Agreed. If one is unwilling to accept the browser deciding to make that extra page request, your solution is quite nice. I think the question just then becomes, what's "acceptable" for a browser to do?
I think as a user, I have to assume that when I click a link or type in a URL, my browser can be making just one HTTP request from one domain, or 100 HTTP requests from 100 different domains, depending on what resources are referenced in the HTML. I might even get redirected to another site entirely.
So, given that, I guess I wouldn't be too torn up if my browser ends up at Google or Bing or whoever -- once again, providing the big provision that there is SOME indication of why I ended up there, and for as interesting as the discussion is, I thus far haven't been able to motivate myself to find a patched Windows box to test it on.
For myself, I tend to gravitate towards the solution that takes me as close to where I want to be as possible. The ideal in my mind would be a browser that can magically identify the site I thought I typed in, then take me to it. Obviously, that's not going to happen. But, second to that is a browser that can say "hey, that ain't right, and here's my best shot at what you meant." So I guess what I'd REALLY like would be a small modification of yours:
"There does not appear to be a web server named sexy.foxterriers.com. Perhaps sexy.foxterriers.com is not the correct name? Did you mean sexy.foxyterriers.com?"
where sexy.foxyterriers.com is the first hit on a search for sexy.foxterriers.com on the search engine. It's an extra query to the search engine, but it wouldn't need any supporting requests for images or other resources. In the interim, maybe the browser can be smart enough to say in place of the recommendation sentence, "please wait while we search Bing, your search engine of choice, for a recommendation." If that request times out, it can say, "It is possible that your Internet connection is not functioning," or some variant thereof.
Of course, that depends on reliable extraction of the URL from each supported search engine, and I'm sure there are issues there.
I can see that we've mutually misinterpreted one another's tones and meanings. My apologies if I came off more rudely than I intended. If we're going to continue this discussion, then let me clarify my tone in the opening sentence that I think you found provocative: I had intended it to be challenging in the style of two guys having a sporting conversation about a subject they both know quite a bit about, as opposed to downright insulting. I can see why that may not have come off as intended, however, particularly since a fair number of posts here really are simply insulting. I agree that the "flamebait" tag was inappropriate. All that aside, I am glad to read your reply. If you're interested in continuing this conversation with a bit more mutual understanding, then so am I. On to more interesting matters.
You mention that this is a standards violation if you believe that the RFCs governing DNS also govern presentation-layer applications which utilize DNS. I don't see this to be the case, and I don't really see how that could be justified based on the content of the DNS RFCs. They define, in rigid detail, how DNS is structured, and how clients and servers may request and transmit information. The actual use of that is left to the application.
But let's say that's not true. Let's say, hey, the application using DNS has a requirement to faithfully present all information that would be meaningful in every response to the user. Obviously, this can't be done in a literal sense. I can't take the exact section you quoted, which defines how DNS clients and servers express an NXDOMAIN, and hand that off to the user, unless I expect them to read and decode the packet by hand. If I'm an application, I HAVE to render that in a way that's actually helpful to the human being who's operating me, and the exact way I do that is certainly not defined in any DNS-related RFC.
Still, I think a reasonable presentation is being made here. The goal here is not to trick the user into thinking that "www.amazon.ocm" is a valid domain which happens to be Bing (or whatever their default engine is), but to make them aware of their mistake, and take a shot at presenting a nice graphical way for the typical user, to get where she meant to go. After all, when Joe Blow types in a bad URL, here's about as much as I bet he'll actually read from Firefox's default response:
"Server not found"
and here's how much information he'll glean from that: ""
Offering a list of possible things that you might have meant is really not such a bad take on how to approach this. I agree that this is a pretty noisy way to accomplish that, and I'm not going to be anxiously watching the Firefox release notes to see when they add it, but the concerns you and I have are pretty different from the concerns of the overwhelming majority of users.
