Sorry. I didn't phrase my thought very well. By default, you get the page as-designed, in that Flashblock is not installed by default. I disagree with your suggestion that Flashblock's functionality should be integrated into the core browser, unless it were included but turned off by default.
I like PDF too. I very frequently need to print out technical materials that I find online, and this is always much easier when those materials are provided in pdf form rather than html. Firefox is a lot better than its predecessors, but it still often fails to print out web pages correctly. Even when the page does come out on paper looking like it did on the screen, printing HTML often results in very inefficient use of paper (inappropriate margins, text size, page breaks, etc.).
The nice thing about Firefox is that it can accommodate a variety of user preferences. To each his own.
Not everyone wants what you want. By default, I want webpages to display as their designer intended. BUT I want the ability to easily block stuff I don't like. Adblock and Flashblock are designed for this approach: by default, you get the page as-designed. If you want to change how it's displayed, you can. Easy.
I agree with you, it would be nice to have a generic plugin-blocker extension, though.
You would need to provide a choice of at least two filters. Different people have different tastes. A lot of people want to block all ads. Many others (like me) want to block only annoying ads (jumpy/blinky/popup/popunder/etc.) The thing I like about Adblock is that by default it is conservative and blocks nothing. I can easily choose what I don't want to see. It would be much less appealing if it came with somebody else's default set of filters installed, especially if those filters were made by someone who prefers to see no ads at all.
I feel the same way, and didn't install Adblock until yesterday, for the same reason. When I installed it, I discovered I had been mistaken. It seems that Adblock, by default, doesn't block anything at all. You have to tell it what to filter, either by right clicking on the things you don't want, or by downloading and installing a pre-made filter list. Adblock seems perfectly compatible with the "ads are fine as long as they aren't annoying" approach to the web.
Caveat--I haven't been using Adblock very long, so don't take this as an overall endorsement.
Loss of signal will not 'take down' the plane. It should just go on 'automatic' and follow pre-programmed orders (probably something like "blow up the sorce of jamming").
You didn't read my message carefully enough. I agree with you, but some significant AI is needed to allow the plane to continue to fight without a pilot. At present, I doubt that the available AI technology is good enough to justify the billions that would be required to develop a new weapons system like this. In any event, my reply was to someone who was suggesting remote control as an alternative to an AI fighter jet. As you've pointed out, basically a remote-controlled fighter needs the full AI anyway.
Can they jam a powerful radio signal coming down from a satellite?
Maybe. The issue is, can you afford to spend billions now developing a remote-controlled fighter, and trust that in ten years the 'enemy' won't be able to do this?
Or simply take them all down by jamming the signal.
An expensive remote-controlled fighter is useless unless it has onboard AI at least good enough to disengage from combat and return home on its own if it loses its control signal. Even at that, it would probably still not be worth the expense unless it could actually carry out a combat mission without a remote pilot. Jamming signals is just too easy to trust that the enemy won't be able to do it.
That's great, and I applaud the higher-tier marketers for their restraint. Unfortunately, the lower-tier marketers may end up spoiling it for all of them.
I'm particularly annoyed lately about the tendency of most advertisers to use Flash, buried under layers of javascript. Images are easy to block (with Firefox) on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis. This makes it possible to penalize the 'bad' advertisers and not the better ones. With Flash, though, it's much harder to selectively block only certain advertisers. Given this new privacy issue with Flash, I will likely end up either disabling it altogether, or putting in an ad blocker that blocks all advertisers.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how your comment relates in any way to what I wrote. I wrote about trust, and the fact that online advertisers have earned a considerable amount of distrust by disregard for the desires of individuals, including their desire for privacy.
P3P still requires you to have some amount of trust for the site that is setting the cookie, since AFAIK with P3P your browser decides whether to accept a cookie based solely on what the site tells it it's privacy policy is. There is no mechanism to enforce these privacy policies, and it's relatively difficult for a user to verify compliance. Worse, many sites (perhaps the majority) do not yet have P3P privacy policies, so setting a reasonably high privacy requirement immediately creates problems when surfing, since trustable, major websites are unable to set necessary cookies.
