There have been. For instance, there was a version of Eudora that came with PGP. There is the theory that the US govt (but also most others) have done everything they can to discourage cryptography in mainstream aplications, to make their spying on the public easier. There was the whole "cryptography as munitions" idiocy, for instance, so you have to click buttons stating "I am not a terrorist", "I don't live in North Korea" before downloading or installing crypto.
See PGP deep-freezed - NAI shrugs: "John Ashcroft has been drumming the beat recently, reminding the tech industry that a 'lucrative surveillance state' (in our Tom's words) can be built from the ashes of the September 11 attacks. This obviously doesn't extend to personal privacy software. Are we the only people who find the neglect of PGP somewhat fishy?"
If you're concerned about privacy in your emails, why not use encryption? The freeware PGP-type solutions are reasonably secure and quite simple to use.
I got excited about this almost ten years ago. I installed PGP in my email client, made my keyring (or whatever it's called) and sent a few test messages to myself. After a couple of years in which time I never found anyone who even understood the idea, I gave up, never bothered to reinstall when I moved to a new PC.
If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem.
Terrorists are going to attack rail systems by using random public terminals!?. You realise, of course, that this "argument" would equally justify opening every letter, bugging every phone call or fax, placing listening devices anywhere?
And in this particular case, there are uncounted thousands of email services, some encrypted, based in every country in the world, that "terrorists" could use. I really doubt they'd want to keep a gigabyte of plots online anyway, for any period.
If the fear is of linkage between email, which gives the identity of the user, along with searching behaviour, then just use different cookies. Presumably there will be a new domain, Gmail.com, rather than the current subdomain off Google.com, which will make keeping the cookies separate trivial.
Also, the statements that mail may not be deleted is probably just a legal disclaimer in case it's not deleted immediately. What would be the point of keeping it -- it's just a legal timebomb to keep it around. But perhaps it's because they intend to separate spam and just keep one copy of each unique message, and give you a pointer to the Viagra ad, kiddie porn site, etc if you really do want to read your spam; in which case they might delete your link but not the actual message.
Yes, I noticed that, but "you're new here" is the traditional comment when someone shows naive faith in the editors or (even less well-founded) other readers.
I remember years ago some were touting heuristic antivirus as the way of the future. Obviously, it didn't work. The idea was to look for certain patterns rather than the actual virus.
Maybe I'm just used to the break neck pace of computer advancement, but this seems a little.. late.
The original Rolex Award was made in 2000. What spurred the submitter was someone posting about it on a buletin board recently. I don't really object to reading about this; but it would have been much better to cite a primary source, like the the RolexAwards site which has full report on this invention and the background.
The point is, and apparently it was novel enough an application to merit $75,000, is that this makes a dry cool space, a refrigerator, that can keep food cold, and has an enormous economic impact -- "Eggplants stay fresh for 27 days, instead of the usual three. Tomatoes and peppers last for up to three weeks" -- not just a pleasantly cool cup of water.
NB, this was reported in Time magazine in 2001.Slashdot is keeping its fine tradition of reporting "news" years late. Expect the dupe tomrrow.
How about when the worker clocks in/out, they get a receipt with the time and an encrypted time signature on it. If there smart enough to keep there receipts, they have evidence to contest.
At a job I had a few years ago I was being paid weeks, then months, in arrears. Having few alternatives and a family, I sucked it up till I got a better offer (at that point, any offer would have been better, but this actually paid twice as much). So I took the bastard to court for back pay and severance. He dragged it out for months, one claim being that I had habitually not worked my allotted hours. Since ther was no time clock, it was just his word and his girlfriend/secretary. However, I'd "backed up" my email at home, so I could show stacks of business email I'd sent at 7 or 8 pm, despite his claim that I "always" went home early.
The moral is, make your own proofs. In court, even a diary hand written by yourself, if it appears to have been kept regularly, has weight. Even more so if you've been unwillingly involved in unsavoury business pracices and want to claim mitigation.
There is an ancient story of a king in India who, being very pleased with a man, told him to ask for any gift. The man asked him to place a gold coin on one of the squares of a chess board and then merely double the amount on each subsequent square. That is, put two on the next square and four on the next square and so on.
