There are a lot of sites out there that look great in the latest Microsoft-issued browser, but decompose badly in alternative browsers such as Opera, and are completely unusable in a text-based browser such as Lynx. Sadly, the formatting that breaks down so badly is often completely unrelated to the content.
Can you give some examples of sites that have excellent content, but are rendered useless for people with disablities by presentation-level bells and whistles?
While the "Progress" resupply ship is critical to keep the station stocked with food and fuel, I've long questioned the whole concept of the "Soyuz" escape capsule.
It may sound heartless, but do we have nobody in this country (or any other) willing to explore like they did 100 years ago? Lewis and Clark didn't have an emergency return system... but that didn't keep them from exploring the Mississippi (though there aren't any alien guides this time around).
Another example. In the 1700s, Captain James Cook lost several men each time he journeyed to unknown lands -- sometimes to hostile natives, often to disease, and not infrequently to accident. In fact, his journeys blow NASA's whole idea of long-voyage "I love you, you love me" compatibility to pieces: Cook was a fair captain, but did not hesitate to use the whip when it was needed.
Another interesting note in Cook's explorations: Free (as in beer) Beer! According to an interview with Cook biographer Tony Horwitz on the local PBS station, the rotten conditions on board ship were made tolerable by the large quantities of strong beer in the hold. This led, of course, to some of the death-by-accident statistics (such as sailors falling off the "comfort seat" -- the gangplank with a hole in it for use as a toilet).
I don't mean to paint too drab a picture of future exploration, and I wouldn't want to see the whip making a return on board ship... but until we're willing to lose more than a half-dozen explorers in 40 years, we're not going to get anywhere.
The subheads are: * Computer virus will destroy US economy! * The US Military will be paralyzed! * Electricity, food and water supplies vanish!
Clearly, we're ignoring these attacks at our own peril, when as technical a publication as the Weekly World News has picked up the story.
(Back to reality, I literally burst out laughing and almost dropped my Mountain Dew when I saw that headline. Blow up "The Internet". Sounds like my daughter's friends... they come over and ask if her computer "has the Internet on it". No, it doesn't, but it has *access* to the Internet. "Oh, you mean AOL?" Grrr...)
Usually, the moderators "get it" much better than the repliers. But this mod total is just schizoid:
Offtopic=1, Troll=2, Interesting=1, Informative=6
While I'm glad that "Interesting and Informative" have outweighted "Offtopic and Troll", I think the modders are missing the point.
I interpreted "Thanks for ruining our just revived webserver, thanks for nothing!" as sarcastic humor, not as a literal slam of the Slashdot effect. So if I had mod points (see my journal for obligatory newbie whining), I'd have given it +1, Funny.
Note to self: remember to enclose all sarcasm in <SARCASM>proper HTML notation</SARCASM>.
Opera wins the privacy contest for me, hands-down, with the "Delete Private Data" option. It's right there in the "File" menu. You get a dialog box asking what you want to delete:
* Cookies (temporary or all) * Cache (password-protected pages or all) * History (visited pages, typed-in addresses, visited links, transferred files) * Clear email passwords (if you use the built-in email)
Of all of these, I think I most like the ability to quickly clear typed-in addresses. I share the computer with the kids, and the last thing I want is for them to type the letter "g" and have "goatse.cx" pop up!
I'm a Christian myself, so I'm not going to jump on the "what's God got to do with it?" bandwagon.
But the Old Testament quotes you gave don't lead me to the conclusion that this is a Bad Thing.
Psalm 111:10 - "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding" could be used by a scientist of faith to show how his/her success in the lab comes from following the way that God has shown.
Proverbs 1:7 - "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline" would seem to be perfectly suited to science, where wisdom and discipline are highly revered.
You've given biblical quotes that would make a great cross-stitch sampler above the petri dish where Life, Jr. is peacefully sleeping.
I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist... but we have a situation where a well-known scientist is going to take a common organism and complete research that he already started a while back.
Ummm... are you telling me that *nobody* in the military -- this country or some other -- has thought of this before?
I'd guess that there's a report on modified Mycoplasma genitalium somewhere in the bowels (bad pun) of some defense department vault.
