> M$ is just cranky that the majority of people are no longer upgrading > their OS and simply sticking with the one that came with the system
That's been the case for two and a half decades, maybe longer, and it's what put and kept Microsoft in the dominant position that they're in. Microsoft knows this, too, and they vigilantly protect their OEM-install market from competition by having "our software exclusively on every unit in the whole product line and no dual-boot setups" clauses in the contracts that the big OEMs have to sign to get special pricing. (That's how they killed Be, among other things.) If people were willing to install new operating systems on their own, they'd be just as likely to try alternatives as to upgrade to Microsoft's latest. I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't want that.
They're probably hoping to convince people to go out and buy a new computer (with Seven on it), but it'll most likely be a few years before everyone toes that line, methinks.
Microsoft has always taken a rather Kenobian view of what is factual. "What we said was true... from a certain point of view [if you are willing to set aside the obviously deceptive intent that was clearly calculated to make you think something that wasn't true and prevent you from learning something else that is true]."
No, that's wrong. If you read what the Microsoft dude wrote, it's extremely clear: "native" in this context means "not cross-platform" and specifically "not built on cross-platform libraries or abstraction layers (like, presumably, Webkit or Gecko or XUL or anything along those lines)".
Really. I'm not making this up. He specifically mentions "avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries".
Leave it to Microsoft to herald the same old archaic non-portability we used to suffer in the bad old days as a positive achievement now that everyone has finally realized the importance of moving away from it.
I sure wish people would stop saying "SSL" when what they mean is "https".
SSL is fine. Other protocols based on SSL (notably, SSH) are fine.
The problem is https was designed badly and uses SSL in a grossly insecure manner and is therefore fundamentally broken.
If the protocol were designed securely, the browser would check that the server cert presented either is the *same* cert that was presented last time the site was visited or at least is signed by the *same* authority cert as signed the previous one. That's a minimum, and it's overwhelmingly more important than the specific identity of the company got paid to sign the thing or whether said certificate authority is on The List. I mean, sure, check that too I suppose, but it is *vitally* important to check that the cert hasn't been issued by a new or different authority since the last time the user visited the site. (Exceptions could be made to that, I suppose, if the previous cert is expired.)
(Yes, yes, a mechanism is needed to allow first-time visitors to a site to verify the identity of the site. This is less important than the current problems, because it's difficult for an attacker to predict first-time visits. At worst you use something very similar to the current mechanism the first time the user visits any given site, at which point the current rash of problems is limited to first-time visits, which are significantly less frequent and MUCH more difficult for the attacker to predict than repeat visits. It might be possible to do better than that.)
> Is there another Google website anyone actually uses?
You mean like, for instance, one with an Alexa rank of three? How about the one with an Alexa rank of eight? Do those count as sites that anybody actually uses? Granted, their web search site ranks at 1, so it's used even more. Still, both YouTube and Blogger rank ahead of Wikipedia, so apparently *somebody* is using them.
It's also used to transfer PNG graphics, CSS stylesheets, SVG vector graphics, XML markup, and various other formats. Off the top of my head I would guess that HTTP is probably the fifth most widely used protocol, after IP protocol, TCP protocol, the DNS system, and SMTP protocol.
Actually, it's simpler than that. Manned travel to Mars is *possible* with the technology of the 1980s -- grossly uneconomic, but possible. You just have to make a fewhundred thousand rocket flights from Earth's surface out to someplace with a more lenient gravity well (like, say, Earth's L2 point just on the far side of the Moon) and assemble your interplanetary ship and launch from there. When you get to Mars you leave the interplanetary craft in orbit and take down only what you need on the surface, plus enough rocket power to get you back up and enough more to slow your descent on the way down. It's an incredibly expensive trip, and the participants would probably develop a rather severe case of cabin fever, but it's physically possible.
Why haven't we done it, then? There's not enough incentive. It's thousands of times cheaper and easier to send robotic probes, and we get very nearly 100% of the benefit of sending a manned expedition.
Note too that while a manned expedition is theoretically possible, given enough funding, long-term colonization really isn't, because there's no way for any colony on Mars to provide for its ongoing needs. There's not enough atmosphere to support life, and keeping everything in a pressurized bubble all the time requires a continuous supply of materials and energy that cannot be produced locally. Even if you could somehow transport a nuclear reactor to Mars, there's no practical way to keep it cooled and maintained, and even if you could it only solves the energy problem. You still need a constant supply of materials and equipment, which would have to come from Earth, at enormous expense. The colony could never produce enough value to pay for that, so it could never be independent -- not with today's technology, anyhow. A colony in a bubble on the ocean floor would be *much* cheaper to build and maintain and produce *much* more value in trade goods and services (not least tourism), but nobody's yet managed to finance one, which should tell you something.
> You don't replace them, you just create a borderless > window and then draw your own widgets in there.
Same difference. Either way they'll be wonky and non-standard. They won't fit with whatever visual theme the user has selected, and, heck, the buttons probably won't even be in the right places. Who would want that?
> Chrome does this
Its window decorations look normal to me here. They even change their appearance when I change my window manager's settings, just like every other window. (I'm using sawfish. I have no idea why the Gnome folks switched the default to metacity, but it probably has something to do with their apparent desire to make Gnome noticeably worse and worse with every passing version.)
> IMO borderless windows should be restricted to full-screen windows.
