I'm pretty sure this is a feature, not censorship.
Imagine being at work and searching for something like "white power cord" or something. Now, yes, you could go to Google Shopping to search for it, or turn off Instant if you're going to be searching for things like that, but most people won't, and do you really want your company seeing you search for "white power?"
As an example, I'm going to be raising some chickens in a while so I was looking up "how to test for salmonella." The instant search suggestion when I typed the "s" in "salmonella" was "STDs." I'd rather not be seen searching for *that* at work.
It just makes sense that Google would avoid doing things that'll trip up your company's web filters if you're searching for innocuous things that temporarily turn less innocuous due to Google's own features and default settings.
Correct. Use I2P (with I2PSnark) instead. The entire torrent stays on the mixnet. It works better because it doesn't rely on exit nodes, only relays, and more people are willing to run relays.
Idea/prediction markets are actually a hotbed of research, and there are several different theories about what could've happened with the terror attack thing. In any case, it was less about specific terror attacks and more about stability indexes for different parts of the world, etc.
By the way, there's awesome open source software under active development for running your own prediction markets and experiments with prediction markets.
And while I'm at it, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES go with aventurehost.com. Seriously shitty service, and they renege on what they promise their customers. A few years ago I paid them $200 for a "lifetime" hosting account that I barely used, mainly for DNS and mail and some dev work. As of the beginning of this year, everyone who had such an account was essentially SoL and they were charging $40/year (IIRC) to continue the subscription on the accounts. I told them in no uncertain terms I wouldn't be renewing, and they still kept sending me invoices trying to get me to stay with them. They're idiots when it comes to system maintenance, too, because after every "upgrade" or "migration" they do, they expect you to put in a ticket to get your account restored. Only reason I stayed with them as long as I did was that it was essentially free after I paid for the initial "lifetime" account.
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
A device's MAC address is ostensibly globally unique... until we start running out of 48-bit MAC addresses, anyway. There's a registry for NIC manufacturers and each manufacturer has one or more 24-bit ranges, at least as I understand it.
The way IPv6 addressing works is that usually the last 64 bits of the address are actually a "stretched" version of the MAC address of the device. See here for a good explanation.
The problem with having a permanent global IP for a device is that routing becomes impossible. You need hierarchical organization of IPs based on location, otherwise your routing tables are made up of untold numbers of/128s (or billions of/32s in the case of IPv4 addresses).
Are you serious? If they limited themselves to non-routable addresses, they'd have a single/8, a single/12 and a single/24. Not to mention that after those ranges become routable, they're no longer usable inside organizations that need to have more machines than their allotted number of routable IPv4 addresses.
GE's use of their 3.0.0.0/8 is exactly the same way. All their devices have public IP addresses, and they're all NATed at the firewall anyway - even for some internal communication. The NAT doesn't cause too many problems at most of the sites I've worked with (except one, getting that firewall migrated was a bitch and a half) but it's a huge waste of IP space.
Same goes for many of the customers of my former employer with full/16 blocks, too. Absolutely no reason for most companies to have that much if you're trying to conserve IPv4 address space.
That said, NAT is heinous and horrible for the end user. Peer-to-peer technologies suck when more than one device on the user's network attempts to use them at the same time (and I'm not just talking about BitTorrent, I'm talking about mixnets like Tor and I2P). I look forward to the day when I can have at least my own/64 if not my own/48 without having to tunnel it. Or several/64s - at least one for home and one for my phone and portable devices tethered thereto.
As above, my car's radio antenna is embedded into my windshield glass.
As for talking on a cell phone while carpooling, I carpool for lunch with coworkers and sometimes one of us (one of the non-drivers, usually) does need to take a call from work and the rest of us understand as we all work in the same place.
What's funny is Sprint phones can and do roam on Verizon. Since I switched to Sprint (from AT&T), I've been able to surf the web on my phone on the DC metro by roaming on Verizon towers - for free. (Of course, now GSM towers for AT&T/T-Mobile are going up in the DC metro too.)
I like how at first the OP mentions that the Droid has the same hardware as the Pre and later in the post says that users aren't impressed with the Pre's hardware.
Also, the Samsung Moment coming out in 2 weeks for Sprint has an 800MHz ARM-based CPU, where the one powering the Droid is apparently only 600MHz (I'm assuming that since the design is similar, the clock speed is a valid way to compare the performance of the CPUs; could be wrong on this).
