Quite remarkable... Yes, and one wonders if a set of such devices in outer space couldn't be used to do interstellar communication, "morse code"-like. The power spike should be easily visible throughout the milkyway, maybe someone who did the math can elaborate on that?
Well, I think you gave the reasons why it is so much more important to stop the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" (data retention).
This ruling won't stop all hosts from logging your data (the evil and foreign servers will do that anyway and won't tell anyone), and only looks like a 'privacy wins' case which can be given to the media to produce the appearence that there is progress in privacy issues in germany.
Without the mapping of IP address to a particular user, which only the ISP can do and which is -in most cases- an independent party, logged IPs are not so much of a problem, IMHO.
BUT... if the data retention laws are enacted, our government (and only our government or any corrupted bureaucrats) will be able to access all this data, and not only by kindly asking (i.e raiding) 3rd party servers which may be distributed all over the world - but by simply looking into the logs of the ISP for your sexual preferences etc.pp.
It is scary to label this as a win for privacy in germany.
Hi, I know how it feels to be almost completely ignored (even here on/.) for a too long time when having a good idea. Kudos!
I still think too many people's ideas are lost because people too often want to stay on the main path.
For example, I myself thought (although surely not as the first person) about wireless self-organizing mesh networking (including car networks) a long time ago (must have been the modem days) - before it got popular/mainstream. People thought I was crazy.
Oh get off trying to misunderstand him. The point is that if you can see ionizing radiation, your probably in for it. The exception would be Cherenkov radiation--which might not kill you if the setup is right. And Cherenkov radiation is not ionizing, except you want to really split hairs and take the the steeply decreasing (with frequency) ultraviolet tail into the equation:-)
Ok, but as you said, we do not have good data for the low exposure range. The simplest model to explain all know effects (apart from the special case of radiation sickness) is a linear one.
Of course, you can speculate as much as you want and you can do research into this - but if you do not come up with something which contradicts the known truth, any complication of the model you do is contrary to scientific principles and irrational.
It's like the cellphone cancer discussion, only the other way around:
Cancer suspected from microwaves without support - Sub-linear effects of ionizing radiation in low dose range suspected without support
See, the thing about evolution is, by most scientific standards of today, a good majority of the principles Darwin outlined in The Origin of Species are actually provable. No, it is not, it is falsifiable. But it has withstood every test until now.
Re:All the more reason to use Jabber/XMPP
on
MSN Censors Your IM
·
· Score: 1
Or a good old IRC server! Open and simple and non-XML-bullshit and everything:-)
The reality of it is that I can take Americium and hold it in my hands. It's an alpha emission radioactive isotope, meaning the first layer of dead skin on my hands would be enough to block the radioactivity. Not quite true. Replace 'block the radioactivity' with 'block the alpha particles' and you're right. But nearly every alpha emitter has also gamma emissions which can harm you, although not as much as ingested alphas.
I have to second the AC and add that thermodynamics indeed covers radiative transport (and, yes, I have a degree in physics). It would help if the GP would not be so damn arrogant!
Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.
Here in germany we have such a thing, at least for some power companies, called 'Nachtstrom' (night current). The rate for the night is about half (9ct) of the rate for the day (16ct).
Of course, the online access device would be even cooler, for private homes, I think some kind of FM radio transmission could be easily used to broadcast the rates to all homes. Signed messages would prevent unnoticed tampering. And this one-direction information flow would prevent the power companies from acquiring per-household usage patterns (which may be a privacy issue).
It is tempting to add more and more features and functionality over time. Ultimatly, you risk getting consumed by "entropy".
KDE and Gnome developers also....lest XFCE surprise them both over time. More functionality is better, as long as the software is integrated in a sane way. The problem is functionality in the wrong places, not functionality itself. I think everyone here knows what harm the will to reduce functionality did to GNOME... (awaiting flames already:)
Given that the youth of America have been brought up on MS products, they're going to have a stronger attachement to them than those of us who were brought up on Commodores, Amigas, and Apples. MS *clearly* knows this. Think about that.
Well, do you know that the Commodore 64 BASIC v2 was largely produced by Microsoft?
A better idea would be to tax them. Maybe, but it seems to me that a lot of people see BIG EVIL TAXES as a bigger constraint to personal freedom than outright banning something. At least this seems to be the case here in germany - 'we' also have a lot of these new ban this ban that laws, with tax reduction laws at the same time.
Maybe you just discovered a pattern in the/. post (as I did, too) and are now just having the usual geek reflex 'hey, that's redundant!'. I think it does not hurt too much, at least the editors seem to get the dupes under control now:-)
The world is relatively safe. The major disaster and major fear we have is from islamic terrorists sending a couple of planes into a building or two. A BUILDING OR TWO! THATS IT!