Okay, the root window, sure, but that's different. It's not borderless because some hair-brained application decided to replace its usual decorations with funky special ones. It's borderless because it's the root window. Something similar could be said for panels and docks (I have gnome-panel running, for example, and the panels don't have window decorations), but again those are not application windows; they're part of the desktop environment. It wouldn't make sense for them to be decorated like an application window.
> Look to Windows for a platform where rampant ignorance of UI consistency is the norm: > Lots of apps are borderless with self-provided (and self-themed) interface elements.
And yet, the user's ability to customize anything is strangely absent. So, yeah, *you* look to Windows if you want. I'll be over here doing my level best to forget about it.
> The idea behind that is that the URL bar affects only the > current tab, thus it logically belongs inside the tab
I ain't buying it. In the first place, they didn't just move the URL bar down. They moved *everything* down into the page content area: the entire navigation bar, the links toolbar, any other toolbars that happen to be installed,... In the second place, only *certain* widgets on the navbar are related specifically to the current tab (mainly, the really old ones that have been around since Mosaic). Other things on the same toolbar do things like show or hide various toolbars, open new tabs or sets of tabs or even whole windows, fire up add-ons, and who knows what else, limited only by what extensions the user decides to install. And that's ignoring the possibility that the user might have the location bar set up to open new tabs.
No. They didn't do tabs on top because the location bar logically belongs inside the tab. That's a sophistry somebody thought up to defend it when people complained. The reason they did tabs on top is because Chrome has tabs on top and somebody thought copying unimportant superficial features of Chrome was a good idea just because Chrome had picked up a whole bunch of new users all of a sudden, and Firefox usage has plateaued.
> Thankfully, the Mozilla devs made tab-on-taop easy to turn off.
That will change. They make controversial new features easy to turn off at first, removing them from the preferences dialog in a later release under the guise of usability, and then subsequently removing them from about:config without apology because due to some unrelated controversial new feature the option stopped working.
Have you tried turning off the stupid "bookmark tabset replaces the content of the current tab" feature in recent versions? Haha. Dataloss? What are you talking about? The contents of your tabs are not data, they're, umm, well, this is the way it's designed to work now, mkay?
> Much of the time it is loopholes, not actual expenses, that result in corps "not paying their share"
The words "loopholes" and "expenses" carry different emotional weight, but in terms of taxes, when it comes down to brass tacks, they actually mean pretty much exactly the same thing. Bottom line: anyone who can afford to hire a high-end accountant can generally arrange things so as to avoid technically having a whole lot of income for tax purposes. That's why politicians love to "tax the rich" (by raising the percentage numbers in the top brackets), even though the rich provide most of their campaign contributions. The rich don't *care* what the percentage numbers are for the top brackets, because the rich aren't in the top brackets, because none of the money they make hand over fist is taxable income.
Personal taxes and corporate taxes are very different, in terms of the details, but such details only matter if you're the accountant. The general principle is the same: if you have the money for a good accountant, you can solve your tax problem. (Of course, this is only worth doing if the taxes you would otherwise pay would be more than the accountant's salary.) Raising the rates at the top of the scale increases the value of a clever accountant, but it has very little impact on government revenue.
I can also tell you from personal experience that people with low income don't pay any significant income taxes (except FICA or Social Security or Medicare or whatever they're calling it these days, and people who can take the EIC get a lot of that back too). If you make less than about fifteen thousand (even more now, with the Schedule M thing) your Federal income taxes, and your State ones too (well, in Ohio anyway), don't amount to squat.
Who pays all the taxes then? Everybody else: the people who are neither really poor nor really rich.
(That's excluding sales and excise taxes, of course, because those are not based on income.)
> "Tax haven" is a common term in UK English. Is the term not common in the US?
In the US it's only a common term among people with at least a secondary education (that's the amount of education that everyone is legally required to complete unless they get a special exemption like the Amish or whatever). It's not usually covered in gradeschool. So I guess that rules out about half of slashdot.
> Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology.
That would be foolish at this point, because Area 51 is quite famous, virtually a byword for conspiracy theory. There's way too much risk that somebody would manage to figure out how to sneak a peek.
At one time, Area 51 may well have been chock full of advanced (for the time) technology, possibly including various experimental aircraft, some of which may have since been declassified, others not. At this point, however, anybody who wanted to keep anything secret (and was at all clever about doing so) would certainly not put it there.
Sure, *some* people will ignore whatever is there on the assumption that there's nothing to be found but a heaping load of wacky tabloid space-alien conspiracy theory. However, other people would want to investigate it anyway, and if you want to keep something secret you have to keep it secret from both kinds of people. It makes a lot more sense to put a weather station at Area 51 and maybe a training center for, I don't know, radar operators or some jazz like that, pay a few soldiers to guard it (hey, we've got to have a standing trained army anyway), and let it be a decoy.
If I were in charge of it, I'd pipe/dev/random through a filter that transforms everything into alphanumeric characters, print a few hundred thousand pages of the results, and fill up a large set of locked filing cabinets with that, just in case anyone ever does break in. Put nice color-coded labels on the folders, each marked with a randomly selected dictionary word.
Then I'd run a Markov chain generator on a large collection of input, pipe its output through a relatively simple substitution cipher, and fill another set of locked cabinets with that.
