Terrorism is a big and scary problem, no doubt, but that doesn't mean that DHS should ignore all it's other duties and just concentrate on that
In the alternate universe in which you apparently live, where patent enforcement has some connection to homelad security, that comment of yours makes a lot of sense. But here in the real world where the rest of us live, it doesn't make any sense.
a man has a penis, which is pretty much required for raping someone
Uhm, not to get too disgusting here with the details, but, that's blatantly false. There are other methods of sex, and rape is any sort of sex against your will - regardless of whether it's traditional missionary position or something else.
The reason for the problems in Windows security versus Unix security all pretty much come down to one thing:
Unix was designed from day 1 to be multi-user, so nobody ever got into the habit of running things where security doesn't matter, and no programs were ever written for it with the single-user mentality.
Windows had multi-user abilities crafted on well after it had been out long enough for 'bad habits' to form, both on the part of the users and the part of the programmers. And since Microsoft's attitude is that the ignorant person is always right (that's how you become popular), the OS never forced a clean break from those bad habits, and MS is trying to wean people off of those habits slowly. The problem is that (A) they are doing it too slowly, and (B) they don't seem to realize that they themselves are also victims of the same mentality and thier own software is just as bad as third-party software (worse in some ways, because it has more permission to screw up). This isn't just a user thing - it's also a programmer thing.
Isn't the ACL issue more of a filesystem issue than a kernel issue? (okay, the filesystem support is in the kernel, but not at a very deeply embedded level - that's why it's easy to plug in filesystems as modules). Yeah, it's a problem, but it's a problem that isn't all that hard to fix. Thus I suspect that the reason it's not fixed yet is that the demand just isn't very strong for it.
And since when does it have to "natively" support ACLs? In a layered design approach, putting something at too low of a level is just as bad as putting it too high. Consider: Unix is very good at running databases, even though it doesn't have any record-based filesystems natively supported. To hear the old VMS and IBM mainframe fans, record-based filesystems are neccessary to optimize data performance, and yet here's unix, where every file is just a dumb array of bytes, doing very well at serving databases. The reason is that you don't lose any signifigant performance by putting the record-izing of your secondary storage up at the shared library level instead of the OS level. Now, ACLs might be a good idea to support, but that support does not need to be native - it can be in a fairly high-level module, like the filesystem.
You can mod this comment down, but until the Linux community realizes that things like the horrible ACL system in the kernel needs an overhaul, the market will still choose Windows.
I don't mod people down just for being wrong, provided it seems like they genuinely believe their own claims. The market, as a whole, doesn't give a damn about ACL's. The Windows market consists primarily of home users, and that's why its numbers are so big. The reason for it's popularity in businesses is simply that using the same thing people are already familiar with at home is immensely appealing to a company.
I saw Windows beating out UNIX for key operations in companies even in the days of Windows 3.1, where you had to use a third-party tool just to even have the slightest brain-damaged TCP/IP capability in Windows at all, and there was no permissions at all, be they ACLs or Unix's "ugo flags", or anything else, becuase the filesystem was FAT. All of this while UNIX had a working X-windows system, already remotable, with multiple desktop paging ability, full internet connectivity, multi-user, yadda, yadda, yadda. I don't believe for a moment that Windows was winning on features, since it was starting to win even when it was just DOS with a gui on top. It was winning because it was in use in people's homes, and businesses wanted to harness that familiarity in their offices.
But as the Yankee Group commented in an independent, non-sponsored global study of 1,000 IT administrators and executives, Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO Comparison, things aren't always as they seem: "All of the major Linux vendors and distributors (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell [SUSE and Ximian] and Red Hat) have begun charging hefty premiums for must-have items such as technical service and support, product warranties and licensing indemnification."
Obviously they are talking about SCO's false claims there. Fucking opportunistic bastards! Regardless of whether or not the conspiracy theory is true, that MS prompted SCO's frivolous lawsuit to discredit Linux, the fact of the matter is that they are trying to make use of it in their PR. Whether it was planned from the start or not, either way that is now part of their strategy now, the deceptive bastards.
