If I was in the US Government I would lean on mobile vendors like Apple, Google, AT&T, etc to ONLY support IPv6 for mobile devices (e.g. Android, iPhone, etc). That way you start to carve out a real consumer base with IPv6. If web-sites want to get iPhone users to their service they better support IPv6 ASAP.
Microsoft already has strong IPv6 support in Windows as does Linux. So there is no reason why ISPs couldn't switch over at any time but the issue is a chicken and egg problem with it being expensive and no consumers caring.
That's what happens when two massive companies run by old white guys have a stranglehold of the entire US telecommunications industry. Cable, Internet, and Cell services are frankly all horrible in the US both in terms of price and technology largely because of lack of competition. It is like BT in the UK before the government forced BT to sell to the competition. The "issue" the US has is that two companies sharing an industry isn't illegal, so they cannot use monopoly powers to squash it. Plus the two have anti-competitive agreement that allows them to control different zones of the country.
Text messages and texting in general is just a stepping stone before always-on internet becomes the norm. Once everyone's phone is online constantly you will see people use AIM, Skype, or similar products instead. Apart from getting an instant reply and richer, longer, content, they're also cheaper. If you're paying for always-on internet anyway (which I'm assuming everyone will be) it will cost you nothing additional to message someone. Frankly the cell phone companies are only speeding up this process by charging, what most would agree, insane prices for text services. Right now 300 texts costs as much as "unlimited" (1 GB/month) internet.
What I never understood is why the patent office doesn't implement some kind of crowd sourcing? I mean patents are public goods so instead of having the patent office review them, why not just stick them on a web-site and ask the public and industry to pick holes in them? And then the patent office only have to examine the ones which are controversial.
I could never find the correct degree of commenting. Didn't help that in school they made us comment in an idiotically verbose way to the point of "this is a for loop to find needle in haystack" and we lost marks if we failed to. My reaction to that level of stupidity was to lose interest in comments entirely which obviously later bit me in the butt.
I really need to find some kind of "idiots guide to when to comment and when NOT to comment."
Just want to clear up something - Ryanair's marketing strategy can only be described as "trolling the media." They release more and more insane ways to "cut costs" on their airline which the media reports and everyone leaves with the message that Ryanair are very serious about low cost flight.
To give two examples, they "announced" they wanted to remove toilets, and remove seats so you spent the entire flight standing. Nothing ever came of either of these, but the media loved it, and they get the CEO on the airways who just repeated the companies business model over and over again - "looking for more ways to cut costs" "I want Ryanair to be the cheapest in the EU" etc.
iTunes 10 is an improvement. Apart from the almost useless Ping, it seems a fair bit faster. The patch notes claim performance improvements and frankly I believe them. I'd recommend it. Only downside I've seen is that the first time you try and download from iTunes Store it attempts to trick you into activating Ping (click Cancel when it asked you for personal information that "might be available to the public.").
Target already sell Farmville and Mafia Wars credit in individual cards and have for almost a year. The only difference here is that it is a general Facebook card so you can use it across all of the games (and Facebook get a much bigger cut). I don't play these games but I find it funny how hypocritical most gamers are about them, it is fine if you buy DLC for that retail game you spent 50 hours playing, but if someone buys virtual credit to buy DLC in Farmville they're just insane!
It is obviously just a lame bias against games that are Flash based (instead of C++) and have minimalistic graphics (like every game had fifteen years ago?).
Isn't it about time we had the Linux, Windows, and OS X guys sit down and agree on a standard for booting into multiple Operating Systems that wasn't invented in the early 1990s? I mean, just create a VERY simply little standard everyone can agree on that simply allows boot loaders to be called.
I know, I know, insanely wishful thinking. Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models. Maybe we should have a third party create the standard and then pressure Microsoft into signing up for it?
Sorry but that is creepy dude. I do the long distance thing, and trust me, I wouldn't even want what you suggest. But that being said I like to try and be helpful so my suggestion would be a Network Web-Camera which you can purchase from NewEgg (wired or wireless), which you'll be able to remote into, and then have a PC with Skype or Live Messenger running, with auto-answer enabled, that has your face / audio.
Then get a router with Dynamic DNS support, you then visit the Dynamic DNS address on a particular port that you have forwarded to your network web-camera, and dial the Skype/Live Messenger account - which will auto answer. They can then speak to you by approaching the computer and talking into the desk microphone, and you can see everyone from the web-portal/Java Applet provided by your network web-cam.
