It'd be really nice to have some kind of comparison list for various blog sites out there. I note from the blogger.com information, that they're still not making RSS part of the free service level, something which (ahem) LiveJournal offers on their free accounts.
I wonder if blogger.com has a client app... Semagic will autocreate your HTML and other handy stuff (including spellcheck) to make posting as easy as sending an instant message.
They also have friends lists, communities, and a bunch of stuff I haven't had time to check out.
Which brings up a core question... why have the blog format at all? In a lot of cases, it seems to just be a higher-tech version of rants written in a personal journal (as browsing some of them indicates), but I think eventually widespread adoption will happen simply because people will want some some way to tie their writing back to themselves. For most community sites/systems (Usenet, IRC,...Slashdot... as prototypical examples), everyone could just be named a variant of joe13234, and it would make no functional difference. Some people (lawyers, politicians, analysts, etc.) are essentially paid for their comments, and a weblog can be seen as an extension of their work that provides a meaningful tieback to themselves.
On the dot-com thing... it seems like everything on the net, private IP or not, is being forced into a shareware model, in effect. Some fraction of the public using a system will toss a few bucks in the direction of the provider, and IMHO people will need to realize that they need to do this occasionally or we'll end up with extremely high-bandwidth connections to nothing. Even if you don't pay for everything, paying for something, even semi-randomly, helps keep the wheels of the net turning.
I now submit my comment to the traditional, ritual Slashdot assault.
Neat... so, mod_gzip will compress such that it's transparent to the user? The browser just automatically decompresses the HTML stream and displays it? Useful info.
Okay, so GIFs, JPGs, streaming video, ZIPs, and compressed.EXE installers are all already compressed near to their thoretical limits.
[Puts cynics hat on]
The vendors mentioned in the PCWorld article seem to be treading dangerously close to copyright infringement by compressing other people's content on their servers to be pulled through their browser proxy.
NetZero and Earthlink apparently force you to use their proprietary internet-access layer, so how are we sure their extra-cost "Super" speed isn't just normal internet speed, and their "Base" speed isn't just slowed down by the interface layer?
[Takes cynics hat off]
The only thing here that seems like it would be genuinely useful is HTML compression... surely there is/will-be an Open Source solution for this. Maybe a new MIME type, e.g. text/html.compressed? Then it could be implemented on both the browser and server side, and this would have far greater impact. This could be implemented either in the browser itself or in a lightweight proxy like Proxomitron. Anyone? Anyone?
Yes, but I think this lack of clarity only makes it worse businesswise for the parties involved in this. A young person's sense of cause-and-effect will likely say "I liked her music"-"I downloaded her music"-"I got hurt". The negative goodwill will go to the artist, not the RIAA acronym. Another reason that if the artists themselves don't see things as the RIAA does, they should speak up now.
Don't studies suggest that using abusive tactics with children only works for a short time, and then they just hate the abuser, permanently?
It looks like the RIAA has completely forgotten the value of a young, enthusiastic fan base can have on an artist's popularity. I'd think as cynical businessmen, they'd recognize that metric right off.
Even if Brianna and her single mother couldn't afford a single one of Britney's (or Artist X's) CD's, Britney and the RIAA are better off having Brianna talk to her friends about how great she is and the like, and sustaining the culture of interest around her. Which for music artists, is the primary thing generating their revenue, and it's something that works best for younger people. The Japanese comics industry knows this well.
For me as a 30-something, well, I can afford one of Britney's CD's, but I'd be adding no further value to her market mystique. I wouldn't be effectively an unpaid volunteer for Britney, as Brianna would probably be happy to be, were the RIAA not stomping on her.
Moreover, according to AT&T, Sprint threatened to disconnect the circuits unless AT&T agreed to move all traffic onto paid-for-access service. When AT&T complained, Sprint resumed service but filed a billing dispute claiming that access fees apply whether the call is delivered over the Net or through copper wires.
Sprint disputes AT&T's account, saying the dropped calls were a "translation error" due in part to AT&T's desire to hide what it was doing. Either way, Sprint maintains that the calls should be subject to traditional access fees.
