1080p screen, PS3 player. Same movie on DVD and Blu-ray (both over HDMI straight from PS3 to screen), the Blu-ray version wins hands down. The difference is night and day. Maybe that points to my screen being a dumb 1080p monitor and not trying to enhance the crappy DVD picture quality. Some friends have really nice 1080p Sony TVs and their DVD quality (also through a PS3 over HDMI) is noticeable better, likely due to their TV doing extra image processing on the video signal that mine doesn't.
I don't know, there aren't a whole lot of trees here, I'm going to have a hard time identifying the "shadier" part of town.
If your town has a large selection of restaurants instead of trees, perhaps you can find the more unsavory parts of town?
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Then how do you explain that hot girl from high school messaging me after not talking to me for over three years, and me having a dream with her in it the prior night?
Feynman explained this one quite well in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". I don't remember exactly how the story went, but here's a retelling that gets a similar point across:
"I was fast asleep and I had the most vivid dream that my grandmother had died. Then, the phone rang and woke me up in the middle of the night. With hesitation, I answered the phone. It was a wrong number."
The point being that coincidences happen all the time. You only tend to remember the ones that match up. How many times have you thought about somebody and they didn't get in touch with you? Nobody tells the story of having dreamed about someone and they didn't call them.
The problem here is if I'm not redirected to PayPal, I'm offering up my palpal authentication information to a third party in the hope that they're going to use it for the transaction I've authorized and nothing else.
If you give your PayPal credentials to a third party and not to a PayPal URL, then yeah... you'll get hacked. No different than a site claiming to support Facebook Connect but showing its own login window instead of Facebook's login window. Or like any OpenID-enabled website. If it doesn't redirect you to the authoritative site you claim to be using, you're screwed.
Why on earth would I want to add the burden of handling and protecting sensitive financial information when I can just send the user to a website they are familiar with to complete the transaction? No credit card numbers in my DB to steal, added trust for the user - this API seems like fail-fail.
If you're storing credit card numbers, you're doing it wrong. Here's how it should happen:
Your payment page is SSL secured and people enter their CC details
Your web server sends it through an SSL-secured API to PayPal
PayPal responds with the result
Your web server does or doesn't approve the order as appropriate (this is the ??? step)
Profit!
The only storage of sensitive information that goes on is inside the server's RAM and it gets discarded from RAM once the transaction concludes.
but does not provide them with any way to prove to anyone who they voted for.
But can I check to make sure not just that my vote "was counted" but that my vote was for the right person?
Yes:
Voters make their selections on a paper ballot using special pens with ink designed by Chaum. When a voter fills in an oval on the ballot, the ink in the pen, which is similar to the yellow ink in highlighter pens, reacts with invisible ink in the oval and turns most of the oval black. At the same time, a unique three-letter code pre-printed on the ballot inside each oval is revealed to the voter.
After making their choices, voters use a form to write down the serial number that is printed on their ballot as well as the three-digit codes inside the ovals they’ve chosen. The codes are generated cryptographically and are different on every ballot to prevent someone from deciphering the voter’s choices and engaging in vote-buying.
So that's the "verify that it was recorded correctly" part. For the "verify it went to the right candidate part":
Voters can also see, based on the three-letter codes, that the system seems to have recorded their selections accurately. But voters can’t be sure just by looking at their ballot image that the system interpreted the codes accurately to apply the vote to the correct candidate. That’s where independent auditors come in.
Scantegrity uses a process called “zero knowledge” that allows skilled, independent auditors to verify that the codes result in votes going to the right candidates, without actually revealing an individual voter’s selections.
I don't know how it works exactly, but I assume it's similar to a public/private keypair given that they describe it as a cryptographic mechanism. The interesting thing is that anyone can audit the election results to demonstrate that votes were counted accurately: https://scantegrity.org/svn/data/takoma-nov3-2009/PUBLIC/PUBLIC/
I recall the days when I would download the newest slackware, install it and spend days getting my X config just right, reconfiguring my kernel an endless number of times to get just the right balance of built in options and building modules, trying to get the hardware to work right and basking in the supreme glory of getting everything to work just right.
Lucky you. I'm still waiting for Gentoo to compile.