I can tell you right now this will fail and I can tell you why - it will cost less to run a heavily armoured vehicle than it would to fly even a lightly armoured one. It would also cost less to produce and be easier to maintain. Oh plus safer from ground fire and rockets.
But apart from all of those blindly obvious holes, this is a grant plan.
Now that Glibc is free we can finally have the year of the Linux desktop we've been waiting for since 2001. I know tons of my friends who would always say "I wanted to use Linux but Glibc isn't free!"
Now with that glaring hole in Linux's offering solved we can move on continuing to ignore the terrible User Experience.
They've been calling colleges out for being "five years behind" since the first Computer Science programs started. But truthfully they are always at least five years behind, but while true the skills most teach are already "soft" enough to transfer into the latest and greatest toys. Java? Now you can write PHP, or C#. C? Now you can write Object C, D, and C++.
There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.
I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.
With Autism being so prevalent in humans you do have to wonder if it is really a disease or mistake, or perhaps either a previous evolutionary step or our next evolutionary step. While people who suffer at the extreme ends of the autistic spectrum would have difficulty maintaining a society, some of the more moderate autistic individuals are leaders in engineering, technology, and science. I do worry that when you diagnose someone with autism there is this natural "I'm broken" feeling along with it, and everyone treats you like you're disabled and thus useless. So I cannot say if being able to identify autism more often is a good or bad thing.
It is interesting, but unsurprising, that they found that ADHD and autism had no link thus far. Based on the symptoms I expect we'll find that if ADHD exists at all that it will be localised around control, while autism is localised around right/left brain communication.
I'm totally confused by this request from the EFF. Authorities exist to assure identity, a root authorities job is to assure identities of the people it hands out certificates to, is the EFF suggesting that Etisalat isn't who they claim to be?
It isn't up to Verizon to police the internet, it is up to Verizon to check that Etisalat is who they claim to be, and then grant them a certificate, or in this case grant them the ability to generate their own child certificates.
If people distrust Etisalat generated key sets then take your business to a root authority which you do trust. You also have the option of revoking their certificates on your machine or in your browser. A better person to send this letter to would be for example MIcrosoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, and anyone else trusting Etisalat RA.
I'm totally confused by this request from the EFF. Authorities exist to assure identity, a root authorities job is to assure identities of the people it hands out certificates to, is the EFF suggesting that Etisalat isn't who they claim to be?
It isn't up to Verizon to police the internet, it is up to Verizon to check that Etisalat is who they claim to be, and then grant them a certificate, or in this case grant them the ability to generate their own child certificates.
If people distrust Etisalat generated key sets then take your business to a root authority which you do trust. You also have the option of revoking their certificates on your machine or in your browser. A better person to send this letter to would be for example MIcrosoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, and anyone else trusting Etisalat RA.
Isn't it interesting how the scope of Trademarks and IP law keep expanding. The original concept of a trademark was to make it difficult for the competition to pass their products off as your products, it had this concept of a "reasonable person" being confused between mark A and mark B. I think when we have companies protecting dictionary words and words containing other words that they happen to have trademarked it has gone far further than the original concept.
I wonder how long until someone protects the letter 'a' and then requires a cash payment each time you use that letter in your trademark? I know that sounds like an insane concept but if you asked people about what is happening today with IP and trademarks they would have told you that was insane too!
Interesting result. Certainly isn't the case at my local University. I do wonder about the demographic of the surveyed college? For example are they fairly wealthy? I cannot imagine students around here even being able to buy a Mac Book, you see many more cheap Dells, HPs, and Acers. You also see a lot of people who don't own laptops at all and certainly don't bring them to classes.
Also very odd how few of the students owned a desktop... With it claiming that tons own two or more laptops but only a small selection owning a laptop AND desktop. Again, locally many students here have a desktop in their room and no laptop at all (which is largely down to how cheap desktops are).
As I said, I am deeply curious how rich these kids are.
I was talking about professional or highly skilled work areas. Since all of my examples were jobs, rather than crimes. I somehow thought that your average/.'er wouldn't need it spelt out to them - clearly I overestimated some of you.
This just goes to show how asinine most "anti-hacking" laws are. Most were written in the 1980s during a big moral panic about "hackers" bringing down the telephone network, corporate networks, and western civilisation as we know it. You can very easily get more time in jail for, what most would consider a prank, than for rape or other violent crimes.
It is interesting that in this case Terry Childs did very little actual damage but got 4 years. In fact more damage was done when the prosecutor decided to publish a list of working passwords for the cities computer network. Just goes to show the kind of technophobic old people working in the city offices and in law.
