From what I understood, their reasoning wasn't that the.kids/.xxx idea was bad, but that it came down to a matter of who would run them?
It's a valid point. An organization would have to then get into the biz of judging content more critically than any other. The only thing close is.mil[.us].
Would the.kids proponent be a competent registrar? Same for.xxx. Would they keep up certain offense-safe standards, either way?
Reading the article, you'll find that the lens must be made of a material with a highly unusual refractive index of -1.
NO SUCH MATERIAL IS KNOWN TO EXIST FOR VISIBLE LIGHT ENERGY.
The article is dealing with energy in the microwave frequency range. It may help you design a better MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) device, but it will not improve your vision.
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
Too many instructors fall to the temptation to teach how to code fancy widgets. Students get away from learning the language and instead spend too much time learning all about MFC. Learning programming using C or a real C course should teach C.
I think this is true, but it's not just Microsoft and Visual Basic and MFC.
For example, how many Java books don't ASSUME you'd be using class Applet? How many assume you're more interested in Swing? It's only after three years that any Java books have begun to focus on servlets and other non-GUI tasks.
Not a Linux guru, but it strikes me that if it has a hard drive, and that hard drive can be extracted and returned to the system unharmed, it can be cracked. Other writable filesystems like compactflash could have the same vulnerabilities.
Mount it on YOUR Linux system as/gizmo, and use YOUR shell (with YOUR root) to do whatever you want to do to that filesystem. Replace/gizmo/etc/passwd, dump a few things in/gizmo/usr/bin and/gizmo/etc/config. Reinstall the hard drive in their hardware, and it's your hardware.
Such an authoritarian title. Are you sure? It proposes ASCII encoding, not a Unicode or other mbcs usage directly.
Also, doesn't it kinda suck to make large parts of the net unavailable for most? Don't you think the Chinese and Japanese people could say the same thing about English?
Within a few minutes of this story being posted, most of the posts are along the following lines.
Why not get European hacks like uumlauts working first? I dunno; maybe because the Japanese don't know enough German? Why should the Asians wait for Europe to get its act together before they solve the issues they face every day?
Great, now I have to see even more ugly spam! Well, if your only connection to the Asian population is spam email, this should make your isolationism even more simple: the standard uses a standard prefix for RACE-encoded domain names; block those and you're in arrogant English/USian bliss.
How can I enter these funky characters? I dunno, just a guess, but maybe someone's already thought of this? Perhaps the people who work in kanji all day know something about entering kanji, and have hardware or software solutions around. If you don't normally have to type it, I'm sure your browser will let you CLICK on encoded links just fine.
So how's this gonna work for systems not set up to handle the asian character set?
Read the links.
The proposal implements an ASCII encoding scheme, called RACE. A certain prefix (they list the debugging prefix as "bq-") indicates a RACE-encoded domain name.
The rest of the ASCII encoding either appears in ASCII for dumb browsers, or is converted to Unicode or Big5 or whatever character set it wants.
For "dumb browsers" (not a flame, just an indication of character-set-awareness), you'd see some crazy domain like http://www.bq-ag0970ag00ah07h.or.jp/; for "smart browsers," it would appear in your own kanji font.
Since the majority of chinese users input their chinese as big5,
(eg www.ê.com) will not be the same as the unicode equivalent
I think it's probably not too difficult for the Chinese browsers to do the conversion behind the scenes. Kinda like ASCIIEBCDIC conversions; you don't need to change the keyboard to enter text of the other variety.
Now, which one does the registrar accept, and the DNS servers cache? Read the article? From the first couple pages, it appeared that the domain name is actually not in Unicode nor Big5; it's translated to an ugly ASCII encoding.
Will moderators shoot down the fact that I mention Microsoft?
Windows has had a CJK-capable kanji input scheme for years. CJK: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Windows also has had bidi (bidirectional) support for right-left and/or top-bottom languages, including Hebrew.
If you have the appropriate cjk-input features installed, it's just a funky keyboard shortcut to open it up to enter kanji. If not, you'll probably be limited to clicking on visible links, not entering domain names or other text by hand.
I don't know what features Linux has to handle EFIGSS (English, French, Italian, Swedish, Spanish) differences, nevermind bidi or kanji input.
I believe you say.. "A hoax" not "AN hoax".. correct me if I'm wrong.
Depends on 'ow ye 'eve learned to say 'H', innit?
