But if you insist, fine, I promise I won't... actually. Guys, let's think about this... "Sorry, babe, my attorney has advised me that dancing in an unlicensed forum could put me in an untenable legal position. Let's just pound a few more drinks and head home, eh?"
Better hope not everyone is too smart to upgrade, or we'll be stuck forever.
Hmm, can you think of any case in which everyone has been too smart, and it caused a problem? Trust me, ubiquitous intelligence is not something we have to worry about. Well, not from humans.
What worried me is something I heard on NPR the other day. There were people standing in line, outside the store, for two hours to get Vista. In New York City. If Vista were that important to you, wouldn't you have grabbed a beta already? People like that scare me.
Yes, the Bush Administration is more at fault than anybody else with respect to Iraq. That includes Hillary, and Kerry. But they supported it. 30% Bullshit, Free Republic? You think I'm a Republican? Nope. Not a Dem either, but I want to see somebody run who can beat the next Republican. I don't see that happening with a Republican Lite like Hillary. Plenty of people knew that the justification for war was false from the get-go and said so. Wesley Clark, for example, was telling the press during the buildup to Iraq that the Bushies had put out the message to link 9/11 with Iraq in the first days after 9/11. Hillary, on the other hand (and Kerry, and Lieberman, and many others), helped give Bush cover because while they had to have known that the case for war was BS (anybody who did some research could see that, at the time), they didn't feel that politically they could get away with standing up against it. Others did. I would like to see one of them win.
And yes, Bush is a scumbag for trying to leave this mess for his successor. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean everybody else is pristine.
I could swear the clowntards at Cingular were crowing about a two year exclusive deal. Also, they mentioned that the Cingular name and logo would ALWAYS be on screen. Doesn't that mean they were effectively lying about the resolution, as some of the resolution will always be used only in a user-hostile fashion?
Ah well, the hardware looks great and it's certainly a platform which could handle almost everything you could want from the current generation. Too bad it's going to be on a crappy, slow network run by a company which is gloating about how badly it can treat its customers due to having a monopoly.
Good news: this will make Linux-based phones much better, much sooner.
This would be nice, were it not Hillary
on
The Privacy Candidate
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You want a consistent defender of privacy rights, look toward Patrick Leahy or Russ Feingold. Hillary... just today she stated that she wants *all* US troops out of Iraq by the time the next President takes office, so that she doesn't have to take the blame for the "surrender." Well, gee, you should have thought of that before you voted for the war, dontcha think? Their is no way that there will be zero US troops in Iraq in 2008 or in 2018. You know this. You don't want to face the consequences of your actions, any of them, ever. And this makes you more trustworthy than Bush... how?
Now, you may say that this is not germane to the privacy issue. But it is, because it shows that Hillary will say anything, at any time, to acquire and hold power. The value of her promises is null. The value of her insight is null. The value of her candidacy is negative, because it is most likely going to give the Presidency to those she claims to fight, while mimicking as closely as possible.
So, we made a decision, and it was wrong. It was a bad call. And now that we're going to keep doing the exact same thing wrong thing, you're mad at us? We expected more from you. We thought you were smarter than this.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. That is a separate issue from the security problems with Windows machines. You're right, the same idiots on another platform could make some of the same bad choices. It might be a good idea for email clients on any platform to advise users on bad manners such as using CC: instead of BCC:.
And WHY won't google rent out Gmail's filters?
on
Fight Spam With Nolisting
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Gmail's filtering is, well, badass. I'd think a large number of companies would be willing to pay them to handle email for their domains and forward to a company mail server which only accepts messages via gmail. You'd get a very nice web interface, but could still have the speed and power of a local POP/IMAP server. And virtually no spam. That would be worth a few bucks a month per account for a lot of people. Me, I'd be a little creeped out by them having that much access to my personal emails. Which is why I only use gmail for stuff that I don't want lost in a spam filter, like job searching, financial transactions, attorneys, my friends traveling in the Middle East, etc. But nothing personal!
...on the assumption that it will be less well-protected than the primary. If many people pull this fake-primary trick, I would assume they'll react quite quickly. This doesn't seem like much of a long-term defense. It looks to me like good defenses will (and do) involve either complex, evolving techniques (think of the p2p/reputation type stuff in razor/pyzor and FuzzyOCR), or hard choices (reject image-heavy messages, whitelist/greylist, etc). No defense, of course, will be perfect.