Besides this, P3P on cookies would not block the Flash-based tracking technique that the original article described. In fact, it may well be that a significant motivator behind this flash-based tracking system is that P3P is in many cases preventing the advertisers from setting durable cookies! Regardless, the fact that the advertisers are trying to get around a clearly-expressed consumer preference by defeating attempts by the consumer to delete unwanted cookies indicates that the advertisers are not to be trusted, whether they post a privacy policy or not.
I wonder what fraction of people are deleting all cookies, as opposed to just deleting cookies that can be used to track them across sites. The latter would not interfere with sites tracking their own repeat visitors.
I thought Ad-aware only deleted the cross-site tracking type cookies, but I could be wrong.
It all comes down to trust. Internet advertisers have in the past proven themselves to be untrustworthy. Maybe today's internet advertisers are reformed and are no longer deserving of this level of distrust. They have a long road ahead to prove that, though, before I will trust them again.
You mentioned frequency capping. What frequency capping? After seeing the stupid animated ad for mortgages (you know the one--it has little buttons for every state, in various configurations) or the stupid "click the moving object" ads for the thousanth time, I have no reason to trust advertisers to 'cap' the number of times I see an ad for any given product. I wouldn't mind seeing a few ads for a new product I'm not familiar with, but I'm sick of seeing ads for mortgate refinancing ten or twenty times a day every !*&(*& day. Advertisers seem to just want every consumer to see their ad as many times as possible, without limit. They have proven by their behavior that this is their goal. Why would we trust them when they claim that they need cookies to provide "frequency capping"? There must be some other motive behind it.
If advertisers don't shape up, we are all going to be using Adblock before long. I'm aware that advertising often pays for content, and I'm willing to see ads to have good content, but there are limits. If you make your ads annoying, intrusive, or privacy-violating they will be blocked. Maybe the amount of content on the web will decline, or maybe the existing ad companies will go bankrupt and will be replaced by ones that are more aware of what consumers want.
The current trend cannot continue, however.
No, I'm not trying to treat a registry like an index. I'm trying to treat a URL like an address. An address provides a means of going to a previously-located resource. There is significant utility value in having addresses that are directly human-usable, without having to be stored or transferred electronically. Something like AOL keywords without the proprietary structure would work (being essentially the same as DNS with a flat namespace), but then you need a central registry that knows the name or keyword of every computer with a direct internet connection, or at least of every one that has a name. The hierarchical structure helps distribute the load of keeping a registry by allowing the second-level domain holders to manage their own third-level domain namespaces. It would be better if the intended uses of the different TLD's had been enforced from the beginning, but even without that the current naming system has some use.
Search is not necessarily a good alternative to an address system, since success in transferring an address offline depends on the person giving the address being able to come up with a search string that will definitely retrieve the desired site. That is not always easy, especially if you are not in front of the computer. It's a lot easier to tell your friend to look for the book he wants at amazon.com than it is to tell him to search for 'amazon' and, um, 'books', and 'not river'. It gets worse if the site doesn't have a clear name like Amazon.
Got any evidence for your claim that the number of typed URL's is decreasing? I call B.S.
There is, actually, one good reason to use a domain name. While you may typically find a page via a search engine, it's not all that uncommon for a human being to have to be able to easily remember the location of a page. For example, a person may want to verbally tell someone else where to find a useful website, or a company may want to be able to advertise the address for their website in another medium (print, radio, tv, etc.) Good luck running a billboard campaign to attract customers to your business' website, if the URL is http://z834jl.lg834.24kj5.biz
Hmmm. The store near me seemed to have upgraded since the last time I was in, several months ago. All the shelves were a foot or two taller. It seems this store was smart enough to expand their stock.
He's a spammer. If found liable for that, he deserves to lose everything he has ever earned by spamming. His company has around 10 million dollars in assets. That means it's pretty likely that he has made more than $49 million in his spamming career. If anything, $49 million might be too little.
There is nothing wrong with bankrupting someone who has made their money through illicit activity.
Nobody uses it because 'strong' passwords are usually too hard to remember. I don't know what Windows allows, but I'm really sick of websites and Unix systems that are uptight about requiring 'strong' passwords, but won't let me pick any password longer than eight characters. A fifteen to twenty character alphabetic passphrase is WAY more secure than any eight character password, and can be much easier to remember. Enough with the bitching about strong passwords, guys. If you care about security, patch the system to allow long passwords.