So, which conspiracy theory is it?
* No conspiracy, he just happened to get $3 million from the government on good looks and charm.
* The military couldn't manage to do it, so there's no harm in letting this guy fail as well.
* The military couldn't manage to do it, so they're going to "open source" the development of artificially created organisms.
* The military *did* manage to do it, so they need this guy to recreate the results so they can blame him when the New Plague appears in the wild.
Excuse me, there's someone knocking on the door... wow, nice suit. Uh oh.
There's now a detailed (enough for +5) step-by-step description of the process further down in the discussion. So what if they're redundant... sometimes, you have to say something more than once to get people to pay attention. In fact, you sometimes have to say something more than once to get people to pay attention.
The panel on Open Source is to include Microsoft representatives? How can that sentence even be written without laughing out loud... I'd have gotten first post if I could have held a straight face!
What's wrong is that 75% of a store's profits come from the top 30% of customers (according to this essay). In the profit-driven corporate world, there is no reason to serve the lower 70%, if higher profits can be made off those 30%.
So caviar and fresh salmon get big "card discounts"... and beans, rice, and tortillas get marked up to make up the difference. In effect, your poorest customers (the ones for whom beans + rice + tortillas = dinner) actually subsidize the purchases of those who can afford luxury foods.
But you're a filthy-rich dotcommer, why should you care? Alright, Mr. Cynical, get this: a lot of that beans and rice are being paid for by food stamps. Food stamps come from tax dollars. Tax dollars come from... YOU!
The grocery stores are double-dipping -- no, triple-dipping -- at the expense of poor customers, middle-class customers, and taxpayers.
That's why, when possible *, we should Just Say No!
* Embarassing full disclosure: I have a Kroger card. They had lower markups and a better privacy policy than their competitors, and are often the only nearby store open when the kids want milk with their cerial. Flames welcome, please address to/dev/null.
Lift from a rotating ballpoint pen?
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
"...lift and float gently across a room." WTF? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could make a cheap ballpoint pen levitate that easily, wouldn't we see impromptu demonstrations of the effect at every computer convention?
I suspect that the intent was not "5, Interesting", but rather "5, Funny". I guess the moderators are reading with IRONY_HUMOR_DETECTION = OFF.
(Full disclosure: I would have tried it, but I couldn't pry the end cap off my pen...)
Would Poker be a good AI test?
on
Behind Deep Blue
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?
You would think that Poker would be a good choice (real poker, not Video Poker). You don't win just by playing the odds -- you have to gauge your opponents' playing style and determine when they're bluffing and when you should bluff. I know how tough that is... I lost $40 to one guy in high school playing nickel-ante poker (do you still have that watch, Ted?).
But so much of that kind of poker depends on body language... setting a CRT in one of the chairs just wouldn't be the same.
Now, when they make a computer that can play An Enchanted Evening, I'll be impressed! (And maybe a little creeped out...)
From the article: Military designers watched Bond films for inspiration, he said, and the films gadgetry helped inspired a prototype called the SmartTruck, a technology-loaded, anti-terrorism personal mover.
I thought that the idea came from the Combat Ready Recreational Vehicle in the movie Stripes, didn't it?
John Winger (Bill Murray): "It's not the speed that's important, I just wish I hadn't drunk all that cough syrup this morning."
Man, I'm waiting for the day I post something that gets a mod like that. So far, I've been way too agreeable. But I digress.
I don't get the point of the children of this parent that make connections with war and peace, etc. I don't read the parent as a call to peace or to war, but a call to a deeper understanding of one basic fact:
You're going to die. Get over it. Move on.
You can go through life scared of death, or you can go through life in complete denial of death, or you can grow up (-1 Flamebait, sorry), admit your mortality, and enjoy whatever time you have left.
...attemps to protect the Northern hemisphere without covering the South...
I don't think the point was that one hemisphere would be protected more than the other -- though I'm sure there are those in major N.H. governments who wouldn't mind such a "plan".
The issue is that we're only *looking* for big, bad rocks from half the planet. Assuming a random distribution of Killer Rocks, we've just reduced our chances of catching the next one by roughly 50%.
