Eh, how precisely is this magical encryption supposed to take place without any key exchange? You might be able to have "secure" email between a mail client and a mail server by using SSL, but the message itself can't be encrypted to a specific recipient without a shared key (or else how would that recipient - and only that recipient - decrypt it?).
The way to make mail encryption prolific is to make key creation, key escrow, and key exchange a simple process. Personally, I think the best way to handle that is to establish a government program for the issuance and authentication of "Internet ID's". Basically, a person applies for an IID by providing verified proof of their identity, then they are issued a smartcard which contains their secret key. To use the card, you need a smartcard reader on your PC (or a cheap aftermarket USB reader). When you want to send a key signed email or decrypt an encrypted email send to you, you insert your card in the reader, and type in your password or PIN.
When someone receives a signed email from you, they don't need to exchange your public key with you, since their software automatically connects to the government key server via the Internet, requests your public key and verifies the signature. Likewise, when they want to send you mail, their mail client searches the federal key database for the recipient's key, and if available, either offers the option to encrypt, or does so automatically (a user-defined option).
Of course, the NSA and the National Security Council will likely poo-poo such a plan, unless of course they are allowed to escrow the secret keys, thus enabling them to decrypt anyone's email. I don't know that this is such a big deal though, since unless you regularly encrypt your email, the government is already reading it.
It was controlled by a 9v battery (like you would put in a smoke detector). When they built the vehicle, they also had a 12v car battery, but I think that was just to power the cool headlights and stuff.:^)
kozmo.com (and the founding members) were the subject of a documentary called 'eDreams' which made a run on the independent film circuit. You might catch it every once in a blue moon on the Sundance channel or IFC.
If you're interested in seeing a play-by-play of a.com going bust, there's another documentary called 'startup.com' about govworks.com and it's founding members. This one was really good at showing you what kind of people actually started these.com's. There is one scene where the two founders show up to sign a contract with a VC without bringing their lawyer, then spend an hour or so trying to get him on the phone long-distance and explain the contract to him. Real professional. Gee, I wonder why the company went under...
You obviously don't know squat about forestry. My family has done this for generations. We own several hundred acres of forest land in Maine, and around 50 acres of that is set aside for tree harvest. You plant once, you check on the land every few years to clear excessive undergrowth (to help prevent forest fires), but there is very little maintenance involved. There aren't any "zoning" restrictions in open country (ie outside city limits).
Every 15 or so years you let a lumber company come in and harvest. They pay you for the priviledge, not the other way around. After the harvest, you burn the land to clear the stumps and underbrush, and replenish the soil. Then replant and repeat.
If you have idle land, this can provide a nice, recurring source of revenue every decade or so for very little added investment. And farming the land does not reduce property value. About 12 years ago, we sold another tract that had been forested for quite a number of years. A developer bought the land specifically because it had just been harvested and would not required extensive clear-cutting before development.
Ok, stupid rhetorical question, because some gamer with far too much time on his hands is just yearning for a few more fps, a few more Mhz, and that will make everything in his pathetic life okay. Until the next new processor.
But for the rest of us, who really needs it? I'm running dual-processor PIII-1Ghz in all of my machines. Why? Because they are dirt cheap and good enough. I can slap two PIII's on a dual m/b for around $300. And it screams (loud enough for just about anybody except Joe MegaGamer). I can do office work, CAD work, design work, run a server, etc, etc.
People talk about the "Mhz myth", but I think a lot of them miss the point. It isn't whether a 2.53Ghz P4 is faster than a 2.1Ghz Athlon. It's whether or not you even need that much processor speed in the first place. Does a web browser run any better on a 2.53Ghz P4 than on a 500Mhz PIII? I doubt it.
A friend of mine had his workstation (1.7Ghz P4) burn out on him, so I loaned him my laptop (700Mhz PIII) to use until he got a new board. A short while later, he asked me how I upgraded such an old laptop to a P4? I told him I didn't, it was a PIII. He was quite surprised because he didn't see much difference between it and his old workstation. If it hadn't been for the fact that he was heavily invested in DDR memory (which won't work in older PC133 SDRAM sockets), I think he would have opted for a dual PIII when he bought the replacement.
