they were exercising proper procedures," because that's a mighty big if.
I don't think it's hard to imagine that at least at the outset of the conflict, the Israeli soldiers might have gone into the conflict with a very distorted idea of the enemy; one that was incapable of doing anything more than listening to the latest propaganda on a 20-year-old shortwave set and cleaning their AK-47.
Thus, like the Germans with their Enigma, they got lax on the procedures, and were compromised as a result.
However, unlike the Germans, I suspect that the Israelis will get another shot, and will probably not be so cavalier next time.
I agree with everything you said, although I doubt that the U.S. really has many export restrictions on encryption gear to Israel, except insofar as they're worried that the gear could end up in somebody else's hands besides Israel and compromise the U.S.'s own capabilities.
This is because it's not like Israel is that far behind the U.S. in terms of mathematics, computers, or encryption, so not exporting to them wouldn't change their strategic posture much at all, and would just deny business to a U.S. corporation in favor of a homegrown one (e.g. IMI).
If there are concerns about exporting to Israel, it's probably more because folks here are afraid that the stuff will be resold and eventually make it to countries that are hostile to the U.S., not really because anyone fears Israel directly. After all, although it's never been publicly admitted, I think there's a very good chance that the U.S. has given Israel nuclear weapons -- I doubt we'd bicker about a few lines of encryption code (that they could probably replicate domestically) if they wanted to buy it.
As to the idiocy of giving away your capabilities if you've successfully broken your enemy's communication system, you're totally right (and yes, it is Singh that goes into much detail about this in his book). However, it may be that Hezbollah either doesn't have the internal safeguards to prevent this type of leak, or is more interested in the public opinion to be gained through bragging than in actual operational superiority. (Or, is so convinced of their own superiority that they don't care, i.e. they've fallen victim to their own rhetoric; this doesn't seem implausible.)
Based on the past few conflicts and the reading I've done about them, the Israelis strike me as being pretty good at doing tough self-assessments and changing the way they fight in order to avoid repeating mistakes. If there is another Israeli/Hezbollah conflict (and I have no reason to believe that there won't be), I would look for some very different tactics on the part of Israel. This is the way war works: you see the greatest changes to tactics and strategy as a result of defeat or near-defeat than you do from victory.
can you imagine plugging a butane canister into your portable?
Yes.
It makes a whole lot more sense to me than just cursing as the machine shuts down because the battery is depleted, and you're nowhere near a power outlet.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair; there are lots of systems that don't much like getting dirt in them, but that's what filters are for. Compared to a horse, an internal-combustion engine probably seems like it's really prone to problems -- after all, a horse doesn't mind if there's some dirt in its feed, but put the same amount of dirt into a tank of gas and run it directly into an engine, and you'll probably have issues. Hence, fuel and oil filters.
They're not unsolvable problems. I assume that actual production units of a micro-turbine would have various types of fuel filtering, and apart from the filters, would exist in a hermetically-sealed case.
Think about hard drives: a few specks of dust in there would result in data loss, and it gets worse all the time -- as the data density increases, the amount you could lose due to one dirt particle grows. But properly ruggedized, there's no reason why they can't be used in the field.
Once the initial technology is developed, the encapsulation into a usable consumer (or military) device is QED by comparison; there are a lot of companies who are pretty good at that sort of thing, so I really think it's the least of the problems this would encounter.
Google News doesn't republish the information with their own ads; all they do is provide you a list of links from traditional news sources' sites along with the first sentence or two of the article, so you can click on it. To read any full article on Google News, you end up looking at the publishing newspaper's advertising. (Unless you're running AdBlock, of course.)
As far as I can tell, the newspaper's complaint actually isn't even about Google News, it's about Google's cache on the regular search results page. They didn't have a robots.txt file, so Google cached the page. Now they're upset about that, but it's pretty much established procedure on the internet that unless you put up a robots.txt file, spiders can and will cache your page; this is how Google works, it's how the Internet Archive works, and I'm sure it's how lots of other search engines work.
Rather than putting up a robots.txt file like everybody else, these newspapers decided to try and go to court and squeeze some money out of Google, and as a result Google dumped them from their systems completely; the cache, regular search results, and Google News.
Personally I don't have much sympathy for the newspapers; they're hanging on to a dying business model that's rapidly becoming obsolete, and history has shown that such stances are generally not productive. They need to either find a way to work with the new ways that people want to get content, or get out of the way. It seems that intentionally or not, they're choosing the latter.
That's pretty much what the whole article and the lawsuit are about: either they're idiots, or they have some ulterior motive.