Call this a troll if you will, but I don't apologise for being honest.
Mr Wizard is broken
on
Verified Voting
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They had a nice wizard at www.verifiedvoting.org (one of the sites mentioned in the article) that would help tell you what voting technologies exist in your precinct, and what alternatives exist if you want a paper receipt of your vote. (In some places, absentee ballot by snail-mail is the only alternative to trusting Diebold, in other places there are more alternatives.) But, possibly because of the slashdot link, all the wizard tells me now is that it can't connect to the mySQL database.
Then we're even. You're not arguing mine. Go up and re-read the thread to this point. I *already* had stated, even before you brought this up, that the way the problem is probably being solved is that IE is denying valid HTML that it knows it couldn't handle anyway - just like you're saying here. This is no different than, say, writing an interpreter for Perl code that knows the target machine archetecture can't have more than 64 Mb of memory, or can't stay running more than 1 hour at a time, and uses that knowlege to cut off Perl code that would otherwise have been 100% finite and might have completed if the archetecture was big enough to handle it.
The way the halting problem is being solved is by having the interpreter make use of the limits of the environment. It's the limits of the environment that break the problem moreso than the limits of the language.
We both agree that the limitations make it not a truly Turing-complete situation. But you're saying it's because of the HTML language not being Turing-complete, while I'm saying it's because the environment isn't an actual turing machine, in that it isn't infinitely capable, and the interpreter is what is using that to cut off the problem, NOT the language itself.
Actually, the article says that one of the great things about this find is that they might be able to obtain DNA material. The bodies are not completely fossilized (replaced with rock material), so there seems to be some organic matter to draw samples from.
So they might just have that DNA to find answer for sure, in enough time.
The article mentioned other differences too besides just size, such as skull shape, and the proportional ratio of limb lengths (longer arms and legs than would look "human" to us.)
However, with HTML, you can just render the slice that's visible to the user
Yes, but you must still calculate it out some aspects of what it would look like even when you don't render it - for justification purposes. Consider if elsewhere on the page there is some center-justified text - you still need to calculate how wide the table is to determine where that other text gets rendered. Also consider the request for a 10,000,000 column table that is width='100%' - it is shrunk down to whatever the window width is - attempting to render it would result in a solid black bar since the screen pixels aren't dense enough - what would the correct solution be? The correct solution would be to heuristcly guess that the table is unrenderable, and not attempt to do what was requested exactly as requested (either by not honoring the request to make it 10,000,000 columns, or not honoring the request to make it width=100%.)
In theory, yes. But in practice, where computers do not have infinite memory or infinite time to finish a job like a theoretical Turing machine does, there is often no relevant difference between "this loop is guaranteed to end after 10 billion iterations" versus "this loop is infinite". HTML does have guaranteed endpoints to its "loops" such as they are (i.e. "please make me a table with 10,000,000 columns" essentially results in a loop even though it isn't expressed that way), but there is no rule for what the max cap should be. A renderer that actually tried to make a 10,000,000 column table would crash for lack of memory or time, even though it is in THEORY, a finite task that it is being asked to accomplish.
So who's the jerk who's going around modding down all my on-topic posts as off-topic? If you don't agree with what I say, that is insufficient reason to mod me down. My response was on-topic to the person I was replying. If you are enacting a policy of modding all religious posts as off-topic, then you should only mod-down the one who brought it up first, not the ones who replied. Once something has been raised, it becomes a legitimate topic for reply.
So, someone claims you'd have to be a dumbass to check e-mail on a public access machine, I explain a case where that isn't true, and some moron comes along and claims that my reply is off-topic???
If you are moderating down posts that are on-topic, but you disagree with, as being offtopic, then you are abusing the system.
In what alternate universe could my post above, with comments about the questions asked on the survey, in reply to an article about that survey, possibly be "off topic"??? I am completely baffled by that moderation.
Here's some survey questions that might have actually meant something for this survey:
- You asked if dorm rooms are networked and if there is a wireless network, but what is the bandwith of said connections?