First, he signed a contract without fully understanding the terms or consulting with a lawyer to explain it to him. When you go about the business of selling your soul, you really need to read the fine print.
Second, he went to the company and told them he had a brilliant idea, even though he hadn't put anything down on paper yet. He should've just quit his job, then developed his idea. There would have been no way for the company to prove that he came up with the idea while he was employed by them.
By the way, this guy may have a beautiful mind, but he sure has an ugly webpage.
1) If you need UNION capability, you are likely starting to get into the advanced SQL area where MySQL starts to break. I would suggest checking out PostgreSQL, which will have support for a lot of these advanced features.
2) The other alternative is to eat a little CPU and use a temporary table to get around the lack of UNION in v.3x. I've had to do this before when I was building an app using MySQL, got 90% done, and then realized I needed to do a UNION. To work around it, I did four separate queries into a temporary table, did my "union" query on the temp table, and then dropped the table. This creates the same result as UNION, but with a little more CPU overhead and a lot less elegance. But it beats either: a) Rewriting your app to use PostgreSQL. b) Taking a chance on a new and unproven version of MySQL.
I wonder how well it rolls on carpet? I doesn't look like it has very big wheels on its feet.
R2D2 Robot: $100 Replacing all your carpet with hardwood flooring: $8000 Look on your buddy's face when R2 serves him a beer: Pricele- eh, actually... probably not worth it.
Re:The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
on
Back to the Moon?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
When people post writings which are not their own, they should at least credit the source. I have seen this before, among other places, here:
You won't find information about any Mac product on Microsoft's home page. They hide all of their Mac stuff at http://www.microsoft.com/mac so none of their Windows users see it.
I think you are confusing AppleWorks and MS Office v.X. AppleWorks is made by Apple, and is a consumer-level productivity suite that competes (somewhat) with Office.
I think the idea that Apple might drop AppleWorks and try to replace it with the more robust StarOffice is definitely not without merit. Given the fact that StarOffice and OpenOffice share a common file format, and those suites together create a compatible document format across Solaris, Windows, and Linux (both x86 and PPC), Apple might be wise to join that group. If Apple and Sun create StarOffice for MacOS X, and Microsoft does pull the plug on Office for Mac, it will be Star/OpenOffice on five platforms versus MS Office on one. Star/OpenOffice would become the de facto choice for anyone not running Windows (or not wanting to spend $500 USD on a productivity suite).
If Apple decides to jump on the StarOffice bandwagon, I don't see them continuing to support AppleWorks. Everything I've seen about this indicates that StarOffice for MacOS X would be bundled for free with pro-level Macs (and most likely available for free or very little money for the consumer-level Macs). I don't see why anyone would choose AppleWorks if they could get StarOffice for less than AppleWorks or for free?
Exactly. They assembled and made their voices heard. They didn't go to the polls and try to cast a ballot. That would have been ineffective and nothing but a useless gesture. Instead they gathered support for their platform, and exercised the political power of mass dissention.
Bruce Perens is making a useless gesture that will accomplish nothing. If he truly wanted to change the law, he would campaign to the masses to stop buying DVDs from companies that use regional encoding. Cut off their funding, and you cut off the political power of the RIAA and the MPAA.
Here's the problem: nobody would do it. Why? Because America is the land of the fat and lazy. What would we do if we didn't have movies to watch and music to listen to? What would we do to entertain ourselves? You know why people aren't marching in the street over the DMCA? Because they can't peel their fat asses away from their computers for a few hours to go participate in a rally.
It's much easier to bitch and moan on Slashdot, because after all, all the politicians read Slashdot, right?
And before anyone asks, I'm not excluding myself here. I'm just as fat and lazy as the rest of you. And I'm disgusted with myself.
People like you make me sick. What would this country be like if our forefathers just bent over and paid the tea tax.
Well, actually, the tea issue of 1773 and the Boston Tea Party that occured in December of 1773 wasn't about citizens paying a tea tax. It was about a single company (the East India Company) NOT having to pay tax on tea sales, and colonial merchants who didn't think that was fair. You see, the EIC could undercut any of the colonial merchants and sell tea cheaper than anyone else. So actually, the tea issue of 1773 was not about colonial consumers paying more for tea, but paying less for tea and buying it from an English company rather than a colonial merchant.
