I agree. When I read an online news site, I middle-click all the articles I am interested in to open them in new tabs in the background. I then read each article, click the single tab-closing button, and Firefox jumps to the next tab to the right, which is the next article. With Opera, I have to find that particular tab's close button, which moves because the tabs change width when there are fewer of them, and Opera jumps to the last read tab, which is usually the main page, and I have to click once again to get to the next article.
Except that a few days later, someone else discovers this flaw, and exploits it to view other people's transcripts. Whom do you think the university IT department, which just received your report of this flaw, will blame?
Remember, there is much more to the Internet than port 80! What if someone wants to send e-mail to McDonald's? Or if Mr. McDonald wants to configure SSH for his farm? A system based on HTML meta tags or disambiguation web pages sure won't help.
Suppose FSF were taken over by, say, Microsoft, and they made GPL version 3.5 say that the author promises support and a warranty. Then anyone who took a copy under an earlier GPL - with the "or later version" clause - could invoke the new obligations.
But the "this version or later" clause only has to do with which licence anyone making a derivative work of your program has to use. The program you wrote is still only licenced through the version of the GPL you released it under. However, in your hypothetical case, anyone making a derivative work of your GPL'd program could choose to distribute it under the new GPL, obligating them to provide support and a warranty. Since you licenced your work under the old GPL, you would not suddenly be obligated to follow a new GPL that you never used.
But for someone to tap your phone, they have to come with alligator clips to your phone line. This means that someone can't easily "screen" a lot of different phone lines without a lot of manpower. VoIP, on the other hand, could be tapped remotely without intervening with your installation at all, and the process can be automated.
What Congress should do is prevent the services that allow music to be downloaded illegally.
You have to remember that some of those services, like bittorrent, aren't made for the specific purpose of downloading music illegally, but rather as a more efficient way to distribute large files. Making the service itself illegal because it is possible to use it illegally would be a bit like forbidding crowbars because they can be used for breaking and entering, or forbidding the sale of carving knives because it's possible to stab someone with them. This is not good IMO.
my car goes through a speed camera and it nabs the number plate, all I have to do is prove that I was somewhere else at the time and I'll easily get the charges dismissed.
Here in Norway, if my car goes through a speed camera, all I have to do is say I wasn't driving, and the police have to prove that it was me, based on the picture the camera took.
The article says that a virus is "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail attachments". This is a quite common, but wrong, point of view. A virus is a program that replicates itself into host code, such that execution of the host code implies execution of the virus. It doesn't have to perform any destructive action to be called a virus.
The BBC's definition of a virus would be more appropriate as a definition of "malware". By giving this incorrect definition, the BBC is upholding the popular belief that a virus is a program that will somehow magically appear on your computer and damage it, unless you buy an "anti-virus program" or "firewall", which will magically protect your computer from viruses.
Wow, I was just thinking it'd be cool if the address bar worked that way no more than a couple hours ago.. nice work:)
It already works this way in Mozilla (the suite), and you don't have to press Ctrl+Enter, just Enter. For example, entering "google/scholar" in the address bar and hitting Enter will bring you to http://www.google.com/scholar. I wonder why this functionality has been removed from Firefox?
I guess that the Semantic Web would need HTML documents to meet strict requirements when it comes to validation, use of logical instead of physical markup and so on. This could be an incentive for people to use HTML the way it was intended, instead of the crapload of pages that don't close tags, use hundreds of redundant FONT tags, use the H1..H6 elements to control font size instead of using them to indicate headings, and so on. Strangely enough, all "beginner's" HTML books still teach people to code this way.
The traditional method is to take frequent bathroom breaks and then flip through an opening book in the stall. Nowadays that's been replaced with a pocket computer.
Another method I've thought of would be to place a small, radio-activated vibrating device in your shoe and have someone send you moves using a simplified Morse-like system. The guy who got busted cheating on "Who wants to be a millionaire" used a system of audience members coughing. If he'd used the radio foot vibrator technique, he might have gotten away with it.
People have been telling me how floppies are just trash for a long time. The fact is that they are very useful for small data transfers. If I'm late one morning and need to work on a document on campus, it's faster to bring it with me on a floppy than to negotiate a secure FTP connection which is often slow. If I need to help a friend build a PC, it's no use e-mailing him the necessary drivers before we've even got to setting up the Internet connection.
Also, I always giggle when people burn a 1 MB Word document on a 800 MB CD-R to bring it to work.
Sure, floppies aren't used as often as they were in the Glorious Days of DOS ten years ago, but they can bail you out when you occasionally need to transfer small files and a network connection isn't possible or too much of a hassle.
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Of course, hydrogen bombs have nothing to do with the explosive reaction of hydrogen with oxygen. Fusion bombs
What about E-mail? SSH? A HTML disambiguation page won't work for those cases. The Internet != The WWW!
I agree. When I read an online news site, I middle-click all the articles I am interested in to open them in new tabs in the background. I then read each article, click the single tab-closing button, and Firefox jumps to the next tab to the right, which is the next article. With Opera, I have to find that particular tab's close button, which moves because the tabs change width when there are fewer of them, and Opera jumps to the last read tab, which is usually the main page, and I have to click once again to get to the next article.