I'd fill the third set of cabinets with random unimportant junk paper, like obsolete office memos about when the next staff meeting is and the new enlightened gender-equality improvements to the dress code policy, doodles made while bored during meetings, and whatever other meaningless junk makes itself available. The bodies of randomly selected messages from usenet, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as it looks like text and isn't important. Maybe I'd have a low-level file clerk use disappearing ink (or just lemon juice) to circle or underline a few letters at random on each page.
Call it a shell game: anybody who manages to break in and steal samples of the files (or even all the files if they're really good) can have a jolly old time trying to figure out which ones are the red herrings and which ones contain the top secret info, but there's no risk of their figuring out anything of consequence, because in fact the pea isn't actually under any of the shells at all. Well, that's what I'd do, anyway.
Honestly? I wouldn't put any of *my* money into Alzheimer's research, because I think a few more decades (at least) of basic primary research will be required before there's any real chance of getting anywhere useful with Alzheimer's. Maybe if we had some kind of reasonably useful model for how the brain actually works, for example, and what (if anything) the various chemical reactions and signals and whatnot have to do with how any of the higher-level functions are achieved, then perhaps we'd have something to go on when trying to figure out how Alzheimer's screws it up, what causes that, and how it can be treated. Otherwise it's like a blind man trying to figure out how to paint photorealistic landscapes, without a seeing person to explain concepts like hue or shade or perspective.
(Note that I'm not saying we should allow a patent troll to prevent other people from spending *their* money on Alzheimer's research. That's a separate issue altogether. I just think it's pretty odd to talk about "impeding" progress when there wasn't any progress before the supposed impeding got underway.)
> not having the tabs on top makes the window smaller by a pixel or two on > platforms where Fx isn't allowed to replace the window decorations.
There are window managers that allow the application to replace its own window decorations?
Seriously? WHY? I cannot imagine anyone EVER wanting that.
I just turn off "tabs on top" because it's the most moronic thing ever. I mean, why on earth would I want all the browser and browser-extension chrome (toolbars and so on) moved down inside the page content area? Also, why would I want to have to move the pointer a couple hundred pixels farther up out of the page area to get to the tabs?
The only reason anyone would use tabs on top, near as I can tell, is because it's the default. Firefox did it is because they were copying Chrome, which had suddenly become popular, but I'm absolutely certain *that isn't why* Chrome suddenly became popular. (Speed might've been part of why. I'm certain aggressive advertising on popular Google web services is part of why. There may be other reasons as well, why Chrome got popular so fast. Tabs on top isn't among them.) I don't know why the Chrome team put tabs on top, but my first guess would be some developer (or their manager) wanted to change things up and make Chrome's UI look different from other browsers just for the sake of being different. (Some people mistake new differences for innovation, even if the specific new differences in question are obviously completely superfluous and useless.)
Okay, but that's a special case. Smartphones, being an even more extreme case, don't show scrollbars or toolbars or anything. That's all well and good, as long as it stays confined to said special devices, but as a desktop user I shouldn't be inconvenienced by that.
Indeed, the desire to save endangered species is really only logical for creationists. If you believe in evolution (well, upward macro-evolution at any rate) then such notions are fundamentally inconsistent with your ontology.
For the record, I am in favor of saving endangered types of animals that we can reasonably save (by, for instance, trying not to actively hunt them to extinction), but when a species has become so genetic-diversity-impoverished that it can't function in the real world if thrown even a small curve ball, I do believe it's reasonable to let go at some point. When you're doing the equivalent of keeping a brain-dead corpse from rotting by artificially pumping its blood through an iron lung, you're not accomplishing anything meaningful. At that point it makes sense to spend the resources where they can do something useful, instead. (Yeah, I know, where to draw the line will be a judgment call in some cases.)
I also don't think it's necessary to save every "species" following Darwin's deliberately-warped definition thereof (which he specifically jerry-rigged so that he'd be able to observe the emergence of new ones during his studies; no obvious or natural definition would have allowed that and he knew it). If a given species doesn't have anything in its genome to differentiate it from other species elsewhere in the world, then the distinction between them is unimportant and there is, in my view, no point in preserving such an artificial distinction.
> So make it pseudorandom and use the first byte of the source IP as part of the seed.
Do note that the seed would also have to be salted with a value unknown to the attacker, which you would probably select when you set the thing up, and which you wouldn't want to change very often because changing it would give them (a small amount each time of) new information about the average delay. They could also get information about the average delay for each different/8 they could use to try to locate you. A statistician could work out what their expected margin of error would be depending on how many different/8 networks they have at their disposal, but botnets would be a threat in any case.
> Then they just have to ping you enough times and the random delay will average out.
So make it pseudorandom and use the first byte of the source IP as part of the seed. That's easier to implement than true randomness anyway.
Of course, introducing (otherwise unnecessary) latency into all your traffic does have some practical consequences that you'd have to take into consideration. The more inaccuracy you want to introduce into their ability to locate you, the longer the delays all your traffic would suffer. If you don't want the delays to be human noticeable (even when multiplied by the inherent back-and-forth of various protocols) they're going to have at least a *general* idea of your location -- but they probably would anyway, by looking up netblock owner.
VPNs and proxies and other route-through-elsewhere setups also complicate matters.
> Most ISP access services reach at least 2 miles in any direction, and often 10 miles and more.
This.
I happen to know (approximately) where the router at the other end of our T1 line is located. It's in Columbus, more than an hour's drive south from here.