It should be noted as well that the people who were bent out of shape over the situation were the colonial merchants, NOT the average consumers. The merchants are the ones who stirred public interest in the issue and proposed the tea boycott of 1773. This is a classical example of politics manipulated by big business. In fact, some of the tactics employed by the tea merchants were almost mafia-like in the way they threatened and coerced employees and agents of the EIC, forcing the resignation of many EIC port agents through violence and intimidation in an effort to close the ports to EIC traffic.
This could probably be classified as the first "Buy American" campaign. Of course, the loudest proponents of "Buy American" today are American companies who are quietly moving their operations south of the border.
People like YOU make ME sick. Why don't you learn some actual history rather than simply regurgitating American mythology?
"The DVD industry uses regional encoding to control consumers, so we're going to play this UK DVD on a US player."
reminds me of a plan we've seen before:
"Terrence and Phillip are supposed to be killed, so we think we should crank call a bunch of policeman and have pizzas sent to them that they didn't order. Viva la resistance!"
I think we need a snobby kid who attended Yardale and had a 4.0 grade point average to come up with something a little more effective.
First off, I didn't cast Perens as a pirate, but I think that is how the mainstream media will cast him, and I don't think that helps the cause he is trying to bolster.
Also, there is the issue of accountability. Perens is standing up as a champion of freedom, but he can afford to do it, can't he? He's got HP behind him to pay the bill (because you know that he wouldn't be doing this without HP's approval). If he was just Joe User making $50k per year with two kids and a wife to support, and he did this, I'd say "there's a guy with conviction" because he has something to lose. But Perens has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. This is really just a publicity stunt, and I think it serves no other purpose than to serve Perens' ego, and HP's image.
As to the Boston Tea Party, you're comparing apples to grapes. The Boston Tea Party took place in December of 1773 and was a largely symbolic jesture against the East India Company and the British government. It didn't spark a revolution, it was a symptom of an occuring revolution, namely the colonial tea boycott of 1773. The Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism against the East India Company, whose agents in Boston refused to be extorted into resignation like their fellows in other shipping ports had been.
Perens' little anti-DMCA stunt is like the Tea Party without the boycott. Instead of staging media events, efforts should be made to convice concerned citizens that they should stop patronizing the media companies that are restricting their rights.
Of course, it's a lot easier to stage a $500,000 media event (which is dirt cheap by industry standards) than to convice people to simply stop buying DVDs and do something more productive with their time than sitting in front of a television.
Yeah, okay. It's a nice stunt. Like watching Evel Knievel jump over a flaming school bus. We all get to watch as the daredevil makes the jump and we are torn between hoping he makes it and hoping he goes barreling into the bus and gets burned alive. What a spectacle.
But what exactly does it accomplish?
I don't see Perens' stunt accomplishing anything except for boosting Perens' own notoriaty. All this does is create an image that "open source advocate == pirate." This is the political equivalent of a bunch of kids driving past the principal's house with their asses out the car window, honking the horn. It is entertaining in a juevenile sort of way, but it doesn't lower the price of pudding in the cafeteria.
If the Open Source community wants to gain respect from the powers that be, we need to stop acting like children. Check your "H4X0RS RULE!" t-shirt at the door.
I just went to a couple of online grocers, and a 32oz bottle of Wesson vegetable oil goes for around $2.85. That's $5.70 a gallon. It'll be a while before pump prices get that high.
So unless you steal it from fast-food joints (because their current waste disposal guys make a profit reselling it, and they won't like you taking their grease) or you grow and process it yourself (and who has that kind of time?), I don't think you're going to see any real savings by doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, how precisely is this magical encryption supposed to take place without any key exchange? You might be able to have "secure" email between a mail client and a mail server by using SSL, but the message itself can't be encrypted to a specific recipient without a shared key (or else how would that recipient - and only that recipient - decrypt it?).
