The reason a government might need broad new powers to fight terrorism is that 1) a small group of people have the ability to hurt a large group of people, and 2) because it's ideologically/religiously/politically based, there's a decent possibility they'll be funded by disparate organazations around the world, possibly including very wealthy people who are protected by national soverenty laws.
We don't need broad new powers to fight one guy who does a random criminal act just to show he's smart/cool. He didn't plan it for years and years, didn't get overseas funding and moral support, and didn't try to choose a crime that would scare the crap out of the most people.
Bush/Ashcroft's "trust us, we won't misuse it" line was always BS, it's just easier to convince the rest of the population now.
Re:Ugh, these aren't viruses...
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The main reason we needed to have a copy of the virus in every executable was because we were running on DOS, which doesn't usually support multiple programs running at once. And a lot of networks were little clumps of networked file systems.
Now that the most common OS's support multiple processes at once, and the internet/web/email is the main thing that connects everybody (and writable network file systems are mainly only found in the workplace), viruses have naturally changed.
Will they be coming out with an updated version of Internet Explorer? IE is already seriously almost everybody else in terms of standards support (not that they were ever near the front). When they have to be very seriously pressured to release just one measley patch, it means they either don't care anymore, or they're working on something big. Just release something, please, so web developers don't have to keep suffering when developing for the lame uninformated masses that are stuck behind.
Mail readers and web browsers are pretty much standardized, so users should pick whatever one they happen to like. If everyone ends up with the same mail reader and browser, two problems occur: 1) viruses spread more easily due to a more hetergeneous environment, and 2) the company plays fast and loose with the standards because they care less and less about interoperability the closer they get to 100% marketshare. So a little up-front inconvenience to the user for standardized applications ends up helping everyone out in the long run.
Some might make the argument that if emergency dialing is that important to consumers, that they'd vote with their feet... That VoIP providers who didn't allow for 911 dialing would be forced to eventually IF it was that important to consumers. And since government doesn't know what's important to consumers, they might as well stay out of it.
Google recently added stemming as a search of {quit smoke} will reveal. You can read about it in their help section. Stemming can be disabled on specific words. Otherwise the update came around November 15, 2003, but is probably still in flux, so there isn't too much good info about it yet.
Re:This has been the "story" for the past two year
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 1
So? Part of the newscasters, and all of sports announcers would be out of a job if people weren't interested in random speculation about possible upsets.
Google is certainly trying to weed out the junk while keeping the good stuff. Anybody who's dealt with a spam filter knows how hard that can be, especially if you want to keep all the good guys happy.
There have been two updates in the last couple months, named Update Florida and Update Austin by the SEO community. As typical, various webmasters have been devoting a lot of thought and emotion to them. But as a normal user, all I can see is that Google is definitely trying, and not succeeding yet.
After seeing the extreme comments in the source code, I had the same question, since I don't think I could ever go comments like that past any peer review I've been a part of. Someone I know said that Microsoft hadn't done peer reviews previously, but now that they're on the "we're increasing security" kick, that they've started doing code reviews on a more organizational level. (though by the time you read this, this is fourth-hand info, so caveat reader)
So a few companies have stated they're unwilling to transfer numbers to a different individual. No problem, I don't see anything stopping the seller from transfering their number to a friendly company who WILL transfer numbers to another individual, and then the buyer can transfer that number to whatever phone company they want (even if it's the same company that the seller originally used).
If there isn't a friendly phone company out there (which is hard to believe since there'd almost certainly be a little money in it from them, especially if they were able to make all the transfers happen in a small number of days), it's possible for someone to set up a company for the sole purpose of doing this.
Given enough flexibility, networks WILL route around damage. Fortunately the FCC has just given us the flexibility we need.
Exactly. Normal advertising is responsive to consumers' wants, because marketing companies can't waste money on expensive advertisements for products that won't sell. On the other hand, spam is, by definition due to the economics, a flood of stuff that people likely don't want. The average person probably sees as much viagra spam as they see Coke and Pepsi adverts throughout the day, even though people want Coke/Pepsi a lot more.