"Oh, that's not enough, ask for more," the king said in his generosity. The man insisted that was all he wanted.
The king could not realize that by the time could not realize that by the time he got to the 32nd square, the cumulative number of gold coins would total amazing 2,147,483,648
A few things wrong with that story. First is that a chessboard has 64 squares. Second, the version I heard was a grain of rice on the first square, and double on each one after. (Just Google for rice+chessboard+king to find lots of references.) This makes the point much more startling.
Back-of the envelope calculation:
total grains of rice = 2^64-1 = 18 x 10^18
1 rice grain = 10-45 mg
so this is min 180 x 10^12 kg (180 billion tons*) rice
at retail I buy rice for $4/5kg = $0.8/kg
so this is worth roughly $140 trillion dollars. Bulk is cheaper, but I'd guess at least 10 trillion.
*World rice production is about 400 million tons (according to the FDA) so this is about 450 years of the world's production.
Bandwidth isn't getting cheap as fast (and in some places is gettgn more expensive); if you want to access your huge hoard of email you'll be using their servers a lot more.
I still want to know why a specialized graphics program like Adobe Photoshop is considered an essential application for Linux adoption
Just Google for
photoshop+linux:
Hit #1: Review: Photoshop under Linux -- "Prior to testing CrossOver Office, I was not sure how much the emulation would affect performance.... There do not seem to be any performance bottlenecks. Everything worked seamlessly, as promised... Access to the Photoshop files was easy."
Maybe they don't get it because they don't see Linux software on store shelves at Best Buy.
Forget about retail. PHBs don't go shopping, least of all in Best Buy. They are visited by a salesman who gets a commission for signing him for the software and support.
Actually, the giveaway is in the supposed extract from the UPI article The miniscule RFID tags.... Unlike Slashdot, UPI has and uses the advanced software known as "spellchecker" which would alert them to the fact that the word is "minuscule".
Actually, I thought the average user's mail is 75% spam. If Google cached the spam and simply stored a link to it, you could easily store gigabytes of spam
If they could determine it was spam, what would be the point of storing it?
Of course most average Joes won't use anywhere near a gig. If this is genuine, the gigabyte thing is more of a gimmick. It'll only be slashdotters and other hardcode user that will ever get anywhere near this amount
Actually, the reverse. The average clueless user sends and receives from his buddies gigantic image and video files, MP3s, etc, etc. You could max out a gig with just one or at most two attached ISOs.
Some twat modded the OP "offtopic". So I'l burn some more karma and repost it, even though several hours later the error has been corrected, it's still unforgiveable to make spelling mistakes when you're posting barely a dozen paragraphs a day.
I wouldn't be too much worried... we just need to provide around 10^19 kg of nitrogen (or some inert gas) and 0.3 x 10^19 kg of oxygen. These are absolutely huge numbers. Even if we take all oxygen from all our water from the Earth this won't be enough to fill out the Mars atmosphere...
There's plenty of CO2 on Mars for a start. Also lots of comets which contain all these elements; and if ice asteroids are hard to find thers certainly plenty around Jupiter.
Bush is probably premature in his plans, but if it results in a "next generation" launch system (ultimately, space elevators) rather than the glorified V2s we use now, and get some infrastructure in orbit and on the Moon, all this is possible. Not this decade, or even this century, but it can happen given the will and if we avoid disaster here.
Personally I can do without IE or WMP so long as I can FTP down a copy of Firefox and then download an open source media player...
but I don't want IE or WMP taken away just to allow other proprietary software to get in and start poping up requests for me to "Register for the Pro version".
Yes, Real player sucks now. One reason is the Real responded to being squeezed out of the market by getting more sleazy. If there was a chance for competing players to make money, by OEM deals for instance, they (Real or someone new, hopefully) could just make a good player and not try to scam money as they do now.
IE and WP won't be "taken away". They'll just be optional, as they should be. Actually, if you assume good connectivity, it makes sense for a preinstalled OS to be as basic as possible and allow installation of completely up to date components on demand, rather than the months or even years old versions that come in the box. A full blown browser with all the frills isn't necessary for that at all. Just something that can connect securely and download and install files, like apt-get with a wizard for newbies.
