There's no physical reason why you can't have both. Having a great UI and security is a resource allocation
Yes, there are real, physical (derived from natural laws) conflicts between ease and security.
An easier version of SSH wouldn't force the user to memorize passwords, which is a fundamental conflict with security. An automobile would be easier to use if you didn't need to carry around an ignition key.
However, the post you were responding to didn't say that. It said "Hitherto it has been impossible", which is an equivocation- a statement of how things have been so far, not a claim it must remain so in the future.
I agree that nearly all services labels once provided to customers are becoming obselete. Talent selection can be accomplished for nominal cost by internet users (friends and fanatics spreading the word to others)
However, promotion, regardless of whether labels are in a good position to do continue it, doesn't count as a service they provided. Promotion (and most all advertising) is actually damaging to consumers. The goal of advertising is to influence opinions... to trick people, however marginally, into buying something they wouldn't otherwise. Promotion hurts the customer, and it hurts the creation of "art".
[Hey, if you're the author, why are you posting as an anonymous coward?]
Yeah, weird. I mean, all the other World Bank emeritus economists have Slashdot accounts...
(But seriously, Slashcode would be improved if people directly mentioned in an accepted story were auto-emailed special passwords they can use to post comments about their story with a a +2 "Primary Source" bonus)
The RIAA is NOT in the distribution business, they are in the association business, hence Recording Industry Association of America. They represent the rights and needs of their members. Whether or not record labels go to digital distribution of music or not is not up to the RIAA, it is up to each individual member company.
An invalid objection. The RIAA is an association of companies, yes. And the most critical business those companies are in is distribution. ("Distribution" not in the narrow sense of shipping boxes around the continent, but in doing everything involved in getting a song from muscian to listener)
Whether or not record labels go to digital distribution of music or not is not up to the RIAA, it is up to each individual member company.
And since those individuals use the same brain cells as the RIAA, the choice is up to the RIAA. There is nothing wrong with using the name of an aggregate to refer to all of it's members- especially when the association was formed for the precise purpose of putting a single face on an industry's needs.
that's what seasonings were for in the old days, to make slightly -off- foods taste a little better.
Wrong. You're talking about spices here. They were added to food to hide spoilage. But salt was added beforehand, to prevent spoiling. The amount of salt a piece of meat was packed in was more than enough to ruin the flavor- I always must soak out a salt-preserved hog for days before it becomes palatable.
The saying has nothing to do with rotten foods. It deals with the BCE superstition that salt is an antidote to poison...
should be taken with a mountain-sized grain of salt
People who enjoy the taste of salt add it in proportion to the amount of food they intend to eat. "Take with a grain of salt" means "Eat so little that just one grain is adequate seasoning", or just "eat very little". The suggestion to only consume a small amount is meant to imply a low level of trust. It is the opposite of expressions like "Swallow if whole" and "Swallow it hook, line, and sinker".
Expanding the salt grain to mountainous proportions therefore means that you will accept the survey results with total creduluity.
On a trip to Hyderabad, India, most of the signs, billboards, and menus I saw were in English.
India is not well represenative of non-English nations. It was part of England for decades, and had a peaceful separatation. Even now, English is one of the about 15 official national languages, and is one of the 2 languages which important government business can be conducted in.
When two Indians from different regions meet, chances are their local Indian dialects will not be mutually comprehensible. They will attempt falling back to either Hindi or English.
And in an area like Hyderabad, which attacts so many foreigners, sign-makers will be even more inclinded to English over Hindi.
You claim that all humans should be able to read a random hostname. What about an average grandmother who happens to only read Chinese? She can't read cnn.com, and that's about as simple as possible when it comes to domain names. Your scheme has already failed.
Ahem. She can look at a printout for cnn.com, look down at her keyboard, which has letters "C" "N" "O" "M" plainly printed on them, do some pattern-matching, and punch it in.
Or did you not know that well more than 99% of computer keyboards are based on English ASCII? Regardless of whether someone is typing in Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, or Korean, they've all got a slight variant of an IBM 101 keyboard under their hands. Those 1% that don't are using some software inputs, and that software has an easily accessible panel to pick out the 37 critical ascii characters.
