Yes, there's an equivalent - it's LTTFP. But I don't *want* to listen to a fscking podcast, I want to read an article. There's also RTFPIWP - and the fscking podcast's index webpage says that it's a podcaster covering several topics and some music, and one of the topics is a talk with an IPv6 expert, and it doesn't say how long any of the segments are. He may be a real expert - I googled his name and he's taken reasonable positions in other discussions - but I do know lots of real IPv6 experts. I'd be happy to read his opinion, and I'd probably be happy in an interactive discussion with him, but listening to some undetermined amount of podcast blather to get to his segment isn't interesting.
Definitely - doing that forces you to limit the amount of actual text on your pages, so your Graphics Design Team has more room to put it in dancing animated Flash content to decorate it!
The article's an MP3, not text! Text Version?
on
IPv6 Readiness Report
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't want to listen to some podcaster ranting about some topic that they may or may not have a clueful opinion about. Is there a text version of that person's comments? Skimming text is not only important for deciding if the author is providing any new or useful information, it also gives you much better control over how much of your time you want to spend on the quality of information you're getting. http://www.intellectualicebergs.org/ indicates that there are two main topics and three other sections, and doesn't say how long the podcast is. I normally don't rant about Slashdot's choice of material, but this is a waste of time; I could probably do better by going to a random social event* around here and asking about IPv6 readiness.
(mid-90s silicon valley story - friend of mine was visiting a friend, the house phone rang, somebody answered it and gave some technical advice about windows. "Who was it?" "Just a wrong number, but it was an easy question.")
Over a decade ago, before all the non-techies had acquired email and when ISPs were still a novel thing, a friend of mine postulated that you should _never_ have your primary personal email contact be your employer, because if you lose that job you've just lost your social contacts and the contact information that potential employers might use to reach you (at least for the kinds of employers that techies want to work for.) He set up a server in his bedroom which he gave friends accounts on to subsidize his bandwidth addiction, and it's since grown into a respectable-sized ISP with several full-time employees.
Normal employment can change policies or downsize, but universities are an especially fickle environment - many of them have policies making it easy for students to have websites, and some of them have strong academic-freedom policies about your rights to posting content, but other universities change policies when they change bureaucrats, and some of them occasionally go full-blast wacko shutdown-and-expel-you no-due-process mode when somebody complains about H4CK3RZ or when some application suddenly sucks down 98% of the school's firewall bandwidth, or when the RIAA/MPAA hands them a complaint about EVIL FILE SHARING CRIMINALS, especially if the complaint gets handed to an organizationally incorrect person who doesn't get it (at some universities, that's the legal department, at others it's a random grunt in the computer management; it varies a lot.) It wouldn't happen at MIT, but it's standard operating procedure at many state universities, and I don't know about UT.
So if you're going to use a university server, make sure than not only is it ok under the official policies, but that you have automatically-updating backups to your off-campus home computer.
Ok, so the Aibo really only sold to really geeky people, and they don't see a marketing linkage between toys like that and selling mini-disks and DRM'd CDs etc. to larger numbers of less geeky people.
I used 5.25 inch floppies extensively as well, but they didn't fit on my shirt pocket, only my jacket pockets:-) I don't remember using 8-inch floppies on CPM, though I did occasionally use them on VAXes (somebody sent us data on one in the late 80s, and we decided we could risk putting it in the boot-floppy drive:-)
If you're *good* with 80-column cards, you can read them straight out of the punch, without the printing along the top. I was never quite that good, though I could read 7-bit ASCII paper tape reasonably well.
Ok, Jack Gold's put a slightly more useful spin on it by talking about accidentally lost data as opposed to deliberately stolen data, but it's still the same old hash with scaremongering about USBs.
Briefcases get lost all the time, and briefcases have been large enough to contain sensitive information for decades now. Keychains also get lost on occasion, and especially for small businesses that's often enough to get in the building at night or steal a company truck.
Yellow Sticky Notes with your IP address and VPN password fit in your pocket just fine, and DSL means that people can suck up your data even faster than when we used to use Yellow Sticky Notes to carry modem phone numbers and dialup passwords.