The technique in the article might be reasonably effective against people in big cities, where everybody gets their upstream bandwidth directly from a local provider, but it's not going to work against networks with long-distance connections, which is fairly common outside the big cities. (Okay, it's not common for home users, but home users' ISPs sell geolocation info to the advertisers anyway, so they can just look you up by net block and get your zipcode.)
That's debatable, especially if you take into account the amount of development that took place from one version to the next. Firefox 2 was arguably a more mature release, with a larger number of major releases preceding it, than IE7. (Opera I'll grant, though. It's been continuously maintained since the days of Trumpet Winsock, so big version numbers are warranted there.)
IE basically skipped versions 1 and 2 (they were minor feature-incomplete dev milestones; normal users never saw them), and even versions 3 and 4 were not feature-complete compared to other browsers of the time (notably Netscape). They just pumped the number up real fast so people would *think* it was equivalent to Netscape 4. Granted, 5.5 could arguably be considered worthy of major-version-number status. Still, being *very* generous, major IE releases are 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, and now 9.0, for a total of eight, max. A less magnanimous assessment might peg it at more like six without being completely unfair.
Meanwhile, when development on the Mozilla codebase (that eventually became Firefox) started, IE was only about three or four years old. Then after the release of 6.0 the IE team at Microsoft was completely disbanded and NO significant development was done for several years (until finally it was so antequated that Microsoft was legitimately concerned they might lose ALL of their browser userbase if they didn't get off their tails and make IE look somewhat less like using stone knives and bear skins). If you throw out the years when browser development at Microsoft had completely ceased, I'm not at all sure that the IE codebase has been developed for more years than the Mozilla codebase.
That brings up another point: the codebase that gave rise to what we now call Firefox has changed version number schemes and application names repeatedly, but starting from around Mozilla 0.8 or so it was essentially feature-complete and stable (compared to the other browsers available at the time, particularly IE). If you count from there, major releases with significant new features include Mozilla 0.9, 0.9.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0, then Phoenix 0.something, a couple of Firebird releases, and then there were a couple of Firefox releases *before* 1.0...
Firefox 2 was a MUCH more mature release than IE7, with I would say a larger history of preceding major releases. Okay, the UI got a big overhaul in the aviary move, but for that matter the IE7 UI doesn't look much like IE6, either. The rendering engine is built on the same codebase in both cases, so I would argue that it's basically a contiguous development history.
Granted, there haven't been a lot of improvements *since* Firefox 2. A small handful of new CSS features (of which about three are any practical use) and a couple of perf improvements -- and a whole raft of seriously undesirable "let's screw up the UI for no good reason until nobody can stand it anymore, then let's do it some more" nonsense, plus a couple of major new stability bugs. Meh.
> Of all the stupid features from Chrome to pick up, > the version numbers is, by far, the dumbest.
I disagree. I think that's relatively harmless. Users won't even notice.
The dumbest has got to be either the stupid idiotic moronic "tabs on top" or the completely insane lack of menubar (pioneered by IE7, granted, but Chrome has had it for a good while now too). I can't decide which is worse. (Yeah, I know, you can turn them both off and get a more or less normal UI. For now. That will change in a future version, mark my words.)
Meh. Firefox 5? I don't even like Firefox 3. Version 2 was the best so far. Okay, page loading was a little slow, and version 3 improved that. But performance has never been as important to me as stability (by which I mean not crashing and even more importantly not losing data), and Firefox 2 is a great deal better in that regard. If the new CSS features in recent versions of Gecko could be backported into Firefox 2, I'd be pleased as punch.
All governments (national or otherwise) are doomed. None of them last forever. A few are conquered or otherwise absorbed from the outside, but most decay from the inside and just fall apart. Either way, sooner or later they cease to exist as a going concern.
> a practice that scientists say could hamper the progress of research into combating the dreaded disease
Progress? Into combating Alzheimer's Disease? What progress?
I haven't seen any progress on that front. At all. Alzheimer's is notoriously intractable. Every few years there's a story in the news about some new medical research into Alzheimer's, but it always comes to nothing. Aluminum pots? Not relevant after all. Amyloid inhibitors? Useless. Beta carotine? Apparently unrelated. Ginko? Ineffective. Just about the only reliable way to *avoid* Alzheimer's, that we've discovered so far, is to die young from something else. Sign us all up for that, right?
I predict every single currently valid patent will expire, and then all the patents that are valid by the time that happens will expire, and we won't know anything significant about Alzheimer's Disease that we didn't already know in the seventies. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I ain't holdin' my breath.
I don't know about the company side, but as an employee I sure as anything prefer to have a workplace outside the home and a home outside the workplace. Take a pay cut to telecommute? Sounds like a raw deal to me. Call me a grumpy curmudgeon if you will, but no thanks.
Unicode support is unwanted. (Actually, I'm pretty sure the code goes out of its way to get rid of non-ASCII characters.) Slashdot is an unapologetically English-language-only forum. Unicode support would only add three things: more annoying forms of spam and trolling, gratuitously weird character-art hacks (e.g., foreign-character emoticons), and the ability for people who know foreign languages to be flagrantly pretentious about it.
This is, of course, not true for the web in general. But for Slashdot specifically, Unicode support would be a step in the WRONG direction.
Of course, pretty much every design change they've ever done has been a step in the wrong direction, so perhaps they *will* add Unicode support one of these days. It could hardly be worse than the completely gratuitous never-ending Javascript they added a few revisions back.