I got a lot of upmods for that post. And I got a lot of negative responses for people who evidently either didn't read it completely (and don't understand that resisting the internationalization of DNS in no way prevents use of native-charset website names), or don't know that English is the international language of technology, and that the 37 char ASCII set is the easiest possible alphabet for all people to learn.
ASCII37 is a subset of the alphabets of 50% of the people on earth. Of those not using it natively, the majority of their computer-using population can already recognize ASCII37. And compared with any other candidate alphabet system, ASCII37 is usually much simpler or at worst equal in abstract difficulty. The combination of it being a small, easy system, and already being the most commonly understood in the world makes ASCII37 the indisputable choice for universal human readability.
I wish Google would give me the option of excluding online stores
The ironic thing is, Google already has a system, http://froogle.google.com, which searches only through online stores. Since they've already got an ability to recognize stores, they should really add a checkbox to disable "store" hits from normal searches.
As an avid Googler, I would prefer blogs be excluded from searches.
It would be great if Google had a few checkboxes on the Advanced Search page to disable results from pages matching a certain pattern. Blogs, mailing-list archives, and catalog pages (places which sell you products, rather than tell about products) should be omittable at the user's preference.
Doesn't mean he's telling the truth. People lie all the time. Especially when that emotionally invested in a subject.
Great artists hate to have to explain their works. They feel that if they admit "Yeah, it's an allegory, and A represents B" then they've given up their secrets, and surrendered to Sam Goldwyn.
It's not going to break the damn film one way or the other.
No, it'll make the film a little more palatable to average theatergoers, while greatly boosting the attractiveness of the "extended" DVD to overexcited geeks.
Christopher Lee will not be attending the premiere of Return of the King because he is so upset.
Typically you expect actors to attend the premieres of their films. Since he's not in the film, why would he go to the premiere? As Lee says, ""No, what's the point? What's the point of going? None at all." That's not upset; it's just logical.
everything's better than it was before...as all the little people and magical beings see that their time is coming to an end and one race of pragmatic, greedy humanity will shortly be dominant through all the lands.
So Libor Vanek mentions WWI. Then you call him totally incorrect, and cite a passage stating that 1939 had no influence on the book.
Guess what? WWI was 1919! "Not topical" means not based on WWII. But since Tolkein had already lived through WWI, it'd be impossible for him to have not been influenced by it.
Come on Darwinists, explain the evolutionary advantage to faith!
There are two major evolutionary explanations for the existence of religosity and superstition.
One: A distinctive trait of homo sapiens is, uh, sapience. Thinking. The ability to predict the results of actions and plan accordingly. Other animals can do this to some extent, but not nearly as well. Humans have a slowed maturation rate so the offspring have time to study inherited knowledge, etc. Knowledge is important to survival- else, we'd just be slow, wimpy apes.
Because knowledge (the ability to predict outcomes) is valuable, humans have evolved to seek it. "Curiosity" is a name for a related trait. People feel distressed when there is something they cannot understand, and seek out explanations. If the question is within their ability to solve, then they've gained knowledge (something on the level of how to keep a fire burning). But if it's too difficult, then humans will feel a degree of satisfaction from deciding on any answer, even if it's false. (Why does thunder strike? Because the sky-father is angry!)
It is the drive to increase knowledge which, when stifled, creates supernatural beliefs. "How can I survive death?" is one primary question which no human has yet answered- yet many of them derive pleasure from believing that the solution is known.
Two: Humans are a social creature, which responds to dire threats by cooperative action. But unlike herd animals, they also increase resource-collection efficiency by distributed action. Yet they always regroup to get back with the clan. The social-bonding traits that encourage this behavior eventually lead into religiosity- distinctive, repetive actions which have no real goal except to perpetuate the performance of those actions.
Religions grow because those societies possessing them are advantaged over others. At the cost of creating a less productive "priest" class, the group gains increased cohesion and wastes fewer resources on outsiders. And, all those humans would might squander time pondering difficult questions instead of working hard will have the answers given to them by a single authority- so insteada of everyone wallowing in philosophy, a dedicated servant performs that job for everyone.
