In short, Open Source is geeks writing software for geeks, and usability suffers...
Duh.:)
I've always taken this as a good thing though... yeah, maybe 'find' is a hard command to figure out, but once you figure out how to pipe things aronud, you can do things with one line of text that you couldn't do anywhere else.
DoubleClick is not sweating over the plans of privacy watchdogs to upset the $1 billion merger of the Internet advertiser and market researcher Abacus Direct, a top DoubleClick executive said today.
"We don't think it's an issue," said Kevin Ryan, DoubleClick's president.
DoubleClick says there is no demand for prior consent. For instance, of the 75 million people per month who view DoubleClick network ads, only ten per day elect to remove the company's cookie, which tracks surfing habits, from their computers.
"I've been very active on the online privacy issues with the FTC since 1997," he added. "We spent a lot of time on this in discussing the merger--if consumers are not happy, neither one of us has a business."
In the course of delivering an ad to you, DoubleClick does not collect any personally-identifiable information about you, such as your name, address, phone number or email address. DoubleClick does, however, collect non-personally identifiable information about you, such as the server your computer is logged onto, your browser type...
But they go on to say
However, as described in "Abacus Alliance" and "Information Collected by DoubleClick's Web Sites" below, non-personally identifiable information collected by DoubleClick in the course of ad delivery can be associated with a user's personally identifiable information if that user has agreed to receive personally-tailored ads.
Does anyone know which sites are a part of the "Abacus Alliance" and whether those sites explicitely ask your permission first? (eg. big flashing letters that say WE ARE WATCHING YOU! ?)
Say you have this in code: "const int NONDESCRIPT = 255; a = b % NONDESCRIPT;"
But you don't care that NONDESCRIPT is exactly 255, just somewhere around there. So if the compiler knew this, it could change NONDESCRIPT to 256, making parts of the program much faster.
There are still many other things that the programmer knows but isn't able to express using today's languages (or wouldn't want to).
For instance, a line in a program might be "a = b % 255". But the 255 might not be set in stone, it could differ by up to 10. Computer languages can't express this, but if they could, the computer could figure out that it could change the 255 to a 256 (here and possibly elsewhere in the program) and make it "a = b & 0xFF" which is much faster.
Granted, this is another trivial example, but there are many more situations like this where optimizations are possible. The more we tell the computer, the more it can figure out. The boundaries of what programming languages can express and what optimizers can do are expanding all the time, but until we tell it every nuance about the program, a human will still be able to use that knowledge to make faster programs.
Care to briefly share how you did that? Yours is a nice solution that I could share with my friends localy who don't have a linux box and don't want to install a proxy.
They confuse me too. My first thought was that they're very skilfully putting together a string of lawsuits to accomplish some goal that we don't fully realize yet, like restricting who writes DVD players or something similar.
Jeffrey Kessler, lead attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association trade group, said the decision "establishes that the rules of intellectual property apply on the Internet, just like in all areas of commerce."
Kessler was not worried the program would continue to circulate in defiance of the court order. "Most people are law-abiding," he said.
Heck, it's often not too hard to identify them just from the titles.
Voices From the Hellmouth
Rethinking Virtual Community
The New Geography
Embracing Insanity
Cyberdemocracy and the Public Sphere
Dark Hearts and the Net
Spirit of the Web
Is The Virtual Community A Myth? --
Couldn't someone set this up themselves as a service to the Slashdot community? At least until they follow through. As long as only one NNTP server was mirroring slashdot, the affect on slashdot would be minimal.
Time was when every law student had a well-used copy of Blackstone, and everybody was familiar with the principles of common law and the Bible. The rights and wrongs of a situation were pretty much accessible to everyone's common sense.
Like "slavery is okay" or "women shouldn't be allowed to vote"?
Law is no longer the expression of foundational, non-arbitrary principles known to all
Maybe what's right and what's wrong isn't always black and white? Especially when it's not just one person who decides.
I know I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. --Socrates
Now with the wisdom of years I try to reason things out And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts Save us all from arrogant men, and all the causes they're for I won't be righteous again I'm not that sure anymore
Shades of grey wherever I go The more I find out the less that I know
On top of that, you could have your 12-year-old child open the package/click the button because s/he can't be legally bound to the agreement. That way the organization as a whole can't be held liable.
I'm not disagreeing with you that the 'net could be better, but I don't think it's as simple as you think to just go back.