Slashdot Mirror
> M$ is just cranky that the majority of people are no longer upgrading
> their OS and simply sticking with the one that came with the system
That's been the case for two and a half decades, maybe longer, and it's what put and kept Microsoft in the dominant position that they're in. Microsoft knows this, too, and they vigilantly protect their OEM-install market from competition by having "our software exclusively on every unit in the whole product line and no dual-boot setups" clauses in the contracts that the big OEMs have to sign to get special pricing. (That's how they killed Be, among other things.) If people were willing to install new operating systems on their own, they'd be just as likely to try alternatives as to upgrade to Microsoft's latest. I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't want that.
They're probably hoping to convince people to go out and buy a new computer (with Seven on it), but it'll most likely be a few years before everyone toes that line, methinks.
Microsoft has always taken a rather Kenobian view of what is factual. "What we said was true... from a certain point of view [if you are willing to set aside the obviously deceptive intent that was clearly calculated to make you think something that wasn't true and prevent you from learning something else that is true]."
No, that's wrong. If you read what the Microsoft dude wrote, it's extremely clear: "native" in this context means "not cross-platform" and specifically "not built on cross-platform libraries or abstraction layers (like, presumably, Webkit or Gecko or XUL or anything along those lines)".
Really. I'm not making this up. He specifically mentions "avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries".
Leave it to Microsoft to herald the same old archaic non-portability we used to suffer in the bad old days as a positive achievement now that everyone has finally realized the importance of moving away from it.
I sure wish people would stop saying "SSL" when what they mean is "https".
SSL is fine. Other protocols based on SSL (notably, SSH) are fine.
The problem is https was designed badly and uses SSL in a grossly insecure manner and is therefore fundamentally broken.
If the protocol were designed securely, the browser would check that the server cert presented either is the *same* cert that was presented last time the site was visited or at least is signed by the *same* authority cert as signed the previous one. That's a minimum, and it's overwhelmingly more important than the specific identity of the company got paid to sign the thing or whether said certificate authority is on The List. I mean, sure, check that too I suppose, but it is *vitally* important to check that the cert hasn't been issued by a new or different authority since the last time the user visited the site. (Exceptions could be made to that, I suppose, if the previous cert is expired.)
(Yes, yes, a mechanism is needed to allow first-time visitors to a site to verify the identity of the site. This is less important than the current problems, because it's difficult for an attacker to predict first-time visits. At worst you use something very similar to the current mechanism the first time the user visits any given site, at which point the current rash of problems is limited to first-time visits, which are significantly less frequent and MUCH more difficult for the attacker to predict than repeat visits. It might be possible to do better than that.)
Whether Google's source is open is somewhat less important than whether the protocol has an open specification that Google's implementation follows.
> Is there another Google website anyone actually uses?
You mean like, for instance, one with an Alexa rank of three? How about the one with an Alexa rank of eight? Do those count as sites that anybody actually uses? Granted, their web search site ranks at 1, so it's used even more. Still, both YouTube and Blogger rank ahead of Wikipedia, so apparently *somebody* is using them.
It's also used to transfer PNG graphics, CSS stylesheets, SVG vector graphics, XML markup, and various other formats. Off the top of my head I would guess that HTTP is probably the fifth most widely used protocol, after IP protocol, TCP protocol, the DNS system, and SMTP protocol.
Actually, it's simpler than that. Manned travel to Mars is *possible* with the technology of the 1980s -- grossly uneconomic, but possible. You just have to make a fewhundred thousand rocket flights from Earth's surface out to someplace with a more lenient gravity well (like, say, Earth's L2 point just on the far side of the Moon) and assemble your interplanetary ship and launch from there. When you get to Mars you leave the interplanetary craft in orbit and take down only what you need on the surface, plus enough rocket power to get you back up and enough more to slow your descent on the way down. It's an incredibly expensive trip, and the participants would probably develop a rather severe case of cabin fever, but it's physically possible.
Why haven't we done it, then? There's not enough incentive. It's thousands of times cheaper and easier to send robotic probes, and we get very nearly 100% of the benefit of sending a manned expedition.
Note too that while a manned expedition is theoretically possible, given enough funding, long-term colonization really isn't, because there's no way for any colony on Mars to provide for its ongoing needs. There's not enough atmosphere to support life, and keeping everything in a pressurized bubble all the time requires a continuous supply of materials and energy that cannot be produced locally. Even if you could somehow transport a nuclear reactor to Mars, there's no practical way to keep it cooled and maintained, and even if you could it only solves the energy problem. You still need a constant supply of materials and equipment, which would have to come from Earth, at enormous expense. The colony could never produce enough value to pay for that, so it could never be independent -- not with today's technology, anyhow. A colony in a bubble on the ocean floor would be *much* cheaper to build and maintain and produce *much* more value in trade goods and services (not least tourism), but nobody's yet managed to finance one, which should tell you something.
> You don't replace them, you just create a borderless
... In the second place, only *certain* widgets on the navbar are related specifically to the current tab (mainly, the really old ones that have been around since Mosaic). Other things on the same toolbar do things like show or hide various toolbars, open new tabs or sets of tabs or even whole windows, fire up add-ons, and who knows what else, limited only by what extensions the user decides to install. And that's ignoring the possibility that the user might have the location bar set up to open new tabs.
> window and then draw your own widgets in there.
Same difference. Either way they'll be wonky and non-standard. They won't fit with whatever visual theme the user has selected, and, heck, the buttons probably won't even be in the right places. Who would want that?