I think that they were probably hoping to use the suit and rulings as leverage in order to wring some money out of Google, and that's why they didn't take the cheap and simple way out and just use a robots.txt file, which I have to imagine even the most backwards webmaster has heard about.
Frankly I foresee this sort of thing becoming all too common in the near future; as people move from traditional sources of news and information (particularly newspapers) to more timely and convenient methods (the internet), you're going to see a desperate effort on the part of traditional media outlets to get a cut of the pie, lest they go out of business. In my opinion, they don't deserve a cut and should probably be allowed to wither; if their demise means that there's no content for Google to display on the news.google.com page, then Google can go out and hire journalists to discover it. Or they'll just buy it from the wire services like the newspapers did anyway, meaning that you'll finally have the system split as it always should have been: you have people dedicated to researching and reporting the news (e.g., Reuters), and then you have other people who are dedicated to packaging together that news into things that customers want to read, and delivering it to them (e.g., Google News, CNN).
The newspaper as a business model is obsolete; there is no reason why the same organization that actually has the reporters needs to or ought to be the same organization that does the publication.
I'm generally as cynical about the government as anybody else here on Slashdot, but I think there are certain situations where it makes sense for the goverment to intervene.
Those cases mostly arise when the market either has already, or threatens to create a situation that prevents future competition in the market. For this reason, you have anti-trust laws and lots of other regulations; the goal of them is to create a basically level playing field on which various firms can compete for business. This is how the system is supposed to work. Let the market work when it can, but when it won't produce the desired outcome on its own (where the desired outcome is determined through the democratic process), then there's a place for regulation to step in and create the environment where it will.
Now I think we can all agree that the outcome that most users want is not one where there is nothing but a series of regional monopolies, dispensing to users your telephone, cable TV, and internet, and charging exorbitant rates to do so, far in excess of what other people in other parts of the world pay. Therefore, if this seems to be the likely result of noninterference, then the government has a mandate to inject itself and regulate.
Although the government does have a history of mucking things up where it's not needed, history does show that there are times when regulation by some sort of governing body is both necessary and in the long run, beneficial. (E.g., securities markets.*) Also, governments have been engaging in infrastructure-development projects since probably the beginning of recorded history, and in the 21st century, the Internet is as much an important economic thoroughfare as the Interstate Highways are. Allowing a small number of companies to control and manipulate our electronic "tubes," would be akin to handing over control of the highways to Ford, GM, and Chrysler in 1955, so that they could prohibit Japanese cars from driving on them.
* - For a pro-capitalist analysis of the development of the U.S. securities markets prior to regulation, I recommend reading The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street; I think most people who advocate complete deregulation aren't quite appreciative of how rough things were prior to its introduction.
Well, they do have a pretty big lake; you could try plying the not-so-high seas there. Maybe they'd give you a letter of marque to pillage the French.
there is a northern country (forgot which) who has a party, which wants to legalize sex with children. so there is the question: is the "pirate party" nearer to marxism than to a fellony?
And to put it quite bluntly, this is perfectly fine. The point of a democracy is that it responds to the will and wishes of its citizens; if they want a law changed, then they have the right (and, I would argue, the responsibility) to attempt to change it within the structure of the system, if possible.
The only difference between the Pirate Party and NAMBLA (I think that's the 'sex with children' thing you're talking about) is how personally offensive you find the behavior they want to legalize. As long as they're not doing the behavior in question while it's still illegal, they're perfectly within their rights to campaign for a change in the laws. This is why political speech is protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and why we tolerate things like the Nazi Party and the Stalinists and any number of other kooks.
For a less extreme example, consider the people who advocated for the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s; history has shown that they were probably doing the right thing, but at the time they could have easily been accused of "advocating illegal behavior."
If you didn't allow people this freedom, then democracy would be nothing but an irreversible march into an oblivion of illegality.
I used to drive a VW New Beetle TDI, which (at least in the '98 model) didn't have any badging on it at all as to whether it was diesel or gasoline.
More than once when I was filling it up, I had some helpful person, including in more than one case, the gas-station attendant, come running at me in order to stop me from "accidentally" putting diesel in my car.
I got quite used to giving a little explanation/demonstration of it, where I'd start it up and then let people listen to it and put their hand in front of the exhaust ("look, ma, no smoke!") and then look at the engine to convince them that it was actually a diesel.
Once you've been around them for a while, though, you can hear the difference in the sound of the engine from a ways off, but to a lot of people since it doesn't sound like a Mack truck, it's not a diesel.
Just as an aside, I had that car throughout several winters in Central Maine, and with regular (petroleum) diesel and standard anti-gel, I never had a problem getting it started in the winter. Its main problem, and the reason I eventually replaced it, was due to the low ground clearance and a tendency to get hung up on snowbanks and poorly-plowed parking lots. Aside from that, it was a great car, and I thought the diesel engine was a significant upgrade.
