Whilst ISPs like to make a big noise about their pop up blockers and the pop up providers now say they are going to try and circumvent the blockers, it seems that all sides are missing the point. The fastest and simplest way to put a stop to pop ups and pop unders is to disable Javascript in your browser. No javascript means no pop ups or unders. Although many web sites are silly enough to require javascript these days, I simply avoid companies who design pages that badly. Although they haven't been widely exploited, there are all sorts of features of javascript which makes it quite risky to run. To cite one example (amongst many), it is easy to design a web page that produces both a pop up and a pop under. However, if the pop up and pop under both point back to the same page, (assuming one does things correctly) the pop up and the pop under will both spawn two more poppers each. Once this process has started, there is no end to the fun. A blue screen of death is a common outcome (depending on browser, OS, etc. etc.), with unsaved data lost. Now, I am one of the good guys. Imagine what horrors the script kiddies could get up to, if they put their minds to it. The conclusion is simple: DISABLE JAVASCRIPT! for it is a device of the devil.
There is another advantage of paper ballots. They leave open the possibility of spoiling one's ballot paper. One problem with all the various machine solutions is that they offer a forced choice. What is a voter supposed to do if none of the candidates are worth voting for? There is no box for 'none of the above'. In the UK, each spoiled ballot paper is inspected by the various candidates, or their agents in order to determine whether the voter intended to vote for someone, but messed up. This provides and excellent opportunity to send a certain kind of message to the candidates. I know people who claimed to have written things like "Which ever way you vote, the government wins", or "Don't vote, it only encourages them", or even "Stop wars, eat politicians". With a paper-based system, the only limit is your imagination. With those voting machines, the voter is little different from a lab rat pulling a level. Sure, paper ballots are slower to count, but they still seem to work OK in the UK, with a population of 60 Million or so. Results are usually in by the early morning. This suggests that the Canadian style solution does in fact scale well.
It seems to me that legislative and technical measures against Nigerian toner enlagement offers have only had limited success. For some time, it has occurred to me that an attack on the spammers business model might be a more effective strategy. It only takes a very few idiots who respond to spam to keep the bad guys in business. I suspect there will always be idiots, so this is not likely to be an effective way of attacking spamers. However, they may still be vulnerable on the cost side. For instance, if every slashdotter was to ask a spammer to spam on their behalf (and then of coursze not follow through, or pay up), then spammers would be forced to spend a great deal of time and energy detecting real customers amongst all the time wasters. This would undoubtedly raise their costs. All it would take is a few people with 'disposable' e-mail accounts, to give spammers a real headache. Has anyone tried this approach? Would anyone be prepared to organise such an effort? I am sure that I know a few people who would be more than willing to spend 10 mins a day causing spammers trouble. What do you all think?"
It seems to me that there may be a bit of a confusion that underlies this notion of selling the song. There is, for the purposes of the law, a difference between the physical object (i.e. the physical file) and the rights to the content of the file. Consider the case of an e-mail. If I send an e-mail to person X, then the physical object (i.e. the arrangement of 1s and 0s that make up the data), belongs to person X. HOWEVER, I still retain the rights to the content of the e-mail. This may sound curious and be news to many, but that is the way things work under the law. One consequence of this is that, without obtaining prior permission, the good old 'Forward' button in your favorite e-mail program is in fact a copyright violating device. In the case of the music file, it may be the case that the person who bought the file from iTunes has the right to sell the physical object, without being able to sell the right to the content of the file. So, I won't be bidding anything (and certainly not $20!) for an object I could own, but not use.
It seems to me that one way in which governments support open source work is through their support of Universities. After all, a great many coders learn their art at State supported institutions. Students, graduate students and university faculty all contribute to open source projects. This is a fact of daily life, in addition to the well-known historical examples. Furthermore, grants provided to faculty often help support open source work (or software that is subsequently released under GPL and similar). So, two conclusions follow, (a) there is already a significant amount of public support of open source work, (b) if there needs to be more, it could easily be achieved through existing funding mechanisms like the NSF.
Although there is a great deal of hot air about fraud and voting machines, it seems to me that it cannot amount to a real threat. How do I know this? Simple, the State of Louisiana has not rushed to adopt such a system. In Louisiana, we have the best politicians money can buy. We also have novel ways of ensuring that people's views are represented -- people keep voting long after they are dead! After the Florida election farce, one Louisiana paper ran an editorial castigating Florida for the amateurness of their attempts at election rigging. So, until Louisiana takes an active interest in these new machines, there can be no grounds for worrying.
Of course, there is a further, thus far undiscussed, problem with voting machines in general: They deny a person the right to spoil their ballot paper. This is a right that needs to be protected until there is a 'none of the above' box on every ballot paper.