The way to make mail encryption prolific is to make key creation, key escrow, and key exchange a simple process. Personally, I think the best way to handle that is to establish a government program for the issuance and authentication of "Internet ID's". Basically, a person applies for an IID by providing verified proof of their identity, then they are issued a smartcard which contains their secret key. To use the card, you need a smartcard reader on your PC (or a cheap aftermarket USB reader). When you want to send a key signed email or decrypt an encrypted email send to you, you insert your card in the reader, and type in your password or PIN.
When someone receives a signed email from you, they don't need to exchange your public key with you, since their software automatically connects to the government key server via the Internet, requests your public key and verifies the signature. Likewise, when they want to send you mail, their mail client searches the federal key database for the recipient's key, and if available, either offers the option to encrypt, or does so automatically (a user-defined option).
Of course, the NSA and the National Security Council will likely poo-poo such a plan, unless of course they are allowed to escrow the secret keys, thus enabling them to decrypt anyone's email. I don't know that this is such a big deal though, since unless you regularly encrypt your email, the government is already reading it.
It was controlled by a 9v battery (like you would put in a smoke detector). When they built the vehicle, they also had a 12v car battery, but I think that was just to power the cool headlights and stuff. :^)
kozmo.com (and the founding members) were the subject of a documentary called 'eDreams' which made a run on the independent film circuit. You might catch it every once in a blue moon on the Sundance channel or IFC.
.com going bust, there's another documentary called 'startup.com' about govworks.com and it's founding members. This one was really good at showing you what kind of people actually started these .com's. There is one scene where the two founders show up to sign a contract with a VC without bringing their lawyer, then spend an hour or so trying to get him on the phone long-distance and explain the contract to him. Real professional. Gee, I wonder why the company went under...
If you're interested in seeing a play-by-play of a
...but pretty darn cool, nonetheless.
You obviously don't know squat about forestry. My family has done this for generations. We own several hundred acres of forest land in Maine, and around 50 acres of that is set aside for tree harvest. You plant once, you check on the land every few years to clear excessive undergrowth (to help prevent forest fires), but there is very little maintenance involved. There aren't any "zoning" restrictions in open country (ie outside city limits).
Every 15 or so years you let a lumber company come in and harvest. They pay you for the priviledge, not the other way around. After the harvest, you burn the land to clear the stumps and underbrush, and replenish the soil. Then replant and repeat.
If you have idle land, this can provide a nice, recurring source of revenue every decade or so for very little added investment. And farming the land does not reduce property value. About 12 years ago, we sold another tract that had been forested for quite a number of years. A developer bought the land specifically because it had just been harvested and would not required extensive clear-cutting before development.
before "UnitedLinux" is just another term for "SuSE". Two down, how's Conectiva doing these days? :^)
Ok, stupid rhetorical question, because some gamer with far too much time on his hands is just yearning for a few more fps, a few more Mhz, and that will make everything in his pathetic life okay. Until the next new processor.
But for the rest of us, who really needs it? I'm running dual-processor PIII-1Ghz in all of my machines. Why? Because they are dirt cheap and good enough. I can slap two PIII's on a dual m/b for around $300. And it screams (loud enough for just about anybody except Joe MegaGamer). I can do office work, CAD work, design work, run a server, etc, etc.
People talk about the "Mhz myth", but I think a lot of them miss the point. It isn't whether a 2.53Ghz P4 is faster than a 2.1Ghz Athlon. It's whether or not you even need that much processor speed in the first place. Does a web browser run any better on a 2.53Ghz P4 than on a 500Mhz PIII? I doubt it.
A friend of mine had his workstation (1.7Ghz P4) burn out on him, so I loaned him my laptop (700Mhz PIII) to use until he got a new board. A short while later, he asked me how I upgraded such an old laptop to a P4? I told him I didn't, it was a PIII. He was quite surprised because he didn't see much difference between it and his old workstation. If it hadn't been for the fact that he was heavily invested in DDR memory (which won't work in older PC133 SDRAM sockets), I think he would have opted for a dual PIII when he bought the replacement.
First, he signed a contract without fully understanding the terms or consulting with a lawyer to explain it to him. When you go about the business of selling your soul, you really need to read the fine print.