Whether or not buying a diesel (or a hybrid) makes sense for you, depends a lot on how long you think you'll keep a car. You can get a simple estimate of how many miles you need to keep it in order to pay the initial investment off, just by drawing two lines on a graph, where the y-intercept is the vehicle's cost, and the slope is the cost of fuel per mile. For the VW diesel, which cost about $1500 more, I want to say that it was around 100,000 miles to pay off. (This was using fuel prices in 2000 or so.) For me, that's only about 3-4 years of driving, so it made sense. If you sell your cars before 100k mi, you'd probably be better off not buying either a diesel or a hybrid, and just pocketing the extra money. Of course, this doesn't take into account the future price of fuels, or the time value of the money spent initially, but you could include all that if you wanted to do the math.
Not totally true. Almost all of these exploits revolve around getting the user to click on an executable file which is disguised as something else.
For example, you take an executable ("TROJAN.COM") and rename it ("FUNNY.JPG") and for reasons that have never been clear to me, the brainiacs at Microsoft designed their OS so that it will execute the latter file when you double-click on it. This seems pretty retardate; clicking on a file shouldn't imply "open or execute," it either means "open," or it means "execute," but rarely does it mean "do either one." Whether the user is trying to open the file or execute it, is pretty easy to determine from context. If the GUI is displaying "JPG" at the end of the file name, it shouldn't be executed -- period. If they really want to execute it, they can change the file name.
The best solution would just be to make the system to refuse to execute code that's not identified in the filesystem as being an executable, say with the suffix and a special icon. A MacOS-style warning the first time any executable is run would also be helpful.
On Linux, you could pretty easily create these safeguards using the execute bit, and linking that to a visible flag in the GUI on the file, and by making all files download by default with the execute-bit set off. It still wouldn't prevent PEBKAC vulnerabilities completely (because if people think there are naked pictures of Angelina Jolie inside, they're going to override any warning you give them), but it would be a big improvement.
At least part of the fault for these exploits lie squarely with Microsoft and the tendency of Windows to coddle users one instant and then throw them to the wolves the next.
I don't think what you're talking about is a solution -- the behavior that's not wanted by a lot of people, is the redirection to the search page, period.
I.e., what's desired is if you type in a bad address, you get a "domain name not found" error, not a search page.
Those search pages are called a "feature" to some, but to many people -- myself included -- they're just unwelcome advertising and an obnoxious waste of bandwidth.
I really don't see the point of having all these wikis, it's kinda stupid in my opinion. Joining the wikipedia cryptography project is much more worthwhile. It is much easier to find information and get data when everything is at one place./I>
To the second part of your comment, I agree, and never meant to imply otherwise. Information certainly is easier to access when it's all in one place. However, and what I was questioning earlier, is whether that's the best way for it to be created.
I think that information is often created when there aren't too many cooks in the same kitchen, so to speak. Perhaps the best way to get the highest-quality finished product (in Wikipedia) is to let people who are really interested in the subject matter develop the content in side projects, and then bring that information back into the main Wikipedia periodically, so that the public can access it.
Amen. Actually, I'm surprised that it took this far down in the discussion for someone to say that.
If you give an assignment that someone can complete in twenty minutes by copying and pasting out of Wikipedia, the biggest problem isn't the cheating per se, it's that the assignment was so brainless. What possible purpose could that serve? A slightly more intelligent student would just have read the WP article, and then retyped it in their own words, or changed slightly more of it so that it wasn't obvious that it was a copy/paste.
I suppose if the purpose of the class was some sort of technical writing, perhaps this would be a valid technique; however, I don't think that the intent of most classes where this is being employed, is to teach students how to regurgitate material in slightly-changed form. (Or if it is, then we have a more serious problem -- why does that class exist and what purpose does it serve?)
My opinion is that a well-written question will allow students to employ all the resources at their disposal, and still be effective as a teaching tool. In other words, it doesn't rely on artificially-induced stupidity or blinders in order to make people think (which rarely works).
There are a few legitimate reasons to limit what resources can be employed on a particular task, obviously, but they're minimal. The first rule is what I refer to as the "Nuclear Flyswatter" rule. Sometimes it makes sense to give a trivial problem and require that only minimal resources are used, because you're trying to simulate a real-world situation where those resources wouldn't be available. For instance, in a geology class, you might want students to be able to identify rocks without grinding them up and putting them into a mass spectrometer, because in the field, you wouldn't have a mass spectrometer. Thus, it would be appropriate and fair to require students to identify rocks using nothing but field tools, if that's a skill that the class is meant to impart. Also, there are legitimate concerns about keeping the playing field level; it isn't particularly fair to let some students employ resources that aren't available to everyone, if they're being graded against each other on the same scale.