So, in response to this/. story, I thought that, as a resident of Louisiana, I would try and e-mail Billy Tauzin on why his proposed bill is silly. After doing some digging, I could not find an e-mail address, other than the usual web form [i.e. auto-ignore]. However, I did find a phone number for his office in Houma, Louisiana (1-800-352-2890). When I called there, Donya, who answered the phone informed me that Mr. Tauzin doesn't have a regular e-mail address. Of course, this is probably not entirely true. Does anybody have an e-mail address for Tauzin? I'd like to send him a few 'get rich quick with Nigerian printer cartridge enlargements' offers I keep getting. Alterantively, perhaps a few/. folks might like to call up Donya and let them know how they feel. After all, what could be better than a man without an e-mail address proposing putatively anti-spam legislation!
Hi there,
To echo alot of other people, it seems that this proposal would be technically hard to implement and have a very nasty effect upon mailing lists and other totally valid and useful services. Thus, it is not a good idea. Indeed, the fact that the folks at Microsoft are investigating the idea, under the name of the Penny Black project, also provides reasons to be suspicious of the idea.
There is another way to combat spam. That is to stop it making financial sense for the spammers. Basically, spam is a numbers game. Provided a tiny fraction of people actually respond to each offer of an enlarged Nigerian toner cartidge, the spammers continue to make money. One way to reverse the economics though would be to increase the supply side costs. Suppose 1% of the readership of slashdot were to, every day, contact a spam company, asking for their services (although never really using them of course), then the spammers would have to spend alot more time, effort and money figuring out who really wants their services and who is just there yanking their chain. This would increase costs and thus make spamming a less financially rewarding activity. After all, there is more than one use of a hotmail account! What do you all think?
Ish
A number of years ago, I needed to set up a computational lab with no budget for software, even though we had machines. We had no choice but to go with a Linux OS. Although a few people groaned and complained at first, after a while, it all worked quite well.
Just recently though a story started circulating that the State (I work at a State University) was contemplating going into a 'Microsoft only' deal. Nobody knows if this story is true, but the gossip around the proverbial techie water fountain now concerns how to keep our linux boxes hidden. FWIW, it seems to me that any OS monoculture is bad -- evolution teaches us that diversity produces advantages.
Hi there,
A few years ago, I was relocating my home office into the basement. I had an old early 80s vintage IBM XT that I used for basic text processing tasks. As I reached the top of the stairs down to the basement, I tripped over my cat. The XT flew out of my hands, down the stairs and landed on the cement floor. The noise it made was not nice. With some trepidation, I hooked the XT back up to see if it would still work. It did -- without a hitch! The only damage from the incident was a dent in the stairs and a mark on the wall. I guess that is why old IBM machines used to be known as 'Blue Metal'. I still have the XT today and it still fires up no problem!
One way to stop this kind of stupidity is to play a trick on the 'signal to noise' ratio. If lots of people were to put up files on various systems, with bogus names to trick the bots, then the bots would become useless. For instance, Mike_West.mp3, BornToRun.mp3 etc. Moreover, if such files were really just text files, with an appropriate message, then the music industry would soon have a very bad time defending the 'good faith' claim in court. This would mean that they would have to check each file, which would be both costly and time consuming. Naturally, such a trick would have to evolve over time. For instance, the bots might begin to check file size, but again a little innovation (e.g. attach the text message to a couple of large photographs of your cat) could present a moving target for the music industry. This would not be the first time this kind of trick has been used on the net. Moreover, it is the sort of stunt that could be used to frustrate the 'bad guys' on many other net issues.
Well, although I seldom use floppies these days (God bless CD-Rs!), I would be sorry to see the drives go out totally. For instance, when a machine goes down badly, booting off the floppy is often the fastest and easiest way of getting things back up and running. Note, it is also much easier for novice users to create bootable floppies than it is for them to create a bootable CD -- so this will mean fewer users will be able to fix their machines without help. A second point concerns 'legacy' data. I still have a few large format floppies around. The data is backed up elsewhere, but backups are not always trustworthy. It is good to be able to go back to the originals. Also, for many of us who have been using machines for years, we all have a few old floppies around that were just not important enough to be worth backing up. However, every once in a while it is nice to be able to grab a few lines of ancient code that is just perfect for some current job, or grab a paragraph from a paper written in grad school. I will admit to having a bit of a thing for backward compatibility, but on balance, I would be happier to have machines with floppies than not.
There is an excellent, though old, discussion of the hallmarks of cranks in Martin Gardner's book *Fads and Fallicies*, in the opening chapter. Most University libraries should have a copy of this work. The rest of the book describes case studies.