Seriously, the a/an flip is purely vocal: if it SOUNDS like a vowel, it needs 'an' to separate the words. A holy shrine. An original thought. An MRI scan [sounds like em ar ai]. A user [sounds like yooser].
Overseas ballots yet to be counted
Even as the recount proceeded, elections supervisors waited for an undetermined number of overseas ballots, primarily from military personnel and their families. The state counted about 2,300 overseas ballots in the 1996 presidential election and allows 10 days to count them.
Earlier stories on CNN quoted the Florida Election Commission: 10 days, postmarked by 7 Nov, allowed for overseas absentee ballots.
I wonder if MS can enforce a trademark on "dot NET", even if it's in common parlance already. ("Windows" was unenforceable trademark but "Microsoft Windows" is okay.)
DMCA may actually save Napster just as CDA did here. There's a provision that grants amnesty to service providers given that they don't knowingly allow illegal use of their service.
In the Patel suit, internal Napster memos were entered into evidence that showed pretty clearly that Napster's founders were complicitous to illegal infringements.
That would cancel the above defense. It's up to the other defenses: Patel's ignoring precedent case law (Betamax, et al.)
perhaps you [...] let people register several weeks/months in advance; they verify your eligiblity and print you out a secret code that you can use over any phone to vote
The coupon scheme that you propose does not validate the identity of the person making the vote. It just validates the identity of the person picking up the coupon. This is just as bad as existing absentee ballot fraud.
The precincts (should) verify your identity and registration, and give you a ballot slip. When you've made your selection, the ballot slip is registered to block any second attempt.
There will always be ways to manipulate this system, but it's the best we've got so far.
the woman at the table helpfully explained write-in votes, and that writing in a vote for anyone but President is a waste because it won't be counted...
it is clearly against the law to campaign at a polling place. This is clearly a violation of the law...
From that report, the precinct lady didn't tell the voter which of the available official non-presidential candidates to choose. She just explained the counting process, with the conclusion that write-ins are not tallied by default.
If the official candidates were getting low numbers, then the state would go back and see why. If the reason was an obviously recurring write-in, then of course, the write-in would get tallied, as it might be the winner.
Since there are Federal matching campaign funds at stake for candidates who get over X% of the vote, even a zero electoral vote presidential candidate wants to know what their numbers were.
No other office has that provision that is significant for the losers of their races, so there's no NEED to tally write-ins unless it becomes obvious that a write-in has a snowball's chance of WINNING.
Stop with the knee-jerk rage, and put on your critical thinking caps.
"No person shall be eleected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President should be elected to the office of the President more than once...."
George Herbert Walker Bush is still eligible for one more elected term. (However, I wouldn't vote for him. "It wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.")
GHWB was Vice President for eight years, then President for one elected term. That means he's got another elected term available. If Ronnie had died in office and GHWB served more than two years to complete that term, then he'd be ineligible.
The Amendment was passed during FDR's fourth term, not because FDR was unpopular (obviously not), but because people were feeling it was going against the founding fathers' intentions: they made four-year terms because they recognized the need for new blood in the highest offices of government.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understood, their reasoning wasn't that the .kids/.xxx idea was bad, but that it came down to a matter of who would run them?
It's a valid point. An organization would have to then get into the biz of judging content more critically than any other. The only thing close is .mil[.us].
Would the .kids proponent be a competent registrar? Same for .xxx. Would they keep up certain offense-safe standards, either way?
Reading the article, you'll find that the lens must be made of a material with a highly unusual refractive index of -1.
NO SUCH MATERIAL IS KNOWN TO EXIST FOR VISIBLE LIGHT ENERGY.
The article is dealing with energy in the microwave frequency range. It may help you design a better MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) device, but it will not improve your vision.
From other IBM materials, and an earlier Slashdot posting:
200 ppi, 16.3 inch Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display diagonal viewing area
2560x2048 pixels (5,242,880 full color pixels)
Subpixels are 42 x 126 microns
15,728,640 high-performance amorphous silicon transistors
1.64 miles of thin film wiring (low-resistance aluminum alloys)
Aperture ratio of 27.3 percent
Backlight power of 44 Watts for a brightness of 230 cd/m2
The prototype is 21 inches high and 16.5 inches wide; the total depth (including base) is 9.5 inches; the thickness of the display is 2.5 inches
The display weighs less than 20 pounds, which is less than a third of today's CRT displays
The power dissipated is less than half the power used by an 18-inch CRT display
The display is Quad-SXGA (4 times the resolution of an SXGA)
From the MSNBC article (which is really just a blurb):
Shipping, sure, but to various famous scientific laboratories only.