As someone on the other side against AT&T in the 80's over a law called "Avoidance of Toll Charges", I find this incredibly ironic. It seems arguable that AT&T is now a phone phreak.
Hey, AT&T... can I have my Commodore SX-64 portable back now?
One factor I'll bring up is that fantasy has a lot of testing time in the field, so to speak.
Tolkien's works are very heavily based on Norse mythology, as an example, and the ideas there have survived in a meme sense for thousands of years. Similar to a genetic algorithm to find the best stories running since the time of early civilizations.
This is a big competitive advantage for a SF writer to overcome, and in fact, many SF stories are really mythological themes overlaid with "space" stuff as a setting.
Nice shot... but to get slightly more on-topic here, the one you refer to and most others share a baseline of mythological imagery across them, something that Jung called a "archetype". You'll find that virgin birth, for example, in quite a few ancient religions.
It's said that basically every modern religion can be distilled down to "Treat others how you'd want to be treated" with a bunch of other symbolic and mythological stuff added in, some of which people find interesting and/or personally valuable.
And for that common baseline of religions, our Scientology topic doesn't seem to qualify.
Hmm... the article seems to center more on "common carrier" arguments and paraphrasing of the original work, the paraphrase of which is posted as content on the site, rather than linking, but regardless...
It amazes me that the "Church of Scientology" continues to pursue this, after the well-known Usenet debacle. I don't see how it helps their image at all, trying to force people not to discuss their "religion". This activity only adds fuel to the fire. Surely they have their share of lawyers or PR consultants on board, doesn't the basic concept of sticking to your points and ignoring/downplaying your opposition's get on the strategy table?
The disturbing part here is Scientology's continuing attempt to treat opposing views or information as derivative products of their ideas, and shut them down as if they were an IP violation. Maybe what Enron should have done is patent the concept of cooked books, and sued anyone talking about it.
I'm also concerned about the possibility of a misinformed or apathetic jury.
Which leads me to think, could the Open Source community go on the offensive on this issue? Is there anyone out there familiar enough with the relevant compilers to determine if there is Linux code inappropriately incorporated into software and products claimed to be of SCO origin/acquisition? I know this possibility has been conjectured, but proof would be outstanding. I know decompiling isn't as straightforward as disassembly, but the PR reward could be huge.
(Or any other Unix-ey OS for that matter, though Linux is SCO's target-of-the-moment...)
It's not irrelevant at all. SCO's strategy at this point appears to be to bill/sue everyone because they are associated with Unix and its variants, and for no more concrete reason at all.
Yes... it would have been more accurate to say corporations profiting from Kazaa Lite, as all three of the original story's linked sites do, taking PayPal or Visa.
When Napster did it, it was cool and unique.
When Kazaa did it, is was merely cool.
When Kazaa Lite did it, it was down to just another corporation, profiting from piracy.
Besides, last I heard, the Kazaa network is rapidly becoming useless, probably due to most everyone going "read-only". And probably everyone on Slashdot knows what the obvious, technically-properly-done successor is, so I won't even mention it.
Also could be called two "straw man" fallacies, for those old-skool... the "straw man" being the second most popular rhetorical technique here on Slashdot, right after ad hominem...
Though DigiCash is gone, PayPal certainly could serve as an example of the concept that's been pretty well "exposed to the elements" for some time now--I'd think there'd be even more incentive to hacking financial transactions than votes.
He mentions several ways that traditional ballot voting is just as 'hackable' as the electronic version.
Though, naturally, the distinction between manual ballot stuffing and computer ballot-stuffing (and the like) has similar differences as between bank robbery and embezzlement... the former usually leaves a lot more physical signature and is usually more easily traceable as to the "who's" and "how's".
update nationalvotes set candidatechosen = "Bush" where name like "%e%"... could be hard to detect or trace, if there was a security lapse.
As an idea, how about having in effect two buttons for a given candidate, each of which hooks up to a completely different network run by a different company, then comparing the results between the two? It seems like this could go a long way to verifying accuracy and providing a traceback method for voting fraud.