It would be a supreme irony, wouldn't it... the industrialized Northern Hemisphere gets their infrastructure walloped by a big rock that comes in from the historically ignored South. Then, as the tech-dependent Northerners die from lack of McDonalds hamburgers, the only survivors will be those who didn't have the opportunity to get hooked on technology.
Actually, Wal-Mart sells the "Duck Brand" ducT tape. Which means that 90% of consumers now believe it's actually supposed to be called "DucK Tape", just like all tissue is Kleenex and all carbonated tooth rot serum is Coke.
Just another of the many reasons to protest Wal-Mart, if you're so inclined.
What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Oops. Better not use my +1 this time around.
How long until... the next badge readers will be based on a combination of Gilette razors in your pocket?
Or worse yet... what happens if the personal-id-implant and inventory-control-device namespaces collide, and you walk past the Federal Building with a pocketful of Gillette's, and their bad guy detector identifies you as Osama Bin Laden and calls in a CIA air strike...
... on second thought, I don't think I'll use my +1 bonus on this one.:)
While I can't match the parent for length and information, I can provide an example of a real-world application of security that is so insecure as to be ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's at the company I work for.
Somebody went and told our clients that "security" for information systems was a problem. The clients demanded "security", so we obligingly delivered. On the software side, it meant making the login process onerous, ensuring that multiple passwords will be written on paper and taped to every client's monitor. Wow, how secure! But the suits like it.
But the clients wanted physical security for the servers, too, and that's where the RFID badges came in. For after-hours access, we already had a system where the badge was placed on a plate (I think it read a metallic signature on the card), so they replaced that with an RFID "wave the card" receiver with a keypad. Now, we were required to wave the card *and* enter a 5-digit number -- which we all immediately wrote on the card. A message came down from data (in)security: "Don't write your number on your card!" The message was universally ignored.
But the "security" gets even better. To promote the idea that we've implemented a real security system, the company installed "optical turnstiles" at the public entrances. When you walk in the lobby, you pass between hip-high black boxes with an RFID/keypad unit. If you don't wave your card *and* enter the PIN (which you wrote on the card), you'll trip an infrared beam and the unit will sound an alarm. The purpose of this alarm is to wake up the receptionist so that she can make you pick up a visitor badge. No, that's not fair... she's not always asleep; sometimes she's on the phone gossiping. Or playing Solitaire.
The first day the unit was installed, I just jumped over the IR beams. This resulted in a well-deserved nastygram from (in)Security. After that, I just made sure to enter the wrong PIN several times... and found out that the last digit can be any one of three values! Hmmm...
And one more tidbit: a co-worker's badge quit working, and when she got a new one, she had to learn a new PIN. It looks like the badge readers aren't cross-referencing the data at all... any bozo who types in the number that his badge transmitted can probably defeat the system... though surely they've done something better for the after-hours system. (Please let me believe that...)
I was very concerned about my email address... I had robertb@geocities.com from way before Yahoo! bought out Geocities. But as the spam increased more and more, the geocities.com/yahoo.com address became more and more worthless. The kicker was when some b*stard used my email address as the reply-to on a spam message... first my inbox filled with bounce messages, then with angry messages from recipients and sysadmins.
I changed my reply-to address to the email on my own domain, dixie-chicks.com, and after a few months, all mail from people I cared to hear from was coming to an email address I controlled. The economics are there:
* 12 euros/year (< us$15 even on a bad day) for a domain name from Gandi.net. If all you need is email forwarding, stop here -- they have it.
* 6 bucks/month for a web host like the one I use. Includes no-ad no-popup web space and unlimited web-based email addresses. Not meaning to plug, but they are reliable and cheap.
All together, it's worth $15 a year + $6 a month for a better deal and better service than I'd ever get from Yahoo!.
(SLASHDOT[T]IA, AP) Today brought surprising new developments in the seccessionist virtual republic of Slashdotia, as the new country threatened to tear itself apart in a conflict over the new principality's name.