- What is the bandwith of the pipes leading to the rest of the internet from the campus (i.e. Campuses on internet2 should get some kudos on this survey.)
- What is the average disk space provided for student accounts?
- What is the bandwith/download limit on student accounts hosted by the server? (It is not enough to just ask if each student can have a web page, if they are all extremely limited.)
- Is there a standardized setup (hardware or OS) everyone must have (if Yes, this is a mark AGAINST. Intelligent Campus IT departments can and should be able to handle the heterogenious network that best serves the students.)
- What percentage of the 1024 well-known service port numbers are firewalled off and thus impossible to use from student's connections? (A campus that has cable laid everywhere, but only allows web clients and nothing else is less connected than one that will let you get at the full range of services the internet provides.)
From the questions you see above, you can probably guess that when it comes to being more "connected", I am of the opinion that less policing equals more connected. The locked-down abilities should be the minimum that basic security will allow.
And if people running big servers from their dorm rooms is a concern, that should only be policed by tracking bandwith usage and responding when it is abused, NOT by just automatically making a particular protocol verbotten regardless of how much traffic a student is generating with it.
Several of the criteria they used in their questionaire had nothing to do with how "connected" the campus is. It is a typical case of "get statistics on phenomenon X, but then report it as if it was phenomenon Y and hope nobody notices the switch."
Here's some examples:
Does tuition include a computer?
Can students get discounted computers?
Are students required to own a computer?
Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school?
Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies?
Now, those are interesting questions, and perhaps useful ones, but they have absolutely nothing to do with how "connected" a campus is, and including them in with the others polluted the results.
There are cases where there is measurable objective data that proves the person really is feeling better (so it's not just faulty self-reporting), and yet the psychological link is not as obvious as it is for blood pressure. For example, lower fever temperatures.
Perhaps my view is being colored by the fact that at work I'm always looking at this from the web server side of the picture. Other than comparing the User-Agent string against a list of known published browsers (an error-prone check at best), from the server's perspective there isn't any detectable difference between a GUI tool that lets users click on things and a dumb telnet session. From where I sit they both fufill the same role - they are the browser I talk to. So, as two your two questions in bold - yes they are browsers too.
And even if you aren't arrested, once you're down to your skin you can't go any further without making a bloody mess, whereas there is no limit to how warmly you can dress.
It could also be a difference in air pressure. That can cause headaches in buildings just as easily as in airplanes. Was there a big wind trying to equalize the pressure whenever you opened the outside doors?
It's not entirely unlike the placebo effect, although I'd stop short of equating the two.
One way in which it differs is that the Hawthorne effect is somewhat more conscious. Workers know that working faster will lead to increased productivity. They consciously can change the outcome. A patient getting a placebo effect doesn't know what "muscles" he's flexing, or which attitudes he's affecting that are causing his healing to speed up.
So in other words:
Hawthorne effect: The subject knows he's being tested, and knows how to change the outcome, and so he changes it.
Placebo effect: The subject knows he's being tested, but he doesn't know how to change the outcome, but manages to change it subconsiously anyway.
The Placebo effect is somewhat more "mysterious". I'd like to see some people study it to learn the mechanism behind it. There's got to be something interesting going on there.
ANY religous practice handed down from generations ago teaches peace, compassion and civility, manners, morals and ethics toward fellow citizen
Your error is in attributing this to religion. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the human tendancy to form communities. Religion does not shape human nature. Human nature shapes religion. A culture's religion tends to express the moral outlook of that culture, whatever it may be. Religions can be just as divisive and nasty as any other movement. It's just that the ones that are like that tend not to survive as long, because the ones that teach community-building tend to result in strong groups that can withstand attack.
I do agree that purging religion would be an attrocity, but not because religion itself has any worth to it. The forceful purging of any type of thought would be an attrocity because the methods necessary to do so would be, as you say, akin to Stalinist purges.
Some public kiosk systems do a better job on privacy than others. I have personally verified that the internet access stations on the local campus (Sun-based, not MS Windows-based) do in fact clear the cache and the history when you log out and let them restart. (Verified by unplugging the network cable and hitting the same site a second time - works if both visits occur within one login, but fails if you log out between.) Also the URL display history is wiped, and the HTML form data history is wiped. (Can't see the answers someone else typed into an HTML form.) Additionally, the cookies are wiped too. It does a pretty good job all around.