Based on watching a few corporate spam sites and even stuff which reaches my private, never-posted addresses, *much* of the spam could be eliminated by moving non-Windows clients. I'm not just talking about zombies. Some of the spam I see hits lists of addresses which are valid and include very difficult to guess addresses inside the company. Once somebody inside your company, or a buddy of yours is rooted, your previously private address is out there; I've never had this happen via any route but a Windows user. Of course, people who CC: everybody they know with idiotic crap instead of BCC: make this problem much worse.
Oh, and please stop with the lame form letter responses to these articles. It was cute once, long ago. I know at least five people will have posted them by now. Damn spammers.
Tabbed browsing. Some versions can make the Tab titles match your current prompt. (Latest CVS seems to break this?)
Looks gorgeous. Transparency, nice design, yadda yadda.
Fastest OSX terminal I've seen.
Nice activity monitoring: activity in a tab turns title purple, then red when it stops.
Can integrate with Growl for notifications.
Cons:
Interface is a bit obtuse. There are about three different places to set options (including Info?!?); you have to remember what goes where.
Uh... some versions crash on OSX/Intel when resizing windows, which is why I'm using latest CVS build:/
Terminal emulation seems slightly wonky. I might not have found the right settings.
Overall, though, it's very close to being as good as Konsole or whatever they call the Gnome equivalent now. And it's way-the-hell better than Terminal.app.
If something that's designed to cause things not to work never did so, and if added complexity, cost, and code never caused problems or price increases, would I...
Let me answer your question with a question. If punching yourself in the crotch didn't hurt, how much would you do it?
Oh, I totally agree that the reason Mr. Ford has been so dull for the last decade is because of the scripts. Thing is, he's in a position to pick and choose which scripts he accepts. For example, did you hear that Harrison Ford Turned Down Han Solo Role?
And despite what he says, this is not about trashing Cingular's network. The big question was whether we were finally going to have a decent platform which didn't nickel and dime you do death for every miniscule feature that an OSS developer could implement in minutes. The answer is-- not from Apple/ATT.
If they were worried about security, things like altering the strength of the radio signal beyond FCC limits, the answer is simple: treat the radio/phone functionality as a black box which only accepts certain commands through its API. For example, your program can dial, play sounds, record, play DTMF, play tones... hey, wait a minute... this is how telephony hardware works! It's been implemented thousands of times! Hey... the command sets even look sorta like... old modem AT command sets... which did not, it turns out, destroy our communications infrastructure! In fact... everybody ended up making *more* money when people started using open, standardized networks. Wowee!
But friends, I am here to tell you that the iPhone is still GFN (Really Good News) for everyone. Why? Because it's going to put a serious crunch on all the other phone makers, and the only way they can beat it is going to be A) Introduce comparable hardware, not the monstrosities that, say, Motorola is putting out, and B) Come up with equal or better software. Wait, how can they do that? Those telcos and Palm and those guys *suck* at software! Well... Open Source. Let the users implement what they want. Look at the Maemo software lineup, if you don't think it can work. Motorola, Nokia, and others are already more than halfway there-- they're not completely stupid, after all. All the iPhone does is send them the message that they can't turn back.
I can't wait. The day an open Linux-based phone with decent screen/input model comes out, I'm kicking the Treo to the curb. Literally. I'll finally be able to do things like... answer a call or do an SMS without losing SSH/Web sessions. By the way, a message for Palm developers: sometimes, in life, more than one thing happens at the same time. I know, it's confusing. There, there.
Wow, I haven't had coffee this late at night in a looong time. Tolerance down. Leaving now.
Okay, I know I'll get roasted for this, but... All I've seen Ford do for, oh, at least the last decade is play the straight man, the righteous normal guy who has to become an avenging action when he is SHOCKED to find that people do evil... but he never has a spark of the bad-boy sass that used to animate Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
I mean... looking at IMDB... the Tom Clancy movies, Air Force One (Worst Idea Ever), The Fugitive, Firewall, K-19... the guy's become a grim automaton. Some of those movies were decent, but his characters were pretty much the same in every damn one. Anyway, let's hope that IJ4 breaks the long grey-brown streak.
I've stayed at one hotel that was intercepting HTTP requests and rewriting them so that if you went to, say, Amazon, you'd be buying with their referral code. Pretty sleazy.