Yet, you expect everyone else's ISP to deal with your ISP's pollution.
You keep saying "your ISP" as if I had any influence. Actually, it's a subsidiary of Sony. Do you really think I can influence the Sony Corporation in any way at all? I can talk to someone at customer service all day long and get be sure that it'll be logged and forgotten immediately. The only upside is that Sony is too big to cut off completely.
And in fact I have no idea if my mail is blocked because of a "flood of sewage" from my ISP, because those bastards at AOL never explain why they've blocked me.
Hey MS, If you weren't afraid of formatting losses, why did you choose PDF? And how did you get your nice Office suite to create PDFs?
You may notice in the info for the PDF that it was created by QuarkXpress on a Mac. (I wondered why it looked so nice, though it has spelling mistakes.)
Slashdot Mirror
There have been. For instance, there was a version of Eudora that came with PGP. There is the theory that the US govt (but also most others) have done everything they can to discourage cryptography in mainstream aplications, to make their spying on the public easier. There was the whole "cryptography as munitions" idiocy, for instance, so you have to click buttons stating "I am not a terrorist", "I don't live in North Korea" before downloading or installing crypto.
See PGP deep-freezed - NAI shrugs: "John Ashcroft has been drumming the beat recently, reminding the tech industry that a 'lucrative surveillance state' (in our Tom's words) can be built from the ashes of the September 11 attacks. This obviously doesn't extend to personal privacy software. Are we the only people who find the neglect of PGP somewhat fishy?"
I got excited about this almost ten years ago. I installed PGP in my email client, made my keyring (or whatever it's called) and sent a few test messages to myself. After a couple of years in which time I never found anyone who even understood the idea, I gave up, never bothered to reinstall when I moved to a new PC.
Terrorists are going to attack rail systems by using random public terminals!?. You realise, of course, that this "argument" would equally justify opening every letter, bugging every phone call or fax, placing listening devices anywhere?
And in this particular case, there are uncounted thousands of email services, some encrypted, based in every country in the world, that "terrorists" could use. I really doubt they'd want to keep a gigabyte of plots online anyway, for any period.
Also, the statements that mail may not be deleted is probably just a legal disclaimer in case it's not deleted immediately. What would be the point of keeping it -- it's just a legal timebomb to keep it around. But perhaps it's because they intend to separate spam and just keep one copy of each unique message, and give you a pointer to the Viagra ad, kiddie porn site, etc if you really do want to read your spam; in which case they might delete your link but not the actual message.
Yes, I noticed that, but "you're new here" is the traditional comment when someone shows naive faith in the editors or (even less well-founded) other readers.
No, it did (does) work. It was simply more profitable to sell a program that requires frequent updates for each new threat. See e.g. Better antivirus software is worse than a virus?
"in the first quater", "varients, not original".
Taco pick up a typo? You must be new here...
No, because the manufacturing cost is 30 cents.
The original Rolex Award was made in 2000. What spurred the submitter was someone posting about it on a buletin board recently. I don't really object to reading about this; but it would have been much better to cite a primary source, like the the RolexAwards site which has full report on this invention and the background.
The point is, and apparently it was novel enough an application to merit $75,000, is that this makes a dry cool space, a refrigerator, that can keep food cold, and has an enormous economic impact -- "Eggplants stay fresh for 27 days, instead of the usual three. Tomatoes and peppers last for up to three weeks" -- not just a pleasantly cool cup of water.
NB, this was reported in Time magazine in 2001.Slashdot is keeping its fine tradition of reporting "news" years late. Expect the dupe tomrrow.
At a job I had a few years ago I was being paid weeks, then months, in arrears. Having few alternatives and a family, I sucked it up till I got a better offer (at that point, any offer would have been better, but this actually paid twice as much). So I took the bastard to court for back pay and severance. He dragged it out for months, one claim being that I had habitually not worked my allotted hours. Since ther was no time clock, it was just his word and his girlfriend/secretary. However, I'd "backed up" my email at home, so I could show stacks of business email I'd sent at 7 or 8 pm, despite his claim that I "always" went home early.