The problem? It uses a motif-style window manager and most people don't understand how to close the browser window. (There is no single-click way to do it - you have to pick 'close' from the titlebar menu.) People keep hitting the icon minimize button and thinking that's good enough, and thus walk away from the machine with their previous session still there as an icon you can click on and restore. If you quit out of the browser, then it kills X and restarts, which is what you're supposed to do, and in the process it cleans the entire trail of your stuff.
I've noticed the IT staff has gone around and put up signs telling people that the safe way to "log out" and clear all their private information is to press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. Obviously they are getting people to ensure they close everything down by getting them to inelegantly kill X, but it does work and they don't have to explain what is really going on.
But you're forgetting the mentality of the average user.
1 - I didn't notice X before.
2 - I performed action Y.
3 - Now I notice X.
4 - Therefore Y must be the cause of X, regardless of what all those geeky pinhead types have to say about it. Don't they know the customer is always right?
The end result will be the google gets blamed for exposing what was there all along, an nobody is going to let facts get in the way of their own personal perceptions.
But telnet *IS* a web browser. And an FTP client. And a telnet client. And so on and so forth. It's just a very, very, BAD one. And yes, it does use links. It's just that the user's way of using them is considerably more complex than "click here", and involves a lot more manual intervention.
The catagorization of a program as a "web browser" simply because it uses "http" to transport files is wrong because it is too broad.
The canonical definition of a term should always be chosen to be the broadest definition of the term. If you want to narrow it down, add adjectives, or use another term that doesn't have as broad a possible definition. Otherwise people end up committing the fallacy of "painting with too wide a brush" when they speak because they observe something about a subset of the possible definitions of a word, and then vocalize it using the generic, wide definition of the word. For example, "Vehicles have wheels", or "Web browsers are interactive". Both of which are false statements because they don't apply universally, as implied.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorism is a big and scary problem, no doubt, but that doesn't mean that DHS should ignore all it's other duties and just concentrate on that
In the alternate universe in which you apparently live, where patent enforcement has some connection to homelad security, that comment of yours makes a lot of sense. But here in the real world where the rest of us live, it doesn't make any sense.
a man has a penis, which is pretty much required for raping someone
Uhm, not to get too disgusting here with the details, but, that's blatantly false. There are other methods of sex, and rape is any sort of sex against your will - regardless of whether it's traditional missionary position or something else.
The reason for the problems in Windows security versus Unix security all pretty much come down to one thing:
Unix was designed from day 1 to be multi-user, so nobody ever got into the habit of running things where security doesn't matter, and no programs were ever written for it with the single-user mentality.
Windows had multi-user abilities crafted on well after it had been out long enough for 'bad habits' to form, both on the part of the users and the part of the programmers. And since Microsoft's attitude is that the ignorant person is always right (that's how you become popular), the OS never forced a clean break from those bad habits, and MS is trying to wean people off of those habits slowly. The problem is that (A) they are doing it too slowly, and (B) they don't seem to realize that they themselves are also victims of the same mentality and thier own software is just as bad as third-party software (worse in some ways, because it has more permission to screw up). This isn't just a user thing - it's also a programmer thing.
Isn't the ACL issue more of a filesystem issue than a kernel issue? (okay, the filesystem support is in the kernel, but not at a very deeply embedded level - that's why it's easy to plug in filesystems as modules). Yeah, it's a problem, but it's a problem that isn't all that hard to fix. Thus I suspect that the reason it's not fixed yet is that the demand just isn't very strong for it.
And since when does it have to "natively" support ACLs? In a layered design approach, putting something at too low of a level is just as bad as putting it too high. Consider: Unix is very good at running databases, even though it doesn't have any record-based filesystems natively supported. To hear the old VMS and IBM mainframe fans, record-based filesystems are neccessary to optimize data performance, and yet here's unix, where every file is just a dumb array of bytes, doing very well at serving databases. The reason is that you don't lose any signifigant performance by putting the record-izing of your secondary storage up at the shared library level instead of the OS level. Now, ACLs might be a good idea to support, but that support does not need to be native - it can be in a fairly high-level module, like the filesystem.