I think I as a consumer have a right to return trashy movies, CDs, or DVDs (i.e. "100% satisfaction guaranteed or money back"), and until the media content companies allow that reasonable accommodation, then I'm not going to buy any of their product unless I've seen it at least once.
Do you also take the same approach when watching a live play? Do you sneak into the theater the first time and only if it's enjoyable enough do you come back and pay to sit through it a second time?
People who not only force advertising on me, but do it in a deceitful manner, deserve nothing more than forcible, unlubed sodomy during the half time show of the Super Bowl.
So if your local library's cork board has individual citizens pinning up advertising deceitfully, will you unleash your gay sexual fantasies on the library staff since you pay for the library with your tax dollars?
I think you're getting a bit worked up because some marketing guy spun this in a way favorable to Microsoft.
Bizdev guy: "Hey, we just signed a deal to get Netflix streaming on the XBox 360!" Marketing guy: "Do any other consoles have this functionality?" Bizdev guy: "Nope, just the XBox."
[Two hours later]
Press release: "This exclusive partnership offers you the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via Xbox 360. Xbox 360 will be the only game console to offer this movie-watching experience..."
Next thing you know, someone will try and claim IBM is going exclusively Linux...
Google is doing something completly different. It is saying. Nah, you don't need a 300 dollar OS with a 300 dollar productivity suite. Just a browser (free) on free/cheap OS and you got all you really need. For free.
Of course, others like their computing without advertisements and are willing to pay money for that.
Slashdot Mirror
1080p screen, PS3 player. Same movie on DVD and Blu-ray (both over HDMI straight from PS3 to screen), the Blu-ray version wins hands down. The difference is night and day. Maybe that points to my screen being a dumb 1080p monitor and not trying to enhance the crappy DVD picture quality. Some friends have really nice 1080p Sony TVs and their DVD quality (also through a PS3 over HDMI) is noticeable better, likely due to their TV doing extra image processing on the video signal that mine doesn't.
I never understood why a condom brand would want to associate itself with the trojans.
New ad campaign: "Put on a Trojan and you'll get inside her walls"
I don't know, there aren't a whole lot of trees here, I'm going to have a hard time identifying the "shadier" part of town.
If your town has a large selection of restaurants instead of trees, perhaps you can find the more unsavory parts of town?
Then how do you explain that hot girl from high school messaging me after not talking to me for over three years, and me having a dream with her in it the prior night?
Feynman explained this one quite well in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". I don't remember exactly how the story went, but here's a retelling that gets a similar point across:
"I was fast asleep and I had the most vivid dream that my grandmother had died. Then, the phone rang and woke me up in the middle of the night. With hesitation, I answered the phone. It was a wrong number."
The point being that coincidences happen all the time. You only tend to remember the ones that match up. How many times have you thought about somebody and they didn't get in touch with you? Nobody tells the story of having dreamed about someone and they didn't call them.
The problem here is if I'm not redirected to PayPal, I'm offering up my palpal authentication information to a third party in the hope that they're going to use it for the transaction I've authorized and nothing else.
If you give your PayPal credentials to a third party and not to a PayPal URL, then yeah... you'll get hacked. No different than a site claiming to support Facebook Connect but showing its own login window instead of Facebook's login window. Or like any OpenID-enabled website. If it doesn't redirect you to the authoritative site you claim to be using, you're screwed.
I did not know that! Thanks for the tip.
Slashdot already owns /.org but it's a real bitch to get browsers to recognize the URL.
Why on earth would I want to add the burden of handling and protecting sensitive financial information when I can just send the user to a website they are familiar with to complete the transaction? No credit card numbers in my DB to steal, added trust for the user - this API seems like fail-fail.
If you're storing credit card numbers, you're doing it wrong. Here's how it should happen:
The only storage of sensitive information that goes on is inside the server's RAM and it gets discarded from RAM once the transaction concludes.
but does not provide them with any way to prove to anyone who they voted for.
But can I check to make sure not just that my vote "was counted" but that my vote was for the right person?
Yes:
Voters make their selections on a paper ballot using special pens with ink designed by Chaum. When a voter fills in an oval on the ballot, the ink in the pen, which is similar to the yellow ink in highlighter pens, reacts with invisible ink in the oval and turns most of the oval black. At the same time, a unique three-letter code pre-printed on the ballot inside each oval is revealed to the voter.