On a more technical point, I don't doubt that there are scripts that rely on IE in certain respects. But, if you're expecting IE to present an error in a specific way when you ask for something that's not there, and you use that in a mission-critical (or heaven forbid, as in your hospital example, life-critical) application, Microsoft is about the last door you should knock on to lay blame.
If anything, it might be nice if they shook things up a bit more often to remind such people that their browser isn't exactly a sturdy foundation on which to rest your scripts.
Once again, the post to which I had replied had not raised a question of "right" and "wrong" -- merely whether standards had been adhered to. Regardless, you haven't substantiated your argument that there is a Sherman Act violation here.
That's not exactly a technical standard, which I'd think would have been clear from context was what we were discussing.
In any case, I don't think Sherman applies here. What legal argument are you presenting, in specific terms?
The ancestor post claimed that standards were violated. I asked which standard, because I do not believe any recognized standard has been violated. In any case, since you've claimed that this is "abhorrent, disgusting and reprehensible," I challenge you to back that up. At best, I think you could say "it decreases usability." While inconvenient, that's hardly "reprehensible."
Whoops, somehow posted that anon. Must have hit the box by mistake.
(original poster here) You're right, I'm not as up on the networking side as I am the code side, and I didn't use the correct terminology when I said "hijacking". However, the NXDOMAIN stuff was added by someone else who edited my post before putting it up on the site; I haven't the slightest idea what NXDOMAIN even is. So yes, I'm ignorant in that regard, but not so much so as to throw out terms I don't understand and give a wildly false report.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the editor for this. I saw your original post on the Firehose, in which you claimed Microsoft is redirecting 404s -- this would be monstrous and bad, and while "hijack" is a term you can quibble over, your original report was significantly more dire, and objectively false. A 404 is the HTTP response when you ask for a file that's not on the server. In this case, we don't even get as far as asking the server for the non-existent file, because we can't find its IP -- so we get the 404's cousin in DNS, the NXDOMAIN. The editor caught your mistake and corrected it.
Basically, what it's done is force-feed all of our machines Bing as a default search engine (it had been Google). It's one thing if it shipped that way, but this just happened all of a sudden and our sales force (who are not exactly IT-savvy) freaked out and started calling in virus reports when the behavior changed without warning.
Sorry for the confusion. Still, sucks what they did.
If I understand you right, you're saying that your salespeople were used to being directed to Google. So, you guys were already comfortable with this behavior from a technical standpoint, and you're annoyed that it changed from Google to Bing. I'm not an IE user, so I don't know exactly how this behavior worked, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were in your position and learned that Microsoft has decided to stop using their browser to promote their competitor in favor of their new product.
From reading the comments here, if you don't want it to use Bing, you can tell your sales guys to set Google as their default browser, because it sounds like that's what it's redirecting to. And as a guy who really dislikes Windows, IE and Microsoft in general, let me say that sounds like a reasonable enough deal.
I think you've grabbed every DNS-related RFC you can find, hoping that I had not read them. I have, and so I will ask you to be more specific. Which part of RFC 2065 (DNSSEC) is violated? Are you suggesting that IE is a poorly-implemented DNS caching server which does not cache negative results (RFC 2038)? I'm particularly curious why you cited RFC 1536. Did the subject of the conversation turn to whether IE is appending your local domain to DNS queries for non-explicit FQDNs?
The only specific citation you've made from the DNS-related RFCs is about structuring the DNS header. I have yet to see anyone point to any claim that IE sends improperly formatted DNS headers. What they ARE doing is presenting your NXDOMAIN result accompanied by results for a search on the missing domain.
I still do not see a standard which requires a browser or other application's response to an NXDOMAIN to not accompany it with search results, and I do not believe one exists. If your script relies on IE presenting NXDOMAINs in a specific way, then you have a badly-written script, and you shouldn't have expected it to keep working.
we decided it was a moral imperative to port it to our cellphones.