If my recollection is correct, all this linking silliness was started a few years ago by http://www.ticketmaster.com getting annoyed about deep links to their site. The really silly thing about this whole issue was that the possibility of links is what motivated the very development of the HTTP standards. Do the outfits that want to regulate linking really expect us to turn back the clock? Even the venerable old gopher system encouraged links! What is that old line about folks who forget their history...?
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst ISPs like to make a big noise about their pop up blockers and the pop up providers now say they are going to try and circumvent the blockers, it seems that all sides are missing the point. The fastest and simplest way to put a stop to pop ups and pop unders is to disable Javascript in your browser. No javascript means no pop ups or unders. Although many web sites are silly enough to require javascript these days, I simply avoid companies who design pages that badly. Although they haven't been widely exploited, there are all sorts of features of javascript which makes it quite risky to run. To cite one example (amongst many), it is easy to design a web page that produces both a pop up and a pop under. However, if the pop up and pop under both point back to the same page, (assuming one does things correctly) the pop up and the pop under will both spawn two more poppers each. Once this process has started, there is no end to the fun. A blue screen of death is a common outcome (depending on browser, OS, etc. etc.), with unsaved data lost. Now, I am one of the good guys. Imagine what horrors the script kiddies could get up to, if they put their minds to it. The conclusion is simple: DISABLE JAVASCRIPT! for it is a device of the devil.
There is another advantage of paper ballots. They leave open the possibility of spoiling one's ballot paper. One problem with all the various machine solutions is that they offer a forced choice. What is a voter supposed to do if none of the candidates are worth voting for? There is no box for 'none of the above'. In the UK, each spoiled ballot paper is inspected by the various candidates, or their agents in order to determine whether the voter intended to vote for someone, but messed up. This provides and excellent opportunity to send a certain kind of message to the candidates. I know people who claimed to have written things like "Which ever way you vote, the government wins", or "Don't vote, it only encourages them", or even "Stop wars, eat politicians". With a paper-based system, the only limit is your imagination. With those voting machines, the voter is little different from a lab rat pulling a level. Sure, paper ballots are slower to count, but they still seem to work OK in the UK, with a population of 60 Million or so. Results are usually in by the early morning. This suggests that the Canadian style solution does in fact scale well.
It seems to me that legislative and technical measures against Nigerian toner enlagement offers have only had limited success. For some time, it has occurred to me that an attack on the spammers business model might be a more effective strategy. It only takes a very few idiots who respond to spam to keep the bad guys in business. I suspect there will always be idiots, so this is not likely to be an effective way of attacking spamers. However, they may still be vulnerable on the cost side. For instance, if every slashdotter was to ask a spammer to spam on their behalf (and then of coursze not follow through, or pay up), then spammers would be forced to spend a great deal of time and energy detecting real customers amongst all the time wasters. This would undoubtedly raise their costs. All it would take is a few people with 'disposable' e-mail accounts, to give spammers a real headache. Has anyone tried this approach? Would anyone be prepared to organise such an effort? I am sure that I know a few people who would be more than willing to spend 10 mins a day causing spammers trouble. What do you all think?"
It seems to me that there may be a bit of a confusion that underlies this notion of selling the song. There is, for the purposes of the law, a difference between the physical object (i.e. the physical file) and the rights to the content of the file. Consider the case of an e-mail. If I send an e-mail to person X, then the physical object (i.e. the arrangement of 1s and 0s that make up the data), belongs to person X. HOWEVER, I still retain the rights to the content of the e-mail. This may sound curious and be news to many, but that is the way things work under the law. One consequence of this is that, without obtaining prior permission, the good old 'Forward' button in your favorite e-mail program is in fact a copyright violating device. In the case of the music file, it may be the case that the person who bought the file from iTunes has the right to sell the physical object, without being able to sell the right to the content of the file. So, I won't be bidding anything (and certainly not $20!) for an object I could own, but not use.
It seems to me that one way in which governments support open source work is through their support of Universities. After all, a great many coders learn their art at State supported institutions. Students, graduate students and university faculty all contribute to open source projects. This is a fact of daily life, in addition to the well-known historical examples. Furthermore, grants provided to faculty often help support open source work (or software that is subsequently released under GPL and similar). So, two conclusions follow, (a) there is already a significant amount of public support of open source work, (b) if there needs to be more, it could easily be achieved through existing funding mechanisms like the NSF.
Of course, there is a further, thus far undiscussed, problem with voting machines in general: They deny a person the right to spoil their ballot paper. This is a right that needs to be protected until there is a 'none of the above' box on every ballot paper.