"We already decided on the form of government," said one citizen who only identified himself as "A.C." "That was cool, because my Friends have Excellent Karma. But when CmdrTaco posted the suggestion about the spelling, that really bummed me out."
Central to the debate is whether the moderatocracy would be called "Slashdotia" (slash-doh-sha) or "Slashdottia" (slash-dot-ee-a). Each side has accused the other of unfair tactics in the moderated discussion, including importing Trolls from Usenet and Bots from IRC.
Talks were scheduled among the "+5, Founding Fathers", but broke down when it was learned that some of the participants were using unmodified IM and ICQ clients, instead of the new country's mandated open-source alternatives.
Also seen in the "-1, Subversive" areas of the yet-unrecognized country were spray-painted references to yet another spelling: "/.ia". "We're not overly concerned about them," one Anonymous Coward noted. "They think they're 3l33t, but they're just a bunch of lUsers."
It does now... but not 7+ years ago, when the application was first being developed. In fact, the built-in grid control at that time was actually a licensed version of a Sheridan grid with some features removed. Since we needed some of the crippled features, it seemed like Sheridan would be the best way to go -- Microsoft liked them, right?
It's amazing what little VB offered in the "base package". We had to get a third-party control ("Aware VBX") for our textboxes, because VB's version couldn't do something as simple as set a different background color. Fortunately, we were able to convert AwareDouble's to regular TextBox's... but it still required ripping out a bunch of code that had been put in place to catch Aware's own abstraction leaks (and adding more buckets to catch the new leaks).
When I think about the 7+ years of cruft in the app, though... [shudders]
Man, I know I am just begging to be modded down, but did anyone else (especially us who grew up in the '80s) read that title as "Java Development with Adam Ant"?
I found myself wondering if he'd been dabbling in programming, as part of his community service.
As a VB programmer, I've *lived* leaky abstractions. Nowhere has it been more obvious than in the gigantic VB app our team is responsible for maintaining. 262.frm files, 36.bas modules, 25.cls classes, and a handful of.ctl's.
Much of our troubles, though, come from a single abstraction leak: the Sheridan (now called Infragistics) Grid control.
Like most VB controls, the Sheridan Grid is designed to be a drop-in, no-code way to display database information. It's designed to be bound to a data control, which itself is a drop-in no-code connection to a database using ODBC (or whatever the flavor of the month happens to be).
The first leak comes in to play because we don't use the data control. We generate SQL on the fly because we need to do things with our queries that go beyond the capabilities of the control, and we don't save to the database until the client clicks "OK". Right away, we've broken the Sheridan Grid's paradigm, and the abstraction started to leak. So we put in buckets -- bucketfuls of code in obscure control events to buffer up changes to be written when the form closes.
Just when things were running smoothly, Sheridan decided to take that kid with his finger in the dike and send him to an orphanage. They "upgraded" the control. The upgrade was designed to make the control more efficient, of course... but we don't use the data control! It completely broke all our code. Every single grid control in the application -- at least one and usually more in each of 200+ forms -- had to have all-new buckets installed to catch the leaks.
You may be wondering by now why we haven't switched to a better grid control. Sure enough, there are controls out there now that would meet 95% of our needs... but 1) that 5% has high client visibility and 2) the rest of the code works, by golly! No way we're going to rip it out unless we're absolutely forced to.
By the way, our application now compiles to a svelte 16.9 MEG...
Oddly enough, I was just asking a video game repair guy if he'd seen a "Mr. Do" game recently. It took a while for him to remember it, but all us children of the '80s have these games buried in our subconcious, somewhere.... so thanks to Slashdot, I now know where to find Mr. Do info! One of those searches you just wouldn't think to "do" without a little reminder. Thanks again, y'all...
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of sites out there that look great in the latest Microsoft-issued browser, but decompose badly in alternative browsers such as Opera, and are completely unusable in a text-based browser such as Lynx. Sadly, the formatting that breaks down so badly is often completely unrelated to the content.
Can you give some examples of sites that have excellent content, but are rendered useless for people with disablities by presentation-level bells and whistles?
While the "Progress" resupply ship is critical to keep the station stocked with food and fuel, I've long questioned the whole concept of the "Soyuz" escape capsule.