You can mod this comment down, but until the Linux community realizes that things like the horrible ACL system in the kernel needs an overhaul, the market will still choose Windows.
I don't mod people down just for being wrong, provided it seems like they genuinely believe their own claims. The market, as a whole, doesn't give a damn about ACL's. The Windows market consists primarily of home users, and that's why its numbers are so big. The reason for it's popularity in businesses is simply that using the same thing people are already familiar with at home is immensely appealing to a company.
I saw Windows beating out UNIX for key operations in companies even in the days of Windows 3.1, where you had to use a third-party tool just to even have the slightest brain-damaged TCP/IP capability in Windows at all, and there was no permissions at all, be they ACLs or Unix's "ugo flags", or anything else, becuase the filesystem was FAT. All of this while UNIX had a working X-windows system, already remotable, with multiple desktop paging ability, full internet connectivity, multi-user, yadda, yadda, yadda. I don't believe for a moment that Windows was winning on features, since it was starting to win even when it was just DOS with a gui on top. It was winning because it was in use in people's homes, and businesses wanted to harness that familiarity in their offices.
But as the Yankee Group commented in an independent, non-sponsored global study of 1,000 IT administrators and executives, Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO Comparison, things aren't always as they seem: "All of the major Linux vendors and distributors (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell [SUSE and Ximian] and Red Hat) have begun charging hefty premiums for must-have items such as technical service and support, product warranties and licensing indemnification."
Obviously they are talking about SCO's false claims there. Fucking opportunistic bastards! Regardless of whether or not the conspiracy theory is true, that MS prompted SCO's frivolous lawsuit to discredit Linux, the fact of the matter is that they are trying to make use of it in their PR. Whether it was planned from the start or not, either way that is now part of their strategy now, the deceptive bastards.
Call this a troll if you will, but I don't apologise for being honest.
They had a nice wizard at www.verifiedvoting.org (one of the sites mentioned in the article) that would help tell you what voting technologies exist in your precinct, and what alternatives exist if you want a paper receipt of your vote. (In some places, absentee ballot by snail-mail is the only alternative to trusting Diebold, in other places there are more alternatives.) But, possibly because of the slashdot link, all the wizard tells me now is that it can't connect to the mySQL database.
You're not arguing my point here
Then we're even. You're not arguing mine. Go up and re-read the thread to this point. I *already* had stated, even before you brought this up, that the way the problem is probably being solved is that IE is denying valid HTML that it knows it couldn't handle anyway - just like you're saying here. This is no different than, say, writing an interpreter for Perl code that knows the target machine archetecture can't have more than 64 Mb of memory, or can't stay running more than 1 hour at a time, and uses that knowlege to cut off Perl code that would otherwise have been 100% finite and might have completed if the archetecture was big enough to handle it.
The way the halting problem is being solved is by having the interpreter make use of the limits of the environment. It's the limits of the environment that break the problem moreso than the limits of the language.
We both agree that the limitations make it not a truly Turing-complete situation. But you're saying it's because of the HTML language not being Turing-complete, while I'm saying it's because the environment isn't an actual turing machine, in that it isn't infinitely capable, and the interpreter is what is using that to cut off the problem, NOT the language itself.
Actually, the article says that one of the great things about this find is that they might be able to obtain DNA material. The bodies are not completely fossilized (replaced with rock material), so there seems to be some organic matter to draw samples from.
So they might just have that DNA to find answer for sure, in enough time.
The article mentioned other differences too besides just size, such as skull shape, and the proportional ratio of limb lengths (longer arms and legs than would look "human" to us.)