Our vision of what the perfect internet would be is somewhat contradictory. These contradictions and complexities are being thought about a lot on slashdot, but until solutions are found (if ever), a simple internet won't be possible:
Limiting company's power (via the government) vs. limiting the government's power to get in our way.
Limiting company's influence vs. allowing free speech (should we censor companies? what about fake organizations (astroturfs)? who decides what's fake?)
Limiting amount of spam received vs. allowing anonynimity on the 'net (accountability vs. anonynimity)
Free speech vs. Privacy (why can't posting of someone's medical records on the 'net be protected under free speech?)
Here's the funny thing about encryption. People use encryption because they want to put the security of their data in their own hands without having to get uncle scam involved, right? Now if the DVD forum had done their job and had a decent encryption algorithm created for DVDs they wouldn't be in this mess right now. But they used an incredibly poor algorithm, and they got bit. Deal with it.
As I see it, this argument is analogous to saying "Tough shit that person X got their house broken in to. They put locks on their door, but the door didn't hold, so it's their fault that the burglar stole their stuff."
While I think that it's good that people take responsibility for protecting their property, I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to use every possible defense to protect it. Society exists to protect humans from their neighbors so they can expend their energy on more useful things (like writing linux code).
What about counting the number of shots that missed vs. the number of shots that hit? 100% hit rate is probably not reasonable, especially for machine gun type weapons.
But this would mean that the bots would make sure they miss 10% of the time (eg. with useless ammo when there's no one to shoot at).
Because everyone knows that 2 days before you finish a massive conversion, the old system dies and you have to do a lot of work to keep the old one running until the new one comes online.
Well, Randell Mills doesn't seem to be a complete quack.
A qui ck search on IBM's patent site reveals 8 patents, most of them having to do with DNA and gene therapy.
This site lists his biography, including his academic history, his resume, a list of supposed patents (11 of them), and a list of publications. None of them seem to be from peer-reviewed journals though?
BlackLight Power will present about 10 compounds to the American Chemical Society and "five papers that give explicit details and is absolutely reproducible," Dr. Mills said. "I have a unified field theory that's absolutely testable at every stage and on every item." "Thank God we're getting our day in court," Dr. Mills said.
On the amazon page, Ulrich Gerlach from the department of Mathematics at Ohio State University gives a pretty long list of things wrong with Mill's theories.
I don't understand the arguments at all, but nobody has mentioned the page yet. Ulrich does indeed exist (http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~gerlach/ ). He's the only scientific reference I've seen in this mess so far.
Then again, anyone is free (able) to use any scientist's name on amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh. :)
I've always taken this as a good thing though... yeah, maybe 'find' is a hard command to figure out, but once you figure out how to pipe things aronud, you can do things with one line of text that you couldn't do anywhere else.
Well, here's the site for Marin County Superior Court, but I can't seem to find any cases under "Hariett Judnick" or "DoubleClick".
This is all that shows on the screen without scrolling through the legaleeze (who does that anymore?):
- Please read the privacy policy described here before submitting your chance to win.
So they kind of tell you, but not really.NetDeals' Privacy Commitment (scroll down)
To learn more about cookies and how to opt-out of targeted advertising, please click here
Anyway, if you have a DoubleClick cookie and you want to have fun with it, go to netdeals.com and type in the following info:
- Name: Kevin Ryan
Does anybody know where he lives? New York?Occupation: DoubleClick President
Email: kryan@doubleclick.net
"We don't think it's an issue," said Kevin Ryan, DoubleClick's president.
DoubleClick says there is no demand for prior consent. For instance, of the 75 million people per month who view DoubleClick network ads, only ten per day elect to remove the company's cookie, which tracks surfing habits, from their computers.
"I've been very active on the online privacy issues with the FTC since 1997," he added. "We spent a lot of time on this in discussing the merger--if consumers are not happy, neither one of us has a business."
- In the course of delivering an ad to you, DoubleClick does not collect any personally-identifiable information about you, such as your name, address, phone number or email address. DoubleClick does, however, collect non-personally identifiable information about you, such as the server your computer is logged onto, your browser type...
But they go on to say- However, as described in "Abacus Alliance" and "Information Collected by DoubleClick's Web Sites" below, non-personally identifiable information collected by DoubleClick in the course of ad delivery can be associated with a user's personally identifiable information if that user has agreed to receive personally-tailored ads.