Posting to Slashdot about how others are wasting time is probably worse.
(doh, wait a minute. don't tell anyone I posted this...)
Re:A Day without SCO...
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately my boss won't let me telecommute EVERY day of the week. When I do drive in, I have a garage so it's not too bad, but I still have to look at the outdoors during the drive to work, and actually step outside for the 30 seconds to walk across the parking lot at work. *shiver*
The Motorola A760 is based on linux, but that doesn't necessarily mean it runs X. It could just be using linux's memory management, file system, etc. code. I don't know how good of reviews it's getting, but I don't think you can really say that linux isn't ready.
Motorola has at least one phone (a 3G phone, the A920) based on Symbian. I like it so far, the interface is pretty well done. But does this mean Nokia will soon be pushing Motorola away from that as well? Motorola's has released phones with their own OS, Symbian, Linux, and one of microsoft's OS too, so I guess motorola has all sorts of alternatives.
Re:Something I learned from Martin Gardner...
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 2
Well, that's not necessarily ALWAYS true... for instance, most crypto is at least heavily mathematics based, and therefore is much easier to analyze from a purely theoretical standpoint how much CPU is required to break. And in some cases (eg. DES) a lot of theoretical work HAS gone into them to identify weaknesses and analyze exactly how much CPU is required to break a given key length.
Just that certain technical protections are of the nature that it's not a "I try some random protection, the idiots and/or hackers try random ways to break in, with various techniques being better than others but we really only know by testing them out in the real world."
But spam unfortunately doesn't fall into that area unless we completely remove anonymity from email, which isn't necessarily the greatest idea. Though I know there are academic proposals for ways to anonymously vote and anonymously send cash in ways that satisfy certain very important criteria (eg. one person can't vote more than once, the receiver of anonymous cash can't retrieve the cash twice from the sender's bank account, the sender can't send a given transaction twice, etc). Do any of these techniques apply to allowing anonymous individual mail and bulk solicited email using a technically verifiable method?
This document defines the generic syntax of URI, including both absolute and
relative forms, and guidelines for their use; it revises and replaces the generic definitions in RFC 1738 and RFC 1808.
RFC 2396, though I still doubt it's mandatory. They don't mention http specifically regarding user/passwords, and they can't mandate it across all URLs (eg. specifying a password in a finger://... URI wouldn't make much sense). Also, HTTP has multiple ways to specify a HTTP user/pass (eg. basic, digest, basic+SSL, method=get, method=post), so that further confuses the idea of a universal way to specify usernames in addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't need broad new powers to fight one guy who does a random criminal act just to show he's smart/cool. He didn't plan it for years and years, didn't get overseas funding and moral support, and didn't try to choose a crime that would scare the crap out of the most people.
Bush/Ashcroft's "trust us, we won't misuse it" line was always BS, it's just easier to convince the rest of the population now.
Now that the most common OS's support multiple processes at once, and the internet/web/email is the main thing that connects everybody (and writable network file systems are mainly only found in the workplace), viruses have naturally changed.
Will they be coming out with an updated version of Internet Explorer? IE is already seriously almost everybody else in terms of standards support (not that they were ever near the front). When they have to be very seriously pressured to release just one measley patch, it means they either don't care anymore, or they're working on something big. Just release something, please, so web developers don't have to keep suffering when developing for the lame uninformated masses that are stuck behind.
Mail readers and web browsers are pretty much standardized, so users should pick whatever one they happen to like. If everyone ends up with the same mail reader and browser, two problems occur: 1) viruses spread more easily due to a more hetergeneous environment, and 2) the company plays fast and loose with the standards because they care less and less about interoperability the closer they get to 100% marketshare. So a little up-front inconvenience to the user for standardized applications ends up helping everyone out in the long run.