There was your first mistake. You felt that simply because you liked it, even though it didn't belong to you, that you could go ahead and do this anyway.
Bad move!
This philosophy applies to closed-source software. However, this software was released under the GPL. The entire POINT of the GPL is that you can take code that you like, and port it to whatever device that you like, so long as your changes are also released under the GPL. That is exactly what they have done here. Separately, Apple has decided to charge for the tools to download code onto the device in question. This is hardly unheard of, and it is outside the control of the submitter. The developers here have freely provided the source code, and you are free to port it on your own to Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Android or whatever else, or to get your own developer account and make changes and put those changes up on the app store, or even to take their existing product as-is and put it up for free on the app store. They have done nothing on their own to restrict the freedom of the software.
I have free energy, and I invite you to come take a look. Oh, you've come to take a look, have you? Wonderful, just have a seat over there while I go work out where I put that damned free energy machine... Hmm... Yes, just be patient now, I'm sure it's probably in one of these cabinets. Or maybe one of the boxes? I've moved recently, and I must admit it might be in my storage shed.
In the meantime, let me tell you how it works. It's really quite simple, based on the principle of mag-- oh, HELLO Mrs. Reynolds! No, I'm not busy. How IS your cousin doing? Oh, fantastic......
Sorry about that, gentlemen, Mrs. Reynolds is a lonely widow, and needs all the social contact she can get. I'm so glad you're still here. In any case, down to business. The notion is really quite simple: use magnets and induction to generate unlimited power. Well, yes, there IS quite a bit more to it that that, but it's all quite technical. Oh yes, quite right, you are trained scientists and engineers, and I suppose you would be interested. All the necessary information is in my notes... Now, where did I put those...
You know what, I think my brother has a copy, I'll just drop him a note. He's living as a vagrant in Somalia, trying to explore the human condition. I'll just send him a quick e-mail, and when he makes his way to a city with working telecommunications infrastructure, I'm sure he can tell me where to find them. In the meantime, who's up for some Boggle? It's really a fantastic game....Wait, where are you going? Come back! Demonstrating free energy is a difficult task, and while I understand your frustrations with the process, you must be patient! Come baaack!
Pah. The scientific establishment has ONCE AGAIN proven that they are unwilling to consider new ideas. Now, where DID I put that perpetual motion machine...
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
The only reason mail admins HAVE to keep spam out is that people expect it. Well, yes, of course they do. The volume of unfiltered spam coming into an e-mail inbox vastly exceeds the volume of junk mail coming into a postal mailbox. If I'm administering a commercial mail server, I'd certainly consider it to be my responsibility to ensure that the people it serves find it useful. In a corporate environment, that usefulness is pretty much nil if legitimate business e-mail is outnumbered by spam 50:1. If I were in charge of deciding my company's mail server admin, I'd absolutely insist that they consider spam to be a major issue.
I'm not saying junk mail isn't a nuisance, or that junk mailers pay all parties for all costs incurred -- but the reality is that it takes active and constant maintenance on the part of admins to keep spammers from completely strangling to death e-mail as a medium. I just don't see junk mailers as inflicting anywhere near that level of damage on the postal system.
If you were asking what the difference is in the context of acceptability, junk mail senders are forced to pay the carrier -- the postal service -- for every piece of mail they generate. When I want to send a package through USPS, I can, and the fact that the junk mailers are also using the postal service has only made it easier, since they carry their own weight financially.
Spammers, on the other hand, force their carrier -- Internet mail servers -- to bear 100% of the cost while receiving no compensation. Thanks to this, mail administrators are now forced to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about keeping spammers out, instead of making sure that the mail of legitimate users gets delivered. When I want to e-mail someone, I am less likely to be able to do so successfully since it's possible to get caught up in the antispam measures that have been set up on the mail server, as well as the recipient's mail client.
In sum: junk mailers pay their carriers, and contribute to the maintenance of the service. Spammers pay nothing to the mail servers, and are a significant detriment to the service.