However, with HTML, you can just render the slice that's visible to the user
Yes, but you must still calculate it out some aspects of what it would look like even when you don't render it - for justification purposes. Consider if elsewhere on the page there is some center-justified text - you still need to calculate how wide the table is to determine where that other text gets rendered. Also consider the request for a 10,000,000 column table that is width='100%' - it is shrunk down to whatever the window width is - attempting to render it would result in a solid black bar since the screen pixels aren't dense enough - what would the correct solution be? The correct solution would be to heuristcly guess that the table is unrenderable, and not attempt to do what was requested exactly as requested (either by not honoring the request to make it 10,000,000 columns, or not honoring the request to make it width=100%.)
In theory, yes. But in practice, where computers do not have infinite memory or infinite time to finish a job like a theoretical Turing machine does, there is often no relevant difference between "this loop is guaranteed to end after 10 billion iterations" versus "this loop is infinite". HTML does have guaranteed endpoints to its "loops" such as they are (i.e. "please make me a table with 10,000,000 columns" essentially results in a loop even though it isn't expressed that way), but there is no rule for what the max cap should be. A renderer that actually tried to make a 10,000,000 column table would crash for lack of memory or time, even though it is in THEORY, a finite task that it is being asked to accomplish.
So who's the jerk who's going around modding down all my on-topic posts as off-topic? If you don't agree with what I say, that is insufficient reason to mod me down. My response was on-topic to the person I was replying. If you are enacting a policy of modding all religious posts as off-topic, then you should only mod-down the one who brought it up first, not the ones who replied. Once something has been raised, it becomes a legitimate topic for reply.
So, someone claims you'd have to be a dumbass to check e-mail on a public access machine, I explain a case where that isn't true, and some moron comes along and claims that my reply is off-topic???
If you are moderating down posts that are on-topic, but you disagree with, as being offtopic, then you are abusing the system.
In what alternate universe could my post above, with comments about the questions asked on the survey, in reply to an article about that survey, possibly be "off topic"??? I am completely baffled by that moderation.
Here's some survey questions that might have actually meant something for this survey:
- You asked if dorm rooms are networked and if there is a wireless network, but what is the bandwith of said connections?
- What is the bandwith of the pipes leading to the rest of the internet from the campus (i.e. Campuses on internet2 should get some kudos on this survey.)
- What is the average disk space provided for student accounts?
- What is the bandwith/download limit on student accounts hosted by the server? (It is not enough to just ask if each student can have a web page, if they are all extremely limited.)
- Is there a standardized setup (hardware or OS) everyone must have (if Yes, this is a mark AGAINST. Intelligent Campus IT departments can and should be able to handle the heterogenious network that best serves the students.)
- What percentage of the 1024 well-known service port numbers are firewalled off and thus impossible to use from student's connections? (A campus that has cable laid everywhere, but only allows web clients and nothing else is less connected than one that will let you get at the full range of services the internet provides.)
From the questions you see above, you can probably guess that when it comes to being more "connected", I am of the opinion that less policing equals more connected. The locked-down abilities should be the minimum that basic security will allow.
And if people running big servers from their dorm rooms is a concern, that should only be policed by tracking bandwith usage and responding when it is abused, NOT by just automatically making a particular protocol verbotten regardless of how much traffic a student is generating with it.
Several of the criteria they used in their questionaire had nothing to do with how "connected" the campus is. It is a typical case of "get statistics on phenomenon X, but then report it as if it was phenomenon Y and hope nobody notices the switch."
Here's some examples:
Does tuition include a computer?
Can students get discounted computers?
Are students required to own a computer?
Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school?
Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies?
Now, those are interesting questions, and perhaps useful ones, but they have absolutely nothing to do with how "connected" a campus is, and including them in with the others polluted the results.
There are cases where there is measurable objective data that proves the person really is feeling better (so it's not just faulty self-reporting), and yet the psychological link is not as obvious as it is for blood pressure. For example, lower fever temperatures.
Perhaps my view is being colored by the fact that at work I'm always looking at this from the web server side of the picture. Other than comparing the User-Agent string against a list of known published browsers (an error-prone check at best), from the server's perspective there isn't any detectable difference between a GUI tool that lets users click on things and a dumb telnet session. From where I sit they both fufill the same role - they are the browser I talk to. So, as two your two questions in bold - yes they are browsers too.
