And HTML differs from Javascript how? Or how about an image?
Neither HTML or JPEG files are Turing-complete programming languages. Sure, your HTML or JPEG parser might have bugs that allow remote exploits, but that's a huge difference from a language like Javascript which can trivially perform these kind of operations. _by design_
This is also what you do when installing and running any program for which you cannot view and understand the source code. And yet millions of computer users do this daily.
And millions of them don't even realise they're now part of a botnet and their computer is controlled by the Russian mob.
Similar here: if I'm looking for information about a movie or TV show, usually about 80% of the autocomplete options Google suggests are piracy-related; at least it might now display something that's actually useful to me.
I think it's trying to be a bit too smart lately, constantly being "helpful" by searching for what it thinks I want to search for instead of what I actually wanted to search for.
Bingo. 'Smart' search engines suck, particularly for technical information, because you can never really tell what it's going to search for... the 'smarter' Google searches get, the less useful they become.
Of course it doesn't help when people pick names for their projects or products which are the same as or very close to some other word that's in common usage.
X will still run fine, even under Wayland, so relax.
Sigh, we're not talking about running X and rendering on a Wayland desktop, we're talking about running Wayland apps and rendering on a remote desktop, the way you currently can with X. The biggest single advantage of X over Windows, which the Wayland developers seem quite happy to throw away in the quest for 'The Shiny'.
Given a choice between fancier compositing effects and being able to run any program on any machine while rendering on any other machine, I'll take the latter any day.
They make big sweeping changes to a new technology that is not well tested or even finished, ala PulseAudio.
To be fair, new technology rarely gets well tested or even finished if no-one is using it.
Pulseaudio has been a disaster though. Every new Ubuntu release seems to fix some sound problems and introduce others (e.g. going from 9.10 to 10.04 stopped the button sounds working in xbmc on my HTPC).
If "weird" includes Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland, I have bad news: Fedora is also dumping X for Wayland (eventually)
Fedora? The base OS for RHEL server systems? Is going to dump X so server admins will no longer be able to run graphical admin programs remotely from their servers to their desktop without using some horrific kludge like VNC? Apps which will apparently require OpenGL to render, on servers which don't even have OpenGL drivers?
Some guy who lives in the Sahara gets a dog, decides to put in a fence, digs a hole, cuts through a cable, and boom -- no electricity for half the world.
Doesn't that part of the world also have a long history of stealing copper cables to sell for scrap? How much does scrap superconducting power cable sell for?
Which is another reason why this won't work: no American policitican in their right mind would want their electricity supply reliant on the whims of Africans and whichever countries the power cables pass through on their way across the Atlantic.
Professor Koinuma is on the right track here. The Sun, being the most abundant source of renewable energy, is obviously the most efficient resource to power the world.
So long as you don't need any power during the night. I'll be impressed if they can manage to build high-temperature superconducting cables which can carry terawatts of electricity half way around the world.
Also, they're going to need to hire a metric fsckload of people to keep wiping the sand off all those panels.
An HTTP header announcing the preference for not being tracked would do the trick, as long as the other party were obliged to actually listen to your setting.
But in the real world such a header would just become another bit to go into your 'unique fingerprint' for the advertisers. And it would mean that advertisers would be even more eager to send you crap.
Ideally we need to get rid of Javascript and Flash. Allowing people to run arbitrary code on your computer from a remote system was always going to turn out to be a really bad idea.
On the plus side, by blocking Javascript and Flash from sites which do this tracking your 'unique fingerprint' suddenly becomes a lot less unque.
uhhhhh.... unless you have a prefix from another country that had to be moved somewhere else.
Then you have to route to a prefix for a global ISP which will do whatever it wants with the packets. But there's no reason to have complex routing for a fixed computer in Africa which allows their packets to be sent to China by accident, just because some people are using satellite internet which could be anywhere on the planet. Though I guess you do always need some way to reconfigure the routers if required, so there's always going to be some protocol which could be used to tell them to send packets in completely the wrong direction.