Documents that are actually important are usually 1-100 pages long. You can store them on mashed-up dead trees if you avoid spilling coffee on them. Them newfangled USB thingies hold a lot of data, but back when we carried 3.5" floppy disks 20 miles through the snow uphill both ways , Microsoft Office wasn't as bloated, so a zipfile of The Secret Plans still usually fit in your pocket. That's not the same as carrying out the whole blueprints for your next chip in your pocket, but mini-CDs do pretty well - they're certainly enough to carry the HR personnel database home.
DVDs and CDROMs fit pretty neatly into briefcases, and most newer PCs have at least a CD burner, so you can still carry the chip blueprints home.
Laptops are easy to carry, and go missing all the time. The San Francisco Police aren't very good at recovering them even when they've got them in their evidence room and the thief in custody; your mileage may vary:-) And unlike keyrings and regular briefcases, laptops have obvious resale value so they're more attractive to thieves.
RM-05 removable disk packs are a bit big to fit in your briefcase, but magtapes fit just fine, and before magtapes we had ASR-33 paper-tape, which works just fine for carrying the Numerical Control tape that tells the milling machine how to cut your submarine-propeller plans.
Mainframes with Greenscreen 3270s are much less portable, but back when I worked for The Big Phone Company they were worried about people carrying computer printouts home, and they checked our briefcases on the way out the door of buildings that handled sensitive information.
But yes, within the next couple of years, somebody's going to have a USB keyring/wristwatch/Walkperson/iPod/Pseudopod/somet hing get lost or stolen with sensitive information on it, and the press probably will fly off the handle telling us they told us so, and that we need to take precautions we've never taken before with laptops or CDROMs or whatever, and that's probably going to include silly bureaucrat tricks instead of getting major operating systems to have convenient encrypted file system support (and remember, "major operating systems" includes the OS's for portable music players and not just the computers they plug into.
Sure, there may be places where you can't create that sort of trust. So go find another country where the banking laws are more flexible, whether that's Switzerland or the Caymans or whatever. Better yet, find two or three, and put part of your money in each, in case one of your banks either fails, invest badly, gets nationalized, or rips you off. But if you've got heirs, make sure they get at least half your cash so they don't fight it.
Or you can go create a corporation to do some of your holdings for you, if you've got enough money - buy a large ranch and turn it into a nature reserve with a deal that you can get it back if you get revived.
"Though the exact mechanism of water molecule clusters remain a matter of scientific debate" and "electrolyzed wine is healthier because it doesn't oxidize easily", i.e. it's made-up bogus nonsense trying to sound scientific, and you can get your snake nice and oily with it, especially if you're wearing your pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat at the time. Probably electrolyzing the wine does make some changes that affect the flavor - so would cooking, or mixing in oxygen. It's not uncommon for wine to improve if you open the bottle and let it air out a bit - that lets some of the unpleasant gasses than might have accumulated escape, and lets a bit of air dissolve into the wine. While that's more noticeable on older wines than really young ones, that's still probably one of the main effects that his system is actually doing.
To the extent that Japanese Shochu is similar to Korean Soju, it usually needs all the help it can get:-) That's actually a bit unfair - soju is hooch made from whatever's available, which may be sweet potatoes or barley or millet, but some of it's quite drinkable, especially cold with spicy Korean food. It's typically about 25% alcohol.
But affecting vodka? Vodka's pretty much straight ethanol and water, and if there's any difference between fancy vodka and cheap vodka other than fancy bottles and marketing campaigns, it's that the fancy vodka has has been distilled and filtered a bit more so there's slightly less of the longer-chain alcohols left over or maybe the water that it's diluted with after distilling has slightly different impurities in it. That's much much different from the processes involved in aging wine, where all the complex materials are there and they chemically change over time, for example through oxidation. Maybe if the water in the vodka has a bit of salt in it the electrolysis will let out some of the chloride and just leave the sodium hydroxide flavor, but there's not likely to be much effect there.
So Beryllium Sphere doesn't get wine or wine-drinking. There are good $5 wines, there are old and dead $100 wines, there are ok $5 wines which will be really good if you stick them in the cellar for 5 years. Sure, some wine-drinkers are just snobs, but it's really mostly about taste. And then there's wine that you're drinking with food, vs. wine that you're drinking by itself. Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" (Charles Shaw) wines don't usually have a lot of complexity, but they're also the most recent year's vintage - keep it around a while - or just treat it as something to have with an average dinner when you might not have bothered getting out the better wine.