They're both annoying as shit to the recipient, though.
The date IS fixed -- it's all a matter of perspective. Dates are divisions of a calendar, and a calendar tracks time using periodic and regular astronomical events. Obviously, the easiest of these is the day, since it's easy to tell when the sun rises, and our body clocks (and therefore the work day) are tuned to it. Unfortunately, days are too granular: to really organize a civilization, you need larger logical units (such as weeks, months and years). Nowadays, we use a calendar which tracks the sidereal year -- the time it takes for the earth to complete one full orbit. For agricultural purposes, this is ideal, since it will tell you when to grow your crops. Unfortunately, it was a tricky one to calculate: even if you know that the earth orbits the sun, you're stuck dealing with the fact that the orbit is nearly circular so you can't find a visible difference in size in the sun, and the stars are so incredibly distant that there's no appreciable parallax. One cue that you CAN watch for is the equinox, and this is exactly what early calendars did to track the seasons. Your typical farmer isn't going to have the time or the tools to measure when the day and night are of equal length, but he can get a general feel for it, and you can have a few people set aside whose job in the springtime is to watch the length of each day.
For the common man, an easier thing to watch is the moon. The phases of the moon are not only regular, but they're highly visible and uncomplicated. This means that if your calendar has something to do with the moon, then it's not only easy for your astronomers to track, but it's easy to explain to the unwashed masses: just tell them the festival is on the next new or full moon, and they'll know exactly what you mean. You can also track days for a very small number of days; 7, for instance. You can tell people "go out and work really hard for 6 days, and on the seventh, take a break," and most people can do that (and those that can't can just notice that those who can aren't working on some days). In the Jewish tradition, as you're probably aware, the seventh day is called the Sabbath, and is considered sacred.
A mix of the two was popular -- the accessibility of the lunar calendar was nice, but the agricultural significance of a sidereal calendar was needed as well. For the Liturgical year, the calendar starts with the first new moon after the spring equinox. This means that there's not even any pretense that the calendar is equivalent to a sidereal year; the orbital period of the moon just isn't any fraction of the orbital period of the earth.
Easter tries to mix the 3 logical units of measurement: the rules are complicated, but it essentially boils down to finding a date which 1) falls on a Sabbath, 2) comes quickly after an equinox and 3) ties into lunar phase. The way they chose was to set it at the first Sabbath following the first full moon following the spring equinox. But, approximations are applied to make it easier to plan: ancient astronomy was amazing for what they had at their disposal, but really very far from perfect. So, since the need to plan out a major annual festival was superior to the need for people to be able to look in the sky and see it get close, approximations were accepted over time. The "full moon" was assumed to occur 14 days after the new moon, which was in turn predicted from tables generated using an agreed-upon system of reckoning. The equinox was eventually taken to occur on March 21. The end result is that it no longer actually directly corresponds to an equinox or a lunar phase, and is instead based off of approximations that were chosen to make the date easier to work with. Nowadays, the approximation that most proponents of Easter date reform put forth is just to pick something like the first Sunday of April and use that. Others want to go back to a pure lunisolar basis and throw out the approximations. At this point, however, there's not much motivation to do either: we can compute Easter out arbitrarily far now, and it's printed on every c
Agreed, the history of time-keeping is a very interesting and important subject, however, an arcane method of determining the date for a specific holiday belongs in the category of 'curious minutiae' and is in and of it self just an obscure exercise, except for the devout adherents to it's attending myths. You could say this about any single aspect of the history of time-keeping. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at, other than that you're annoyed that there's an article that even tangentially involves religion on Slashdot.
Historical significance, for one. The history of time-keeping and astronomy are intimately tied to the need to celebrate religious events; this goes back much before Christianity. It's really a very neat subject, and it's really fascinating how much math developed simply out of a need to know when and how to throw a party for the gods.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. If one is unwilling to accept the browser deciding to make that extra page request, your solution is quite nice. I think the question just then becomes, what's "acceptable" for a browser to do?