Of course, rather than pay him a shit-load of money for the game, they are probably better off suing him and shutting down his business, and then offering him a tenth of a shit-load for whatever part of the rights to his code the courts don't give them. While his site was operational, he had no incentive to sell for a low price. If they shut it down, they can get a much better deal.
If you are in the U.S., give your local National Public Radio (NPR) station a try. They usually have a good mix of interesting commentary on social issues, the news, technology, etc. They also have some good science and technology shows, although perhaps not at the time of day when you are commuting. I know that you can play past shows via their website (www.npr.org). You may be able to download them as well.
Google downloaded the image, resized it, and distibuted it from their server.
If that's actually what they do, then I agree with you. I assumed that they merely linked to the source website, rather than serving up a copy from their own server. If that's what they are doing, then the AFP has every right to the damages they will get from their lawsuit. That doesn't mean it isn't a stupid move on AFP's part, of course.
Technically, everytime you download something you copy it.
That's true, but not all copying is a violation of copyright. 'Fair use' provides some rights to copy materials for personal use. I suspect that when you view a page on the internet, the 'copying' that is necessary for you to view the page would fall under fair use. Of course, in most cases you also implicitly have the copyright owner's permission to make these temporary copies for purposes of viewing the content. I'm not a lawyer, but that might be the case even if the website has a claim that you need written permission to copy, since the copyright owner clearly intended for you to be able to view the content without requesting permission in writing first.
I agree with you about it being in principle the end of the internet. The courts have really not yet gotten their heads around the concept of linking as a reference to a work, rather than the work itself. There have been a number of cases where the courts found someone liable for linking to material that was hosted elsewhere.
That isn't actually true. As the copyright owner, they are free to put their work in a place where the public can see it. They still have the right to deny people the right to copy it and do whatever they want with it. The lack of a technical measure to prevent you from doing something does NOT automatically mean that you have the right to do it, anymore than an unlocked door entitles you to enter and take whatever you want.
It's not clear to me, though that Google has actually done anything that infringes on AFP's copyright. It's not an infringement to make a reference to a copyrighted work, only to copy it.
I disagree. If google puts a tag on its page which loads an image from AFP's publicly accessible server they have neither reproduced nor distributed the content. They have simply provided a reference to AFP's image, which the consumer's browser loads and displays in the middle of google's page. Google has done nothing but point to a location where the image can be found. It is the consumer who has actually downloaded the image from AFP. If AFP doesn't like this, they need to adjust their server not to provide images to people who aren't viewing an AFP page, or take other technical measures to prevent google from indexing news on their site.
Household dimmers of the modern variety use an active solid state component called a triac.
Interesting. I assumed they were just a variable resistor in series with the lamp. I'm familiar with triacs, but didn't think they were used in residential dimmers.
So, in either state (conducting/nonconducting), the dimmer that controls your light fixture is dissipating very little power, and not getting hot at all. This is easy to confirm. Take a light fixture that gets quite hot on full power, and attach it to a dimmer set nearly all the way down. If your theory was correct, the dimmer would get very very hot.
I have seen older residential dimmers that did get quite warm, and a higher-rated one that actually had a heatsink. This was part of what led to my theory that they were just potentiometers in series. I think you have overestimated how hot the dimmer would get, though, if it were a POT. The power dissipated in a POT in series with a lightbulb varies nonlinearly with the setting. If you turn the dimmer nearly all the way down, you wouldn't dissipate all the power that would normally go to the lamp.
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NB, that with Firefox you can not only block unwanted cookies, but also prevent future cookies from being set by that site. Useful.
I like PDF too. I very frequently need to print out technical materials that I find online, and this is always much easier when those materials are provided in pdf form rather than html. Firefox is a lot better than its predecessors, but it still often fails to print out web pages correctly. Even when the page does come out on paper looking like it did on the screen, printing HTML often results in very inefficient use of paper (inappropriate margins, text size, page breaks, etc.).
The nice thing about Firefox is that it can accommodate a variety of user preferences. To each his own.
I agree with you, it would be nice to have a generic plugin-blocker extension, though.