There's increasing use of cell-phone browsers, and there are business travellers who still use dialup if they're in hotels that don't have wireless or DSL, so if you're trying to support the cutting-edge road warrior market you'd better tolerate them. In particular, don't assume that because somebody's using IE, it must be ok to hand them a 5MB Flash interface just to navigate your site.
Non-support shouldn't mean rejection - if you're detecting what browser they have and it's not one of your favorites, you should still give them the option of continuing anyway (ideally with a low-graphics low-features version of your web page.) Sure, there are applications that are way too cool to run on Lynx or a 160x160 grayscale screen, but they're surprisingly few if you give it a bit of thought, and most of that thought goes to leaving off all the features that your graphics-designer people thought would look catchy, and doing the same hard work you should have done anyway in thinking about what the user wants to do, what they need to tell you, and what you need to tell them.
Hear, hear! Give the parent some extra Karma for that, because he's entirely correct. And make sure that if your code detects what browser the user is using, and doesn't like it, then it doesn't absolutely refuse to let them use it, but instead gives them some reasonable option like "I don't recognize your browser - want the low-graphics version of my site?". Not only are there people who aren't using IE version N+2, there are people whose browsers lie about what they're really using, people who use cell-phone browsers that don't have 1280x1024 screens, and the occasional blind people with readers.
For some applications, like consumer-oriented web stuff, maybe you still want to use the flashy browser features, but if you're building a business application or online banking or something, make sure it can be run in a very minimal portable browser, like Lynx, so that they can download it to low-end machines if they need to. And especially make sure that business applications can work adequately on dial-up - my employer's CRM/timecard/project-mgmt system is this appalling mess of Javascript/ActiveX/whatever that only marginally works when I'm in the office on a LAN, and if I'm in a hotel with no wireless and lousy wiring that limits me to 28kbps, the system is almost totally useless, and it's always faster to drive to Starbucks than to bother trying unless I'm totally desperate.
The video cards are already converting to MPEG-2 - if you want to squash that to MPEG-4, you don't _have_ to do it in realtime, you just have to have some spare disk space for scratch. You'll almost never be recording 11 shows at once except to be silly - if you can keep up with 2-3 simultaneous recordings, that's almost always enough for realtime, and if you've got too many, you can convert the rest later - or watch them unconverted, if you're in a hurry.
I definitely record more than 11 show episodes a week on Tivo, but that's counting some things I record daily, like The Daily Show, Leno, and Olberman's news show. And it would occasionally be useful to record two shows at once, or very rarely 3 shows if there's a good movie on. But mostly that's too much television.
Porting to Mac Darwin so they get the award?
on
Myware and Spyware
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· Score: 1
Darwin's going to take care of this business model fairly quickly, and the Invisible Hand Of The Market is going to give it the Invisible Finger.
AFAICT, this is basically offering to let you give the company your surfing information so that spammers can stalk you around the web and target you with coupons for Viagra and Wristwatches instead of untargeted ads. The article says they might sell the ads to mortgage companies - but I already own a home, and therefore the mortgage companies *already* spam me with phone calls and snail mail about refinancing because the home ownership is public record, and if I actually *do* want to refinance, I want to go look at a website that has decent rate comparison information, which is the type of place they already advertise, and I also get more real and fake credit card junk mail than I need. If I want consumer electronics or gamer stuff, I'll go to websites about that that already carry appropriate ads.
Google Ads already tracks more information about me than I want, and I need to remember to log off of Google Gmail now that the Google Search pages remind me that they know who I am if I forget.
John Doe's a valid name, and General Delivery at least used to be a valid address, though I don't know if the Post Office would still actually give me John Doe's mail without me showing ID. I don't mind them having my city's name, and the zipcode for the downtown post office is close enough for demographic use.
It's still a fair tradeoff for the grocery store - they get to learn whether running a sale on chicken means they should mark up the prices of barbeque sauce or beer or white wine or tortillas, and they give me my discount at the checkout counter, and if they do try to mail me coupons, I don't get them, but it's no big deal (especially since that's usually for a turkey at Thanksgiving, and they've probably noticed by now that this John Doe never buys meat...)