(This has been alluded to by other responses, so I won't go on at length)
I truly think that with France's support early on, the whole scenario could and would have been resolved without a war.
Maybe. But that's not what GW Bush wanted. He wanted a war. He didn't want to "resolve" the situation- he wanted to invade Iraq and kill Saddam. Finishing "family business" had been a goal ever since his election.
The US would've gotten international assistance if they'd taken the approach "We need to solve the Iraq problem". But they didn't; they said "We will invade Iraq", and proceeded to do so.
As others have pointed out, if you dont use the accents, why would you want to visit a foreign language page?
To look at the pictures
To download the audio
To read text which you're personally able to understand, even if you don't know how to generate those symbols with the computer you're sitting at
To click the little GIF reading "English" that many foreign websites already use
To file a complaint that one of the system's users is DOSing you
To feed the text into your Machine Translation software
focus on the things you like and ignore those that dont mean a thing.
I (and everyone) currently has the can look at any DNS hostname, scribble it onto a pad, read that over the phone to a friend, and have him connect to the computer. Internationalized DNS will take away that ability.
your average surfer does not. They go clickly clickly on the results returned by the search engine
If that were true, it would be an argument against changing DNS in any way. Since normal users never look at URLs, who cares what character set they use?
DNS should never get Unicode support, or any form of "internationalization" for that matter!
DNS is supposed to be a way for humans to communicate with computers about internet hosts. The intent is not for some human to be able to read it, but for all humans. This has worked until now because hostnames were limited to only ~37 characters. Regardless of native language, any computer operator can quickly learn to handle the [a-z][0-9] gylphs. Basically anyone literate in one language can copy ASCII characters from a signpost onto a notepad, and then punch those into a keyboard. Even if her culture doesn't use the ASCII set in normal daily activities (which about everyone in America, Europe, and Japan does), then the shapes are at least simple enough to copy geometrically.
But if 16-bit charsets are allowed in DNS, we could get hostnames composed of 3 Chinese characters and two Arabic ones, and which a Russian or Briton will be incapable of processing without tremendous pain.
DNS is something that should be left in a "lowest common denominator" form, so that it's accessible to all of humanity (if they meet the low hurdle of operating a normal PC)
Internationalized host identifiers in URLs will be important, of course. But they should be a separate layer implemented on top of DNS. DNS is a standard that already exists. Rather than changing the standard and breaking every single internet-using computer (the "flag day" scenario), a new system should be rolled out for people who want host identifiers in funny-looking squiggles.
Saying Linux is a clone of Unix, is like saying Windows XP is a clone of MS DOS 2.1.
Ok, lets go down to the time machine and grab some skilled Unix and DOS users from 1982. Sit them in front of Linux and WinXP, and see how long it takes them to notice something changed. One could take weeks... the other won't last a second.
Those weren't new concepts. Except for socket (and maybe union filesystem, which isn't too useful), all of those things were reimplementations of someone else's idea. They had been done before, just not in UNIX. Xerox, Digital, and MIT had done all those things, and not released code.
One could even argue socket() was a clone of something else (in that it's just an API for TCP/IP, a government-created spec)
You're using the "constructivist language" definition of "atheism"- based on building up the word from individual parts. Unfortunately, popular usage has ignored that simple logic, and the common definition of atheism (as repeated in many dictionaries) is equal to what you call anti-theism. Other dictionaries give 2 definitions for atheism, permitting it to mean either explicit denial or merely refusal to affirm.
The most popularly used meanings have theism, agnosticism, and atheism meaning belief, uncertainty, and disbelief respectively. The equivalent words, based on meanings of component parts, would be theism, atheism/nontheism, and antitheism.
Another excellent example of a word whose usage is at odds with it's constructive meaning is "homophobia". Logically, that means "fear of the same", an antonym for xenophobia.
I've seen worse, but the GITS movie included some seriously wrong dubbing. Whenever a character goes of on a quasi-mystical subconcious monologue, the English actors just couldn't keep up.
Slashdot Mirror
As of yesterday, an exploit for these security holes has been available.