I think as a user, I have to assume that when I click a link or type in a URL, my browser can be making just one HTTP request from one domain, or 100 HTTP requests from 100 different domains, depending on what resources are referenced in the HTML. I might even get redirected to another site entirely.
So, given that, I guess I wouldn't be too torn up if my browser ends up at Google or Bing or whoever -- once again, providing the big provision that there is SOME indication of why I ended up there, and for as interesting as the discussion is, I thus far haven't been able to motivate myself to find a patched Windows box to test it on.
For myself, I tend to gravitate towards the solution that takes me as close to where I want to be as possible. The ideal in my mind would be a browser that can magically identify the site I thought I typed in, then take me to it. Obviously, that's not going to happen. But, second to that is a browser that can say "hey, that ain't right, and here's my best shot at what you meant." So I guess what I'd REALLY like would be a small modification of yours:
"There does not appear to be a web server named sexy.foxterriers.com. Perhaps sexy.foxterriers.com is not the correct name? Did you mean sexy.foxyterriers.com?"
where sexy.foxyterriers.com is the first hit on a search for sexy.foxterriers.com on the search engine. It's an extra query to the search engine, but it wouldn't need any supporting requests for images or other resources. In the interim, maybe the browser can be smart enough to say in place of the recommendation sentence, "please wait while we search Bing, your search engine of choice, for a recommendation." If that request times out, it can say, "It is possible that your Internet connection is not functioning," or some variant thereof.
Of course, that depends on reliable extraction of the URL from each supported search engine, and I'm sure there are issues there.
I can see that we've mutually misinterpreted one another's tones and meanings. My apologies if I came off more rudely than I intended. If we're going to continue this discussion, then let me clarify my tone in the opening sentence that I think you found provocative: I had intended it to be challenging in the style of two guys having a sporting conversation about a subject they both know quite a bit about, as opposed to downright insulting. I can see why that may not have come off as intended, however, particularly since a fair number of posts here really are simply insulting. I agree that the "flamebait" tag was inappropriate. All that aside, I am glad to read your reply. If you're interested in continuing this conversation with a bit more mutual understanding, then so am I. On to more interesting matters.
You mention that this is a standards violation if you believe that the RFCs governing DNS also govern presentation-layer applications which utilize DNS. I don't see this to be the case, and I don't really see how that could be justified based on the content of the DNS RFCs. They define, in rigid detail, how DNS is structured, and how clients and servers may request and transmit information. The actual use of that is left to the application.
But let's say that's not true. Let's say, hey, the application using DNS has a requirement to faithfully present all information that would be meaningful in every response to the user. Obviously, this can't be done in a literal sense. I can't take the exact section you quoted, which defines how DNS clients and servers express an NXDOMAIN, and hand that off to the user, unless I expect them to read and decode the packet by hand. If I'm an application, I HAVE to render that in a way that's actually helpful to the human being who's operating me, and the exact way I do that is certainly not defined in any DNS-related RFC.
Still, I think a reasonable presentation is being made here. The goal here is not to trick the user into thinking that "www.amazon.ocm" is a valid domain which happens to be Bing (or whatever their default engine is), but to make them aware of their mistake, and take a shot at presenting a nice graphical way for the typical user, to get where she meant to go. After all, when Joe Blow types in a bad URL, here's about as much as I bet he'll actually read from Firefox's default response:
"Server not found"
and here's how much information he'll glean from that:
""
Offering a list of possible things that you might have meant is really not such a bad take on how to approach this. I agree that this is a pretty noisy way to accomplish that, and I'm not going to be anxiously watching the Firefox release notes to see when they add it, but the concerns you and I have are pretty different from the concerns of the overwhelming majority of users.