The search engine problem is really just Deep Linking all over again, plus a bit of ranting about prices of ads, and as you say, TFA's author really doesn't have a clue - if you think search engines are leaching value from your site, because of your site's business model, adapt your site to take advantage of the search engines instead of whining. (A classic Deep Linking issue was one Scottish newspaper wrapping its header and advertising frames around another newspaper's story without giving the other newspaper credit, and there's also the popular problem of linking to pictures or text without taking the reader to the login page.) robots.txt is a fairly crude approach, which was mainly useful for keeping early search engines from overwhelming your web server and making it easier to keep some content semi-private. But if you *want* to cooperate with the search engines, you can be a bit more sophisticated in how you respond to requests, so that the search engines can find things you want to find while letting you have some control over what the reader sees.
* HTTP-REFERER tells you what web page had the URL that pointed to your site. This lets you do things like pointing visitors from search engines to your front-door page while letting links from your own site access the content directly. So for instance your front door might have a registration link, or might have an index to the cool stuff on your site plus some ads and a "click here to get the page you wanted" link so that your advertisers get real click-through data instead of the readers always reading cached versions. Or maybe HTTP requests from Google and Yahoo get the version of your page with a frame of advertising, raw text, and a "See the version with the pictures here" pointer.
* CGI scripts are a very popular way to handle URLs, especially for news sites. You get a lot of control there over what the recipient gets, and can do different things for humans and robots.
The real problem I find with search engines isn't that they let readers see your content from the cache or the 2-line Google summary - it's that they create an ecosystem of other sites that aggregate information and display advertising without providing any real comment, so for instance if you want to find out technical information about a piece of consumer electronics or a type of medicine, most of the first N pages of Google results are sites that point to advertising for people who sell those things, rather than pointing to genuine content, and most of them use scummy Search Engine Optimizer tricks to rank them above the useful sites.
If I want to find information at Cisco.com, I usually use Google to find it, with site:cisco.com and whatever other terms I need, because it's usually more effective than using Cisco's own search or hierarchical indexes. In Cisco's case, they're not providing third-party advertising on their web site, though in some sense it's all advertising for Cisco's own hardware. For sites that don't want to get deep-linked by Google, it's easy to push everything with an HTTP-REFERER at Google through their front page.
If the Mozilla/Firefox team is actually paying attention to the privacy implications, they'd put in a menu UI for this similar to the ones used for cookies, popups, and images (Mozilla has this; I forget if Firefox does currently.)
One of the big lessons we learned from REFERER and Cookies is that it's easy to think about the privacy implications of a feature in isolation, but when you combine it with other features it's a lot more complex - e.g. DoubleClick works because you can combine the two features, so even though Website A's cookies don't get shared with Website B, DoubleClick can track cookies across sessions and use REFERER to track the sites that include its ad banners.
Hey, English is only one of the local languages here in the US. That's especially true at colleges, where there are a lot of foreign students and a lot of Gamerz.
And "Bad English" is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, including by Americans whose native tongue is ostensibly English as well as other people...
Ninjitsu may have originated in China, but ninja-looting appears to have originated on MMORPGs, mostly.... though it has antecedents in more conventional gaming and real life.
Hi, Vint - You probably won't see this, because TFA says you're taking "Slashdot-style" input on CircleID, not "input on Slashdot":-) I didn't actually see any way to rate comments or chain replies together, but CircleID is a smaller and better-behaved community so that may work.
That sort of geographical hierarchical relationship maps very neatly into subdomains, and there are already standards for structures like name.city.state.us. Almost nobody uses them, partly for historical reasons (policies were pretty confused or hostile for a while, and management responsibility was really confused, and nobody really knows how to find how to buy a domain name in an arbitrary US city), and partly for popularity reasons (.com was just cooler), and partly because geographically-specific names are really only useful for businesses that have only one location and don't move. What they mostly could work well for is restaurants - there's no particular reason that www.joesbar.com should get to be the only joesbar in the.com world, as opposed to using joesbar.chicago.il.us (or joesbar.lincolnpark.chi.il.us) which leaves room for joesbar.sanjose.ca.us and joesbar.bronx.ny.us. McDonalds is global enough that it really could use a.com, though mcdonalds.[anycity].[anystate].us could point you to a server that shows the nearest N McDonalds' restaurants to that city if they felt like it.