As others have noted, it's good to proxy. And it's wise to assume the worst about hotel networks; no, any foreign network; no, any network; no, any communications medium. Probably even your own thoughts.
Microsoft wants to empower its users, and everyone else, for that matter. Don't you see how convenient it is that MS products execute treat every piece of data they ever come into contact with, no matter where it's from or whether it's a video, sound file, Office document, image-- whatever!-- as an executable? It's just like how you pick up every piece of garbage you see and put it in your mouth because it might be food. That's the taste of Freedom!
Yet I think that not even the deffest of jams merits compensation sufficient for an interstellar platinum plated Hummer-- which I can get you, for $1.65 trillion, I promise. Heck, I'll to it for half that. But I need it up front.
I'd mod you up if I could. Another benefit of this would be the network effect on hashing tools. Yeah, any linux/osx/unix user has them already, and they're easy to get for Windows as well. But if google started exposing this, tool makers would follow. This would really boost infrastructure and standards for things like p2p apps, desktop search, backup tools, Internet-hosted storage, etc. The ??AA would also want to use it, of course, and this might even be a reason google has refrained from making it public so far but... I think the tech is more useful than damaging.
Does Google allow searching by md5sum or equivalent? I'm sure they have the capability. While not as impressive as what this company claims, it'd also be more reliable for unaltered media files.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you insist, fine, I promise I won't... actually. Guys, let's think about this... "Sorry, babe, my attorney has advised me that dancing in an unlicensed forum could put me in an untenable legal position. Let's just pound a few more drinks and head home, eh?"
I was going to do that this weekend, but, with one thing and another... Tell you what, remind me Friday.
Hmm, can you think of any case in which everyone has been too smart, and it caused a problem? Trust me, ubiquitous intelligence is not something we have to worry about. Well, not from humans.
What worried me is something I heard on NPR the other day. There were people standing in line, outside the store, for two hours to get Vista. In New York City. If Vista were that important to you, wouldn't you have grabbed a beta already? People like that scare me.
And yes, Bush is a scumbag for trying to leave this mess for his successor. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean everybody else is pristine.
Ah well, the hardware looks great and it's certainly a platform which could handle almost everything you could want from the current generation. Too bad it's going to be on a crappy, slow network run by a company which is gloating about how badly it can treat its customers due to having a monopoly.
Good news: this will make Linux-based phones much better, much sooner.
Now, you may say that this is not germane to the privacy issue. But it is, because it shows that Hillary will say anything, at any time, to acquire and hold power. The value of her promises is null. The value of her insight is null. The value of her candidacy is negative, because it is most likely going to give the Presidency to those she claims to fight, while mimicking as closely as possible.
So, we made a decision, and it was wrong. It was a bad call. And now that we're going to keep doing the exact same thing wrong thing, you're mad at us? We expected more from you. We thought you were smarter than this.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. That is a separate issue from the security problems with Windows machines. You're right, the same idiots on another platform could make some of the same bad choices. It might be a good idea for email clients on any platform to advise users on bad manners such as using CC: instead of BCC:.
Gmail's filtering is, well, badass. I'd think a large number of companies would be willing to pay them to handle email for their domains and forward to a company mail server which only accepts messages via gmail. You'd get a very nice web interface, but could still have the speed and power of a local POP/IMAP server. And virtually no spam. That would be worth a few bucks a month per account for a lot of people. Me, I'd be a little creeped out by them having that much access to my personal emails. Which is why I only use gmail for stuff that I don't want lost in a spam filter, like job searching, financial transactions, attorneys, my friends traveling in the Middle East, etc. But nothing personal!
Based on watching a few corporate spam sites and even stuff which reaches my private, never-posted addresses, *much* of the spam could be eliminated by moving non-Windows clients. I'm not just talking about zombies. Some of the spam I see hits lists of addresses which are valid and include very difficult to guess addresses inside the company. Once somebody inside your company, or a buddy of yours is rooted, your previously private address is out there; I've never had this happen via any route but a Windows user. Of course, people who CC: everybody they know with idiotic crap instead of BCC: make this problem much worse.
Oh, and please stop with the lame form letter responses to these articles. It was cute once, long ago. I know at least five people will have posted them by now. Damn spammers.
Pros:
- Tabbed browsing. Some versions can make the Tab titles match your current prompt. (Latest CVS seems to break this?)