The statement "There aren't any attacks on IE yet" doesn't mean there are no exploits, just that no one is using exploits (attacking).
There's no physical reason why you can't have both. Having a great UI and security is a resource allocation
Yes, there are real, physical (derived from natural laws) conflicts between ease and security.
An easier version of SSH wouldn't force the user to memorize passwords, which is a fundamental conflict with security. An automobile would be easier to use if you didn't need to carry around an ignition key.
However, the post you were responding to didn't say that. It said "Hitherto it has been impossible", which is an equivocation- a statement of how things have been so far, not a claim it must remain so in the future.
I agree that nearly all services labels once provided to customers are becoming obselete. Talent selection can be accomplished for nominal cost by internet users (friends and fanatics spreading the word to others)
However, promotion, regardless of whether labels are in a good position to do continue it, doesn't count as a service they provided. Promotion (and most all advertising) is actually damaging to consumers. The goal of advertising is to influence opinions... to trick people, however marginally, into buying something they wouldn't otherwise. Promotion hurts the customer, and it hurts the creation of "art".
[Hey, if you're the author, why are you posting as an anonymous coward?]
Yeah, weird. I mean, all the other World Bank emeritus economists have Slashdot accounts...
(But seriously, Slashcode would be improved if people directly mentioned in an accepted story were auto-emailed special passwords they can use to post comments about their story with a a +2 "Primary Source" bonus)
The RIAA is NOT in the distribution business, they are in the association business, hence Recording Industry Association of America. They represent the rights and needs of their members. Whether or not record labels go to digital distribution of music or not is not up to the RIAA, it is up to each individual member company.
An invalid objection. The RIAA is an association of companies, yes. And the most critical business those companies are in is distribution. ("Distribution" not in the narrow sense of shipping boxes around the continent, but in doing everything involved in getting a song from muscian to listener)
Whether or not record labels go to digital distribution of music or not is not up to the RIAA, it is up to each individual member company.
And since those individuals use the same brain cells as the RIAA, the choice is up to the RIAA. There is nothing wrong with using the name of an aggregate to refer to all of it's members- especially when the association was formed for the precise purpose of putting a single face on an industry's needs.
that's what seasonings were for in the old days, to make slightly -off- foods taste a little better.
Wrong. You're talking about spices here. They were added to food to hide spoilage. But salt was added beforehand, to prevent spoiling. The amount of salt a piece of meat was packed in was more than enough to ruin the flavor- I always must soak out a salt-preserved hog for days before it becomes palatable.
The saying has nothing to do with rotten foods. It deals with the BCE superstition that salt is an antidote to poison...
should be taken with a mountain-sized grain of salt
People who enjoy the taste of salt add it in proportion to the amount of food they intend to eat. "Take with a grain of salt" means "Eat so little that just one grain is adequate seasoning", or just "eat very little". The suggestion to only consume a small amount is meant to imply a low level of trust. It is the opposite of expressions like "Swallow if whole" and "Swallow it hook, line, and sinker".
Expanding the salt grain to mountainous proportions therefore means that you will accept the survey results with total creduluity.
On a trip to Hyderabad, India, most of the signs, billboards, and menus I saw were in English.
India is not well represenative of non-English nations. It was part of England for decades, and had a peaceful separatation. Even now, English is one of the about 15 official national languages, and is one of the 2 languages which important government business can be conducted in.
When two Indians from different regions meet, chances are their local Indian dialects will not be mutually comprehensible. They will attempt falling back to either Hindi or English.
And in an area like Hyderabad, which attacts so many foreigners, sign-makers will be even more inclinded to English over Hindi.
You claim that all humans should be able to read a random hostname. What about an average grandmother who happens to only read Chinese? She can't read cnn.com, and that's about as simple as possible when it comes to domain names. Your scheme has already failed.
Ahem. She can look at a printout for cnn.com, look down at her keyboard, which has letters "C" "N" "O" "M" plainly printed on them, do some pattern-matching, and punch it in.
Or did you not know that well more than 99% of computer keyboards are based on English ASCII? Regardless of whether someone is typing in Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, or Korean, they've all got a slight variant of an IBM 101 keyboard under their hands. Those 1% that don't are using some software inputs, and that software has an easily accessible panel to pick out the 37 critical ascii characters.
