Digital media, however offers the added difficulty or requiring a compatible system to unencode the data just to be able to view it. At the rate standards are changing it is very likely that players capable of rendering the contents of digital media will not be available even before the medium becomes inaccessible (with excellent care). An analog copy of all important digital info should always be kept somewhere.
Doesn't sound like a good software equivalent. After reading the EULA, you will notice that the correct analogy is more on the lines of:
One is free and has no warranty whatsoever. The other one costs you some good money and has no warranty whatsoever. The Free one, is at least serviceable by your neighbourhood repair shop (or any more reliable, or affordable one depending on your inclinations) because all specs are available, and everyone has the right to manufacture replacement parts. The expesive one can only be repaired or replacement parts provided by the original manufacturer, at their conditions and a price of their choosing.
OK, but we kind of already know which UniCode characters look like the ASCII characters. Which means that whenever those characters (and only those) are used that's when spoofing is likely. If the UniCode characters represent non-ASCII characters, there is no more risk of spoofing than with punychode itself, since www.thisissomeurl.com can look similar to www.thisissomeur1.com and be used for phishing anyways wether we use punycode or not. Some amount of phishing will always take place because in a long url, the brain will tend to assume what the next letter is.
Unfortunately, this kind of farce is the one thing that may erode some of the support for patents by certain companies. Obviously if patents are perceived as a dangerous weapon that can "turn you your hands", then some deep pockets may have less incentive to push it down our throats by buying politicians. So, the "live by the sword" addage may have its use after all, not in making us feel "avenged" but in making the dangers of the system real to the ones who want to use it.
The irony is: I have seen the pirated copies of XP people carry around. They are usually cracked so people don't have to activate them. Seems to me that they are ensuring that the only copies of Windows attractive to customers are the pirated ones.
On a side note, the other day, somebody was implying that I was cheap because I only used "Free" software . As just asked them how many legal copies of software they had... that shut them up.
You know, what would be really great, some kind of grand open source project in this area... a joint venture of geeks to make the tools to facilitate computer side production, computer artists to work on all those models and special effects using those tools, and the on stage artists providing their acting talent. If you add some writers to create original content, you might end up producing a very creative community.
It may not so much: "Is Linux ready for the desktop" but "Is open source ready to go beyond software." I'm really excited about the potential.
In any event, creating a special project, a repository of tools for creating movies, and a repository of models and special effects would be great.
I think a better approach to this issue would be an "intelligent" punycode display. For instance, if any ASCII character is respresented using IDN characters then AND ONLY THEN should punycode be used.
As I understand it, there is only one IDN representation of non ASCII characters, if the only characters using IDN are non ASCII, then the address cannot be spoofed. However if an ASCII character is being represented using IDN representation, then spoofing is likely taking place, switch to punycode. This would preserve the ease of use for end users (punycode url are incomprehensible however much more comprehensible than other things they may be) without affecting the security since unnecessary use of IDN codes would trigger the "fishy" flag.
What do you think? Does this approach make sense. If so what is the best way to transmit this view to Firefox developpers?
Of course, I could be out to lunch on this one too, since I don't know in detail how the IDN thing works.
Even if the software is 100% accurate, students who use it rather than work on assignments are more likely to fail exams. The trick is to give appropriately low value to assignments (you can compensate by having very frequent little quizzes). The assignments should always be regarded as learning opportunities. They should have little weight gradewise so that one feels free to try one's abilities. Those who don't try prove it in quizzes and exams.
True. Text Ads don't annoy me but popups and banners do. Incidentally, while I have been getting some popups in Konqueror I haven't gotten any on Firefox. I think that Adblock takes care of many of those nasties since I've been blocking all kinds of images and scripts from evil advertiser sites. I think the great genius of Google (however they may haver turned later) is to have understood that the non agressive ads are more likely to be tolerated. Animations are the worst. And what to say about those floaty frames that are not windows but are always in the way. They are the ones that made sure that Adblock is the first Extension I get.
You are forgetting one thing: we need to compress the hydrogen gas from atmospheric pressure to tank pressure. This is a 50% energy cost. Half your solar cells are generating hydrogen, and the other half are compressing it.
Sometimes the hydrogen does not need to be compressed, but can be produced on the fly. There are still energy costs involved in the production of the raw products, of course, so I don't know how that would factor in. But definitely using compressed hydrogen directly sounds unsafe on top of expensive.
You are also stuck with all the leakage problems which only get worse when you need high pressures. Maintenance costs of the feed system are sure to pile up also if past experience with potentially leaky systems serves me well.
I prefer to add Yahoo (and other more specialized search thingies) on the MyCroft search bar. It avoids the clutter that all those fancy toolbars add. I have a good dozen different search engines (including Yahoo) in Mycroft, and NO clutter whatsoever in my toolbars. Firefox is just amazing.