On a more technical point, I don't doubt that there are scripts that rely on IE in certain respects. But, if you're expecting IE to present an error in a specific way when you ask for something that's not there, and you use that in a mission-critical (or heaven forbid, as in your hospital example, life-critical) application, Microsoft is about the last door you should knock on to lay blame.
If anything, it might be nice if they shook things up a bit more often to remind such people that their browser isn't exactly a sturdy foundation on which to rest your scripts.
Once again, the post to which I had replied had not raised a question of "right" and "wrong" -- merely whether standards had been adhered to. Regardless, you haven't substantiated your argument that there is a Sherman Act violation here.
That's not exactly a technical standard, which I'd think would have been clear from context was what we were discussing. In any case, I don't think Sherman applies here. What legal argument are you presenting, in specific terms?
The ancestor post claimed that standards were violated. I asked which standard, because I do not believe any recognized standard has been violated. In any case, since you've claimed that this is "abhorrent, disgusting and reprehensible," I challenge you to back that up. At best, I think you could say "it decreases usability." While inconvenient, that's hardly "reprehensible."
Whoops, somehow posted that anon. Must have hit the box by mistake.
Seriously, I haven't ignored an editor since Jon Katz. kdawson is like Slashdot's Fox News.
(original poster here) You're right, I'm not as up on the networking side as I am the code side, and I didn't use the correct terminology when I said "hijacking". However, the NXDOMAIN stuff was added by someone else who edited my post before putting it up on the site; I haven't the slightest idea what NXDOMAIN even is. So yes, I'm ignorant in that regard, but not so much so as to throw out terms I don't understand and give a wildly false report.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the editor for this. I saw your original post on the Firehose, in which you claimed Microsoft is redirecting 404s -- this would be monstrous and bad, and while "hijack" is a term you can quibble over, your original report was significantly more dire, and objectively false. A 404 is the HTTP response when you ask for a file that's not on the server. In this case, we don't even get as far as asking the server for the non-existent file, because we can't find its IP -- so we get the 404's cousin in DNS, the NXDOMAIN. The editor caught your mistake and corrected it.
Basically, what it's done is force-feed all of our machines Bing as a default search engine (it had been Google). It's one thing if it shipped that way, but this just happened all of a sudden and our sales force (who are not exactly IT-savvy) freaked out and started calling in virus reports when the behavior changed without warning.
Sorry for the confusion. Still, sucks what they did.
If I understand you right, you're saying that your salespeople were used to being directed to Google. So, you guys were already comfortable with this behavior from a technical standpoint, and you're annoyed that it changed from Google to Bing. I'm not an IE user, so I don't know exactly how this behavior worked, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were in your position and learned that Microsoft has decided to stop using their browser to promote their competitor in favor of their new product.
From reading the comments here, if you don't want it to use Bing, you can tell your sales guys to set Google as their default browser, because it sounds like that's what it's redirecting to. And as a guy who really dislikes Windows, IE and Microsoft in general, let me say that sounds like a reasonable enough deal.
As an experiment, I just tried typing "wolverine/some/long/path/?with=variables" into my Firefox address bar.
Result: I was dropped off at http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=wolverine
So, in this respect, Firefox is no better than IE.
I think you've grabbed every DNS-related RFC you can find, hoping that I had not read them. I have, and so I will ask you to be more specific. Which part of RFC 2065 (DNSSEC) is violated? Are you suggesting that IE is a poorly-implemented DNS caching server which does not cache negative results (RFC 2038)? I'm particularly curious why you cited RFC 1536. Did the subject of the conversation turn to whether IE is appending your local domain to DNS queries for non-explicit FQDNs?
The only specific citation you've made from the DNS-related RFCs is about structuring the DNS header. I have yet to see anyone point to any claim that IE sends improperly formatted DNS headers. What they ARE doing is presenting your NXDOMAIN result accompanied by results for a search on the missing domain.