> Chrome does this
Its window decorations look normal to me here. They even change their appearance when I change my window manager's settings, just like every other window. (I'm using sawfish. I have no idea why the Gnome folks switched the default to metacity, but it probably has something to do with their apparent desire to make Gnome noticeably worse and worse with every passing version.)
> IMO borderless windows should be restricted to full-screen windows.
Okay, the root window, sure, but that's different. It's not borderless because some hair-brained application decided to replace its usual decorations with funky special ones. It's borderless because it's the root window. Something similar could be said for panels and docks (I have gnome-panel running, for example, and the panels don't have window decorations), but again those are not application windows; they're part of the desktop environment. It wouldn't make sense for them to be decorated like an application window.
> Look to Windows for a platform where rampant ignorance of UI consistency is the norm:
> Lots of apps are borderless with self-provided (and self-themed) interface elements.
And yet, the user's ability to customize anything is strangely absent. So, yeah, *you* look to Windows if you want. I'll be over here doing my level best to forget about it.
> The idea behind that is that the URL bar affects only the
> current tab, thus it logically belongs inside the tab
I ain't buying it. In the first place, they didn't just move the URL bar down. They moved *everything* down into the page content area: the entire navigation bar, the links toolbar, any other toolbars that happen to be installed,
No. They didn't do tabs on top because the location bar logically belongs inside the tab. That's a sophistry somebody thought up to defend it when people complained. The reason they did tabs on top is because Chrome has tabs on top and somebody thought copying unimportant superficial features of Chrome was a good idea just because Chrome had picked up a whole bunch of new users all of a sudden, and Firefox usage has plateaued.
> Thankfully, the Mozilla devs made tab-on-taop easy to turn off.
That will change. They make controversial new features easy to turn off at first, removing them from the preferences dialog in a later release under the guise of usability, and then subsequently removing them from about:config without apology because due to some unrelated controversial new feature the option stopped working.
Have you tried turning off the stupid "bookmark tabset replaces the content of the current tab" feature in recent versions? Haha. Dataloss? What are you talking about? The contents of your tabs are not data, they're, umm, well, this is the way it's designed to work now, mkay?
> Much of the time it is loopholes, not actual expenses, that result in corps "not paying their share"
The words "loopholes" and "expenses" carry different emotional weight, but in terms of taxes, when it comes down to brass tacks, they actually mean pretty much exactly the same thing. Bottom line: anyone who can afford to hire a high-end accountant can generally arrange things so as to avoid technically having a whole lot of income for tax purposes. That's why politicians love to "tax the rich" (by raising the percentage numbers in the top brackets), even though the rich provide most of their campaign contributions. The rich don't *care* what the percentage numbers are for the top brackets, because the rich aren't in the top brackets, because none of the money they make hand over fist is taxable income.
Personal taxes and corporate taxes are very different, in terms of the details, but such details only matter if you're the accountant. The general principle is the same: if you have the money for a good accountant, you can solve your tax problem. (Of course, this is only worth doing if the taxes you would otherwise pay would be more than the accountant's salary.) Raising the rates at the top of the scale increases the value of a clever accountant, but it has very little impact on government revenue.
I can also tell you from personal experience that people with low income don't pay any significant income taxes (except FICA or Social Security or Medicare or whatever they're calling it these days, and people who can take the EIC get a lot of that back too). If you make less than about fifteen thousand (even more now, with the Schedule M thing) your Federal income taxes, and your State ones too (well, in Ohio anyway), don't amount to squat.
Who pays all the taxes then? Everybody else: the people who are neither really poor nor really rich.
(That's excluding sales and excise taxes, of course, because those are not based on income.)
> "Tax haven" is a common term in UK English. Is the term not common in the US?
In the US it's only a common term among people with at least a secondary education (that's the amount of education that everyone is legally required to complete unless they get a special exemption like the Amish or whatever). It's not usually covered in gradeschool. So I guess that rules out about half of slashdot.
> Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology.
That would be foolish at this point, because Area 51 is quite famous, virtually a byword for conspiracy theory. There's way too much risk that somebody would manage to figure out how to sneak a peek.
At one time, Area 51 may well have been chock full of advanced (for the time) technology, possibly including various experimental aircraft, some of which may have since been declassified, others not. At this point, however, anybody who wanted to keep anything secret (and was at all clever about doing so) would certainly not put it there.
Sure, *some* people will ignore whatever is there on the assumption that there's nothing to be found but a heaping load of wacky tabloid space-alien conspiracy theory. However, other people would want to investigate it anyway, and if you want to keep something secret you have to keep it secret from both kinds of people. It makes a lot more sense to put a weather station at Area 51 and maybe a training center for, I don't know, radar operators or some jazz like that, pay a few soldiers to guard it (hey, we've got to have a standing trained army anyway), and let it be a decoy.
If I were in charge of it, I'd pipe /dev/random through a filter that transforms everything into alphanumeric characters, print a few hundred thousand pages of the results, and fill up a large set of locked filing cabinets with that, just in case anyone ever does break in. Put nice color-coded labels on the folders, each marked with a randomly selected dictionary word.
Then I'd run a Markov chain generator on a large collection of input, pipe its output through a relatively simple substitution cipher, and fill another set of locked cabinets with that.