Some might make the argument that if emergency dialing is that important to consumers, that they'd vote with their feet... That VoIP providers who didn't allow for 911 dialing would be forced to eventually IF it was that important to consumers. And since government doesn't know what's important to consumers, they might as well stay out of it.
Google recently added stemming as a search of {quit smoke} will reveal. You can read about it in their help section. Stemming can be disabled on specific words. Otherwise the update came around November 15, 2003, but is probably still in flux, so there isn't too much good info about it yet.
So? Part of the newscasters, and all of sports announcers would be out of a job if people weren't interested in random speculation about possible upsets.
There have been two updates in the last couple months, named Update Florida and Update Austin by the SEO community. As typical, various webmasters have been devoting a lot of thought and emotion to them. But as a normal user, all I can see is that Google is definitely trying, and not succeeding yet.
But maybe it's not all PR hype, who knows.
Oh. Duh. ;)
Slashdot is going to start mirror articles from now on? When did this start?
This is probably a good time to remind everyone that Freenet is making progress and is asking for donations.
This site and this one seem to be doing just fine. (though that second one is almost blatant trademark infringement, one would think...)
If there isn't a friendly phone company out there (which is hard to believe since there'd almost certainly be a little money in it from them, especially if they were able to make all the transfers happen in a small number of days), it's possible for someone to set up a company for the sole purpose of doing this.
Given enough flexibility, networks WILL route around damage. Fortunately the FCC has just given us the flexibility we need.
Exactly. Normal advertising is responsive to consumers' wants, because marketing companies can't waste money on expensive advertisements for products that won't sell. On the other hand, spam is, by definition due to the economics, a flood of stuff that people likely don't want. The average person probably sees as much viagra spam as they see Coke and Pepsi adverts throughout the day, even though people want Coke/Pepsi a lot more.
(doh, wait a minute. don't tell anyone I posted this...)
Unfortunately my boss won't let me telecommute EVERY day of the week. When I do drive in, I have a garage so it's not too bad, but I still have to look at the outdoors during the drive to work, and actually step outside for the 30 seconds to walk across the parking lot at work. *shiver*
The Motorola A760 is based on linux, but that doesn't necessarily mean it runs X. It could just be using linux's memory management, file system, etc. code. I don't know how good of reviews it's getting, but I don't think you can really say that linux isn't ready.
Motorola has at least one phone (a 3G phone, the A920) based on Symbian. I like it so far, the interface is pretty well done. But does this mean Nokia will soon be pushing Motorola away from that as well? Motorola's has released phones with their own OS, Symbian, Linux, and one of microsoft's OS too, so I guess motorola has all sorts of alternatives.
byproduct's converges quite a bit faster though.
Just that certain technical protections are of the nature that it's not a "I try some random protection, the idiots and/or hackers try random ways to break in, with various techniques being better than others but we really only know by testing them out in the real world."
But spam unfortunately doesn't fall into that area unless we completely remove anonymity from email, which isn't necessarily the greatest idea. Though I know there are academic proposals for ways to anonymously vote and anonymously send cash in ways that satisfy certain very important criteria (eg. one person can't vote more than once, the receiver of anonymous cash can't retrieve the cash twice from the sender's bank account, the sender can't send a given transaction twice, etc). Do any of these techniques apply to allowing anonymous individual mail and bulk solicited email using a technically verifiable method?
- notice that provider-subsidized cell phones never have a USB output through which the picture can travel?
Phones are starting to have various flash cards as well, so that's another way to transfer files off.RFC 2396, though I still doubt it's mandatory. They don't mention http specifically regarding user/passwords, and they can't mandate it across all URLs (eg. specifying a password in a finger://... URI wouldn't make much sense). Also, HTTP has multiple ways to specify a HTTP user/pass (eg. basic, digest, basic+SSL, method=get, method=post), so that further confuses the idea of a universal way to specify usernames in addresses.
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