Hemophilia can be caused by a lack of several proteins that take part in the clotting cascade, but the substance usually responsible is factor VIII.
Because people will stand up and be counted to defend their right to bare arms.
I agree, we have to defend our right to bare arms! Damn those new laws requiring us to wear long-sleeved shirts only.
Except that a few days later, someone else discovers this flaw, and exploits it to view other people's transcripts. Whom do you think the university IT department, which just received your report of this flaw, will blame?
Remember, there is much more to the Internet than port 80! What if someone wants to send e-mail to McDonald's? Or if Mr. McDonald wants to configure SSH for his farm? A system based on HTML meta tags or disambiguation web pages sure won't help.
Yep, some really nasty stuff, like, um, hydrogen.
What, you mean there are explosive substances in my food?
Suppose FSF were taken over by, say, Microsoft, and they made GPL version 3.5 say that the author promises support and a warranty. Then anyone who took a copy under an earlier GPL - with the "or later version" clause - could invoke the new obligations.
But the "this version or later" clause only has to do with which licence anyone making a derivative work of your program has to use. The program you wrote is still only licenced through the version of the GPL you released it under. However, in your hypothetical case, anyone making a derivative work of your GPL'd program could choose to distribute it under the new GPL, obligating them to provide support and a warranty. Since you licenced your work under the old GPL, you would not suddenly be obligated to follow a new GPL that you never used.
But for someone to tap your phone, they have to come with alligator clips to your phone line. This means that someone can't easily "screen" a lot of different phone lines without a lot of manpower. VoIP, on the other hand, could be tapped remotely without intervening with your installation at all, and the process can be automated.
What Congress should do is prevent the services that allow music to be downloaded illegally.
You have to remember that some of those services, like bittorrent, aren't made for the specific purpose of downloading music illegally, but rather as a more efficient way to distribute large files. Making the service itself illegal because it is possible to use it illegally would be a bit like forbidding crowbars because they can be used for breaking and entering, or forbidding the sale of carving knives because it's possible to stab someone with them. This is not good IMO.
my car goes through a speed camera and it nabs the number plate, all I have to do is prove that I was somewhere else at the time and I'll easily get the charges dismissed.
Here in Norway, if my car goes through a speed camera, all I have to do is say I wasn't driving, and the police have to prove that it was me, based on the picture the camera took.
The article says that a virus is "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail attachments". This is a quite common, but wrong, point of view. A virus is a program that replicates itself into host code, such that execution of the host code implies execution of the virus. It doesn't have to perform any destructive action to be called a virus.
The BBC's definition of a virus would be more appropriate as a definition of "malware". By giving this incorrect definition, the BBC is upholding the popular belief that a virus is a program that will somehow magically appear on your computer and damage it, unless you buy an "anti-virus program" or "firewall", which will magically protect your computer from viruses.
Wow, I was just thinking it'd be cool if the address bar worked that way no more than a couple hours ago.. nice work :)
It already works this way in Mozilla (the suite), and you don't have to press Ctrl+Enter, just Enter. For example, entering "google/scholar" in the address bar and hitting Enter will bring you to http://www.google.com/scholar. I wonder why this functionality has been removed from Firefox?
In Norway, it was 1 click for 1, 2 for 2, etc, in all of the country except Oslo, where it was 1 click for 9, 2 clicks for 8, etc.
Remember that for your typical person, WWW *is* the Internet. The media, schools, etc. all use "the Internet" when they mean "the WWW".
Do you think these SMART cars will be drive by wire and have an onboard computer to protect the drivers from themselves?
I guess that the Semantic Web would need HTML documents to meet strict requirements when it comes to validation, use of logical instead of physical markup and so on. This could be an incentive for people to use HTML the way it was intended, instead of the crapload of pages that don't close tags, use hundreds of redundant FONT tags, use the H1..H6 elements to control font size instead of using them to indicate headings, and so on. Strangely enough, all "beginner's" HTML books still teach people to code this way.
The traditional method is to take frequent bathroom breaks and then flip through an opening book in the stall. Nowadays that's been replaced with a pocket computer.
Another method I've thought of would be to place a small, radio-activated vibrating device in your shoe and have someone send you moves using a simplified Morse-like system. The guy who got busted cheating on "Who wants to be a millionaire" used a system of audience members coughing. If he'd used the radio foot vibrator technique, he might have gotten away with it.
People have been telling me how floppies are just trash for a long time. The fact is that they are very useful for small data transfers. If I'm late one morning and need to work on a document on campus, it's faster to bring it with me on a floppy than to negotiate a secure FTP connection which is often slow. If I need to help a friend build a PC, it's no use e-mailing him the necessary drivers before we've even got to setting up the Internet connection.
Also, I always giggle when people burn a 1 MB Word document on a 800 MB CD-R to bring it to work.
Sure, floppies aren't used as often as they were in the Glorious Days of DOS ten years ago, but they can bail you out when you occasionally need to transfer small files and a network connection isn't possible or too much of a hassle.