I'd fill the third set of cabinets with random unimportant junk paper, like obsolete office memos about when the next staff meeting is and the new enlightened gender-equality improvements to the dress code policy, doodles made while bored during meetings, and whatever other meaningless junk makes itself available. The bodies of randomly selected messages from usenet, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as it looks like text and isn't important. Maybe I'd have a low-level file clerk use disappearing ink (or just lemon juice) to circle or underline a few letters at random on each page.
Call it a shell game: anybody who manages to break in and steal samples of the files (or even all the files if they're really good) can have a jolly old time trying to figure out which ones are the red herrings and which ones contain the top secret info, but there's no risk of their figuring out anything of consequence, because in fact the pea isn't actually under any of the shells at all. Well, that's what I'd do, anyway.
Honestly? I wouldn't put any of *my* money into Alzheimer's research, because I think a few more decades (at least) of basic primary research will be required before there's any real chance of getting anywhere useful with Alzheimer's. Maybe if we had some kind of reasonably useful model for how the brain actually works, for example, and what (if anything) the various chemical reactions and signals and whatnot have to do with how any of the higher-level functions are achieved, then perhaps we'd have something to go on when trying to figure out how Alzheimer's screws it up, what causes that, and how it can be treated. Otherwise it's like a blind man trying to figure out how to paint photorealistic landscapes, without a seeing person to explain concepts like hue or shade or perspective.
(Note that I'm not saying we should allow a patent troll to prevent other people from spending *their* money on Alzheimer's research. That's a separate issue altogether. I just think it's pretty odd to talk about "impeding" progress when there wasn't any progress before the supposed impeding got underway.)
> not having the tabs on top makes the window smaller by a pixel or two on
> platforms where Fx isn't allowed to replace the window decorations.
There are window managers that allow the application to replace its own window decorations?
Seriously? WHY? I cannot imagine anyone EVER wanting that.
I just turn off "tabs on top" because it's the most moronic thing ever. I mean, why on earth would I want all the browser and browser-extension chrome (toolbars and so on) moved down inside the page content area? Also, why would I want to have to move the pointer a couple hundred pixels farther up out of the page area to get to the tabs?
The only reason anyone would use tabs on top, near as I can tell, is because it's the default. Firefox did it is because they were copying Chrome, which had suddenly become popular, but I'm absolutely certain *that isn't why* Chrome suddenly became popular. (Speed might've been part of why. I'm certain aggressive advertising on popular Google web services is part of why. There may be other reasons as well, why Chrome got popular so fast. Tabs on top isn't among them.) I don't know why the Chrome team put tabs on top, but my first guess would be some developer (or their manager) wanted to change things up and make Chrome's UI look different from other browsers just for the sake of being different. (Some people mistake new differences for innovation, even if the specific new differences in question are obviously completely superfluous and useless.)
> On my netbook
Okay, but that's a special case. Smartphones, being an even more extreme case, don't show scrollbars or toolbars or anything. That's all well and good, as long as it stays confined to said special devices, but as a desktop user I shouldn't be inconvenienced by that.
Indeed, the desire to save endangered species is really only logical for creationists. If you believe in evolution (well, upward macro-evolution at any rate) then such notions are fundamentally inconsistent with your ontology.
For the record, I am in favor of saving endangered types of animals that we can reasonably save (by, for instance, trying not to actively hunt them to extinction), but when a species has become so genetic-diversity-impoverished that it can't function in the real world if thrown even a small curve ball, I do believe it's reasonable to let go at some point. When you're doing the equivalent of keeping a brain-dead corpse from rotting by artificially pumping its blood through an iron lung, you're not accomplishing anything meaningful. At that point it makes sense to spend the resources where they can do something useful, instead. (Yeah, I know, where to draw the line will be a judgment call in some cases.)
I also don't think it's necessary to save every "species" following Darwin's deliberately-warped definition thereof (which he specifically jerry-rigged so that he'd be able to observe the emergence of new ones during his studies; no obvious or natural definition would have allowed that and he knew it). If a given species doesn't have anything in its genome to differentiate it from other species elsewhere in the world, then the distinction between them is unimportant and there is, in my view, no point in preserving such an artificial distinction.
> So make it pseudorandom and use the first byte of the source IP as part of the seed.
/8 they could use to try to locate you. A statistician could work out what their expected margin of error would be depending on how many different /8 networks they have at their disposal, but botnets would be a threat in any case.
Do note that the seed would also have to be salted with a value unknown to the attacker, which you would probably select when you set the thing up, and which you wouldn't want to change very often because changing it would give them (a small amount each time of) new information about the average delay. They could also get information about the average delay for each different
> Then they just have to ping you enough times and the random delay will average out.
So make it pseudorandom and use the first byte of the source IP as part of the seed. That's easier to implement than true randomness anyway.
Of course, introducing (otherwise unnecessary) latency into all your traffic does have some practical consequences that you'd have to take into consideration. The more inaccuracy you want to introduce into their ability to locate you, the longer the delays all your traffic would suffer. If you don't want the delays to be human noticeable (even when multiplied by the inherent back-and-forth of various protocols) they're going to have at least a *general* idea of your location -- but they probably would anyway, by looking up netblock owner.
VPNs and proxies and other route-through-elsewhere setups also complicate matters.
> Most ISP access services reach at least 2 miles in any direction, and often 10 miles and more.
This.
I happen to know (approximately) where the router at the other end of our T1 line is located. It's in Columbus, more than an hour's drive south from here.