I got a lot of upmods for that post. And I got a lot of negative responses for people who evidently either didn't read it completely (and don't understand that resisting the internationalization of DNS in no way prevents use of native-charset website names), or don't know that English is the international language of technology, and that the 37 char ASCII set is the easiest possible alphabet for all people to learn.
ASCII37 is a subset of the alphabets of 50% of the people on earth. Of those not using it natively, the majority of their computer-using population can already recognize ASCII37. And compared with any other candidate alphabet system, ASCII37 is usually much simpler or at worst equal in abstract difficulty. The combination of it being a small, easy system, and already being the most commonly understood in the world makes ASCII37 the indisputable choice for universal human readability.
I wish Google would give me the option of excluding online stores
The ironic thing is, Google already has a system, http://froogle.google.com, which searches only through online stores. Since they've already got an ability to recognize stores, they should really add a checkbox to disable "store" hits from normal searches.
As an avid Googler, I would prefer blogs be excluded from searches.
It would be great if Google had a few checkboxes on the Advanced Search page to disable results from pages matching a certain pattern. Blogs, mailing-list archives, and catalog pages (places which sell you products, rather than tell about products) should be omittable at the user's preference.
but the man himself denied it vigoursly.
Doesn't mean he's telling the truth. People lie all the time. Especially when that emotionally invested in a subject.
Great artists hate to have to explain their works. They feel that if they admit "Yeah, it's an allegory, and A represents B" then they've given up their secrets, and surrendered to Sam Goldwyn.
It's not going to break the damn film one way or the other.
No, it'll make the film a little more palatable to average theatergoers, while greatly boosting the attractiveness of the "extended" DVD to overexcited geeks.
Christopher Lee will not be attending the premiere of Return of the King because he is so upset.
Typically you expect actors to attend the premieres of their films. Since he's not in the film, why would he go to the premiere? As Lee says, ""No, what's the point? What's the point of going? None at all." That's not upset; it's just logical.
everything's better than it was before ...as all the little people and magical beings see that their time is coming to an end and one race of pragmatic, greedy humanity will shortly be dominant through all the lands.
So Libor Vanek mentions WWI. Then you call him totally incorrect, and cite a passage stating that 1939 had no influence on the book.
Guess what? WWI was 1919! "Not topical" means not based on WWII. But since Tolkein had already lived through WWI, it'd be impossible for him to have not been influenced by it.
Come on Darwinists, explain the evolutionary advantage to faith!
There are two major evolutionary explanations for the existence of religosity and superstition.
One: A distinctive trait of homo sapiens is, uh, sapience. Thinking. The ability to predict the results of actions and plan accordingly. Other animals can do this to some extent, but not nearly as well. Humans have a slowed maturation rate so the offspring have time to study inherited knowledge, etc. Knowledge is important to survival- else, we'd just be slow, wimpy apes.
Because knowledge (the ability to predict outcomes) is valuable, humans have evolved to seek it. "Curiosity" is a name for a related trait. People feel distressed when there is something they cannot understand, and seek out explanations. If the question is within their ability to solve, then they've gained knowledge (something on the level of how to keep a fire burning). But if it's too difficult, then humans will feel a degree of satisfaction from deciding on any answer, even if it's false. (Why does thunder strike? Because the sky-father is angry!)
It is the drive to increase knowledge which, when stifled, creates supernatural beliefs. "How can I survive death?" is one primary question which no human has yet answered- yet many of them derive pleasure from believing that the solution is known.
Two: Humans are a social creature, which responds to dire threats by cooperative action. But unlike herd animals, they also increase resource-collection efficiency by distributed action. Yet they always regroup to get back with the clan. The social-bonding traits that encourage this behavior eventually lead into religiosity- distinctive, repetive actions which have no real goal except to perpetuate the performance of those actions.
Religions grow because those societies possessing them are advantaged over others. At the cost of creating a less productive "priest" class, the group gains increased cohesion and wastes fewer resources on outsiders. And, all those humans would might squander time pondering difficult questions instead of working hard will have the answers given to them by a single authority- so insteada of everyone wallowing in philosophy, a dedicated servant performs that job for everyone.