You would need to provide a choice of at least two filters. Different people have different tastes. A lot of people want to block all ads. Many others (like me) want to block only annoying ads (jumpy/blinky/popup/popunder/etc.) The thing I like about Adblock is that by default it is conservative and blocks nothing. I can easily choose what I don't want to see. It would be much less appealing if it came with somebody else's default set of filters installed, especially if those filters were made by someone who prefers to see no ads at all.
Caveat--I haven't been using Adblock very long, so don't take this as an overall endorsement.
You didn't read my message carefully enough. I agree with you, but some significant AI is needed to allow the plane to continue to fight without a pilot. At present, I doubt that the available AI technology is good enough to justify the billions that would be required to develop a new weapons system like this. In any event, my reply was to someone who was suggesting remote control as an alternative to an AI fighter jet. As you've pointed out, basically a remote-controlled fighter needs the full AI anyway.
Can they jam a powerful radio signal coming down from a satellite?
Maybe. The issue is, can you afford to spend billions now developing a remote-controlled fighter, and trust that in ten years the 'enemy' won't be able to do this?
An expensive remote-controlled fighter is useless unless it has onboard AI at least good enough to disengage from combat and return home on its own if it loses its control signal. Even at that, it would probably still not be worth the expense unless it could actually carry out a combat mission without a remote pilot. Jamming signals is just too easy to trust that the enemy won't be able to do it.
I'm particularly annoyed lately about the tendency of most advertisers to use Flash, buried under layers of javascript. Images are easy to block (with Firefox) on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis. This makes it possible to penalize the 'bad' advertisers and not the better ones. With Flash, though, it's much harder to selectively block only certain advertisers. Given this new privacy issue with Flash, I will likely end up either disabling it altogether, or putting in an ad blocker that blocks all advertisers.
P3P still requires you to have some amount of trust for the site that is setting the cookie, since AFAIK with P3P your browser decides whether to accept a cookie based solely on what the site tells it it's privacy policy is. There is no mechanism to enforce these privacy policies, and it's relatively difficult for a user to verify compliance. Worse, many sites (perhaps the majority) do not yet have P3P privacy policies, so setting a reasonably high privacy requirement immediately creates problems when surfing, since trustable, major websites are unable to set necessary cookies.
Besides this, P3P on cookies would not block the Flash-based tracking technique that the original article described. In fact, it may well be that a significant motivator behind this flash-based tracking system is that P3P is in many cases preventing the advertisers from setting durable cookies! Regardless, the fact that the advertisers are trying to get around a clearly-expressed consumer preference by defeating attempts by the consumer to delete unwanted cookies indicates that the advertisers are not to be trusted, whether they post a privacy policy or not.
I thought Ad-aware only deleted the cross-site tracking type cookies, but I could be wrong.
You mentioned frequency capping. What frequency capping? After seeing the stupid animated ad for mortgages (you know the one--it has little buttons for every state, in various configurations) or the stupid "click the moving object" ads for the thousanth time, I have no reason to trust advertisers to 'cap' the number of times I see an ad for any given product. I wouldn't mind seeing a few ads for a new product I'm not familiar with, but I'm sick of seeing ads for mortgate refinancing ten or twenty times a day every !*&(*& day. Advertisers seem to just want every consumer to see their ad as many times as possible, without limit. They have proven by their behavior that this is their goal. Why would we trust them when they claim that they need cookies to provide "frequency capping"? There must be some other motive behind it.
If advertisers don't shape up, we are all going to be using Adblock before long. I'm aware that advertising often pays for content, and I'm willing to see ads to have good content, but there are limits. If you make your ads annoying, intrusive, or privacy-violating they will be blocked. Maybe the amount of content on the web will decline, or maybe the existing ad companies will go bankrupt and will be replaced by ones that are more aware of what consumers want. The current trend cannot continue, however.
Search is not necessarily a good alternative to an address system, since success in transferring an address offline depends on the person giving the address being able to come up with a search string that will definitely retrieve the desired site. That is not always easy, especially if you are not in front of the computer. It's a lot easier to tell your friend to look for the book he wants at amazon.com than it is to tell him to search for 'amazon' and, um, 'books', and 'not river'. It gets worse if the site doesn't have a clear name like Amazon.
Got any evidence for your claim that the number of typed URL's is decreasing? I call B.S.