So, in response to this /. story, I thought that, as a resident of Louisiana, I would try and e-mail Billy Tauzin on why his proposed bill is silly. After doing some digging, I could not find an e-mail address, other than the usual web form [i.e. auto-ignore]. However, I did find a phone number for his office in Houma, Louisiana (1-800-352-2890). When I called there, Donya, who answered the phone informed me that Mr. Tauzin doesn't have a regular e-mail address. Of course, this is probably not entirely true. Does anybody have an e-mail address for Tauzin? I'd like to send him a few 'get rich quick with Nigerian printer cartridge enlargements' offers I keep getting. Alterantively, perhaps a few /. folks might like to call up Donya and let them know how they feel. After all, what could be better than a man without an e-mail address proposing putatively anti-spam legislation!
There is another way to combat spam. That is to stop it making financial sense for the spammers. Basically, spam is a numbers game. Provided a tiny fraction of people actually respond to each offer of an enlarged Nigerian toner cartidge, the spammers continue to make money. One way to reverse the economics though would be to increase the supply side costs. Suppose 1% of the readership of slashdot were to, every day, contact a spam company, asking for their services (although never really using them of course), then the spammers would have to spend alot more time, effort and money figuring out who really wants their services and who is just there yanking their chain. This would increase costs and thus make spamming a less financially rewarding activity. After all, there is more than one use of a hotmail account! What do you all think? Ish
A number of years ago, I needed to set up a computational lab with no budget for software, even though we had machines. We had no choice but to go with a Linux OS. Although a few people groaned and complained at first, after a while, it all worked quite well. Just recently though a story started circulating that the State (I work at a State University) was contemplating going into a 'Microsoft only' deal. Nobody knows if this story is true, but the gossip around the proverbial techie water fountain now concerns how to keep our linux boxes hidden. FWIW, it seems to me that any OS monoculture is bad -- evolution teaches us that diversity produces advantages.
Hi there, A few years ago, I was relocating my home office into the basement. I had an old early 80s vintage IBM XT that I used for basic text processing tasks. As I reached the top of the stairs down to the basement, I tripped over my cat. The XT flew out of my hands, down the stairs and landed on the cement floor. The noise it made was not nice. With some trepidation, I hooked the XT back up to see if it would still work. It did -- without a hitch! The only damage from the incident was a dent in the stairs and a mark on the wall. I guess that is why old IBM machines used to be known as 'Blue Metal'. I still have the XT today and it still fires up no problem!
One way to stop this kind of stupidity is to play a trick on the 'signal to noise' ratio. If lots of people were to put up files on various systems, with bogus names to trick the bots, then the bots would become useless. For instance, Mike_West.mp3, BornToRun.mp3 etc. Moreover, if such files were really just text files, with an appropriate message, then the music industry would soon have a very bad time defending the 'good faith' claim in court. This would mean that they would have to check each file, which would be both costly and time consuming. Naturally, such a trick would have to evolve over time. For instance, the bots might begin to check file size, but again a little innovation (e.g. attach the text message to a couple of large photographs of your cat) could present a moving target for the music industry. This would not be the first time this kind of trick has been used on the net. Moreover, it is the sort of stunt that could be used to frustrate the 'bad guys' on many other net issues.
Well, although I seldom use floppies these days (God bless CD-Rs!), I would be sorry to see the drives go out totally. For instance, when a machine goes down badly, booting off the floppy is often the fastest and easiest way of getting things back up and running. Note, it is also much easier for novice users to create bootable floppies than it is for them to create a bootable CD -- so this will mean fewer users will be able to fix their machines without help. A second point concerns 'legacy' data. I still have a few large format floppies around. The data is backed up elsewhere, but backups are not always trustworthy. It is good to be able to go back to the originals. Also, for many of us who have been using machines for years, we all have a few old floppies around that were just not important enough to be worth backing up. However, every once in a while it is nice to be able to grab a few lines of ancient code that is just perfect for some current job, or grab a paragraph from a paper written in grad school. I will admit to having a bit of a thing for backward compatibility, but on balance, I would be happier to have machines with floppies than not.
There is an excellent, though old, discussion of the hallmarks of cranks in Martin Gardner's book *Fads and Fallicies*, in the opening chapter. Most University libraries should have a copy of this work. The rest of the book describes case studies.
If my recollection is correct, all this linking silliness was started a few years ago by http://www.ticketmaster.com getting annoyed about deep links to their site. The really silly thing about this whole issue was that the possibility of links is what motivated the very development of the HTTP standards. Do the outfits that want to regulate linking really expect us to turn back the clock? Even the venerable old gopher system encouraged links! What is that old line about folks who forget their history...?