Yes, yes... install all patches, etc. The thing is, Microsoft is releasing security patches at an alarming rate at this point, and XP's Automatic Update seems profoundly dumb... I could swear I've downloaded the same security updates 3 times now, since it apparently either doesn't detect whether you already downloaded them (I can't always install-and-reboot in the middle of my work), or there's a ongoing stream of new revs to the patches, without them stating such.
And now, MSN Messenger keeps informing me that there's a "Critical Security Update" with a link to a download page (naturally, I can't reply to the message...), and going there informs me that I must set up a.NET Passport before I can do anything.
All I want to do is turn MSN Messenger off. Close, disable, whatever. Version 7 seems to have no method of preventing it from connecting and giving me a bunch of messages when I connect to the internet. Try exiting it, it says it's in use by another application, even when I have none open. Select anything regarding its startup options in the options menu, still comes up. I've now went ahead and uninstalled it using Add/Remove Programs, though I'm reluctant to do that in case I need to communicate with a client using it at some point.
This is truly annoying. It seems that in effect, Microsoft is zealously forcing me to maintain my vulnerability to exploits, by insisting I continually use their Messenger (Yahoo IM works just fine for me, thank you...). They nicely give me the alternative of updating, to do which I need to sign up for.NET Passport, which has also been cracked, and potentially sensitive user information taken.
At least in most areas, you can choose to avoid a vulnerability-laden application. It seems the Microsoft solution to their insecure software is just to go ahead and force you to use it.
Argh. Does anyone know how I can just turn off MSN Messenger? TIA!
(Disclaimer: My personal experience, Microsoft used fictionally, MS lawyers are good people, etc...)
Please note that to have any basis whatsoever to bill you, SCO needs to demonstrate not only that "Linux" infringes, but that your build of Linux infringes. They haven't remotely done the first, much less the second.
And that's even if an end-user could be found liable, as the often-mentioned reader-of-an-infringing-New-York-Times analogy addresses.
As it stands now, this is analogous to a company that sells classical music billing you because they've heard you have classical music in your CD collection, and it's absurd.
Sigh. Slashdot provides the forum itself, a very non-trivial cost and technical accomplishment.
I'm picturing you at a group meeting at a park, and expecting everyone to be impressed by your refusal to chip in for the cost of renting a space there.
I thought I had fully qualified my statement with "I heard" and "it's conjectured", but go right ahead and enumerate the shaky premises, false inferences, and unjustified conclusions you can extract from a 2-line opening of a topic. That's what I posted it for, as I would hope the last line makes manifestly clear.
There are many, many examples of things humans can do in the context of their "computing architecture" that rely on the biological equivalent of "parallel processing". Vision is one of them, catching a ball real-time is another.
"Nothing to do with..." So what? It's an analogy. If the topic was nuclear fusion, and I drew an analogy to the sun, would you then respond with "The challenges of nuclear power plants have nothing to do with a star" or some equally pointless, uninformative response? If you are trying to design a system that poses seemingly unresolvable problems, looking at another system of *any* origin that *does* work could be considered an appropriate course of action, to generate ideas if nothing else.
Obviously any parallel solution can be performed serially, given time. The context of our evolution, however, has pressed upon us the need to generate real-time responses to large amounts of sensory data, which is exactly what's needed for the original story's requirements. But thanks for the wholly gratuitous, self-evident information.
Please at least make your next troll a little less content-free.
I heard that a very substantial amount of our brain's capacity is devoted to differentiating faces, and it's conjectured that this processing overkill is responsible for such things as people seeing a "face" in the objectively very non-face-like features of the moon.
Give the parallel processing capability people have to do this trick, it's probably not too surprising that computer tech hasn't gotten there yet.
Anyone know more about face-recognition processing in the human brain? I find this topic quite interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
Not disdain at all... just an acknowledgement of the livejournal link and the resulting possibility I'm partisan on this. :)
Random, haphazard thoughts on this...