It may sound heartless, but do we have nobody in this country (or any other) willing to explore like they did 100 years ago? Lewis and Clark didn't have an emergency return system... but that didn't keep them from exploring the Mississippi (though there aren't any alien guides this time around).
Another example. In the 1700s, Captain James Cook lost several men each time he journeyed to unknown lands -- sometimes to hostile natives, often to disease, and not infrequently to accident. In fact, his journeys blow NASA's whole idea of long-voyage "I love you, you love me" compatibility to pieces: Cook was a fair captain, but did not hesitate to use the whip when it was needed.
Another interesting note in Cook's explorations: Free (as in beer) Beer! According to an interview with Cook biographer Tony Horwitz on the local PBS station, the rotten conditions on board ship were made tolerable by the large quantities of strong beer in the hold. This led, of course, to some of the death-by-accident statistics (such as sailors falling off the "comfort seat" -- the gangplank with a hole in it for use as a toilet).
I don't mean to paint too drab a picture of future exploration, and I wouldn't want to see the whip making a return on board ship... but until we're willing to lose more than a half-dozen explorers in 40 years, we're not going to get anywhere.
Yep, the Weekly World News, home of Bat Boy and "Iraqi Submarines Prowling Lake Michigan", has a giant headline in the issue I just saw at the checkout stand: TERRORIST PLOT TO BLOW UP INTERNET ON 1-11!"
The subheads are:
* Computer virus will destroy US economy!
* The US Military will be paralyzed!
* Electricity, food and water supplies vanish!
Clearly, we're ignoring these attacks at our own peril, when as technical a publication as the Weekly World News has picked up the story.
(Back to reality, I literally burst out laughing and almost dropped my Mountain Dew when I saw that headline. Blow up "The Internet". Sounds like my daughter's friends... they come over and ask if her computer "has the Internet on it". No, it doesn't, but it has *access* to the Internet. "Oh, you mean AOL?" Grrr...)
Usually, the moderators "get it" much better than the repliers. But this mod total is just schizoid:
Offtopic=1, Troll=2, Interesting=1, Informative=6
While I'm glad that "Interesting and Informative" have outweighted "Offtopic and Troll", I think the modders are missing the point.
I interpreted "Thanks for ruining our just revived webserver, thanks for nothing!" as sarcastic humor, not as a literal slam of the Slashdot effect. So if I had mod points (see my journal for obligatory newbie whining), I'd have given it +1, Funny.
Note to self: remember to enclose all sarcasm in <SARCASM>proper HTML notation</SARCASM>.
Opera wins the privacy contest for me, hands-down, with the "Delete Private Data" option. It's right there in the "File" menu. You get a dialog box asking what you want to delete:
* Cookies (temporary or all)
* Cache (password-protected pages or all)
* History (visited pages, typed-in addresses, visited links, transferred files)
* Clear email passwords (if you use the built-in email)
Of all of these, I think I most like the ability to quickly clear typed-in addresses. I share the computer with the kids, and the last thing I want is for them to type the letter "g" and have "goatse.cx" pop up!
I'm a Christian myself, so I'm not going to jump on the "what's God got to do with it?" bandwagon.
But the Old Testament quotes you gave don't lead me to the conclusion that this is a Bad Thing.
Psalm 111:10 - "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding" could be used by a scientist of faith to show how his/her success in the lab comes from following the way that God has shown.
Proverbs 1:7 - "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline" would seem to be perfectly suited to science, where wisdom and discipline are highly revered.
You've given biblical quotes that would make a great cross-stitch sampler above the petri dish where Life, Jr. is peacefully sleeping.
I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist... but we have a situation where a well-known scientist is going to take a common organism and complete research that he already started a while back.
Ummm... are you telling me that *nobody* in the military -- this country or some other -- has thought of this before?
I'd guess that there's a report on modified Mycoplasma genitalium somewhere in the bowels (bad pun) of some defense department vault.
So, which conspiracy theory is it?
* No conspiracy, he just happened to get $3 million from the government on good looks and charm.
* The military couldn't manage to do it, so there's no harm in letting this guy fail as well.