Yeah, sure. You guys are so paranoid, next you're going to be telling me that the flesh-reanimation technology I've been working on can be used for evil too.
Sure can. My wife just used your invention to bring back to life her dead mother. That is nothing but pure evil, believe you me.
I don't think the solution is in disabling IDN. While this is a solution as any other for english (or classical Latin) speaking surfers, it is not desirable for all others (a nuisance for some, and a roadblock for others).
The real long term solution, is changing DNS registrations so that IDN is the only way domain names are registered. If the only "character set" is IDN then there would not be 2 ways to type the same thing, and phishing would become impossible.
The way to fight this in the meantime, is to maybe have a little box before the rendered URL in the URL bar. This box would contain the full original string of the URL if there is enough room in the Addressbar to show both, or compress it to an optimum size, and showing, with context, the IDN string where it differs from the rendered string. Even when the whole string is not visible, just hovering the cursor over it should show the unrendered string.
I think I remember hearing somewhere that some think that the great Permian Extinction, the greatest extinction of all times, may have been triggered by great volcanism (the Siberian Traps) which might have raised the global temperature by about 5 degrees (centigrades)... which in turn whould have caused the release of Methane from the sea, which would have caused another 5 degrees increase in temperature (or so).
An 11K increase in temperatures is therefore nothing to sneeze at. Of course, that all depends on the base temperature you are starting from, but I still hope we (or our children) are not going to see anything near that kind of global temperature change.
I haven't RTFA, of course, but this topic in itself brings up very serious concerns about viruses getting a boost into jumping the species barrier. And even a benign virus can become extremely lethal to a new population that has never been exposed to it. Many deaths, and virus generations, are necessary before natural selection makes the new virus less lethal to its new host.
That is not the only negative effect of such a monopoly, although granted a major one. There is also very great disadvantage to the consumer.
The little local specialized store, will have a great diversity of products of a narrow field. That means you can get the odd-ball fitting, or gadget, or piece of cloth that is not in high demand. But since that's their business, they keep a little stock of the seldom requested items. Of course, their bread and butter is the run of the mill items, the ones that move quickly.
When as consumers we start buying these things exclusively from the big guys, the ones that sell a little bit of everything, and undercut the local business in their bread and butter items, we end up losing the source of the more specialized devices, for which we have to pay exhorbitant prices for special deliveries, if we find them at all. Those big surface stores only carry the big movers, they don't care about keeping a little stock of the seldom requested items.
You must be using extremely simple documents... basically plain text. My supervisor and his other grad students use different versions of Word (I'm not sure which one), but all the the figure positions, get screwed up, equations get put everywhere, and it's a general mess. I manage to maintain compatibily with both of those guys by not using Word but OpenOffice instead. It's actually this lack of compatibility between Word versions that got one of the other grad students to switch to OpenOffice, which was better at handling different versions of Word documents than Word itself.
Pretty soon they are going to claim that they don't make any money from cartridges that cost a few cents to produce ship and are then sold at 60$ with an obviously vanishingly small overhead. That kind of tiny overhead certainly can't stand the currency exchanges.
While the pictures are probably relatively accurate on the horizontal scale, the elevation is probably pure guesswork. Without radar, or stereoscopic shots, the only way to do this would be with photoclinometry, but then you need to know accurately the relative position of the light source and the camera's characteristics, position and orientation. The nature of the surface also affect the reading the interpretation using this method.
That being said, the amateur work does undoubtedly greatly enhance the scientists' work. They provide a rough early estimation so that we can all get our instant gratification, and in the meantime, the analysts can try to get the most accurate information possible to generate improved data.
It's not just the high tech companies who do it either. Today, I bought a jar of pickles. An it had a sticker saying how they were "Fat Free".
One of these days they'll sell us water bottles, with stickers saying how it is "fat free" "no choleterol" "No trans fats" "no carbs" and charging a premium for it.
In our leading edge geotechnical lab, we have 3 wonderful 486 running the amazing masked wonder that is 3.1. Does the job. Can't complain. Win95 would certainly not run on at least 2 of those, and the data acquisition cards won't work on any computer more recent. It's a no-brainer.
Maybe the reason they mention sweatshirt recharging devices is the following one: This thing is sensitive to infrared light... it's not only the sun that emits in infrared. We are ourselves walking infrared bulbs. So having a shirt coated with the stuff means we pick up whatever falls from heaven in the form of infrared, but we also gather what we emit ourselves. Of course we'll be able to gather the emitions (to a lesser degree probably) from other heat sources that surround us like cars etc.