...Slashdot... as prototypical examples), everyone could just be named a variant of joe13234, and it would make no functional difference. Some people (lawyers, politicians, analysts, etc.) are essentially paid for their comments, and a weblog can be seen as an extension of their work that provides a meaningful tieback to themselves.
It'd be really nice to have some kind of comparison list for various blog sites out there. I note from the blogger.com information, that they're still not making RSS part of the free service level, something which (ahem) LiveJournal offers on their free accounts.
I wonder if blogger.com has a client app... Semagic will autocreate your HTML and other handy stuff (including spellcheck) to make posting as easy as sending an instant message.
They also have friends lists, communities, and a bunch of stuff I haven't had time to check out.
Which brings up a core question... why have the blog format at all? In a lot of cases, it seems to just be a higher-tech version of rants written in a personal journal (as browsing some of them indicates), but I think eventually widespread adoption will happen simply because people will want some some way to tie their writing back to themselves. For most community sites/systems (Usenet, IRC,
On the dot-com thing... it seems like everything on the net, private IP or not, is being forced into a shareware model, in effect. Some fraction of the public using a system will toss a few bucks in the direction of the provider, and IMHO people will need to realize that they need to do this occasionally or we'll end up with extremely high-bandwidth connections to nothing. Even if you don't pay for everything, paying for something, even semi-randomly, helps keep the wheels of the net turning.
I now submit my comment to the traditional, ritual Slashdot assault.
Neat... so, mod_gzip will compress such that it's transparent to the user? The browser just automatically decompresses the HTML stream and displays it? Useful info.
Okay, so GIFs, JPGs, streaming video, ZIPs, and compressed .EXE installers are all already compressed near to their thoretical limits.
[Puts cynics hat on]
The vendors mentioned in the PCWorld article seem to be treading dangerously close to copyright infringement by compressing other people's content on their servers to be pulled through their browser proxy.
NetZero and Earthlink apparently force you to use their proprietary internet-access layer, so how are we sure their extra-cost "Super" speed isn't just normal internet speed, and their "Base" speed isn't just slowed down by the interface layer?
[Takes cynics hat off]
The only thing here that seems like it would be genuinely useful is HTML compression... surely there is/will-be an Open Source solution for this. Maybe a new MIME type, e.g. text/html.compressed? Then it could be implemented on both the browser and server side, and this would have far greater impact. This could be implemented either in the browser itself or in a lightweight proxy like Proxomitron. Anyone? Anyone?
Yes, but I think this lack of clarity only makes it worse businesswise for the parties involved in this. A young person's sense of cause-and-effect will likely say "I liked her music"-"I downloaded her music"-"I got hurt". The negative goodwill will go to the artist, not the RIAA acronym. Another reason that if the artists themselves don't see things as the RIAA does, they should speak up now.
Don't studies suggest that using abusive tactics with children only works for a short time, and then they just hate the abuser, permanently?
It looks like the RIAA has completely forgotten the value of a young, enthusiastic fan base can have on an artist's popularity. I'd think as cynical businessmen, they'd recognize that metric right off.
Even if Brianna and her single mother couldn't afford a single one of Britney's (or Artist X's) CD's, Britney and the RIAA are better off having Brianna talk to her friends about how great she is and the like, and sustaining the culture of interest around her. Which for music artists, is the primary thing generating their revenue, and it's something that works best for younger people. The Japanese comics industry knows this well.
For me as a 30-something, well, I can afford one of Britney's CD's, but I'd be adding no further value to her market mystique. I wouldn't be effectively an unpaid volunteer for Britney, as Brianna would probably be happy to be, were the RIAA not stomping on her.
Moreover, according to AT&T, Sprint threatened to disconnect the circuits unless AT&T agreed to move all traffic onto paid-for-access service. When AT&T complained, Sprint resumed service but filed a billing dispute claiming that access fees apply whether the call is delivered over the Net or through copper wires.
Sprint disputes AT&T's account, saying the dropped calls were a "translation error" due in part to AT&T's desire to hide what it was doing. Either way, Sprint maintains that the calls should be subject to traditional access fees.
As someone on the other side against AT&T in the 80's over a law called "Avoidance of Toll Charges", I find this incredibly ironic. It seems arguable that AT&T is now a phone phreak.