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such. That way you can get a bunch of people who know how far this person has stepped out of line.
Just for clarity, what Terry Childs did was wrong - but he certainly didn't deserve jail. Even if he did deserve jail he already spent a year inside before the trial (for some ungodly reason) and that was more than enough time served for this. The only reason they kept pushing this is to avoid the huge lawsuit if they failed to get a sentence longer than the time he already spent inside.
That's just silly. Amazon's typical markup is approx. 10%, a brick and mortar like B&N has a typical markup of around 25%. But keep in mind these are markups on the price the suppliers charge to these companies. If Amazon for example sells 10K of this book, and B&N sell 5K then the initial price is higher. As soon as Amazon got ahead then it is likely to stay ahead and consumer pressure will only re-enforce that.
You claim B&N charges 50% because they feel "entitled" but realistically Amazon has less than 1 staff per 500 orders, compared to maybe 3 staff per 500 orders at a B&N retail store. They also have to pay more in heating, cleaning, lighting, and other silly service costs that are associated with having a public face.
The sales tax issue is funny, or sad. Maybe both. States really deserve what they get if you aren't paying them sales tax when you order out of state.
Well you know what they say, the grade C lawyers work for the government while the grade A lawyers work for everyone else. As someone remarked about on another site, you almost had to wonder why the FBI picked this little fights, and if someone mistakenly thought Wikipedia was somehow related to the now infamous Wikileaks. Even just reading the FBI's correspondence you can tell they're seriously out of their depth.
Google has been driving around and scanning WiFi networks in order to use it as a location service (Read: cheap GPS). Thus Google now have a cross referenced list of Wireless networks ("mac addresses") with GPS location data on that network's source (based on triangulation).
We've already seen attacks that allow web-sites to break into routers when the default password isn't change, and for example change their DNS servers to servers operated by the attacker. This is an attack that is also assuming the default router password (and address) and retrieving the WiFi mac address, which is then sent back using postback.
You then create a web-site, when someone visits it, it logs into their router, sends the mac address back to the site, which the owner can then search for on Google Maps for that WiFi network giving you a rough location of that person (without about two street blocks).
I cannot tell if this is sarcasm. What school makes people write code on paper? I've literally never seen that (at least "real code" obviously algorithm design and maths).
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If I was in the US Government I would lean on mobile vendors like Apple, Google, AT&T, etc to ONLY support IPv6 for mobile devices (e.g. Android, iPhone, etc). That way you start to carve out a real consumer base with IPv6. If web-sites want to get iPhone users to their service they better support IPv6 ASAP.
Microsoft already has strong IPv6 support in Windows as does Linux. So there is no reason why ISPs couldn't switch over at any time but the issue is a chicken and egg problem with it being expensive and no consumers caring.
That's what happens when two massive companies run by old white guys have a stranglehold of the entire US telecommunications industry. Cable, Internet, and Cell services are frankly all horrible in the US both in terms of price and technology largely because of lack of competition. It is like BT in the UK before the government forced BT to sell to the competition. The "issue" the US has is that two companies sharing an industry isn't illegal, so they cannot use monopoly powers to squash it. Plus the two have anti-competitive agreement that allows them to control different zones of the country.
Text messages and texting in general is just a stepping stone before always-on internet becomes the norm. Once everyone's phone is online constantly you will see people use AIM, Skype, or similar products instead. Apart from getting an instant reply and richer, longer, content, they're also cheaper. If you're paying for always-on internet anyway (which I'm assuming everyone will be) it will cost you nothing additional to message someone. Frankly the cell phone companies are only speeding up this process by charging, what most would agree, insane prices for text services. Right now 300 texts costs as much as "unlimited" (1 GB/month) internet.
What I never understood is why the patent office doesn't implement some kind of crowd sourcing? I mean patents are public goods so instead of having the patent office review them, why not just stick them on a web-site and ask the public and industry to pick holes in them? And then the patent office only have to examine the ones which are controversial.
I could never find the correct degree of commenting. Didn't help that in school they made us comment in an idiotically verbose way to the point of "this is a for loop to find needle in haystack" and we lost marks if we failed to. My reaction to that level of stupidity was to lose interest in comments entirely which obviously later bit me in the butt.
I really need to find some kind of "idiots guide to when to comment and when NOT to comment."
Just want to clear up something - Ryanair's marketing strategy can only be described as "trolling the media." They release more and more insane ways to "cut costs" on their airline which the media reports and everyone leaves with the message that Ryanair are very serious about low cost flight.