* The military couldn't manage to do it, so they're going to "open source" the development of artificially created organisms.
* The military *did* manage to do it, so they need this guy to recreate the results so they can blame him when the New Plague appears in the wild.
Excuse me, there's someone knocking on the door... wow, nice suit. Uh oh.
There's now a detailed (enough for +5) step-by-step description of the process further down in the discussion. So what if they're redundant... sometimes, you have to say something more than once to get people to pay attention. In fact, you sometimes have to say something more than once to get people to pay attention.
The panel on Open Source is to include Microsoft representatives? How can that sentence even be written without laughing out loud... I'd have gotten first post if I could have held a straight face!
The issue is larger than individual privacy, and lying about your information doesn't really help.
/dev/null.
As detailed at the CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering) site, supermarkets don't care who you are... they just want to know about your buying patterns.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong is that 75% of a store's profits come from the top 30% of customers (according to this essay). In the profit-driven corporate world, there is no reason to serve the lower 70%, if higher profits can be made off those 30%.
So caviar and fresh salmon get big "card discounts"... and beans, rice, and tortillas get marked up to make up the difference. In effect, your poorest customers (the ones for whom beans + rice + tortillas = dinner) actually subsidize the purchases of those who can afford luxury foods.
But you're a filthy-rich dotcommer, why should you care? Alright, Mr. Cynical, get this: a lot of that beans and rice are being paid for by food stamps. Food stamps come from tax dollars. Tax dollars come from... YOU!
The grocery stores are double-dipping -- no, triple-dipping -- at the expense of poor customers, middle-class customers, and taxpayers.
That's why, when possible *, we should Just Say No!
* Embarassing full disclosure: I have a Kroger card. They had lower markups and a better privacy policy than their competitors, and are often the only nearby store open when the kids want milk with their cerial. Flames welcome, please address to
"...lift and float gently across a room." WTF? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you could make a cheap ballpoint pen levitate that easily, wouldn't we see impromptu demonstrations of the effect at every computer convention?
I suspect that the intent was not "5, Interesting", but rather "5, Funny". I guess the moderators are reading with IRONY_HUMOR_DETECTION = OFF.
(Full disclosure: I would have tried it, but I couldn't pry the end cap off my pen...)
Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?
You would think that Poker would be a good choice (real poker, not Video Poker). You don't win just by playing the odds -- you have to gauge your opponents' playing style and determine when they're bluffing and when you should bluff. I know how tough that is... I lost $40 to one guy in high school playing nickel-ante poker (do you still have that watch, Ted?).
But so much of that kind of poker depends on body language... setting a CRT in one of the chairs just wouldn't be the same.
Now, when they make a computer that can play An Enchanted Evening, I'll be impressed! (And maybe a little creeped out...)
That link to the movie Stripes should be this one. Obviously, "http://slashdot.org/Militarydes...mover." is not a valid URL.
:(
"Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!"
1 out of 3 kinda sucks. Mod parent as "-1, Preview-Impaired"
From the article: Military designers watched Bond films for inspiration, he said, and the films gadgetry helped inspired a prototype called the SmartTruck, a technology-loaded, anti-terrorism personal mover.
I thought that the idea came from the Combat Ready Recreational Vehicle in the movie Stripes, didn't it?
John Winger (Bill Murray): "It's not the speed that's important, I just wish I hadn't drunk all that cough syrup this morning."
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Insightful=5, Interesting=1, Overrated=3, Total=10.
Man, I'm waiting for the day I post something that gets a mod like that. So far, I've been way too agreeable. But I digress.
I don't get the point of the children of this parent that make connections with war and peace, etc. I don't read the parent as a call to peace or to war, but a call to a deeper understanding of one basic fact:
You're going to die. Get over it. Move on.
You can go through life scared of death, or you can go through life in complete denial of death, or you can grow up (-1 Flamebait, sorry), admit your mortality, and enjoy whatever time you have left.
Once you get to that point, it doesn't really matter if The End comes via Apocalyptic Judgement or Vehicular Conveyance. You'll be just as dead either way.