You certainly have a point, but please also consider that several world leaders have at least played with broadening the military situations where nukes would be considered an apt tool. A 'local' war in th middle east would still kill tens of millions and have severe worldwide consequences. I would feel rather uneasy as an Israeli or Iranian now.
And there are still thousands of nukes in the hands of the superpowers - enough to destroy most of the world's population. The MAD principle is still true, maybe only in a more passive variant.
free will exists, then there must be something which is NOT governed by the physical universe (hence, not deterministic),
May I point out that determinsm has nothing to do with the 'physical universe'? Something ruled just by chance (see quantum mechanics) not deterministic, but you don't need a supernatural being for that.
Of course, I could argue that there are underlying principles to QM (BTW, this would not be the scientific interpretation as it is not the simplest one and involves superfluous assumptions (the famous example is Einstein's 'god does not place dice')).
Well, and I could equally well argue the other standpoint. It's the same with the free will, I can be agnostic about it, just like I can be about the existence of god.
We need to stop burning stuff for our energy. Sure, batteries store energy made by mostly burning coal and stuff, but there other options for generating electricity to fill those batteries that don't involve adding carbon. I wish these people focused their research towards these types of energy sources.
Here's an idea I have not yet seen anywhere: Suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere using large beds of soda lye and reprocess the resulting sodium carbonate using only nuclear power to pure CO2 and lye. The CO2 (+H2O) could be further processed (with the help of the same power plant) to synthetic crude.
There is your CO2 neutral power source which can be used to drive any car. How about that?
He's discussing voting systems here! (Well, not for governments, but anyway:-)
. . .
How about a system where this data is encoded into the post (like your -1, flamebait) in a defined way and a firefox plugin which hides the corresponding stories? Anybody?:-)
The vote for the story could be weighted with the moderation score of your post. Also, this would be complete independent of slashdots staff and could induce some changes which support such a moderation style.
This idea is somewhat heretical, I know. But I'm reading with the Slashdotter firefox extension script so this idea came to my mind.
When you expose your application via VNC/NX, you have to additionally provide the per-user user environment (windowing, at least). The client machine is already providing the window managaer etc to run the thin client in, so why duplicate that in the backend? The flipside of thin client is fatter backend. True, but I still doubt that simple server-side windowing (it's about a web app, not a web desktop, isn't it?) will be more resource hungry than producing messages for a fat API to the client. This api does not even exists implicitely in the server case. Form handling this, templating that... or, for example, managing sessions through complicated and fault-prone mechanisms which are as least as complicated as unix process management.
Consider also that there are (already) a lot of incompatibilities in the client API. A standard for a fat client (which also gets a fatter and fatter API with all the 'neccessary' extensions) is more complicated and therefore much harder to implement correctly.
t's a blessing and a curse that http connections are mostly ephemoral. Web 1.0 applications have built-in assumptions that the user at the other end can go away without so much as a by-your-leave. Just ask a terminal service or Citrix admin if s/he wants to see Web 2.0 implemented on persistent TCP connections.
I have to be honest here... I do not have any information about what current TCP as a transport for a terminal-like UI would mean for the infrastructure.
But (as you also mention), there is already VoIP (and IRC and online games!). And some popular Web 2.0 applications. And the net still works. And the web2 isn't stateless any longer.
This effect - if it exists at all on such a scale, which I doubt (any references?) - could be easily mitigated by longer delay between keepalive messages.
A laggy end user experience with a VNC-like remote UI... ok, that's a valid point. But of course, it does not need to be solely pixel based and it does not need to transfer every mouse click.
I just think that some simple, low bandwidth standard for 'fullscreen remote applications' would be a better idea than the extension of HTTP+HTML with a lot of heavy APIs and many layers of software.
Because HTTP is one of the not-so-many-left protocols that go through firewalls, forced proxies and filters.
This is why application level firewalls are developed. Until all sides finally realize that they are just repeating history and that constraints on certain types of SOAP queries are not really different to constraints on certain TCP ports. In the meantime, a lot of those 'internet security consultants' got a lot of money in salaries for implementing such firewalls and the web traffic volume (and therefore the ISP stocks) got larger by the additional header of some protocol stacked onto HTTP. Worth mentioning are all those 'specialist' articles filling up pages in otherwise interesting computer magazines.
Ok...:-) I'm exaggerating and simplifying a bit, but I think this is a very common pattern today.
Because a browser is all you've got when you use a public terminal.
They usually run on a fully-fledged GUI toolkit and a capable operating system...
Because WWW has the biggest user base ever.
Yes, this is probably the main reason (- I think the other of your arguments are essentially variations on this).
But I do not think that it is a good idea to keep going this direction, just because there is a lot inertial.