The moral is, make your own proofs. In court, even a diary hand written by yourself, if it appears to have been kept regularly, has weight. Even more so if you've been unwillingly involved in unsavoury business pracices and want to claim mitigation.
A few things wrong with that story. First is that a chessboard has 64 squares. Second, the version I heard was a grain of rice on the first square, and double on each one after. (Just Google for rice+chessboard+king to find lots of references.) This makes the point much more startling.
Back-of the envelope calculation:
total grains of rice = 2^64-1 = 18 x 10^18
1 rice grain = 10-45 mg
so this is min 180 x 10^12 kg (180 billion tons*) rice
at retail I buy rice for $4/5kg = $0.8/kg
so this is worth roughly $140 trillion dollars. Bulk is cheaper, but I'd guess at least 10 trillion.
*World rice production is about 400 million tons (according to the FDA) so this is about 450 years of the world's production.
Bandwidth isn't getting cheap as fast (and in some places is gettgn more expensive); if you want to access your huge hoard of email you'll be using their servers a lot more.
Just Google for photoshop+linux:
Hit #1: Review: Photoshop under Linux -- "Prior to testing CrossOver Office, I was not sure how much the emulation would affect performance.... There do not seem to be any performance bottlenecks. Everything worked seamlessly, as promised... Access to the Photoshop files was easy."
Forget about retail. PHBs don't go shopping, least of all in Best Buy. They are visited by a salesman who gets a commission for signing him for the software and support.
Actually, the giveaway is in the supposed extract from the UPI article The miniscule RFID tags.... Unlike Slashdot, UPI has and uses the advanced software known as "spellchecker" which would alert them to the fact that the word is "minuscule".
If they could determine it was spam, what would be the point of storing it?
Actually, the reverse. The average clueless user sends and receives from his buddies gigantic image and video files, MP3s, etc, etc. You could max out a gig with just one or at most two attached ISOs.
(Yes, I know "GMail" is an April Fool joke.)
It has to be said, Timothy is illiterate.
Some twat modded the OP "offtopic". So I'l burn some more karma and repost it, even though several hours later the error has been corrected, it's still unforgiveable to make spelling mistakes when you're posting barely a dozen paragraphs a day.
It has to be said, Timothy is illiterate.
Of course, literate geeks should know that paper ignites at Fahrenheit 451, (233 C).
There's plenty of CO2 on Mars for a start. Also lots of comets which contain all these elements; and if ice asteroids are hard to find thers certainly plenty around Jupiter.
Bush is probably premature in his plans, but if it results in a "next generation" launch system (ultimately, space elevators) rather than the glorified V2s we use now, and get some infrastructure in orbit and on the Moon, all this is possible. Not this decade, or even this century, but it can happen given the will and if we avoid disaster here.
Yes, Real player sucks now. One reason is the Real responded to being squeezed out of the market by getting more sleazy. If there was a chance for competing players to make money, by OEM deals for instance, they (Real or someone new, hopefully) could just make a good player and not try to scam money as they do now.
IE and WP won't be "taken away". They'll just be optional, as they should be. Actually, if you assume good connectivity, it makes sense for a preinstalled OS to be as basic as possible and allow installation of completely up to date components on demand, rather than the months or even years old versions that come in the box. A full blown browser with all the frills isn't necessary for that at all. Just something that can connect securely and download and install files, like apt-get with a wizard for newbies.
You keep saying "your ISP" as if I had any influence. Actually, it's a subsidiary of Sony. Do you really think I can influence the Sony Corporation in any way at all? I can talk to someone at customer service all day long and get be sure that it'll be logged and forgotten immediately. The only upside is that Sony is too big to cut off completely.
And in fact I have no idea if my mail is blocked because of a "flood of sewage" from my ISP, because those bastards at AOL never explain why they've blocked me.
You may notice in the info for the PDF that it was created by QuarkXpress on a Mac. (I wondered why it looked so nice, though it has spelling mistakes.)