To give two examples, they "announced" they wanted to remove toilets, and remove seats so you spent the entire flight standing. Nothing ever came of either of these, but the media loved it, and they get the CEO on the airways who just repeated the companies business model over and over again - "looking for more ways to cut costs" "I want Ryanair to be the cheapest in the EU" etc.
iTunes 10 is an improvement. Apart from the almost useless Ping, it seems a fair bit faster. The patch notes claim performance improvements and frankly I believe them. I'd recommend it. Only downside I've seen is that the first time you try and download from iTunes Store it attempts to trick you into activating Ping (click Cancel when it asked you for personal information that "might be available to the public.").
GoDaddy sell both. Are you sure you know what you're paying for?
Target already sell Farmville and Mafia Wars credit in individual cards and have for almost a year. The only difference here is that it is a general Facebook card so you can use it across all of the games (and Facebook get a much bigger cut). I don't play these games but I find it funny how hypocritical most gamers are about them, it is fine if you buy DLC for that retail game you spent 50 hours playing, but if someone buys virtual credit to buy DLC in Farmville they're just insane!
It is obviously just a lame bias against games that are Flash based (instead of C++) and have minimalistic graphics (like every game had fifteen years ago?).
Isn't it about time we had the Linux, Windows, and OS X guys sit down and agree on a standard for booting into multiple Operating Systems that wasn't invented in the early 1990s? I mean, just create a VERY simply little standard everyone can agree on that simply allows boot loaders to be called.
I know, I know, insanely wishful thinking. Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models. Maybe we should have a third party create the standard and then pressure Microsoft into signing up for it?
Sorry but that is creepy dude. I do the long distance thing, and trust me, I wouldn't even want what you suggest. But that being said I like to try and be helpful so my suggestion would be a Network Web-Camera which you can purchase from NewEgg (wired or wireless), which you'll be able to remote into, and then have a PC with Skype or Live Messenger running, with auto-answer enabled, that has your face / audio. Then get a router with Dynamic DNS support, you then visit the Dynamic DNS address on a particular port that you have forwarded to your network web-camera, and dial the Skype/Live Messenger account - which will auto answer. They can then speak to you by approaching the computer and talking into the desk microphone, and you can see everyone from the web-portal/Java Applet provided by your network web-cam.
I can tell you right now this will fail and I can tell you why - it will cost less to run a heavily armoured vehicle than it would to fly even a lightly armoured one. It would also cost less to produce and be easier to maintain. Oh plus safer from ground fire and rockets.
But apart from all of those blindly obvious holes, this is a grant plan.
Now that Glibc is free we can finally have the year of the Linux desktop we've been waiting for since 2001. I know tons of my friends who would always say "I wanted to use Linux but Glibc isn't free!"
Now with that glaring hole in Linux's offering solved we can move on continuing to ignore the terrible User Experience.
They've been calling colleges out for being "five years behind" since the first Computer Science programs started. But truthfully they are always at least five years behind, but while true the skills most teach are already "soft" enough to transfer into the latest and greatest toys. Java? Now you can write PHP, or C#. C? Now you can write Object C, D, and C++.
There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.
I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.
With Autism being so prevalent in humans you do have to wonder if it is really a disease or mistake, or perhaps either a previous evolutionary step or our next evolutionary step. While people who suffer at the extreme ends of the autistic spectrum would have difficulty maintaining a society, some of the more moderate autistic individuals are leaders in engineering, technology, and science. I do worry that when you diagnose someone with autism there is this natural "I'm broken" feeling along with it, and everyone treats you like you're disabled and thus useless. So I cannot say if being able to identify autism more often is a good or bad thing.
It is interesting, but unsurprising, that they found that ADHD and autism had no link thus far. Based on the symptoms I expect we'll find that if ADHD exists at all that it will be localised around control, while autism is localised around right/left brain communication.
I'm totally confused by this request from the EFF. Authorities exist to assure identity, a root authorities job is to assure identities of the people it hands out certificates to, is the EFF suggesting that Etisalat isn't who they claim to be?
It isn't up to Verizon to police the internet, it is up to Verizon to check that Etisalat is who they claim to be, and then grant them a certificate, or in this case grant them the ability to generate their own child certificates.
If people distrust Etisalat generated key sets then take your business to a root authority which you do trust. You also have the option of revoking their certificates on your machine or in your browser. A better person to send this letter to would be for example MIcrosoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, and anyone else trusting Etisalat RA.