Oh, BTW, you're still using IPv4, don't you?;-)
Sadly, yes! I'd like to have all these IPv6 multicasting capabilities:-)
... is why they are using the essentially useless HTML/HTTP stack with all the addtional layers (JS, AJAX, flash etc.) at all.
There are cross-platform thin-client network solutions like VNC or Nomachine's NX. They do exactly what the web x.0 wants to do, they do it fast and they do it without all the bloat and packing/unpacking of (essentially very simple) data.... and you can use your favourite GUI toolkit to build applications.
Do not bring up the bandwidth argument before looking at NX first. It runs over really small links.
I also do not think that it allows additional security breaches in principle, as a web browser with all the additional plug-ins is also similar to a very high-level shell to a remote server.
But maybe if you have millions of people doing this, no one is listening to net gossip anymore? Maybe this would even let people judge others by their actions and not their image in public:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Quite remarkable...
Yes, and one wonders if a set of such devices in outer space couldn't be used to do interstellar communication, "morse code"-like. The power spike should be easily visible throughout the milkyway, maybe someone who did the math can elaborate on that?
Well, I think you gave the reasons why it is so much more important to stop the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" (data retention).
This ruling won't stop all hosts from logging your data (the evil and foreign servers will do that anyway and won't tell anyone), and only looks like a 'privacy wins' case which can be given to the media to produce the appearence that there is progress in privacy issues in germany.
Without the mapping of IP address to a particular user, which only the ISP can do and which is -in most cases- an independent party, logged IPs are not so much of a problem, IMHO.
BUT... if the data retention laws are enacted, our government (and only our government or any corrupted bureaucrats) will be able to access all this data, and not only by kindly asking (i.e raiding) 3rd party servers which may be distributed all over the world - but by simply looking into the logs of the ISP for your sexual preferences etc.pp.
It is scary to label this as a win for privacy in germany.
Well, that would be nice, but I think you're wrong: Look at China as well as the former soviet union.
Hi, I know how it feels to be almost completely ignored (even here on /.) for a too long time when having a good idea. Kudos!
I still think too many people's ideas are lost because people too often want to stay on the main path.
For example, I myself thought (although surely not as the first person) about wireless self-organizing mesh networking (including car networks) a long time ago (must have been the modem days) - before it got popular/mainstream. People thought I was crazy.
Ok, but as you said, we do not have good data for the low exposure range. The simplest model to explain all know effects (apart from the special case of radiation sickness) is a linear one.
Of course, you can speculate as much as you want and you can do research into this - but if you do not come up with something which contradicts the known truth, any complication of the model you do is contrary to scientific principles and irrational.
It's like the cellphone cancer discussion, only the other way around:
Cancer suspected from microwaves without support - Sub-linear effects of ionizing radiation in low dose range suspected without support
Or a good old IRC server! Open and simple and non-XML-bullshit and everything :-)
I have to second the AC and add that thermodynamics indeed covers radiative transport (and, yes, I have a degree in physics). It would help if the GP would not be so damn arrogant!
.
Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.
Here in germany we have such a thing, at least for some power companies, called 'Nachtstrom' (night current). The rate for the night is about half (9ct) of the rate for the day (16ct).
Of course, the online access device would be even cooler, for private homes, I think some kind of FM radio transmission could be easily used to broadcast the rates to all homes. Signed messages would prevent unnoticed tampering. And this one-direction information flow would prevent the power companies from acquiring per-household usage patterns (which may be a privacy issue).
KDE and Gnome developers also....lest XFCE surprise them both over time. More functionality is better, as long as the software is integrated in a sane way. The problem is functionality in the wrong places, not functionality itself. I think everyone here knows what harm the will to reduce functionality did to GNOME... (awaiting flames already
Given that the youth of America have been brought up on MS products, they're going to have a stronger attachement to them than those of us who were brought up on Commodores, Amigas, and Apples. MS *clearly* knows this. Think about that.
Well, do you know that the Commodore 64 BASIC v2 was largely produced by Microsoft?
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC
Seems to make many happy, which is kind of sad.
Maybe you just discovered a pattern in the /. post (as I did, too) and are now just having the usual geek reflex 'hey, that's redundant!'. I think it does not hurt too much, at least the editors seem to get the dupes under control now :-)
You certainly have a point, but please also consider that several world leaders have at least played with broadening the military situations where nukes would be considered an apt tool. A 'local' war in th middle east would still kill tens of millions and have severe worldwide consequences. I would feel rather uneasy as an Israeli or Iranian now.
And there are still thousands of nukes in the hands of the superpowers - enough to destroy most of the world's population. The MAD principle is still true, maybe only in a more passive variant.
free will exists, then there must be something which is NOT governed by the physical universe (hence, not deterministic),
May I point out that determinsm has nothing to do with the 'physical universe'? Something ruled just by chance (see quantum mechanics) not deterministic, but you don't need a supernatural being for that.