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
Too many instructors fall to the temptation to teach how to code fancy widgets. Students get away from learning the language and instead spend too much time learning all about MFC. Learning programming using C or a real C course should teach C.
I think this is true, but it's not just Microsoft and Visual Basic and MFC.
For example, how many Java books don't ASSUME you'd be using class Applet ? How many assume you're more interested in Swing? It's only after three years that any Java books have begun to focus on servlets and other non-GUI tasks.
Apparently, the ruling has been reversed again. Florida law states that the judgement forms must spell the field as "Yea", not Yay.
In related news, the defense attorneys are stonewalling the ruling, by forcing investigations into similar cases being tried in other states.
Not a Linux guru, but it strikes me that if it has a hard drive, and that hard drive can be extracted and returned to the system unharmed, it can be cracked. Other writable filesystems like compactflash could have the same vulnerabilities.
Mount it on YOUR Linux system as /gizmo, and use YOUR shell (with YOUR root) to do whatever you want to do to that filesystem. Replace /gizmo/etc/passwd, dump a few things in /gizmo/usr/bin and /gizmo/etc/config. Reinstall the hard drive in their hardware, and it's your hardware.
Such an authoritarian title. Are you sure? It proposes ASCII encoding, not a Unicode or other mbcs usage directly.
Also, doesn't it kinda suck to make large parts of the net unavailable for most? Don't you think the Chinese and Japanese people could say the same thing about English?
Within a few minutes of this story being posted, most of the posts are along the following lines.
I dunno; maybe because the Japanese don't know enough German? Why should the Asians wait for Europe to get its act together before they solve the issues they face every day?
Well, if your only connection to the Asian population is spam email, this should make your isolationism even more simple: the standard uses a standard prefix for RACE-encoded domain names; block those and you're in arrogant English/USian bliss.
I dunno, just a guess, but maybe someone's already thought of this? Perhaps the people who work in kanji all day know something about entering kanji, and have hardware or software solutions around. If you don't normally have to type it, I'm sure your browser will let you CLICK on encoded links just fine.
Missed anything?
So how's this gonna work for systems not set up to handle the asian character set?
Read the links.
The proposal implements an ASCII encoding scheme, called RACE. A certain prefix (they list the debugging prefix as "bq-") indicates a RACE-encoded domain name.
The rest of the ASCII encoding either appears in ASCII for dumb browsers, or is converted to Unicode or Big5 or whatever character set it wants.
For "dumb browsers" (not a flame, just an indication of character-set-awareness), you'd see some crazy domain like http://www.bq-ag0970ag00ah07h.or.jp/; for "smart browsers," it would appear in your own kanji font.
The rp is a variable. The first couple pages notes that the implementation-testers should assume that the "RACE Prefix," or rp, should be "bq-".
Since the majority of chinese users input their chinese as big5, (eg www.ê.com) will not be the same as the unicode equivalent
I think it's probably not too difficult for the Chinese browsers to do the conversion behind the scenes. Kinda like ASCIIEBCDIC conversions; you don't need to change the keyboard to enter text of the other variety.
Now, which one does the registrar accept, and the DNS servers cache? Read the article? From the first couple pages, it appeared that the domain name is actually not in Unicode nor Big5; it's translated to an ugly ASCII encoding.
Will moderators shoot down the fact that I mention Microsoft?
Windows has had a CJK-capable kanji input scheme for years. CJK: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Windows also has had bidi (bidirectional) support for right-left and/or top-bottom languages, including Hebrew.
If you have the appropriate cjk-input features installed, it's just a funky keyboard shortcut to open it up to enter kanji. If not, you'll probably be limited to clicking on visible links, not entering domain names or other text by hand.
I don't know what features Linux has to handle EFIGSS (English, French, Italian, Swedish, Spanish) differences, nevermind bidi or kanji input.
I believe you say.. "A hoax" not "AN hoax".. correct me if I'm wrong.
Depends on 'ow ye 'eve learned to say 'H', innit?