As far as your policy proposal goes, though, the different country code TLDs have radically different policies on locality and the mood of the ccTLD administrators, which aren't necessarily government-controlled
some countries rented their ccTLD names to the highest bidder, like.TV
some countries strictly limit the names to individuals or businesses that are geographically located there and subject to the government' jurisdictions
Some countries had well-run ccTLDs created by hobbyists or businesses back when the net was new and forced them to hand control over to incompetent monopoly telecom bureaucrats.
Some geographical regions aren't countries at all, like.AQ, but they're mostly administered by scientists so they work fine.
There have been other proposals for geographically-based addressing, with DNS hierarchies that correspond to lat/long locations. IMHO, the ones I've seen are mostly not ready for prime time, and it would be much better for them to start with a 2LD instead of a TLD while they experiment with their applications and usage models. While I disapprove of ICANN's $50K non-refundable fee for applying for a TLD, it does cut down on the riff-raff.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there's an equivalent - it's LTTFP. But I don't *want* to listen to a fscking podcast, I want to read an article. There's also RTFPIWP - and the fscking podcast's index webpage says that it's a podcaster covering several topics and some music, and one of the topics is a talk with an IPv6 expert, and it doesn't say how long any of the segments are. He may be a real expert - I googled his name and he's taken reasonable positions in other discussions - but I do know lots of real IPv6 experts. I'd be happy to read his opinion, and I'd probably be happy in an interactive discussion with him, but listening to some undetermined amount of podcast blather to get to his segment isn't interesting.
Definitely - doing that forces you to limit the amount of actual text on your pages, so your Graphics Design Team has more room to put it in dancing animated Flash content to decorate it!
(mid-90s silicon valley story - friend of mine was visiting a friend, the house phone rang, somebody answered it and gave some technical advice about windows. "Who was it?" "Just a wrong number, but it was an easy question.")
Normal employment can change policies or downsize, but universities are an especially fickle environment - many of them have policies making it easy for students to have websites, and some of them have strong academic-freedom policies about your rights to posting content, but other universities change policies when they change bureaucrats, and some of them occasionally go full-blast wacko shutdown-and-expel-you no-due-process mode when somebody complains about H4CK3RZ or when some application suddenly sucks down 98% of the school's firewall bandwidth, or when the RIAA/MPAA hands them a complaint about EVIL FILE SHARING CRIMINALS, especially if the complaint gets handed to an organizationally incorrect person who doesn't get it (at some universities, that's the legal department, at others it's a random grunt in the computer management; it varies a lot.) It wouldn't happen at MIT, but it's standard operating procedure at many state universities, and I don't know about UT.
So if you're going to use a university server, make sure than not only is it ok under the official policies, but that you have automatically-updating backups to your off-campus home computer.
Ok, so the Aibo really only sold to really geeky people, and they don't see a marketing linkage between toys like that and selling mini-disks and DRM'd CDs etc. to larger numbers of less geeky people.
If you're *good* with 80-column cards, you can read them straight out of the punch, without the printing along the top. I was never quite that good, though I could read 7-bit ASCII paper tape reasonably well.
Yup. And the actual first post was actually on topic and informative :-)
- Briefcases get lost all the time, and briefcases have been large enough to contain sensitive information for decades now. Keychains also get lost on occasion, and especially for small businesses that's often enough to get in the building at night or steal a company truck.
- Yellow Sticky Notes with your IP address and VPN password fit in your pocket just fine, and DSL means that people can suck up your data even faster than when we used to use Yellow Sticky Notes to carry modem phone numbers and dialup passwords.
- Documents that are actually important are usually 1-100 pages long. You can store them on mashed-up dead trees if you avoid spilling coffee on them. Them newfangled USB thingies hold a lot of data, but back when we carried 3.5" floppy disks 20 miles through the snow uphill both ways , Microsoft Office wasn't as bloated, so a zipfile of The Secret Plans still usually fit in your pocket. That's not the same as carrying out the whole blueprints for your next chip in your pocket, but mini-CDs do pretty well - they're certainly enough to carry the HR personnel database home.