After making their choices, voters use a form to write down the serial number that is printed on their ballot as well as the three-digit codes inside the ovals they’ve chosen. The codes are generated cryptographically and are different on every ballot to prevent someone from deciphering the voter’s choices and engaging in vote-buying.
So that's the "verify that it was recorded correctly" part. For the "verify it went to the right candidate part":
Voters can also see, based on the three-letter codes, that the system seems to have recorded their selections accurately. But voters can’t be sure just by looking at their ballot image that the system interpreted the codes accurately to apply the vote to the correct candidate. That’s where independent auditors come in.
Scantegrity uses a process called “zero knowledge” that allows skilled, independent auditors to verify that the codes result in votes going to the right candidates, without actually revealing an individual voter’s selections.
I don't know how it works exactly, but I assume it's similar to a public/private keypair given that they describe it as a cryptographic mechanism. The interesting thing is that anyone can audit the election results to demonstrate that votes were counted accurately: https://scantegrity.org/svn/data/takoma-nov3-2009/PUBLIC/PUBLIC/
I recall the days when I would download the newest slackware, install it and spend days getting my X config just right, reconfiguring my kernel an endless number of times to get just the right balance of built in options and building modules, trying to get the hardware to work right and basking in the supreme glory of getting everything to work just right.
Lucky you. I'm still waiting for Gentoo to compile.
It's, ah... probably pining for the fjords.
Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
Are they relocating them to Hiroshima?
Huh? How does a dictionary definition of "posthumous" have anything to do with humor or karma?
My sig says nothing about humor, but reveals everything about the humor of the person reading it.
I think I as a consumer have a right to return trashy movies, CDs, or DVDs (i.e. "100% satisfaction guaranteed or money back"), and until the media content companies allow that reasonable accommodation, then I'm not going to buy any of their product unless I've seen it at least once.
Do you also take the same approach when watching a live play? Do you sneak into the theater the first time and only if it's enjoyable enough do you come back and pay to sit through it a second time?
As long as they all host Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg files, which is the only thing Slashdot users would download from them.
Astraweb is $11/month. Let me see... which to choose.
The one that meets your criteria best, obviously. If Astraweb offers the same or a sufficient level of performance and bandwidth, why pay more?
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. You could let me Google that for you, but instead I'll point you to Linode which hits to $20/month price point.
Also, is this an actual article or a press release for Witopia?
People who not only force advertising on me, but do it in a deceitful manner, deserve nothing more than forcible, unlubed sodomy during the half time show of the Super Bowl.
So if your local library's cork board has individual citizens pinning up advertising deceitfully, will you unleash your gay sexual fantasies on the library staff since you pay for the library with your tax dollars?
I think you're getting a bit worked up because some marketing guy spun this in a way favorable to Microsoft.
Bizdev guy: "Hey, we just signed a deal to get Netflix streaming on the XBox 360!"
Marketing guy: "Do any other consoles have this functionality?"
Bizdev guy: "Nope, just the XBox."
[Two hours later]
Press release: "This exclusive partnership offers you the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via Xbox 360. Xbox 360 will be the only game console to offer this movie-watching experience..."
Next thing you know, someone will try and claim IBM is going exclusively Linux...
anything that can't survive without serving as an advertising substrate isn't worth saving, just like websites that can't survive without ads.
Um... so why exactly are you on advertising-supported Slashdot if it's not worth it?
... some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.
Ob. STTNG: "Correction, sir: that's blown out"
Would you enter into heaven with your wood and hay and stubble and thus defile the kingdom of God
"Shave with Gillette Mach 3, to ensure you fully remove all stubble. Gillette, the best a Christian man can get."
Try the rear window. Those defroster lines that "don't work"? Yeah, that's your radio antenna.
Thanks... I completely missed the 6 month vs. 1 week distinction.
Google is doing something completly different. It is saying. Nah, you don't need a 300 dollar OS with a 300 dollar productivity suite. Just a browser (free) on free/cheap OS and you got all you really need. For free.
Of course, others like their computing without advertisements and are willing to pay money for that.