Of course, I could argue that there are underlying principles to QM (BTW, this would not be the scientific interpretation as it is not the simplest one and involves superfluous assumptions (the famous example is Einstein's 'god does not place dice')).
Well, and I could equally well argue the other standpoint. It's the same with the free will, I can be agnostic about it, just like I can be about the existence of god.
We need to stop burning stuff for our energy. Sure, batteries store energy made by mostly burning coal and stuff, but there other options for generating electricity to fill those batteries that don't involve adding carbon. I wish these people focused their research towards these types of energy sources.
Here's an idea I have not yet seen anywhere: Suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere using large beds of soda lye and reprocess the resulting sodium carbonate using only nuclear power to pure CO2 and lye.
The CO2 (+H2O) could be further processed (with the help of the same power plant) to synthetic crude.
There is your CO2 neutral power source which can be used to drive any car. How about that?
Who modded this redundant or offtopic?
:-)
:-)
He's discussing voting systems here! (Well, not for governments, but anyway
.
.
.
How about a system where this data is encoded into the post (like your -1, flamebait) in a defined way and a firefox plugin which hides the corresponding stories? Anybody?
The vote for the story could be weighted with the moderation score of your post. Also, this would be complete independent of slashdots staff and could induce some changes which support such a moderation style.
This idea is somewhat heretical, I know. But I'm reading with the Slashdotter firefox extension script so this idea came to my mind.
When you expose your application via VNC/NX, you have to additionally provide the per-user user environment (windowing, at least). The client machine is already providing the window managaer etc to run the thin client in, so why duplicate that in the backend? The flipside of thin client is fatter backend.
True, but I still doubt that simple server-side windowing (it's about a web app, not a web desktop, isn't it?) will be more resource hungry than producing messages for a fat API to the client. This api does not even exists implicitely in the server case.
Form handling this, templating that... or, for example, managing sessions through complicated and fault-prone mechanisms which are as least as complicated as unix process management.
Consider also that there are (already) a lot of incompatibilities in the client API. A standard for a fat client (which also gets a fatter and fatter API with all the 'neccessary' extensions) is more complicated and therefore much harder to implement correctly.
t's a blessing and a curse that http connections are mostly ephemoral. Web 1.0 applications have built-in assumptions that the user at the other end can go away without so much as a by-your-leave. Just ask a terminal service or Citrix admin if s/he wants to see Web 2.0 implemented on persistent TCP connections.
I have to be honest here... I do not have any information about what current TCP as a transport for a terminal-like UI would mean for the infrastructure.
But (as you also mention), there is already VoIP (and IRC and online games!). And some popular Web 2.0 applications. And the net still works. And the web2 isn't stateless any longer.
This effect - if it exists at all on such a scale, which I doubt (any references?) - could be easily mitigated by longer delay between keepalive messages.
A laggy end user experience with a VNC-like remote UI... ok, that's a valid point. But of course, it does not need to be solely pixel based and it does not need to transfer every mouse click.
I just think that some simple, low bandwidth standard for 'fullscreen remote applications' would be a better idea than the extension of HTTP+HTML with a lot of heavy APIs and many layers of software.
This is why application level firewalls are developed. Until all sides finally realize that they are just repeating history and that constraints on certain types of SOAP queries are not really different to constraints on certain TCP ports. In the meantime, a lot of those 'internet security consultants' got a lot of money in salaries for implementing such firewalls and the web traffic volume (and therefore the ISP stocks) got larger by the additional header of some protocol stacked onto HTTP. Worth mentioning are all those 'specialist' articles filling up pages in otherwise interesting computer magazines.
Ok...
They usually run on a fully-fledged GUI toolkit and a capable operating system...
Yes, this is probably the main reason (- I think the other of your arguments are essentially variations on this).
But I do not think that it is a good idea to keep going this direction, just because there is a lot inertial.
Sadly, yes! I'd like to have all these IPv6 multicasting capabilities
... is why they are using the essentially useless HTML/HTTP stack with all the addtional layers (JS, AJAX, flash etc.) at all.
... and you can use your favourite GUI toolkit to build applications.
There are cross-platform thin-client network solutions like VNC or Nomachine's NX. They do exactly what the web x.0 wants to do, they do it fast and they do it without all the bloat and packing/unpacking of (essentially very simple) data.
Do not bring up the bandwidth argument before looking at NX first. It runs over really small links.
I also do not think that it allows additional security breaches in principle, as a web browser with all the additional plug-ins is also similar to a very high-level shell to a remote server.
I like your post, especially for the (intended?) irony that you write down the company's rights from a
:-)
first person perspective
But maybe if you have millions of people doing this, no one is listening to net gossip anymore? :-)
Maybe this would even let people judge others by their actions and not their image in public