- Looks gorgeous. Transparency, nice design, yadda yadda.
- Fastest OSX terminal I've seen.
- Nice activity monitoring: activity in a tab turns title purple, then red when it stops.
- Can integrate with Growl for notifications.
Cons:Overall, though, it's very close to being as good as Konsole or whatever they call the Gnome equivalent now. And it's way-the-hell better than Terminal.app.
Now why'd you have to go and do that for. Trying to make a point, here...
Let me answer your question with a question. If punching yourself in the crotch didn't hurt, how much would you do it?
Oh, I totally agree that the reason Mr. Ford has been so dull for the last decade is because of the scripts. Thing is, he's in a position to pick and choose which scripts he accepts. For example, did you hear that Harrison Ford Turned Down Han Solo Role?
If they were worried about security, things like altering the strength of the radio signal beyond FCC limits, the answer is simple: treat the radio/phone functionality as a black box which only accepts certain commands through its API. For example, your program can dial, play sounds, record, play DTMF, play tones... hey, wait a minute... this is how telephony hardware works! It's been implemented thousands of times! Hey... the command sets even look sorta like... old modem AT command sets... which did not, it turns out, destroy our communications infrastructure! In fact... everybody ended up making *more* money when people started using open, standardized networks. Wowee!
But friends, I am here to tell you that the iPhone is still GFN (Really Good News) for everyone. Why? Because it's going to put a serious crunch on all the other phone makers, and the only way they can beat it is going to be A) Introduce comparable hardware, not the monstrosities that, say, Motorola is putting out, and B) Come up with equal or better software. Wait, how can they do that? Those telcos and Palm and those guys *suck* at software! Well... Open Source. Let the users implement what they want. Look at the Maemo software lineup, if you don't think it can work. Motorola, Nokia, and others are already more than halfway there-- they're not completely stupid, after all. All the iPhone does is send them the message that they can't turn back.
I can't wait. The day an open Linux-based phone with decent screen/input model comes out, I'm kicking the Treo to the curb. Literally. I'll finally be able to do things like... answer a call or do an SMS without losing SSH/Web sessions. By the way, a message for Palm developers: sometimes, in life, more than one thing happens at the same time. I know, it's confusing. There, there.
Wow, I haven't had coffee this late at night in a looong time. Tolerance down. Leaving now.
I mean... looking at IMDB... the Tom Clancy movies, Air Force One (Worst Idea Ever), The Fugitive, Firewall, K-19... the guy's become a grim automaton. Some of those movies were decent, but his characters were pretty much the same in every damn one. Anyway, let's hope that IJ4 breaks the long grey-brown streak.
As others have noted, it's good to proxy. And it's wise to assume the worst about hotel networks; no, any foreign network; no, any network; no, any communications medium. Probably even your own thoughts.
Have you ever noticed that any product with "!" in the name... well, there's no delicate way to put this... sucks?
Microsoft wants to empower its users, and everyone else, for that matter. Don't you see how convenient it is that MS products execute treat every piece of data they ever come into contact with, no matter where it's from or whether it's a video, sound file, Office document, image-- whatever!-- as an executable? It's just like how you pick up every piece of garbage you see and put it in your mouth because it might be food. That's the taste of Freedom!
I always wanted mirrored contact lenses, actually. Then when people took a flash photo of me it would look like my head was exploding.
Pfft. Gloves.
or if a special camera shows that the driver's pupils are not in focus.
Pfft. Blindfold.
You'll have to try harder than that to infringe on my freedoms, Toyota!
Yet I think that not even the deffest of jams merits compensation sufficient for an interstellar platinum plated Hummer-- which I can get you, for $1.65 trillion, I promise. Heck, I'll to it for half that. But I need it up front.
I'd mod you up if I could. Another benefit of this would be the network effect on hashing tools. Yeah, any linux/osx/unix user has them already, and they're easy to get for Windows as well. But if google started exposing this, tool makers would follow. This would really boost infrastructure and standards for things like p2p apps, desktop search, backup tools, Internet-hosted storage, etc. The ??AA would also want to use it, of course, and this might even be a reason google has refrained from making it public so far but... I think the tech is more useful than damaging.
But it looks like the real "innovation" these guys are pushing toward is fully automated filing of lawsuits. I think that was in Accelerando, which is fantastic, and which you can download it free.