Hey, AT&T... can I have my Commodore SX-64 portable back now?
One factor I'll bring up is that fantasy has a lot of testing time in the field, so to speak.
Tolkien's works are very heavily based on Norse mythology, as an example, and the ideas there have survived in a meme sense for thousands of years. Similar to a genetic algorithm to find the best stories running since the time of early civilizations.
This is a big competitive advantage for a SF writer to overcome, and in fact, many SF stories are really mythological themes overlaid with "space" stuff as a setting.
Nice shot... but to get slightly more on-topic here, the one you refer to and most others share a baseline of mythological imagery across them, something that Jung called a "archetype". You'll find that virgin birth, for example, in quite a few ancient religions.
It's said that basically every modern religion can be distilled down to "Treat others how you'd want to be treated" with a bunch of other symbolic and mythological stuff added in, some of which people find interesting and/or personally valuable.
And for that common baseline of religions, our Scientology topic doesn't seem to qualify.
Hmm... the article seems to center more on "common carrier" arguments and paraphrasing of the original work, the paraphrase of which is posted as content on the site, rather than linking, but regardless...
It amazes me that the "Church of Scientology" continues to pursue this, after the well-known Usenet debacle. I don't see how it helps their image at all, trying to force people not to discuss their "religion". This activity only adds fuel to the fire. Surely they have their share of lawyers or PR consultants on board, doesn't the basic concept of sticking to your points and ignoring/downplaying your opposition's get on the strategy table?
The disturbing part here is Scientology's continuing attempt to treat opposing views or information as derivative products of their ideas, and shut them down as if they were an IP violation. Maybe what Enron should have done is patent the concept of cooked books, and sued anyone talking about it.
Taste the irony here.
I'm also concerned about the possibility of a misinformed or apathetic jury.
Which leads me to think, could the Open Source community go on the offensive on this issue? Is there anyone out there familiar enough with the relevant compilers to determine if there is Linux code inappropriately incorporated into software and products claimed to be of SCO origin/acquisition? I know this possibility has been conjectured, but proof would be outstanding. I know decompiling isn't as straightforward as disassembly, but the PR reward could be huge.
(Or any other Unix-ey OS for that matter, though Linux is SCO's target-of-the-moment...)
It's not irrelevant at all. SCO's strategy at this point appears to be to bill/sue everyone because they are associated with Unix and its variants, and for no more concrete reason at all.
Yes... it would have been more accurate to say corporations profiting from Kazaa Lite, as all three of the original story's linked sites do, taking PayPal or Visa.
When Napster did it, it was cool and unique.
When Kazaa did it, is was merely cool.
When Kazaa Lite did it, it was down to just another corporation, profiting from piracy.
Besides, last I heard, the Kazaa network is rapidly becoming useless, probably due to most everyone going "read-only". And probably everyone on Slashdot knows what the obvious, technically-properly-done successor is, so I won't even mention it.
Also could be called two "straw man" fallacies, for those old-skool... the "straw man" being the second most popular rhetorical technique here on Slashdot, right after ad hominem...
Good catch.
Though DigiCash is gone, PayPal certainly could serve as an example of the concept that's been pretty well "exposed to the elements" for some time now--I'd think there'd be even more incentive to hacking financial transactions than votes.
Nice concept.
He mentions several ways that traditional ballot voting is just as 'hackable' as the electronic version.
... could be hard to detect or trace, if there was a security lapse.
Though, naturally, the distinction between manual ballot stuffing and computer ballot-stuffing (and the like) has similar differences as between bank robbery and embezzlement... the former usually leaves a lot more physical signature and is usually more easily traceable as to the "who's" and "how's".
update nationalvotes set candidatechosen = "Bush" where name like "%e%"
As an idea, how about having in effect two buttons for a given candidate, each of which hooks up to a completely different network run by a different company, then comparing the results between the two? It seems like this could go a long way to verifying accuracy and providing a traceback method for voting fraud.
Just a thought.
I got hit with the W32.Wechia.Worm today.