I believe the intention is that location would be encoded in the IPV6 address, so routing be easy and misrouting would never be an issue (OK, router bugs aside). If, say, you give each country a 16-bit top-level IPV6 prefix, then you'll never end up sending American data to China by accident and you'd still never run out of IP addresses for those countries.
Just another example of why we need to switch from IPV4 to IPV6.
No, government imposed central banking running artificially low interest rates in order to make people thing 'you've never had it so good' in order to keep them voting the usual suspects back into power led to the stock market boom and bust, and then the government created the Great Depression by raising taxes when the economy was tanking.
Free (unregulated) markets don't work.
The free market is what people do when some guy isn't holding a gun to their head to force them to do something else. Obviously it 'works' because otherwise we'd still be living in caves and fighting over yak bones.
And even if they did, this market was artificially created and now has a few corporations monopolizing the vast majority of the resources, the cost of entry is exorbinant, and there would be no return on the investment for years, possibly decades, once you factor in all the legal challenges and bartering with the thousands of municipalities which have to approve the contracts for new infrastructure to be built.
Bingo. The problem is that the government created many of these big corporations (typically by building the infrastructure using the powers of government to force access to people's land or simply take it at gunpoint and then selling off the infrastructure to private companies) and now they prevent access to new competitiors.
So why are you arguing for more government interference when it's clearly been a disaster?
That's what address books are for, and DNS is a gigantic global address book.
Except other people keep coming in and changing your address book so you go to visit your mother and end up at some porn store or the DHS instead.
The centralised nature of DNS has been a huge flaw in the Internet for a long time, and it should really be replaced. The problem is coming up with a better solution.
The vast majority of a game's level of fun has little to do with hardware. About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need or with loading times which completely screw up immersion.
Yes and no. There's a fundamental limit to what you can do with whatever hardware you have available, and that directly feeds into how much fun the game can be. In particular, the more CPU power you have the better you can make in-game AI... except, oh, consoles have crappy CPUs so we can't make a game with AI that takes advantage of the vastly superior performance of the PC because it has to run on five-year-old cut-price hardware.
If hardware didn't matter, we'd all still be playing Pacman or Manic Miner.
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers"
That and because most PC games are crippled so they can also run on consoles (or are ports of comparitively cripppled console games), thereby leaving most of their computing power idle.
Therefore hackers could register wellfargo.com, or wellsfargo.net, or a million variations and harvest usernames and passwords. Clearly URL spoofing did not play a part. Few people look closely at the URL.
How would a lock icon have helped? If the phishers own a similar domain name they can get an SSL certificate and there'll be a nice fancy lock icon showing that the connection is secure... it's just not going to the site you think it's going to.
Self driving cars on the Highway are on the way, if the pun is excused. There are quite a lot of experiments and development. There is an EU program, etc. Sure, to get them on the roads (and integrate their systems with highways etc) will certainly take at least another decade.
I predict that self-driving cars will be in widespread use on public roads about a year after flying cars are available in your local Ford dealer.
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
No they're not, and there was plenty of skepticism about such claims when O'Neill in the 70s was proclaiming that we could be doing them all in a few years, because it was clearly technologically impossible with any reasonably justifiable amount of money. There's far less skepticism today because we can see that they could be viable in a few decades.
Similarly, I haven't seen too much wrong with Kurzweil's claims, other than that he expects things to happen within the next few years, rather than the next few decades (or centuries if you're pessimistic).
I believe Clarke once said something along the lines that near-term predictions were always optimistic and far-future predictions pessimistic, because humans expect linear progress when most things are exponential.
Slashdot Mirror
And HTML differs from Javascript how? Or how about an image?
Neither HTML or JPEG files are Turing-complete programming languages. Sure, your HTML or JPEG parser might have bugs that allow remote exploits, but that's a huge difference from a language like Javascript which can trivially perform these kind of operations. _by design_
This is also what you do when installing and running any program for which you cannot view and understand the source code. And yet millions of computer users do this daily.