There is, actually, one good reason to use a domain name. While you may typically find a page via a search engine, it's not all that uncommon for a human being to have to be able to easily remember the location of a page. For example, a person may want to verbally tell someone else where to find a useful website, or a company may want to be able to advertise the address for their website in another medium (print, radio, tv, etc.) Good luck running a billboard campaign to attract customers to your business' website, if the URL is http://z834jl.lg834.24kj5.biz
This makes a lot of sense, which means it will never happen.
Hmmm. The store near me seemed to have upgraded since the last time I was in, several months ago. All the shelves were a foot or two taller. It seems this store was smart enough to expand their stock.
In fact, the spam makes the material you are viewing more expensive, by increasing everybody's bandwidth costs.
There is nothing wrong with bankrupting someone who has made their money through illicit activity.
Nobody uses it because 'strong' passwords are usually too hard to remember. I don't know what Windows allows, but I'm really sick of websites and Unix systems that are uptight about requiring 'strong' passwords, but won't let me pick any password longer than eight characters. A fifteen to twenty character alphabetic passphrase is WAY more secure than any eight character password, and can be much easier to remember. Enough with the bitching about strong passwords, guys. If you care about security, patch the system to allow long passwords.
Of course, rather than pay him a shit-load of money for the game, they are probably better off suing him and shutting down his business, and then offering him a tenth of a shit-load for whatever part of the rights to his code the courts don't give them. While his site was operational, he had no incentive to sell for a low price. If they shut it down, they can get a much better deal.
If you are in the U.S., give your local National Public Radio (NPR) station a try. They usually have a good mix of interesting commentary on social issues, the news, technology, etc. They also have some good science and technology shows, although perhaps not at the time of day when you are commuting. I know that you can play past shows via their website (www.npr.org). You may be able to download them as well.
If that's actually what they do, then I agree with you. I assumed that they merely linked to the source website, rather than serving up a copy from their own server. If that's what they are doing, then the AFP has every right to the damages they will get from their lawsuit. That doesn't mean it isn't a stupid move on AFP's part, of course.
That's true, but not all copying is a violation of copyright. 'Fair use' provides some rights to copy materials for personal use. I suspect that when you view a page on the internet, the 'copying' that is necessary for you to view the page would fall under fair use. Of course, in most cases you also implicitly have the copyright owner's permission to make these temporary copies for purposes of viewing the content. I'm not a lawyer, but that might be the case even if the website has a claim that you need written permission to copy, since the copyright owner clearly intended for you to be able to view the content without requesting permission in writing first.
I agree with you about it being in principle the end of the internet. The courts have really not yet gotten their heads around the concept of linking as a reference to a work, rather than the work itself. There have been a number of cases where the courts found someone liable for linking to material that was hosted elsewhere.
It's not clear to me, though that Google has actually done anything that infringes on AFP's copyright. It's not an infringement to make a reference to a copyrighted work, only to copy it.
I disagree. If google puts a tag on its page which loads an image from AFP's publicly accessible server they have neither reproduced nor distributed the content. They have simply provided a reference to AFP's image, which the consumer's browser loads and displays in the middle of google's page. Google has done nothing but point to a location where the image can be found. It is the consumer who has actually downloaded the image from AFP. If AFP doesn't like this, they need to adjust their server not to provide images to people who aren't viewing an AFP page, or take other technical measures to prevent google from indexing news on their site.
Interesting. I assumed they were just a variable resistor in series with the lamp. I'm familiar with triacs, but didn't think they were used in residential dimmers.
So, in either state (conducting/nonconducting), the dimmer that controls your light fixture is dissipating very little power, and not getting hot at all. This is easy to confirm. Take a light fixture that gets quite hot on full power, and attach it to a dimmer set nearly all the way down. If your theory was correct, the dimmer would get very very hot.
I have seen older residential dimmers that did get quite warm, and a higher-rated one that actually had a heatsink. This was part of what led to my theory that they were just potentiometers in series. I think you have overestimated how hot the dimmer would get, though, if it were a POT. The power dissipated in a POT in series with a lightbulb varies nonlinearly with the setting. If you turn the dimmer nearly all the way down, you wouldn't dissipate all the power that would normally go to the lamp.