(This has been alluded to by other responses, so I won't go on at length)
Should. Could. It doesn't matter. It's still illegal to use somebody elses data link without their permission.
You are right now using a data link to slashdot.org.
Do you have their permission to do so? Yes? How do you know?
The very fact that the computer exchanges data with anyone who connects to it, with no attempt at authenication, constitutes permission.
I truly think that with France's support early on, the whole scenario could and would have been resolved without a war.
Maybe. But that's not what GW Bush wanted. He wanted a war. He didn't want to "resolve" the situation- he wanted to invade Iraq and kill Saddam. Finishing "family business" had been a goal ever since his election.
The US would've gotten international assistance if they'd taken the approach "We need to solve the Iraq problem". But they didn't; they said "We will invade Iraq", and proceeded to do so.
focus on the things you like and ignore those that dont mean a thing.
I (and everyone) currently has the can look at any DNS hostname, scribble it onto a pad, read that over the phone to a friend, and have him connect to the computer. Internationalized DNS will take away that ability.
your average surfer does not. They go clickly clickly on the results returned by the search engine
If that were true, it would be an argument against changing DNS in any way. Since normal users never look at URLs, who cares what character set they use?
Why not extend dns to support unicode?
DNS should never get Unicode support, or any form of "internationalization" for that matter!
DNS is supposed to be a way for humans to communicate with computers about internet hosts. The intent is not for some human to be able to read it, but for all humans. This has worked until now because hostnames were limited to only ~37 characters. Regardless of native language, any computer operator can quickly learn to handle the [a-z][0-9] gylphs. Basically anyone literate in one language can copy ASCII characters from a signpost onto a notepad, and then punch those into a keyboard. Even if her culture doesn't use the ASCII set in normal daily activities (which about everyone in America, Europe, and Japan does), then the shapes are at least simple enough to copy geometrically.
But if 16-bit charsets are allowed in DNS, we could get hostnames composed of 3 Chinese characters and two Arabic ones, and which a Russian or Briton will be incapable of processing without tremendous pain.
DNS is something that should be left in a "lowest common denominator" form, so that it's accessible to all of humanity (if they meet the low hurdle of operating a normal PC)
Internationalized host identifiers in URLs will be important, of course. But they should be a separate layer implemented on top of DNS. DNS is a standard that already exists. Rather than changing the standard and breaking every single internet-using computer (the "flag day" scenario), a new system should be rolled out for people who want host identifiers in funny-looking squiggles.
Saying Linux is a clone of Unix, is like saying Windows XP is a clone of MS DOS 2.1.
Ok, lets go down to the time machine and grab some skilled Unix and DOS users from 1982. Sit them in front of Linux and WinXP, and see how long it takes them to notice something changed. One could take weeks... the other won't last a second.
Those weren't new concepts. Except for socket (and maybe union filesystem, which isn't too useful), all of those things were reimplementations of someone else's idea. They had been done before, just not in UNIX. Xerox, Digital, and MIT had done all those things, and not released code.
One could even argue socket() was a clone of something else (in that it's just an API for TCP/IP, a government-created spec)
Atheism is not a misnomer.
You're using the "constructivist language" definition of "atheism"- based on building up the word from individual parts. Unfortunately, popular usage has ignored that simple logic, and the common definition of atheism (as repeated in many dictionaries) is equal to what you call anti-theism. Other dictionaries give 2 definitions for atheism, permitting it to mean either explicit denial or merely refusal to affirm.
The most popularly used meanings have theism, agnosticism, and atheism meaning belief, uncertainty, and disbelief respectively. The equivalent words, based on meanings of component parts, would be theism, atheism/nontheism, and antitheism.
Another excellent example of a word whose usage is at odds with it's constructive meaning is "homophobia". Logically, that means "fear of the same", an antonym for xenophobia.
I've seen worse, but the GITS movie included some seriously wrong dubbing. Whenever a character goes of on a quasi-mystical subconcious monologue, the English actors just couldn't keep up.