The technique in the article might be reasonably effective against people in big cities, where everybody gets their upstream bandwidth directly from a local provider, but it's not going to work against networks with long-distance connections, which is fairly common outside the big cities. (Okay, it's not common for home users, but home users' ISPs sell geolocation info to the advertisers anyway, so they can just look you up by net block and get your zipcode.)
That's debatable, especially if you take into account the amount of development that took place from one version to the next. Firefox 2 was arguably a more mature release, with a larger number of major releases preceding it, than IE7. (Opera I'll grant, though. It's been continuously maintained since the days of Trumpet Winsock, so big version numbers are warranted there.)
IE basically skipped versions 1 and 2 (they were minor feature-incomplete dev milestones; normal users never saw them), and even versions 3 and 4 were not feature-complete compared to other browsers of the time (notably Netscape). They just pumped the number up real fast so people would *think* it was equivalent to Netscape 4. Granted, 5.5 could arguably be considered worthy of major-version-number status. Still, being *very* generous, major IE releases are 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, and now 9.0, for a total of eight, max. A less magnanimous assessment might peg it at more like six without being completely unfair.
Meanwhile, when development on the Mozilla codebase (that eventually became Firefox) started, IE was only about three or four years old. Then after the release of 6.0 the IE team at Microsoft was completely disbanded and NO significant development was done for several years (until finally it was so antequated that Microsoft was legitimately concerned they might lose ALL of their browser userbase if they didn't get off their tails and make IE look somewhat less like using stone knives and bear skins). If you throw out the years when browser development at Microsoft had completely ceased, I'm not at all sure that the IE codebase has been developed for more years than the Mozilla codebase.
That brings up another point: the codebase that gave rise to what we now call Firefox has changed version number schemes and application names repeatedly, but starting from around Mozilla 0.8 or so it was essentially feature-complete and stable (compared to the other browsers available at the time, particularly IE). If you count from there, major releases with significant new features include Mozilla 0.9, 0.9.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0, then Phoenix 0.something, a couple of Firebird releases, and then there were a couple of Firefox releases *before* 1.0...
Firefox 2 was a MUCH more mature release than IE7, with I would say a larger history of preceding major releases. Okay, the UI got a big overhaul in the aviary move, but for that matter the IE7 UI doesn't look much like IE6, either. The rendering engine is built on the same codebase in both cases, so I would argue that it's basically a contiguous development history.
Granted, there haven't been a lot of improvements *since* Firefox 2. A small handful of new CSS features (of which about three are any practical use) and a couple of perf improvements -- and a whole raft of seriously undesirable "let's screw up the UI for no good reason until nobody can stand it anymore, then let's do it some more" nonsense, plus a couple of major new stability bugs. Meh.
> Of all the stupid features from Chrome to pick up,
> the version numbers is, by far, the dumbest.
I disagree. I think that's relatively harmless. Users won't even notice.
The dumbest has got to be either the stupid idiotic moronic "tabs on top" or the completely insane lack of menubar (pioneered by IE7, granted, but Chrome has had it for a good while now too). I can't decide which is worse. (Yeah, I know, you can turn them both off and get a more or less normal UI. For now. That will change in a future version, mark my words.)
Meh. Firefox 5? I don't even like Firefox 3. Version 2 was the best so far. Okay, page loading was a little slow, and version 3 improved that. But performance has never been as important to me as stability (by which I mean not crashing and even more importantly not losing data), and Firefox 2 is a great deal better in that regard. If the new CSS features in recent versions of Gecko could be backported into Firefox 2, I'd be pleased as punch.
> Cali is doomed anyhow
All governments (national or otherwise) are doomed. None of them last forever. A few are conquered or otherwise absorbed from the outside, but most decay from the inside and just fall apart. Either way, sooner or later they cease to exist as a going concern.
The only question is how long it takes.
> a practice that scientists say could hamper the progress of research into combating the dreaded disease
Progress? Into combating Alzheimer's Disease? What progress?
I haven't seen any progress on that front. At all. Alzheimer's is notoriously intractable. Every few years there's a story in the news about some new medical research into Alzheimer's, but it always comes to nothing. Aluminum pots? Not relevant after all. Amyloid inhibitors? Useless. Beta carotine? Apparently unrelated. Ginko? Ineffective. Just about the only reliable way to *avoid* Alzheimer's, that we've discovered so far, is to die young from something else. Sign us all up for that, right?
I predict every single currently valid patent will expire, and then all the patents that are valid by the time that happens will expire, and we won't know anything significant about Alzheimer's Disease that we didn't already know in the seventies. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I ain't holdin' my breath.
I don't know about the company side, but as an employee I sure as anything prefer to have a workplace outside the home and a home outside the workplace. Take a pay cut to telecommute? Sounds like a raw deal to me. Call me a grumpy curmudgeon if you will, but no thanks.
Unicode support is unwanted. (Actually, I'm pretty sure the code goes out of its way to get rid of non-ASCII characters.) Slashdot is an unapologetically English-language-only forum. Unicode support would only add three things: more annoying forms of spam and trolling, gratuitously weird character-art hacks (e.g., foreign-character emoticons), and the ability for people who know foreign languages to be flagrantly pretentious about it.
This is, of course, not true for the web in general. But for Slashdot specifically, Unicode support would be a step in the WRONG direction.
Of course, pretty much every design change they've ever done has been a step in the wrong direction, so perhaps they *will* add Unicode support one of these days. It could hardly be worse than the completely gratuitous never-ending Javascript they added a few revisions back.