Second, he went to the company and told them he had a brilliant idea, even though he hadn't put anything down on paper yet. He should've just quit his job, then developed his idea. There would have been no way for the company to prove that he came up with the idea while he was employed by them.
By the way, this guy may have a beautiful mind, but he sure has an ugly webpage.
1) If you need UNION capability, you are likely starting to get into the advanced SQL area where MySQL starts to break. I would suggest checking out PostgreSQL, which will have support for a lot of these advanced features.
2) The other alternative is to eat a little CPU and use a temporary table to get around the lack of UNION in v.3x. I've had to do this before when I was building an app using MySQL, got 90% done, and then realized I needed to do a UNION. To work around it, I did four separate queries into a temporary table, did my "union" query on the temp table, and then dropped the table. This creates the same result as UNION, but with a little more CPU overhead and a lot less elegance. But it beats either:
a) Rewriting your app to use PostgreSQL.
b) Taking a chance on a new and unproven version of MySQL.
I wonder how well it rolls on carpet? I doesn't look like it has very big wheels on its feet.
R2D2 Robot: $100
Replacing all your carpet with hardwood flooring: $8000
Look on your buddy's face when R2 serves him a beer: Pricele- eh, actually... probably not worth it.
When people post writings which are not their own, they should at least credit the source. I have seen this before, among other places, here:
http://spiralx.dyndns.org/texts/troll1.html
Someone should mod this down for blatant plagiarism.
You won't find information about any Mac product on Microsoft's home page. They hide all of their Mac stuff at http://www.microsoft.com/mac so none of their Windows users see it.
I think you are confusing AppleWorks and MS Office v.X. AppleWorks is made by Apple, and is a consumer-level productivity suite that competes (somewhat) with Office.
I think the idea that Apple might drop AppleWorks and try to replace it with the more robust StarOffice is definitely not without merit. Given the fact that StarOffice and OpenOffice share a common file format, and those suites together create a compatible document format across Solaris, Windows, and Linux (both x86 and PPC), Apple might be wise to join that group. If Apple and Sun create StarOffice for MacOS X, and Microsoft does pull the plug on Office for Mac, it will be Star/OpenOffice on five platforms versus MS Office on one. Star/OpenOffice would become the de facto choice for anyone not running Windows (or not wanting to spend $500 USD on a productivity suite).
If Apple decides to jump on the StarOffice bandwagon, I don't see them continuing to support AppleWorks. Everything I've seen about this indicates that StarOffice for MacOS X would be bundled for free with pro-level Macs (and most likely available for free or very little money for the consumer-level Macs). I don't see why anyone would choose AppleWorks if they could get StarOffice for less than AppleWorks or for free?
Exactly. They assembled and made their voices heard. They didn't go to the polls and try to cast a ballot. That would have been ineffective and nothing but a useless gesture. Instead they gathered support for their platform, and exercised the political power of mass dissention.
Bruce Perens is making a useless gesture that will accomplish nothing. If he truly wanted to change the law, he would campaign to the masses to stop buying DVDs from companies that use regional encoding. Cut off their funding, and you cut off the political power of the RIAA and the MPAA.
Here's the problem: nobody would do it. Why? Because America is the land of the fat and lazy. What would we do if we didn't have movies to watch and music to listen to? What would we do to entertain ourselves? You know why people aren't marching in the street over the DMCA? Because they can't peel their fat asses away from their computers for a few hours to go participate in a rally.
It's much easier to bitch and moan on Slashdot, because after all, all the politicians read Slashdot, right?
And before anyone asks, I'm not excluding myself here. I'm just as fat and lazy as the rest of you. And I'm disgusted with myself.
People like you make me sick. What would this country be like if our forefathers just bent over and paid the tea tax.
Well, actually, the tea issue of 1773 and the Boston Tea Party that occured in December of 1773 wasn't about citizens paying a tea tax. It was about a single company (the East India Company) NOT having to pay tax on tea sales, and colonial merchants who didn't think that was fair. You see, the EIC could undercut any of the colonial merchants and sell tea cheaper than anyone else. So actually, the tea issue of 1773 was not about colonial consumers paying more for tea, but paying less for tea and buying it from an English company rather than a colonial merchant.