As far as running Android 2.0, anyone with an Android phone can upgrade to that. That's one of the great things about Android in the first place.
In the end, though, I wish Motorola and Verizon good fortune launching this phone, because anything that increases Android (or Linux in general - Maemo is nice) adoption on consumer phones is cool with me. IMO Apple is so control freakish that they are firmly in "evil" territory, much more so than Microsoft.
I had to read The Lottery in English class in HS because the author graduated from my high school. It's kinda cool still seeing references to it, even in popular literature.
Oh, and for classic fantasy you can't do much better than pre-monotheistic mythology. Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey... all those fun gods and creatures that form the basis of modern fantasy. Don't forget the Celts and the Norse and the Slavs (Orson Scott Card wrote a book based on Slavic mythology!), and also don't forget African and Asian and pre-European-dominance Australian and American cultures as sources of myths that to this day color horror and fantasy.
I'd add some H. G. Wells and John W. Campbell - classics before Asimov (although Campbell's personal views are somewhat controversial now). And of course Asimov was mentioned by some people above me already.
Also, there are genres that fall within sci-fi and fantasy, like alternate history. Some good sources for short stories, too, are the Asimov's, Analog and SF&F literary magazines, and also short story digests published on a regular basis that include some big names writing short stories for the more literary public.
They're still pretty far from being able to do this at a scale practical for breaking RSA......but when scientists have reached the scale for breaking RSA, are there quantum algorithms that would work for breaking ECC? What about D-H? Are there any public key schemes that will still work when quantum computing is available?
It doesn't really matter to me whether it'll only ever be practical for labs to break - the government can afford that kind of muscle. If it's physically possible, they'll be able to do it. I'm working (very slowly) on an implementation of Chaumian anonymous crypto-cash, and in that application, all a government would need to do is break one key and an entire currency would go kaput. I need to include support for future-proof public key crypto algorithms as early as possible.
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The abstract says that saccharin was tested. That's a very easy to get substance.
Some people don't like having their porn search history attached to their account.
I'm pretty sure this is a feature, not censorship.
Imagine being at work and searching for something like "white power cord" or something. Now, yes, you could go to Google Shopping to search for it, or turn off Instant if you're going to be searching for things like that, but most people won't, and do you really want your company seeing you search for "white power?"
As an example, I'm going to be raising some chickens in a while so I was looking up "how to test for salmonella." The instant search suggestion when I typed the "s" in "salmonella" was "STDs." I'd rather not be seen searching for *that* at work.
It just makes sense that Google would avoid doing things that'll trip up your company's web filters if you're searching for innocuous things that temporarily turn less innocuous due to Google's own features and default settings.
Need to find Osama bin Laden? There's an app for that.
Correct. Use I2P (with I2PSnark) instead. The entire torrent stays on the mixnet. It works better because it doesn't rely on exit nodes, only relays, and more people are willing to run relays.
Maybe you typed "Fnord" instead? :)
I do not think this [phrase] means what you think it means.
Idea/prediction markets are actually a hotbed of research, and there are several different theories about what could've happened with the terror attack thing. In any case, it was less about specific terror attacks and more about stability indexes for different parts of the world, etc.
By the way, there's awesome open source software under active development for running your own prediction markets and experiments with prediction markets.
Man, Tech.coop looks awesome. Thanks for the suggestion, I might join it shortly!
And while I'm at it, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES go with aventurehost.com. Seriously shitty service, and they renege on what they promise their customers. A few years ago I paid them $200 for a "lifetime" hosting account that I barely used, mainly for DNS and mail and some dev work. As of the beginning of this year, everyone who had such an account was essentially SoL and they were charging $40/year (IIRC) to continue the subscription on the accounts. I told them in no uncertain terms I wouldn't be renewing, and they still kept sending me invoices trying to get me to stay with them. They're idiots when it comes to system maintenance, too, because after every "upgrade" or "migration" they do, they expect you to put in a ticket to get your account restored. Only reason I stayed with them as long as I did was that it was essentially free after I paid for the initial "lifetime" account.
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
A device's MAC address is ostensibly globally unique... until we start running out of 48-bit MAC addresses, anyway. There's a registry for NIC manufacturers and each manufacturer has one or more 24-bit ranges, at least as I understand it.
The way IPv6 addressing works is that usually the last 64 bits of the address are actually a "stretched" version of the MAC address of the device. See here for a good explanation.