Does anyone know which sites are a part of the "Abacus Alliance" and whether those sites explicitely ask your permission first? (eg. big flashing letters that say WE ARE WATCHING YOU! ?)Say you have this in code: "const int NONDESCRIPT = 255; a = b % NONDESCRIPT;"
But you don't care that NONDESCRIPT is exactly 255, just somewhere around there. So if the compiler knew this, it could change NONDESCRIPT to 256, making parts of the program much faster.
Yes, "a % 256" is the same as "a & 255".
This isn't quite right. If either:
- The programmer doesn't know everything about the target machine (eg. there's more than one), or
- The programmer doesn't take the time to optimize the code (it happens all the time)
then a JIT compiler could be faster than a human coder.For instance, a line in a program might be "a = b % 255". But the 255 might not be set in stone, it could differ by up to 10. Computer languages can't express this, but if they could, the computer could figure out that it could change the 255 to a 256 (here and possibly elsewhere in the program) and make it "a = b & 0xFF" which is much faster.
Granted, this is another trivial example, but there are many more situations like this where optimizations are possible. The more we tell the computer, the more it can figure out. The boundaries of what programming languages can express and what optimizers can do are expanding all the time, but until we tell it every nuance about the program, a human will still be able to use that knowledge to make faster programs.
Care to briefly share how you did that? Yours is a nice solution that I could share with my friends localy who don't have a linux box and don't want to install a proxy.
But then I ran across this from a Routers clip:
- Jeffrey Kessler, lead attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association trade group, said the decision "establishes that the rules of intellectual property apply on the Internet, just like in all areas of commerce."
They're not that naive, are they?Kessler was not worried the program would continue to circulate in defiance of the court order. "Most people are law-abiding," he said.
They're letting AC's put stories on the front page now? Kinda hard to verify their email address or anything else...
Voices From the Hellmouth
Rethinking Virtual Community
The New Geography
Embracing Insanity
Cyberdemocracy and the Public Sphere
Dark Hearts and the Net
Spirit of the Web
Is The Virtual Community A Myth?
--
Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill)
Couldn't someone set this up themselves as a service to the Slashdot community? At least until they follow through. As long as only one NNTP server was mirroring slashdot, the affect on slashdot would be minimal.
Like "slavery is okay" or "women shouldn't be allowed to vote"?
Maybe what's right and what's wrong isn't always black and white? Especially when it's not just one person who decides.
I know I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. --Socrates
And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts
Save us all from arrogant men, and all the causes they're for
I won't be righteous again
I'm not that sure anymore
Shades of grey wherever I go
The more I find out the less that I know
--Billy Joel, "Shades of Grey"
On top of that, you could have your 12-year-old child open the package/click the button because s/he can't be legally bound to the agreement. That way the organization as a whole can't be held liable.
I'd move there in a heartbeat.
Our vision of what the perfect internet would be is somewhat contradictory. These contradictions and complexities are being thought about a lot on slashdot, but until solutions are found (if ever), a simple internet won't be possible:
As I see it, this argument is analogous to saying "Tough shit that person X got their house broken in to. They put locks on their door, but the door didn't hold, so it's their fault that the burglar stole their stuff."
While I think that it's good that people take responsibility for protecting their property, I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to use every possible defense to protect it. Society exists to protect humans from their neighbors so they can expend their energy on more useful things (like writing linux code).
But this would mean that the bots would make sure they miss 10% of the time (eg. with useless ammo when there's no one to shoot at).
Because everyone knows that 2 days before you finish a massive conversion, the old system dies and you have to do a lot of work to keep the old one running until the new one comes online.
And the earth is flat.
A qui ck search on IBM's patent site reveals 8 patents, most of them having to do with DNA and gene therapy.
This site lists his biography, including his academic history, his resume, a list of supposed patents (11 of them), and a list of publications. None of them seem to be from peer-reviewed journals though?
Also, the Aquarian Research Foundation is backing him. A quote from their page:
BlackLight Power will present about 10 compounds to the American Chemical Society and "five papers that give explicit details and is absolutely reproducible," Dr. Mills said. "I have a unified field theory that's absolutely testable at every stage and on every item." "Thank God we're getting our day in court," Dr. Mills said.
On the amazon page, Ulrich Gerlach from the department of Mathematics at Ohio State University gives a pretty long list of things wrong with Mill's theories.
I don't understand the arguments at all, but nobody has mentioned the page yet. Ulrich does indeed exist (http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~gerlach/ ). He's the only scientific reference I've seen in this mess so far.
Then again, anyone is free (able) to use any scientist's name on amazon.