It should be noted as well that the people who were bent out of shape over the situation were the colonial merchants, NOT the average consumers. The merchants are the ones who stirred public interest in the issue and proposed the tea boycott of 1773. This is a classical example of politics manipulated by big business. In fact, some of the tactics employed by the tea merchants were almost mafia-like in the way they threatened and coerced employees and agents of the EIC, forcing the resignation of many EIC port agents through violence and intimidation in an effort to close the ports to EIC traffic.
This could probably be classified as the first "Buy American" campaign. Of course, the loudest proponents of "Buy American" today are American companies who are quietly moving their operations south of the border.
People like YOU make ME sick. Why don't you learn some actual history rather than simply regurgitating American mythology?
Perens' protest plan:
"The DVD industry uses regional encoding to control consumers, so we're going to play this UK DVD on a US player."
reminds me of a plan we've seen before:
"Terrence and Phillip are supposed to be killed, so we think we should crank call a bunch of policeman and have pizzas sent to them that they didn't order. Viva la resistance!"
I think we need a snobby kid who attended Yardale and had a 4.0 grade point average to come up with something a little more effective.
Oh, yeah. And Kyle's mom is a bitch.
First off, I didn't cast Perens as a pirate, but I think that is how the mainstream media will cast him, and I don't think that helps the cause he is trying to bolster.
Also, there is the issue of accountability. Perens is standing up as a champion of freedom, but he can afford to do it, can't he? He's got HP behind him to pay the bill (because you know that he wouldn't be doing this without HP's approval). If he was just Joe User making $50k per year with two kids and a wife to support, and he did this, I'd say "there's a guy with conviction" because he has something to lose. But Perens has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. This is really just a publicity stunt, and I think it serves no other purpose than to serve Perens' ego, and HP's image.
As to the Boston Tea Party, you're comparing apples to grapes. The Boston Tea Party took place in December of 1773 and was a largely symbolic jesture against the East India Company and the British government. It didn't spark a revolution, it was a symptom of an occuring revolution, namely the colonial tea boycott of 1773. The Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism against the East India Company, whose agents in Boston refused to be extorted into resignation like their fellows in other shipping ports had been.
Perens' little anti-DMCA stunt is like the Tea Party without the boycott. Instead of staging media events, efforts should be made to convice concerned citizens that they should stop patronizing the media companies that are restricting their rights.
Of course, it's a lot easier to stage a $500,000 media event (which is dirt cheap by industry standards) than to convice people to simply stop buying DVDs and do something more productive with their time than sitting in front of a television.
Yeah, okay. It's a nice stunt. Like watching Evel Knievel jump over a flaming school bus. We all get to watch as the daredevil makes the jump and we are torn between hoping he makes it and hoping he goes barreling into the bus and gets burned alive. What a spectacle.
But what exactly does it accomplish?
I don't see Perens' stunt accomplishing anything except for boosting Perens' own notoriaty. All this does is create an image that "open source advocate == pirate." This is the political equivalent of a bunch of kids driving past the principal's house with their asses out the car window, honking the horn. It is entertaining in a juevenile sort of way, but it doesn't lower the price of pudding in the cafeteria.
If the Open Source community wants to gain respect from the powers that be, we need to stop acting like children. Check your "H4X0RS RULE!" t-shirt at the door.
Anyone remember those breakins into Microsoft's development network a while back, where source code was allegedly compromised? Hmmmm....
Oops! You're right, 128oz in a gallon. My bad. I knew there was a reason I preferred the metric system...
I mean, if you want to make your own fuel, you'll need to grow the vegetables, usually corn, and then process the raw corn to get the oil.
I ASSUME there would be SOME processing required. I don't think you can just shove vegetables into your fuel tank and go...
I just went to a couple of online grocers, and a 32oz bottle of Wesson vegetable oil goes for around $2.85. That's $5.70 a gallon. It'll be a while before pump prices get that high.
So unless you steal it from fast-food joints (because their current waste disposal guys make a profit reselling it, and they won't like you taking their grease) or you grow and process it yourself (and who has that kind of time?), I don't think you're going to see any real savings by doing this.