.NET Passport before I can do anything.
.NET Passport, which has also been cracked, and potentially sensitive user information taken.
Yes, yes... install all patches, etc. The thing is, Microsoft is releasing security patches at an alarming rate at this point, and XP's Automatic Update seems profoundly dumb... I could swear I've downloaded the same security updates 3 times now, since it apparently either doesn't detect whether you already downloaded them (I can't always install-and-reboot in the middle of my work), or there's a ongoing stream of new revs to the patches, without them stating such.
And now, MSN Messenger keeps informing me that there's a "Critical Security Update" with a link to a download page (naturally, I can't reply to the message...), and going there informs me that I must set up a
All I want to do is turn MSN Messenger off. Close, disable, whatever. Version 7 seems to have no method of preventing it from connecting and giving me a bunch of messages when I connect to the internet. Try exiting it, it says it's in use by another application, even when I have none open. Select anything regarding its startup options in the options menu, still comes up. I've now went ahead and uninstalled it using Add/Remove Programs, though I'm reluctant to do that in case I need to communicate with a client using it at some point.
This is truly annoying. It seems that in effect, Microsoft is zealously forcing me to maintain my vulnerability to exploits, by insisting I continually use their Messenger (Yahoo IM works just fine for me, thank you...). They nicely give me the alternative of updating, to do which I need to sign up for
At least in most areas, you can choose to avoid a vulnerability-laden application. It seems the Microsoft solution to their insecure software is just to go ahead and force you to use it.
Argh. Does anyone know how I can just turn off MSN Messenger? TIA!
(Disclaimer: My personal experience, Microsoft used fictionally, MS lawyers are good people, etc...)
Please note that to have any basis whatsoever to bill you, SCO needs to demonstrate not only that "Linux" infringes, but that your build of Linux infringes. They haven't remotely done the first, much less the second.
And that's even if an end-user could be found liable, as the often-mentioned reader-of-an-infringing-New-York-Times analogy addresses.
As it stands now, this is analogous to a company that sells classical music billing you because they've heard you have classical music in your CD collection, and it's absurd.
Sigh. Slashdot provides the forum itself, a very non-trivial cost and technical accomplishment.
I'm picturing you at a group meeting at a park, and expecting everyone to be impressed by your refusal to chip in for the cost of renting a space there.
"Worst... episode... ever."
I thought I had fully qualified my statement with "I heard" and "it's conjectured", but go right ahead and enumerate the shaky premises, false inferences, and unjustified conclusions you can extract from a 2-line opening of a topic. That's what I posted it for, as I would hope the last line makes manifestly clear.
There are many, many examples of things humans can do in the context of their "computing architecture" that rely on the biological equivalent of "parallel processing". Vision is one of them, catching a ball real-time is another.
"Nothing to do with..." So what? It's an analogy. If the topic was nuclear fusion, and I drew an analogy to the sun, would you then respond with "The challenges of nuclear power plants have nothing to do with a star" or some equally pointless, uninformative response? If you are trying to design a system that poses seemingly unresolvable problems, looking at another system of *any* origin that *does* work could be considered an appropriate course of action, to generate ideas if nothing else.
Obviously any parallel solution can be performed serially, given time. The context of our evolution, however, has pressed upon us the need to generate real-time responses to large amounts of sensory data, which is exactly what's needed for the original story's requirements. But thanks for the wholly gratuitous, self-evident information.
Please at least make your next troll a little less content-free.
Maybe god is like some kind of ubercoder, daring us to figure out his implementation.
And like most of them, he doesn't document.
I heard that a very substantial amount of our brain's capacity is devoted to differentiating faces, and it's conjectured that this processing overkill is responsible for such things as people seeing a "face" in the objectively very non-face-like features of the moon.
Give the parallel processing capability people have to do this trick, it's probably not too surprising that computer tech hasn't gotten there yet.
Anyone know more about face-recognition processing in the human brain? I find this topic quite interesting...
My point being there's now a common mindset of paying for nothing one doesn't have to.
Many will pay for their bandwidth bill and nothing else.