Seriously, the a/an flip is purely vocal: if it SOUNDS like a vowel, it needs 'an' to separate the words. A holy shrine. An original thought. An MRI scan [sounds like em ar ai]. A user [sounds like yooser].
From CNN:
Even as the recount proceeded, elections supervisors waited for an undetermined number of overseas ballots, primarily from military personnel and their families. The state counted about 2,300 overseas ballots in the 1996 presidential election and allows 10 days to count them.
Earlier stories on CNN quoted the Florida Election Commission: 10 days, postmarked by 7 Nov, allowed for overseas absentee ballots.
Sun is the DOT in .NET
I wonder if MS can enforce a trademark on "dot NET", even if it's in common parlance already. ("Windows" was unenforceable trademark but "Microsoft Windows" is okay.)
DMCA may actually save Napster just as CDA did here. There's a provision that grants amnesty to service providers given that they don't knowingly allow illegal use of their service.
In the Patel suit, internal Napster memos were entered into evidence that showed pretty clearly that Napster's founders were complicitous to illegal infringements.
That would cancel the above defense. It's up to the other defenses: Patel's ignoring precedent case law (Betamax, et al.)
Florida still has 3000+ absentee ballots expected, from overseas.
FLORIDA RECOUNT 32 of 67 counties reporting
PRESIDENT Loss/Gain New Total
Bush +346 2,909,481
Gore +1,189 2,908,540
I doubt, from the recount's results so far, that Gore and Bush will be more than 3000 votes apart after the recount.
This means the absentee ballots must be counted. They're due within 10 days, if postmarked from anywhere in the world by Nov 7.
We won't know our next president until Nov 17.
REUTERS: BUSH FLORIDA LEAD DROPS TO 500 VOTES
Gore gains a net of 843 votes in recounts in 32 of Florida's 67 counties. Bush's statewide lead is now 941. Bush 2,909,481, Gore 2,908,540.
Where's the "500 votes" figure from?
I can use one networked listing service to sell shady items, but I can't use another networked listing service to sell shady items?
In what district is the Napster case being decided? In what district will this eBay case be appealed (cuz we know it will)?
Two rulings on very similar cases that contradict each other: that's one of the tickets for Supreme Court review.
perhaps you [...] let people register several weeks/months in advance; they verify your eligiblity and print you out a secret code that you can use over any phone to vote
The coupon scheme that you propose does not validate the identity of the person making the vote. It just validates the identity of the person picking up the coupon. This is just as bad as existing absentee ballot fraud.
The precincts (should) verify your identity and registration, and give you a ballot slip. When you've made your selection, the ballot slip is registered to block any second attempt.
There will always be ways to manipulate this system, but it's the best we've got so far.
the woman at the table helpfully explained write-in votes, and that writing in a vote for anyone but President is a waste because it won't be counted...
it is clearly against the law to campaign at a polling place. This is clearly a violation of the law...
From that report, the precinct lady didn't tell the voter which of the available official non-presidential candidates to choose. She just explained the counting process, with the conclusion that write-ins are not tallied by default.
If the official candidates were getting low numbers, then the state would go back and see why. If the reason was an obviously recurring write-in, then of course, the write-in would get tallied, as it might be the winner.
Since there are Federal matching campaign funds at stake for candidates who get over X% of the vote, even a zero electoral vote presidential candidate wants to know what their numbers were.
No other office has that provision that is significant for the losers of their races, so there's no NEED to tally write-ins unless it becomes obvious that a write-in has a snowball's chance of WINNING.
Stop with the knee-jerk rage, and put on your critical thinking caps.
[Article from KKK allegedly endorsing Bush snipped]
Endorsements aren't commutative.
Bush hasn't been proven (or disproven) to be racist, strictly from the evidence of a racist's endorsement of Bush.
Put on your critical thinking caps, people.
"No person shall be eleected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President should be elected to the office of the President more than once...."
George Herbert Walker Bush is still eligible for one more elected term. (However, I wouldn't vote for him. "It wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.")
GHWB was Vice President for eight years, then President for one elected term. That means he's got another elected term available. If Ronnie had died in office and GHWB served more than two years to complete that term, then he'd be ineligible.
The Amendment was passed during FDR's fourth term, not because FDR was unpopular (obviously not), but because people were feeling it was going against the founding fathers' intentions: they made four-year terms because they recognized the need for new blood in the highest offices of government.
Wipe off that smugness. It looks kinda like egg.