Enjoy the time you have now. Pet a cat. Have sex. Watch a sunset. Don't worry about when the clock's going to run out.
(IMHO, I've found faith in God to be very useful, but of course YMMV...)
...attemps to protect the Northern hemisphere without covering the South...
I don't think the point was that one hemisphere would be protected more than the other -- though I'm sure there are those in major N.H. governments who wouldn't mind such a "plan".
The issue is that we're only *looking* for big, bad rocks from half the planet. Assuming a random distribution of Killer Rocks, we've just reduced our chances of catching the next one by roughly 50%.
It would be a supreme irony, wouldn't it... the industrialized Northern Hemisphere gets their infrastructure walloped by a big rock that comes in from the historically ignored South. Then, as the tech-dependent Northerners die from lack of McDonalds hamburgers, the only survivors will be those who didn't have the opportunity to get hooked on technology.
Do you want fries with that?
Actually, Wal-Mart sells the "Duck Brand" ducT tape. Which means that 90% of consumers now believe it's actually supposed to be called "DucK Tape", just like all tissue is Kleenex and all carbonated tooth rot serum is Coke.
Just another of the many reasons to protest Wal-Mart, if you're so inclined.
What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Oops. Better not use my +1 this time around.
Or worse yet... what happens if the personal-id-implant and inventory-control-device namespaces collide, and you walk past the Federal Building with a pocketful of Gillette's, and their bad guy detector identifies you as Osama Bin Laden and calls in a CIA air strike...
While I can't match the parent for length and information, I can provide an example of a real-world application of security that is so insecure as to be ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's at the company I work for.
Somebody went and told our clients that "security" for information systems was a problem. The clients demanded "security", so we obligingly delivered. On the software side, it meant making the login process onerous, ensuring that multiple passwords will be written on paper and taped to every client's monitor. Wow, how secure! But the suits like it.
But the clients wanted physical security for the servers, too, and that's where the RFID badges came in. For after-hours access, we already had a system where the badge was placed on a plate (I think it read a metallic signature on the card), so they replaced that with an RFID "wave the card" receiver with a keypad. Now, we were required to wave the card *and* enter a 5-digit number -- which we all immediately wrote on the card. A message came down from data (in)security: "Don't write your number on your card!" The message was universally ignored.
But the "security" gets even better. To promote the idea that we've implemented a real security system, the company installed "optical turnstiles" at the public entrances. When you walk in the lobby, you pass between hip-high black boxes with an RFID/keypad unit. If you don't wave your card *and* enter the PIN (which you wrote on the card), you'll trip an infrared beam and the unit will sound an alarm. The purpose of this alarm is to wake up the receptionist so that she can make you pick up a visitor badge. No, that's not fair... she's not always asleep; sometimes she's on the phone gossiping. Or playing Solitaire.
The first day the unit was installed, I just jumped over the IR beams. This resulted in a well-deserved nastygram from (in)Security. After that, I just made sure to enter the wrong PIN several times... and found out that the last digit can be any one of three values! Hmmm...
And one more tidbit: a co-worker's badge quit working, and when she got a new one, she had to learn a new PIN. It looks like the badge readers aren't cross-referencing the data at all... any bozo who types in the number that his badge transmitted can probably defeat the system... though surely they've done something better for the after-hours system. (Please let me believe that...)
I was very concerned about my email address... I had robertb@geocities.com from way before Yahoo! bought out Geocities. But as the spam increased more and more, the geocities.com/yahoo.com address became more and more worthless. The kicker was when some b*stard used my email address as the reply-to on a spam message... first my inbox filled with bounce messages, then with angry messages from recipients and sysadmins.
I changed my reply-to address to the email on my own domain, dixie-chicks.com, and after a few months, all mail from people I cared to hear from was coming to an email address I controlled. The economics are there:
* 12 euros/year (< us$15 even on a bad day) for a domain name from Gandi.net. If all you need is email forwarding, stop here -- they have it.
* 6 bucks/month for a web host like the one I use. Includes no-ad no-popup web space and unlimited web-based email addresses. Not meaning to plug, but they are reliable and cheap.