And millions of them don't even realise they're now part of a botnet and their computer is controlled by the Russian mob.
Similar here: if I'm looking for information about a movie or TV show, usually about 80% of the autocomplete options Google suggests are piracy-related; at least it might now display something that's actually useful to me.
I think it's trying to be a bit too smart lately, constantly being "helpful" by searching for what it thinks I want to search for instead of what I actually wanted to search for.
Bingo. 'Smart' search engines suck, particularly for technical information, because you can never really tell what it's going to search for... the 'smarter' Google searches get, the less useful they become.
Of course it doesn't help when people pick names for their projects or products which are the same as or very close to some other word that's in common usage.
X will still run fine, even under Wayland, so relax.
Sigh, we're not talking about running X and rendering on a Wayland desktop, we're talking about running Wayland apps and rendering on a remote desktop, the way you currently can with X. The biggest single advantage of X over Windows, which the Wayland developers seem quite happy to throw away in the quest for 'The Shiny'.
Given a choice between fancier compositing effects and being able to run any program on any machine while rendering on any other machine, I'll take the latter any day.
Is it completely impossible to get something similar into Wayland?
Every time I've seen someone ask the Wayland devs how they plan to support remote rendering, their response seems to be 'we don't. go away'.
They make big sweeping changes to a new technology that is not well tested or even finished, ala PulseAudio.
To be fair, new technology rarely gets well tested or even finished if no-one is using it.
Pulseaudio has been a disaster though. Every new Ubuntu release seems to fix some sound problems and introduce others (e.g. going from 9.10 to 10.04 stopped the button sounds working in xbmc on my HTPC).
If "weird" includes Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland, I have bad news: Fedora is also dumping X for Wayland (eventually)
Fedora? The base OS for RHEL server systems? Is going to dump X so server admins will no longer be able to run graphical admin programs remotely from their servers to their desktop without using some horrific kludge like VNC? Apps which will apparently require OpenGL to render, on servers which don't even have OpenGL drivers?
Some guy who lives in the Sahara gets a dog, decides to put in a fence, digs a hole, cuts through a cable, and boom -- no electricity for half the world.
Doesn't that part of the world also have a long history of stealing copper cables to sell for scrap? How much does scrap superconducting power cable sell for?
Sandstorm + Solar Array = ???
America goes offline for the night.
Which is another reason why this won't work: no American policitican in their right mind would want their electricity supply reliant on the whims of Africans and whichever countries the power cables pass through on their way across the Atlantic.
Professor Koinuma is on the right track here. The Sun, being the most abundant source of renewable energy, is obviously the most efficient resource to power the world.
So long as you don't need any power during the night. I'll be impressed if they can manage to build high-temperature superconducting cables which can carry terawatts of electricity half way around the world.
Also, they're going to need to hire a metric fsckload of people to keep wiping the sand off all those panels.
Tracking brings in BIG BUCKS.
[citation required]
Tracking certainly brings in BIG BUCKS for tracking companies, but is there any evidence that it actually brings in much money for anyone else?
An HTTP header announcing the preference for not being tracked would do the trick, as long as the other party were obliged to actually listen to your setting.
But in the real world such a header would just become another bit to go into your 'unique fingerprint' for the advertisers. And it would mean that advertisers would be even more eager to send you crap.
So we need laws? No, we need counter-tactics.
Ideally we need to get rid of Javascript and Flash. Allowing people to run arbitrary code on your computer from a remote system was always going to turn out to be a really bad idea.
On the plus side, by blocking Javascript and Flash from sites which do this tracking your 'unique fingerprint' suddenly becomes a lot less unque.
Then why don't you run for office? If you really believe that it's an illusion surely you could change it by getting yourself elected.
Are you going to give them a billion dollars to fund their election campaign?
uhhhhh.... unless you have a prefix from another country that had to be moved somewhere else.