Still the best cars for the environment are those they used in the Flintstones. Put a gallon of gasoline in those, and it'll stay there forever if it's in a well sealed jar:)
That plus the weight in stone you have to personally carry around will ensure that you will not abuse this mode of transportation, thus reduding the global energy comsumption (in the form of food) attributed to transportation. All in all, the perfect environmental solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital media, however offers the added difficulty or requiring a compatible system to unencode the data just to be able to view it. At the rate standards are changing it is very likely that players capable of rendering the contents of digital media will not be available even before the medium becomes inaccessible (with excellent care). An analog copy of all important digital info should always be kept somewhere.
Doesn't sound like a good software equivalent. After reading the EULA, you will notice that the correct analogy is more on the lines of:
One is free and has no warranty whatsoever. The other one costs you some good money and has no warranty whatsoever. The Free one, is at least serviceable by your neighbourhood repair shop (or any more reliable, or affordable one depending on your inclinations) because all specs are available, and everyone has the right to manufacture replacement parts. The expesive one can only be repaired or replacement parts provided by the original manufacturer, at their conditions and a price of their choosing.
Now, which truck do you buy?
OK, but we kind of already know which UniCode characters look like the ASCII characters. Which means that whenever those characters (and only those) are used that's when spoofing is likely. If the UniCode characters represent non-ASCII characters, there is no more risk of spoofing than with punychode itself, since www.thisissomeurl.com can look similar to www.thisissomeur1.com and be used for phishing anyways wether we use punycode or not. Some amount of phishing will always take place because in a long url, the brain will tend to assume what the next letter is.
Unfortunately, this kind of farce is the one thing that may erode some of the support for patents by certain companies. Obviously if patents are perceived as a dangerous weapon that can "turn you your hands", then some deep pockets may have less incentive to push it down our throats by buying politicians. So, the "live by the sword" addage may have its use after all, not in making us feel "avenged" but in making the dangers of the system real to the ones who want to use it.
Exactly. The discrete unobtrusive text ads somewhere (or little logos here and there) don't bug me. Adblock already takes care of nasty floaters.
The irony is: I have seen the pirated copies of XP people carry around. They are usually cracked so people don't have to activate them. Seems to me that they are ensuring that the only copies of Windows attractive to customers are the pirated ones.
On a side note, the other day, somebody was implying that I was cheap because I only used "Free" software . As just asked them how many legal copies of software they had... that shut them up.
You know, what would be really great, some kind of grand open source project in this area... a joint venture of geeks to make the tools to facilitate computer side production, computer artists to work on all those models and special effects using those tools, and the on stage artists providing their acting talent. If you add some writers to create original content, you might end up producing a very creative community.
It may not so much: "Is Linux ready for the desktop" but "Is open source ready to go beyond software." I'm really excited about the potential.
In any event, creating a special project, a repository of tools for creating movies, and a repository of models and special effects would be great.
I think a better approach to this issue would be an "intelligent" punycode display. For instance, if any ASCII character is respresented using IDN characters then AND ONLY THEN should punycode be used.
As I understand it, there is only one IDN representation of non ASCII characters, if the only characters using IDN are non ASCII, then the address cannot be spoofed. However if an ASCII character is being represented using IDN representation, then spoofing is likely taking place, switch to punycode. This would preserve the ease of use for end users (punycode url are incomprehensible however much more comprehensible than other things they may be) without affecting the security since unnecessary use of IDN codes would trigger the "fishy" flag.
What do you think? Does this approach make sense. If so what is the best way to transmit this view to Firefox developpers?
Of course, I could be out to lunch on this one too, since I don't know in detail how the IDN thing works.
Even if the software is 100% accurate, students who use it rather than work on assignments are more likely to fail exams. The trick is to give appropriately low value to assignments (you can compensate by having very frequent little quizzes). The assignments should always be regarded as learning opportunities. They should have little weight gradewise so that one feels free to try one's abilities. Those who don't try prove it in quizzes and exams.
True. Text Ads don't annoy me but popups and banners do. Incidentally, while I have been getting some popups in Konqueror I haven't gotten any on Firefox. I think that Adblock takes care of many of those nasties since I've been blocking all kinds of images and scripts from evil advertiser sites. I think the great genius of Google (however they may haver turned later) is to have understood that the non agressive ads are more likely to be tolerated. Animations are the worst. And what to say about those floaty frames that are not windows but are always in the way. They are the ones that made sure that Adblock is the first Extension I get.
I prefer to add Yahoo (and other more specialized search thingies) on the MyCroft search bar. It avoids the clutter that all those fancy toolbars add. I have a good dozen different search engines (including Yahoo) in Mycroft, and NO clutter whatsoever in my toolbars. Firefox is just amazing.
Yeah, sure. You guys are so paranoid, next you're going to be telling me that the flesh-reanimation technology I've been working on can be used for evil too.
Sure can. My wife just used your invention to bring back to life her dead mother. That is nothing but pure evil, believe you me.