I still do not see a standard which requires a browser or other application's response to an NXDOMAIN to not accompany it with search results, and I do not believe one exists. If your script relies on IE presenting NXDOMAINs in a specific way, then you have a badly-written script, and you shouldn't have expected it to keep working.
Can you point me to the relevant RFC, or at least a standard from a recognized standards body which is being violated here?
There was your first mistake. You felt that simply because you liked it, even though it didn't belong to you, that you could go ahead and do this anyway.
Bad move!
This philosophy applies to closed-source software. However, this software was released under the GPL. The entire POINT of the GPL is that you can take code that you like, and port it to whatever device that you like, so long as your changes are also released under the GPL. That is exactly what they have done here. Separately, Apple has decided to charge for the tools to download code onto the device in question. This is hardly unheard of, and it is outside the control of the submitter. The developers here have freely provided the source code, and you are free to port it on your own to Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Android or whatever else, or to get your own developer account and make changes and put those changes up on the app store, or even to take their existing product as-is and put it up for free on the app store. They have done nothing on their own to restrict the freedom of the software.
Yes. They firmly believe in your right to choose between radical Islam and death.
I'm not sure what a crowd of angry MythBusters fans would do, but I'm sure that it would involve large amounts of kinetic energy.
From what it sounds like, this is more like:
I have free energy, and I invite you to come take a look. Oh, you've come to take a look, have you? Wonderful, just have a seat over there while I go work out where I put that damned free energy machine... Hmm... Yes, just be patient now, I'm sure it's probably in one of these cabinets. Or maybe one of the boxes? I've moved recently, and I must admit it might be in my storage shed.
In the meantime, let me tell you how it works. It's really quite simple, based on the principle of mag-- oh, HELLO Mrs. Reynolds! No, I'm not busy. How IS your cousin doing? Oh, fantastic... ...
Sorry about that, gentlemen, Mrs. Reynolds is a lonely widow, and needs all the social contact she can get. I'm so glad you're still here. In any case, down to business. The notion is really quite simple: use magnets and induction to generate unlimited power. Well, yes, there IS quite a bit more to it that that, but it's all quite technical. Oh yes, quite right, you are trained scientists and engineers, and I suppose you would be interested. All the necessary information is in my notes... Now, where did I put those...
You know what, I think my brother has a copy, I'll just drop him a note. He's living as a vagrant in Somalia, trying to explore the human condition. I'll just send him a quick e-mail, and when he makes his way to a city with working telecommunications infrastructure, I'm sure he can tell me where to find them. In the meantime, who's up for some Boggle? It's really a fantastic game. ...Wait, where are you going? Come back! Demonstrating free energy is a difficult task, and while I understand your frustrations with the process, you must be patient! Come baaack!
Pah. The scientific establishment has ONCE AGAIN proven that they are unwilling to consider new ideas. Now, where DID I put that perpetual motion machine...
I'm glad we didn't have to watch Mr Joybee whip out his joystick though.
Yeah, but he does spend a lot of time with his LED projector watching "home made movies" with his girlfriend.
If the service does indeed belong to history, then let's see history pay its bills.
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
EFF: Two is the loneliest number since the number one.
Wonderful. Finally, people won't look at me like I'm from Mars when I tell them that DRM affects legitimate paying customers like them.
...on whether or not these bad boys get more consensual sex ...but high school and college do.I'm not saying junk mail isn't a nuisance, or that junk mailers pay all parties for all costs incurred -- but the reality is that it takes active and constant maintenance on the part of admins to keep spammers from completely strangling to death e-mail as a medium. I just don't see junk mailers as inflicting anywhere near that level of damage on the postal system.
If you were asking what the difference is in the context of acceptability, junk mail senders are forced to pay the carrier -- the postal service -- for every piece of mail they generate. When I want to send a package through USPS, I can, and the fact that the junk mailers are also using the postal service has only made it easier, since they carry their own weight financially.