All together, it's worth $15 a year + $6 a month for a better deal and better service than I'd ever get from Yahoo!.
(SLASHDOT[T]IA, AP) Today brought surprising new developments in the seccessionist virtual republic of Slashdotia, as the new country threatened to tear itself apart in a conflict over the new principality's name.
"We already decided on the form of government," said one citizen who only identified himself as "A.C." "That was cool, because my Friends have Excellent Karma. But when CmdrTaco posted the suggestion about the spelling, that really bummed me out."
Central to the debate is whether the moderatocracy would be called "Slashdotia" (slash-doh-sha) or "Slashdottia" (slash-dot-ee-a). Each side has accused the other of unfair tactics in the moderated discussion, including importing Trolls from Usenet and Bots from IRC.
Talks were scheduled among the "+5, Founding Fathers", but broke down when it was learned that some of the participants were using unmodified IM and ICQ clients, instead of the new country's mandated open-source alternatives.
Also seen in the "-1, Subversive" areas of the yet-unrecognized country were spray-painted references to yet another spelling: "/.ia". "We're not overly concerned about them," one Anonymous Coward noted. "They think they're 3l33t, but they're just a bunch of lUsers."
Doesn't VB come with some basic grid(s) widgets?
It does now... but not 7+ years ago, when the application was first being developed. In fact, the built-in grid control at that time was actually a licensed version of a Sheridan grid with some features removed. Since we needed some of the crippled features, it seemed like Sheridan would be the best way to go -- Microsoft liked them, right?
It's amazing what little VB offered in the "base package". We had to get a third-party control ("Aware VBX") for our textboxes, because VB's version couldn't do something as simple as set a different background color. Fortunately, we were able to convert AwareDouble's to regular TextBox's... but it still required ripping out a bunch of code that had been put in place to catch Aware's own abstraction leaks (and adding more buckets to catch the new leaks).
When I think about the 7+ years of cruft in the app, though... [shudders]
Man, I know I am just begging to be modded down, but did anyone else (especially us who grew up in the '80s) read that title as "Java Development with Adam Ant"?
I found myself wondering if he'd been dabbling in programming, as part of his community service.
ah ah ah ah ah, Antmusic, ah ah ah ah ah...
As a VB programmer, I've *lived* leaky abstractions. Nowhere has it been more obvious than in the gigantic VB app our team is responsible for maintaining. 262 .frm files, 36 .bas modules, 25 .cls classes, and a handful of .ctl's.
Much of our troubles, though, come from a single abstraction leak: the Sheridan (now called Infragistics) Grid control.
Like most VB controls, the Sheridan Grid is designed to be a drop-in, no-code way to display database information. It's designed to be bound to a data control, which itself is a drop-in no-code connection to a database using ODBC (or whatever the flavor of the month happens to be).
The first leak comes in to play because we don't use the data control. We generate SQL on the fly because we need to do things with our queries that go beyond the capabilities of the control, and we don't save to the database until the client clicks "OK". Right away, we've broken the Sheridan Grid's paradigm, and the abstraction started to leak. So we put in buckets -- bucketfuls of code in obscure control events to buffer up changes to be written when the form closes.
Just when things were running smoothly, Sheridan decided to take that kid with his finger in the dike and send him to an orphanage. They "upgraded" the control. The upgrade was designed to make the control more efficient, of course... but we don't use the data control! It completely broke all our code. Every single grid control in the application -- at least one and usually more in each of 200+ forms -- had to have all-new buckets installed to catch the leaks.
You may be wondering by now why we haven't switched to a better grid control. Sure enough, there are controls out there now that would meet 95% of our needs... but 1) that 5% has high client visibility and 2) the rest of the code works, by golly! No way we're going to rip it out unless we're absolutely forced to.
By the way, our application now compiles to a svelte 16.9 MEG...
Oddly enough, I was just asking a video game repair guy if he'd seen a "Mr. Do" game recently. It took a while for him to remember it, but all us children of the '80s have these games buried in our subconcious, somewhere. ... so thanks to Slashdot, I now know where to find Mr. Do info! One of those searches you just wouldn't think to "do" without a little reminder. Thanks again, y'all...