- DVDs and CDROMs fit pretty neatly into briefcases, and most newer PCs have at least a CD burner, so you can still carry the chip blueprints home.
- Laptops are easy to carry, and go missing all the time. The San Francisco Police aren't very good at recovering them even when they've got them in their evidence room and the thief in custody; your mileage may vary
:-) And unlike keyrings and regular briefcases, laptops have obvious resale value so they're more attractive to thieves.
- RM-05 removable disk packs are a bit big to fit in your briefcase, but magtapes fit just fine, and before magtapes we had ASR-33 paper-tape, which works just fine for carrying the Numerical Control tape that tells the milling machine how to cut your submarine-propeller plans.
- Mainframes with Greenscreen 3270s are much less portable, but back when I worked for The Big Phone Company they were worried about people carrying computer printouts home, and they checked our briefcases on the way out the door of buildings that handled sensitive information.
But yes, within the next couple of years, somebody's going to have a USB keyring/wristwatch/Walkperson/iPod/Pseudopod/someSorry, haven't gotten First Post in ages, mod me Offtopic :-)
Or you can go create a corporation to do some of your holdings for you, if you've got enough money - buy a large ranch and turn it into a nature reserve with a deal that you can get it back if you get revived.
To the extent that Japanese Shochu is similar to Korean Soju, it usually needs all the help it can get :-) That's actually a bit unfair - soju is hooch made from whatever's available, which may be sweet potatoes or barley or millet, but some of it's quite drinkable, especially cold with spicy Korean food. It's typically about 25% alcohol.
But affecting vodka? Vodka's pretty much straight ethanol and water, and if there's any difference between fancy vodka and cheap vodka other than fancy bottles and marketing campaigns, it's that the fancy vodka has has been distilled and filtered a bit more so there's slightly less of the longer-chain alcohols left over or maybe the water that it's diluted with after distilling has slightly different impurities in it. That's much much different from the processes involved in aging wine, where all the complex materials are there and they chemically change over time, for example through oxidation. Maybe if the water in the vodka has a bit of salt in it the electrolysis will let out some of the chloride and just leave the sodium hydroxide flavor, but there's not likely to be much effect there.
So Beryllium Sphere doesn't get wine or wine-drinking. There are good $5 wines, there are old and dead $100 wines, there are ok $5 wines which will be really good if you stick them in the cellar for 5 years. Sure, some wine-drinkers are just snobs, but it's really mostly about taste. And then there's wine that you're drinking with food, vs. wine that you're drinking by itself. Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" (Charles Shaw) wines don't usually have a lot of complexity, but they're also the most recent year's vintage - keep it around a while - or just treat it as something to have with an average dinner when you might not have bothered getting out the better wine.
Non-support shouldn't mean rejection - if you're detecting what browser they have and it's not one of your favorites, you should still give them the option of continuing anyway (ideally with a low-graphics low-features version of your web page.) Sure, there are applications that are way too cool to run on Lynx or a 160x160 grayscale screen, but they're surprisingly few if you give it a bit of thought, and most of that thought goes to leaving off all the features that your graphics-designer people thought would look catchy, and doing the same hard work you should have done anyway in thinking about what the user wants to do, what they need to tell you, and what you need to tell them.
For some applications, like consumer-oriented web stuff, maybe you still want to use the flashy browser features, but if you're building a business application or online banking or something, make sure it can be run in a very minimal portable browser, like Lynx, so that they can download it to low-end machines if they need to. And especially make sure that business applications can work adequately on dial-up - my employer's CRM/timecard/project-mgmt system is this appalling mess of Javascript/ActiveX/whatever that only marginally works when I'm in the office on a LAN, and if I'm in a hotel with no wireless and lousy wiring that limits me to 28kbps, the system is almost totally useless, and it's always faster to drive to Starbucks than to bother trying unless I'm totally desperate.
The video cards are already converting to MPEG-2 - if you want to squash that to MPEG-4, you don't _have_ to do it in realtime, you just have to have some spare disk space for scratch. You'll almost never be recording 11 shows at once except to be silly - if you can keep up with 2-3 simultaneous recordings, that's almost always enough for realtime, and if you've got too many, you can convert the rest later - or watch them unconverted, if you're in a hurry.