And even if you aren't arrested, once you're down to your skin you can't go any further without making a bloody mess, whereas there is no limit to how warmly you can dress.
It could also be a difference in air pressure. That can cause headaches in buildings just as easily as in airplanes. Was there a big wind trying to equalize the pressure whenever you opened the outside doors?
It's not entirely unlike the placebo effect, although I'd stop short of equating the two.
One way in which it differs is that the Hawthorne effect is somewhat more conscious. Workers know that working faster will lead to increased productivity. They consciously can change the outcome. A patient getting a placebo effect doesn't know what "muscles" he's flexing, or which attitudes he's affecting that are causing his healing to speed up.
So in other words:
Hawthorne effect: The subject knows he's being tested, and knows how to change the outcome, and so he changes it.
Placebo effect: The subject knows he's being tested, but he doesn't know how to change the outcome, but manages to change it subconsiously anyway.
The Placebo effect is somewhat more "mysterious". I'd like to see some people study it to learn the mechanism behind it. There's got to be something interesting going on there.
ANY religous practice handed down from generations ago teaches peace, compassion and civility, manners, morals and ethics toward fellow citizen
Your error is in attributing this to religion. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the human tendancy to form communities. Religion does not shape human nature. Human nature shapes religion. A culture's religion tends to express the moral outlook of that culture, whatever it may be. Religions can be just as divisive and nasty as any other movement. It's just that the ones that are like that tend not to survive as long, because the ones that teach community-building tend to result in strong groups that can withstand attack.
I do agree that purging religion would be an attrocity, but not because religion itself has any worth to it. The forceful purging of any type of thought would be an attrocity because the methods necessary to do so would be, as you say, akin to Stalinist purges.
Some public kiosk systems do a better job on privacy than others. I have personally verified that the internet access stations on the local campus (Sun-based, not MS Windows-based) do in fact clear the cache and the history when you log out and let them restart. (Verified by unplugging the network cable and hitting the same site a second time - works if both visits occur within one login, but fails if you log out between.) Also the URL display history is wiped, and the HTML form data history is wiped. (Can't see the answers someone else typed into an HTML form.) Additionally, the cookies are wiped too. It does a pretty good job all around.
The problem? It uses a motif-style window manager and most people don't understand how to close the browser window. (There is no single-click way to do it - you have to pick 'close' from the titlebar menu.) People keep hitting the icon minimize button and thinking that's good enough, and thus walk away from the machine with their previous session still there as an icon you can click on and restore. If you quit out of the browser, then it kills X and restarts, which is what you're supposed to do, and in the process it cleans the entire trail of your stuff.
I've noticed the IT staff has gone around and put up signs telling people that the safe way to "log out" and clear all their private information is to press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. Obviously they are getting people to ensure they close everything down by getting them to inelegantly kill X, but it does work and they don't have to explain what is really going on.
But you're forgetting the mentality of the average user.
1 - I didn't notice X before.
2 - I performed action Y.
3 - Now I notice X.
4 - Therefore Y must be the cause of X, regardless of what all those geeky pinhead types have to say about it. Don't they know the customer is always right?
The end result will be the google gets blamed for exposing what was there all along, an nobody is going to let facts get in the way of their own personal perceptions.
But telnet *IS* a web browser. And an FTP client. And a telnet client. And so on and so forth. It's just a very, very, BAD one. And yes, it does use links. It's just that the user's way of using them is considerably more complex than "click here", and involves a lot more manual intervention.
The catagorization of a program as a "web browser" simply because it uses "http" to transport files is wrong because it is too broad.
The canonical definition of a term should always be chosen to be the broadest definition of the term. If you want to narrow it down, add adjectives, or use another term that doesn't have as broad a possible definition. Otherwise people end up committing the fallacy of "painting with too wide a brush" when they speak because they observe something about a subset of the possible definitions of a word, and then vocalize it using the generic, wide definition of the word. For example, "Vehicles have wheels", or "Web browsers are interactive". Both of which are false statements because they don't apply universally, as implied.