Spammers, on the other hand, force their carrier -- Internet mail servers -- to bear 100% of the cost while receiving no compensation. Thanks to this, mail administrators are now forced to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about keeping spammers out, instead of making sure that the mail of legitimate users gets delivered. When I want to e-mail someone, I am less likely to be able to do so successfully since it's possible to get caught up in the antispam measures that have been set up on the mail server, as well as the recipient's mail client.
In sum: junk mailers pay their carriers, and contribute to the maintenance of the service. Spammers pay nothing to the mail servers, and are a significant detriment to the service.
They're both annoying as shit to the recipient, though.
The date IS fixed -- it's all a matter of perspective. Dates are divisions of a calendar, and a calendar tracks time using periodic and regular astronomical events. Obviously, the easiest of these is the day, since it's easy to tell when the sun rises, and our body clocks (and therefore the work day) are tuned to it. Unfortunately, days are too granular: to really organize a civilization, you need larger logical units (such as weeks, months and years). Nowadays, we use a calendar which tracks the sidereal year -- the time it takes for the earth to complete one full orbit. For agricultural purposes, this is ideal, since it will tell you when to grow your crops. Unfortunately, it was a tricky one to calculate: even if you know that the earth orbits the sun, you're stuck dealing with the fact that the orbit is nearly circular so you can't find a visible difference in size in the sun, and the stars are so incredibly distant that there's no appreciable parallax. One cue that you CAN watch for is the equinox, and this is exactly what early calendars did to track the seasons. Your typical farmer isn't going to have the time or the tools to measure when the day and night are of equal length, but he can get a general feel for it, and you can have a few people set aside whose job in the springtime is to watch the length of each day.
For the common man, an easier thing to watch is the moon. The phases of the moon are not only regular, but they're highly visible and uncomplicated. This means that if your calendar has something to do with the moon, then it's not only easy for your astronomers to track, but it's easy to explain to the unwashed masses: just tell them the festival is on the next new or full moon, and they'll know exactly what you mean. You can also track days for a very small number of days; 7, for instance. You can tell people "go out and work really hard for 6 days, and on the seventh, take a break," and most people can do that (and those that can't can just notice that those who can aren't working on some days). In the Jewish tradition, as you're probably aware, the seventh day is called the Sabbath, and is considered sacred.
A mix of the two was popular -- the accessibility of the lunar calendar was nice, but the agricultural significance of a sidereal calendar was needed as well. For the Liturgical year, the calendar starts with the first new moon after the spring equinox. This means that there's not even any pretense that the calendar is equivalent to a sidereal year; the orbital period of the moon just isn't any fraction of the orbital period of the earth.
Easter tries to mix the 3 logical units of measurement: the rules are complicated, but it essentially boils down to finding a date which 1) falls on a Sabbath, 2) comes quickly after an equinox and 3) ties into lunar phase. The way they chose was to set it at the first Sabbath following the first full moon following the spring equinox. But, approximations are applied to make it easier to plan: ancient astronomy was amazing for what they had at their disposal, but really very far from perfect. So, since the need to plan out a major annual festival was superior to the need for people to be able to look in the sky and see it get close, approximations were accepted over time. The "full moon" was assumed to occur 14 days after the new moon, which was in turn predicted from tables generated using an agreed-upon system of reckoning. The equinox was eventually taken to occur on March 21. The end result is that it no longer actually directly corresponds to an equinox or a lunar phase, and is instead based off of approximations that were chosen to make the date easier to work with. Nowadays, the approximation that most proponents of Easter date reform put forth is just to pick something like the first Sunday of April and use that. Others want to go back to a pure lunisolar basis and throw out the approximations. At this point, however, there's not much motivation to do either: we can compute Easter out arbitrarily far now, and it's printed on every c
Historical significance, for one. The history of time-keeping and astronomy are intimately tied to the need to celebrate religious events; this goes back much before Christianity. It's really a very neat subject, and it's really fascinating how much math developed simply out of a need to know when and how to throw a party for the gods.