I definitely record more than 11 show episodes a week on Tivo, but that's counting some things I record daily, like The Daily Show, Leno, and Olberman's news show. And it would occasionally be useful to record two shows at once, or very rarely 3 shows if there's a good movie on. But mostly that's too much television.
AFAICT, this is basically offering to let you give the company your surfing information so that spammers can stalk you around the web and target you with coupons for Viagra and Wristwatches instead of untargeted ads. The article says they might sell the ads to mortgage companies - but I already own a home, and therefore the mortgage companies *already* spam me with phone calls and snail mail about refinancing because the home ownership is public record, and if I actually *do* want to refinance, I want to go look at a website that has decent rate comparison information, which is the type of place they already advertise, and I also get more real and fake credit card junk mail than I need. If I want consumer electronics or gamer stuff, I'll go to websites about that that already carry appropriate ads.
Google Ads already tracks more information about me than I want, and I need to remember to log off of Google Gmail now that the Google Search pages remind me that they know who I am if I forget.
It's still a fair tradeoff for the grocery store - they get to learn whether running a sale on chicken means they should mark up the prices of barbeque sauce or beer or white wine or tortillas, and they give me my discount at the checkout counter, and if they do try to mail me coupons, I don't get them, but it's no big deal (especially since that's usually for a turkey at Thanksgiving, and they've probably noticed by now that this John Doe never buys meat...)
* HTTP-REFERER tells you what web page had the URL that pointed to your site. This lets you do things like pointing visitors from search engines to your front-door page while letting links from your own site access the content directly. So for instance your front door might have a registration link, or might have an index to the cool stuff on your site plus some ads and a "click here to get the page you wanted" link so that your advertisers get real click-through data instead of the readers always reading cached versions. Or maybe HTTP requests from Google and Yahoo get the version of your page with a frame of advertising, raw text, and a "See the version with the pictures here" pointer.
* CGI scripts are a very popular way to handle URLs, especially for news sites. You get a lot of control there over what the recipient gets, and can do different things for humans and robots.
The real problem I find with search engines isn't that they let readers see your content from the cache or the 2-line Google summary - it's that they create an ecosystem of other sites that aggregate information and display advertising without providing any real comment, so for instance if you want to find out technical information about a piece of consumer electronics or a type of medicine, most of the first N pages of Google results are sites that point to advertising for people who sell those things, rather than pointing to genuine content, and most of them use scummy Search Engine Optimizer tricks to rank them above the useful sites.
If I want to find information at Cisco.com, I usually use Google to find it, with site:cisco.com and whatever other terms I need, because it's usually more effective than using Cisco's own search or hierarchical indexes. In Cisco's case, they're not providing third-party advertising on their web site, though in some sense it's all advertising for Cisco's own hardware. For sites that don't want to get deep-linked by Google, it's easy to push everything with an HTTP-REFERER at Google through their front page.
One of the big lessons we learned from REFERER and Cookies is that it's easy to think about the privacy implications of a feature in isolation, but when you combine it with other features it's a lot more complex - e.g. DoubleClick works because you can combine the two features, so even though Website A's cookies don't get shared with Website B, DoubleClick can track cookies across sessions and use REFERER to track the sites that include its ad banners.
And "Bad English" is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, including by Americans whose native tongue is ostensibly English as well as other people...
Ninjitsu may have originated in China, but ninja-looting appears to have originated on MMORPGs, mostly.... though it has antecedents in more conventional gaming and real life.
Hi, Vint - You probably won't see this, because TFA says you're taking "Slashdot-style" input on CircleID, not "input on Slashdot" :-) I didn't actually see any way to rate comments or chain replies together, but CircleID is a smaller and better-behaved community so that may work.
As far as your policy proposal goes, though, the different country code TLDs have radically different policies on locality and the mood of the ccTLD administrators, which aren't necessarily government-controlled
There have been other proposals for geographically-based addressing, with DNS hierarchies that correspond to lat/long locations. IMHO, the ones I've seen are mostly not ready for prime time, and it would be much better for them to start with a 2LD instead of a TLD while they experiment with their applications and usage models. While I disapprove of ICANN's $50K non-refundable fee for applying for a TLD, it does cut down on the riff-raff.