Then you have to route to a prefix for a global ISP which will do whatever it wants with the packets. But there's no reason to have complex routing for a fixed computer in Africa which allows their packets to be sent to China by accident, just because some people are using satellite internet which could be anywhere on the planet. Though I guess you do always need some way to reconfigure the routers if required, so there's always going to be some protocol which could be used to tell them to send packets in completely the wrong direction.
I believe the intention is that location would be encoded in the IPV6 address, so routing be easy and misrouting would never be an issue (OK, router bugs aside). If, say, you give each country a 16-bit top-level IPV6 prefix, then you'll never end up sending American data to China by accident and you'd still never run out of IP addresses for those countries.
Just another example of why we need to switch from IPV4 to IPV6.
Free markets led to the Great Depression.
No, government imposed central banking running artificially low interest rates in order to make people thing 'you've never had it so good' in order to keep them voting the usual suspects back into power led to the stock market boom and bust, and then the government created the Great Depression by raising taxes when the economy was tanking.
Free (unregulated) markets don't work.
The free market is what people do when some guy isn't holding a gun to their head to force them to do something else. Obviously it 'works' because otherwise we'd still be living in caves and fighting over yak bones.
And even if they did, this market was artificially created and now has a few corporations monopolizing the vast majority of the resources, the cost of entry is exorbinant, and there would be no return on the investment for years, possibly decades, once you factor in all the legal challenges and bartering with the thousands of municipalities which have to approve the contracts for new infrastructure to be built.
Bingo. The problem is that the government created many of these big corporations (typically by building the infrastructure using the powers of government to force access to people's land or simply take it at gunpoint and then selling off the infrastructure to private companies) and now they prevent access to new competitiors.
So why are you arguing for more government interference when it's clearly been a disaster?
That's what address books are for, and DNS is a gigantic global address book.
Except other people keep coming in and changing your address book so you go to visit your mother and end up at some porn store or the DHS instead.
The centralised nature of DNS has been a huge flaw in the Internet for a long time, and it should really be replaced. The problem is coming up with a better solution.
Can't he just ask the Chinese to redirect the domain to his server?
The vast majority of a game's level of fun has little to do with hardware. About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need or with loading times which completely screw up immersion.
Yes and no. There's a fundamental limit to what you can do with whatever hardware you have available, and that directly feeds into how much fun the game can be. In particular, the more CPU power you have the better you can make in-game AI... except, oh, consoles have crappy CPUs so we can't make a game with AI that takes advantage of the vastly superior performance of the PC because it has to run on five-year-old cut-price hardware.
If hardware didn't matter, we'd all still be playing Pacman or Manic Miner.
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers"
That and because most PC games are crippled so they can also run on consoles (or are ports of comparitively cripppled console games), thereby leaving most of their computing power idle.
Therefore hackers could register wellfargo.com, or wellsfargo.net, or a million variations and harvest usernames and passwords. Clearly URL spoofing did not play a part. Few people look closely at the URL.
How would a lock icon have helped? If the phishers own a similar domain name they can get an SSL certificate and there'll be a nice fancy lock icon showing that the connection is secure... it's just not going to the site you think it's going to.
Self driving cars on the Highway are on the way, if the pun is excused. There are quite a lot of experiments and development. There is an EU program, etc. Sure, to get them on the roads (and integrate their systems with highways etc) will certainly take at least another decade.
I predict that self-driving cars will be in widespread use on public roads about a year after flying cars are available in your local Ford dealer.
Why isn't there an equal skepticism about Space Nuttery like Moon colonies, space-based solar power and asteroid mining? They are equally delusional.
No they're not, and there was plenty of skepticism about such claims when O'Neill in the 70s was proclaiming that we could be doing them all in a few years, because it was clearly technologically impossible with any reasonably justifiable amount of money. There's far less skepticism today because we can see that they could be viable in a few decades.
Similarly, I haven't seen too much wrong with Kurzweil's claims, other than that he expects things to happen within the next few years, rather than the next few decades (or centuries if you're pessimistic).
I believe Clarke once said something along the lines that near-term predictions were always optimistic and far-future predictions pessimistic, because humans expect linear progress when most things are exponential.