I don't think the solution is in disabling IDN. While this is a solution as any other for english (or classical Latin) speaking surfers, it is not desirable for all others (a nuisance for some, and a roadblock for others).
The real long term solution, is changing DNS registrations so that IDN is the only way domain names are registered. If the only "character set" is IDN then there would not be 2 ways to type the same thing, and phishing would become impossible.
The way to fight this in the meantime, is to maybe have a little box before the rendered URL in the URL bar. This box would contain the full original string of the URL if there is enough room in the Addressbar to show both, or compress it to an optimum size, and showing, with context, the IDN string where it differs from the rendered string. Even when the whole string is not visible, just hovering the cursor over it should show the unrendered string.
I think I remember hearing somewhere that some think that the great Permian Extinction, the greatest extinction of all times, may have been triggered by great volcanism (the Siberian Traps) which might have raised the global temperature by about 5 degrees (centigrades)... which in turn whould have caused the release of Methane from the sea, which would have caused another 5 degrees increase in temperature (or so).
An 11K increase in temperatures is therefore nothing to sneeze at. Of course, that all depends on the base temperature you are starting from, but I still hope we (or our children) are not going to see anything near that kind of global temperature change.
I haven't RTFA, of course, but this topic in itself brings up very serious concerns about viruses getting a boost into jumping the species barrier. And even a benign virus can become extremely lethal to a new population that has never been exposed to it. Many deaths, and virus generations, are necessary before natural selection makes the new virus less lethal to its new host.
We might need to come up with a P2P Usenet then.
That is not the only negative effect of such a monopoly, although granted a major one. There is also very great disadvantage to the consumer.
The little local specialized store, will have a great diversity of products of a narrow field. That means you can get the odd-ball fitting, or gadget, or piece of cloth that is not in high demand. But since that's their business, they keep a little stock of the seldom requested items. Of course, their bread and butter is the run of the mill items, the ones that move quickly.
When as consumers we start buying these things exclusively from the big guys, the ones that sell a little bit of everything, and undercut the local business in their bread and butter items, we end up losing the source of the more specialized devices, for which we have to pay exhorbitant prices for special deliveries, if we find them at all. Those big surface stores only carry the big movers, they don't care about keeping a little stock of the seldom requested items.
You must be using extremely simple documents... basically plain text. My supervisor and his other grad students use different versions of Word (I'm not sure which one), but all the the figure positions, get screwed up, equations get put everywhere, and it's a general mess. I manage to maintain compatibily with both of those guys by not using Word but OpenOffice instead. It's actually this lack of compatibility between Word versions that got one of the other grad students to switch to OpenOffice, which was better at handling different versions of Word documents than Word itself.
Pretty soon they are going to claim that they don't make any money from cartridges that cost a few cents to produce ship and are then sold at 60$ with an obviously vanishingly small overhead. That kind of tiny overhead certainly can't stand the currency exchanges.
While the pictures are probably relatively accurate on the horizontal scale, the elevation is probably pure guesswork. Without radar, or stereoscopic shots, the only way to do this would be with photoclinometry, but then you need to know accurately the relative position of the light source and the camera's characteristics, position and orientation. The nature of the surface also affect the reading the interpretation using this method.
That being said, the amateur work does undoubtedly greatly enhance the scientists' work. They provide a rough early estimation so that we can all get our instant gratification, and in the meantime, the analysts can try to get the most accurate information possible to generate improved data.
All in all they make a great team.
It's not just the high tech companies who do it either. Today, I bought a jar of pickles. An it had a sticker saying how they were "Fat Free". One of these days they'll sell us water bottles, with stickers saying how it is "fat free" "no choleterol" "No trans fats" "no carbs" and charging a premium for it.
In our leading edge geotechnical lab, we have 3 wonderful 486 running the amazing masked wonder that is 3.1. Does the job. Can't complain. Win95 would certainly not run on at least 2 of those, and the data acquisition cards won't work on any computer more recent. It's a no-brainer.
Maybe the reason they mention sweatshirt recharging devices is the following one: This thing is sensitive to infrared light... it's not only the sun that emits in infrared. We are ourselves walking infrared bulbs. So having a shirt coated with the stuff means we pick up whatever falls from heaven in the form of infrared, but we also gather what we emit ourselves. Of course we'll be able to gather the emitions (to a lesser degree probably) from other heat sources that surround us like cars etc.
Still the best cars for the environment are those they used in the Flintstones. Put a gallon of gasoline in those, and it'll stay there forever if it's in a well sealed jar :)
That plus the weight in stone you have to personally carry around will ensure that you will not abuse this mode of transportation, thus reduding the global energy comsumption (in the form of food) attributed to transportation. All in all, the perfect environmental solution.