The problem with having a permanent global IP for a device is that routing becomes impossible. You need hierarchical organization of IPs based on location, otherwise your routing tables are made up of untold numbers of /128s (or billions of /32s in the case of IPv4 addresses).
Are you serious? If they limited themselves to non-routable addresses, they'd have a single /8, a single /12 and a single /24. Not to mention that after those ranges become routable, they're no longer usable inside organizations that need to have more machines than their allotted number of routable IPv4 addresses.
GE's use of their 3.0.0.0/8 is exactly the same way. All their devices have public IP addresses, and they're all NATed at the firewall anyway - even for some internal communication. The NAT doesn't cause too many problems at most of the sites I've worked with (except one, getting that firewall migrated was a bitch and a half) but it's a huge waste of IP space.
Same goes for many of the customers of my former employer with full /16 blocks, too. Absolutely no reason for most companies to have that much if you're trying to conserve IPv4 address space.
That said, NAT is heinous and horrible for the end user. Peer-to-peer technologies suck when more than one device on the user's network attempts to use them at the same time (and I'm not just talking about BitTorrent, I'm talking about mixnets like Tor and I2P). I look forward to the day when I can have at least my own /64 if not my own /48 without having to tunnel it. Or several /64s - at least one for home and one for my phone and portable devices tethered thereto.
As above, my car's radio antenna is embedded into my windshield glass.
As for talking on a cell phone while carpooling, I carpool for lunch with coworkers and sometimes one of us (one of the non-drivers, usually) does need to take a call from work and the rest of us understand as we all work in the same place.
What Spectre says above. My Toyota Avalon has an antenna embedded in the windshield glass.
Passengers can also use cell phones, you know. Some people carpool. Also, I don't know about you, but I like to listen to the radio while driving.
What's funny is Sprint phones can and do roam on Verizon. Since I switched to Sprint (from AT&T), I've been able to surf the web on my phone on the DC metro by roaming on Verizon towers - for free. (Of course, now GSM towers for AT&T/T-Mobile are going up in the DC metro too.)
I like how at first the OP mentions that the Droid has the same hardware as the Pre and later in the post says that users aren't impressed with the Pre's hardware.
Also, the Samsung Moment coming out in 2 weeks for Sprint has an 800MHz ARM-based CPU, where the one powering the Droid is apparently only 600MHz (I'm assuming that since the design is similar, the clock speed is a valid way to compare the performance of the CPUs; could be wrong on this).
As far as running Android 2.0, anyone with an Android phone can upgrade to that. That's one of the great things about Android in the first place.
In the end, though, I wish Motorola and Verizon good fortune launching this phone, because anything that increases Android (or Linux in general - Maemo is nice) adoption on consumer phones is cool with me. IMO Apple is so control freakish that they are firmly in "evil" territory, much more so than Microsoft.
I had to read The Lottery in English class in HS because the author graduated from my high school. It's kinda cool still seeing references to it, even in popular literature.
Oh, and for classic fantasy you can't do much better than pre-monotheistic mythology. Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey... all those fun gods and creatures that form the basis of modern fantasy. Don't forget the Celts and the Norse and the Slavs (Orson Scott Card wrote a book based on Slavic mythology!), and also don't forget African and Asian and pre-European-dominance Australian and American cultures as sources of myths that to this day color horror and fantasy.
I'd add some H. G. Wells and John W. Campbell - classics before Asimov (although Campbell's personal views are somewhat controversial now). And of course Asimov was mentioned by some people above me already.
Also, there are genres that fall within sci-fi and fantasy, like alternate history. Some good sources for short stories, too, are the Asimov's, Analog and SF&F literary magazines, and also short story digests published on a regular basis that include some big names writing short stories for the more literary public.
How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.
Sweet, thanks for the awesome pointers. You've given me a whole lot of stuff to look over as a research starting point.
They're still pretty far from being able to do this at a scale practical for breaking RSA... ...but when scientists have reached the scale for breaking RSA, are there quantum algorithms that would work for breaking ECC? What about D-H? Are there any public key schemes that will still work when quantum computing is available?
It doesn't really matter to me whether it'll only ever be practical for labs to break - the government can afford that kind of muscle. If it's physically possible, they'll be able to do it. I'm working (very slowly) on an implementation of Chaumian anonymous crypto-cash, and in that application, all a government would need to do is break one key and an entire currency would go kaput. I need to include support for future-proof public key crypto algorithms as early as possible.
RTFS. It's a design patent, not a software (utility) patent.