I'm totally confused by this request from the EFF. Authorities exist to assure identity, a root authorities job is to assure identities of the people it hands out certificates to, is the EFF suggesting that Etisalat isn't who they claim to be? It isn't up to Verizon to police the internet, it is up to Verizon to check that Etisalat is who they claim to be, and then grant them a certificate, or in this case grant them the ability to generate their own child certificates. If people distrust Etisalat generated key sets then take your business to a root authority which you do trust. You also have the option of revoking their certificates on your machine or in your browser. A better person to send this letter to would be for example MIcrosoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, and anyone else trusting Etisalat RA.
Isn't it interesting how the scope of Trademarks and IP law keep expanding. The original concept of a trademark was to make it difficult for the competition to pass their products off as your products, it had this concept of a "reasonable person" being confused between mark A and mark B. I think when we have companies protecting dictionary words and words containing other words that they happen to have trademarked it has gone far further than the original concept.
I wonder how long until someone protects the letter 'a' and then requires a cash payment each time you use that letter in your trademark? I know that sounds like an insane concept but if you asked people about what is happening today with IP and trademarks they would have told you that was insane too!
Interesting result. Certainly isn't the case at my local University. I do wonder about the demographic of the surveyed college? For example are they fairly wealthy? I cannot imagine students around here even being able to buy a Mac Book, you see many more cheap Dells, HPs, and Acers. You also see a lot of people who don't own laptops at all and certainly don't bring them to classes. Also very odd how few of the students owned a desktop... With it claiming that tons own two or more laptops but only a small selection owning a laptop AND desktop. Again, locally many students here have a desktop in their room and no laptop at all (which is largely down to how cheap desktops are). As I said, I am deeply curious how rich these kids are.
I was talking about professional or highly skilled work areas. Since all of my examples were jobs, rather than crimes. I somehow thought that your average /.'er wouldn't need it spelt out to them - clearly I overestimated some of you.
This just goes to show how asinine most "anti-hacking" laws are. Most were written in the 1980s during a big moral panic about "hackers" bringing down the telephone network, corporate networks, and western civilisation as we know it. You can very easily get more time in jail for, what most would consider a prank, than for rape or other violent crimes.
It is interesting that in this case Terry Childs did very little actual damage but got 4 years. In fact more damage was done when the prosecutor decided to publish a list of working passwords for the cities computer network. Just goes to show the kind of technophobic old people working in the city offices and in law.
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such. That way you can get a bunch of people who know how far this person has stepped out of line.
Just for clarity, what Terry Childs did was wrong - but he certainly didn't deserve jail. Even if he did deserve jail he already spent a year inside before the trial (for some ungodly reason) and that was more than enough time served for this. The only reason they kept pushing this is to avoid the huge lawsuit if they failed to get a sentence longer than the time he already spent inside.
That's just silly. Amazon's typical markup is approx. 10%, a brick and mortar like B&N has a typical markup of around 25%. But keep in mind these are markups on the price the suppliers charge to these companies. If Amazon for example sells 10K of this book, and B&N sell 5K then the initial price is higher. As soon as Amazon got ahead then it is likely to stay ahead and consumer pressure will only re-enforce that.
You claim B&N charges 50% because they feel "entitled" but realistically Amazon has less than 1 staff per 500 orders, compared to maybe 3 staff per 500 orders at a B&N retail store. They also have to pay more in heating, cleaning, lighting, and other silly service costs that are associated with having a public face.
The sales tax issue is funny, or sad. Maybe both. States really deserve what they get if you aren't paying them sales tax when you order out of state.
Well you know what they say, the grade C lawyers work for the government while the grade A lawyers work for everyone else. As someone remarked about on another site, you almost had to wonder why the FBI picked this little fights, and if someone mistakenly thought Wikipedia was somehow related to the now infamous Wikileaks. Even just reading the FBI's correspondence you can tell they're seriously out of their depth.
Google has been driving around and scanning WiFi networks in order to use it as a location service (Read: cheap GPS). Thus Google now have a cross referenced list of Wireless networks ("mac addresses") with GPS location data on that network's source (based on triangulation).
We've already seen attacks that allow web-sites to break into routers when the default password isn't change, and for example change their DNS servers to servers operated by the attacker. This is an attack that is also assuming the default router password (and address) and retrieving the WiFi mac address, which is then sent back using postback.
You then create a web-site, when someone visits it, it logs into their router, sends the mac address back to the site, which the owner can then search for on Google Maps for that WiFi network giving you a rough location of that person (without about two street blocks).
I cannot tell if this is sarcasm. What school makes people write code on paper? I've literally never seen that (at least "real code" obviously algorithm design and maths).