In real life, people use whatever resources they can get their hands on when they're trying to solve a problem. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to artificially deny their use, particularly since a better instructive and pedagogical technique would allow them to become part of the learning process, rather than working against it.
This is a free-for-all open conversation that will effectively disappear in 24 hours, not a doctoral thesis.
If by "24 hours," you mean "probably forever," sure.
Actually, I think that most Slashdot comments will probably be more widely accessible, and accessible for longer, than all but a select few doctoral theses.
I don't mean to exaggerate, but I wish more people would realize that every time they hit the "Submit" button, they're carving something into the digital equivalent of a stone tablet. Barring a nuclear war or extreme shortage of hard drive space for CmdrTaco's porn collection, it's going to be around forever.
While I am not an educator by training, Ithink I can offer a little insight into why calculators (and other computer systems) are seen as Good Things, in the teaching of mathematics and physics.
The reason to use them in a classroom is because they're prevalent in real life. It doesn't make sense for students to slave over problems that nobody does anymore, once they've learned the critical concepts involved. Instead, that time would be better spent in class, learning more advanced material. Furthermore, it would be doing students a bit of a disservice to not expose them to the tools that are standard practice in the real world, and in higher-level academia. (We can argue about whether teachers effectively use the time that's saved by powerful tools to teach more advanced material, but that's more of a commentary on our educational system generally, and not on the tools involved.)
This argument is not a new one; half a century ago, we might have had the same discussion over the appropriateness of Comptometers in a statistics class, versus using pen-and-pencil or a simpler adding machine. Using the tool instead of doing something manually necessarily implies that you will become less practiced at the manual skill: the ultimate question being, which is more valuable? The experience using the tool, or the ability of doing it manually?
There are a lot of things, where I am not sure that the ability to do them manually is valuable anymore. For example, I think we're rapidly approaching the point where long division is obsolete. There's really no point in making students practice it until they're blue in the face, except as it makes learning some related and more-important skills easier. Once you understand what division is, and how it works, bring on the machines, and start teaching more complex material.
There are some places where students shouldn't stop practicing basic skills, and those are the areas where those basic skills are direct requirements for more advanced ones. For example, I think it's a mistake to let students use a CAS in their Algebra 1 class, because it might cause them to not understand the basics of symbolic manipulation, which is the key to much higher mathematics. However, more mechanical skills can be conveniently forgotten with little consequence, provided the tools are always available.
So in general, I think that once a tool has saturated our society -- and I think at this point, that computers and graphing calculators have -- it becomes appropriate to bring them into the classroom. Except where skills have to be done unaided for pedagogical reasons, I think our default approach to teaching should use all the tools that are commonly available. That way, students have a chance to cover more material in school, and are better prepared when they move on to higher education or the workforce, because they're familar with the tools.
Either way, (My semi-educated opinion) it's not an engineering problem, it's a managerial problem about how the whole lot is being run at the moment and it obviously needs a re-think on how things are being done.
Bingo; yet again, it's an attempt to solve a policy/managerial/social problem with a technological solution. Almost any time this is attempted, failure results.
As to the OP, if you want to provide customer satisfaction, and your customers want BT, then you need to provide externally-facing IP addresses and allow as much traffic to each client as is technologically and economically feasible. The law ought to be on your side, since you'd be acting as a 'common carrier,' just like any other ISP. Provided you respond to and comply with any court orders or other legal requests for action by copyright holders, and don't attempt to shield you users from the consequences of their actions, you ought to be OK.
I think that the cost of internet access to each student should be broken out on their residence-fee bill, so they know what they're paying: if they're only paying $5/mo for it, then they can't expect even Comcast-like service and customer satisfaction. But if they're paying $75 or $80 a month for a 128kbit pipe, on top of which you layer tons of NAT and filtering, then they probably are within their rights to be pissed. I certainly would be.
You make a good point, but in this case I don't think that the other project really detracts too much from Wikipedia in the long run -- they use the same license on their content, so that they could borrow from each other.
I would hope that the CryptoDox people would at least start by using what's been written in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians would feel free to borrow back improved content that was worked on at CryptoDox.
I think this is similar to the greater argument between a totally open, encyclopediac-style information source, and a more specialized source with slightly higher barriers to entry. (Not an 'expert system' per se, but just because it's dedicated to a particular topic, it means that only people interested in that topic will probably join.) I think there's room for both, and by using compatible licenses, both can benefit.