Because of black lists and a dial-up connection, I can not use my home server to send email to a friend of mine who uses earthlink or to subscribe to a number of SourceForge mailing lists. At work, I can not receive email from my wife or daughter, because they use web.de addresses
Neither my wife, my daughter nor I have had anything to do with spamming, yet we are limited in our ability to use the internet to communicate with each other or with our friends. This limitation is due to conditions which are almost completely out of our hands to control or to correct. Who is going to compensate us for our loss of use? Why are our rights sacrificed and written off as a necessary part of gaining a greater good?
Some here will no doubt argue that I should pressure my ISP to stop supporting spam. They want the anti-spammer's denial of service and use to rouse me to take up their cause. I should join them on the barricades. I am not going to do this because:
1) I don't have the time or resources to fight this. 2) I don't think my ISP has violated my rights. I think Julian Haight, et al. have violated my rights by taking from me functionality I have a valid reason to expect from my ISP. 3) I think that the anti-spammer's have held a huge kangaroo court in which I have been injustly tried and jailed.
I may have grown complacent because I don't live in a country where a history of the web sites I search for can get me arrested (at least not yet), but I don't see the danger.
Information is not dangerous. It is how someone uses the information they have that makes that person - not the information - dangerous. (Ideas don't kill people; people kill people.)
It also bothers me that being concerned that someone else knows what sites I am searching for is a concession to the idea that there are sites I shouldn't visit.
And if you are overseas?
on
U.S. Endorses ENUM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would love to see what their plan is for supporting members of the US Armed Forces and Foreign Service and US expats overseas. We get a number like this while in the US and then we are stationed outside the US. What happens then?
I am still waiting for about 50% of online merchants to figure out the APO/FPO system and how to mail me products. I would rather the Dept. of Commerce fix that problem first before they help telemarketers spam me no matter where on the globe I am.
And what about costs of the calls/transmissions? If I am in Southwest Asia and someone in the US calls my ENUM, who gets tagged for the long distance bill?
What will be interesting is the follow-on research to determine why the two cats (or any two cloned cats) are not the same. Using clones, they have removed the DNA as a variable. The differences that resulted must therefore be due to other factors. What the other factors are and how they effect the end result should then become the central question.
My guess is that the end analysis will be that these other factors are too many and too widely variable to be consistently controlled.
Yes, I admit that a centrally located server with a bluetooth dongle would work for many people. I don't believe it would work in my case, because
1) I have no place to put a server centrally in my house and still have access to my DSL line. Unless I lay a new line, and that is one of the things I am trying to avoid in the first place. In the German house I live in, we originally only had one phone plug in a three story (cellar, ground floor and upper story) house, and this is not unusual here.
2) My server sits in the cellar. I have a wireless network set up, and on the ground floor in the living room I can get 11 Mbps. In the upper story, on the stairs, bandwidth drops to 2 Mbps. If I step into any of the upstairs rooms, the connection becomes pretty much unusable. The construction materials used in this house are not unusual at all for Germany, and it is built primarily out of concrete. Bad for wireless. The house isn't that large though, comparatively speaking. It has about 112 square meters of living area, including the small terrace outside (on which I get between 5 and 11 Mbps). I'm reasonably certain that bluetooth would fare even worse than wireless under these conditions. Unless of course, the data is carried part of the way by something else - such as powerline networking.
So, why not move my acces point to somewhere central in the house and go with wireless? Because I have yet to see a cell phone/handy that incorporates wireless, but bluetooth enabled handies are sprouting up all over - as are bluetooth hands-free head sets. How about the idea of a bluetooth hands-free head set that knows when to connect to my handy and when to use my home phoneline to make/receive a connection?
I think a powerline/bluetooth solution would work for a house like mine with its sturdy construction, a larger house where a "central server" is still a good bit away, or for a firm that is spread through a medium-sized building.
Last year I talked to a couple of powerline networking and bluetooth manufacturing firms at CeBIT 2002 in Hannover, Germany. I was trying to get an idea of what future products they were working on, because I think both technologies would work well with each other.
What I would like to see is a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the wall socket to provide powerline network access to my home server to any bluetooth enabled device in the room. I should provide a straight through plug so I could still plug, say, a lamp into the socket. PDAs and TabletPCs could access the server through this bluetooth/powerline network, so for example, my PDA could automatically sync with my server when I walked into the house or into my home office. This set up might even be more secure due to the shorter range of bluetooth devices as compared to 802.11 wireless.
The powerline network would also help other technologies get a foothold. For example, I can see synergies in my refrigerator and pantry being intelligent enough to sense intelligent packaging and to be able tell how well stocked they were. (I don't want an Internet-enabled refrigerator though. That is like begging for trouble.) Using powerline networking, I could connect the 'frig to my server (hey, it has to be plugged in anyway!) and software on my server could combine the data from both refrigerator and pantry inventories to develop a shopping list transmitted/updated to my PDA automatically.
Personally, I think the Open Source community should jump on the home server bandwagon soon, and start providing a client/server API and applications that can be used by smart devices to connect via wireless/bluetooth/pwoerline networking to home servers. That is the future. Fighting the battle of the desktop is only of limited future use. The real battle, and the one that Linux and open source can win, is home servers that provide stable support to the intelligent devices finding their way into our homes and offices.
Hey, if computers are supposed to make our lives easier, that seems like a good benchmark.
I guess I could have used as an example some other activity that I wouldn't want my attention drawn away from - coding, opening a beer, disarming a small thermonuclear device, you know, that kind of thing.
Excellent point about the picture of "misguided." The real point to what you are saying, though, I think, is that the definition of best interface depends on the message being sent.
The examples given in the article, analyzing stock prices or genomes, seem to be specifically chosen to support the idea that voice will never work for communicating with our computers. But, this is really just an example of limiting the question so that the answer you already have is the correct one. The reasons we communicate with our computers is as broad as the tasks we set them to, so using these specific examples is tantamount to saying that the only good use for computers is analyzing stocks and genomes. Of course, that is not true.
Consider what user interface (voice or visual) is best when you want to have your computer preheat the oven to 400 degrees and notify you when the oven has reached the desired temperature. Add the additional condition that you want to do it while incurring the least distraction from the television show you are watching.
1. Current standard method. Get up, go into the kitchen. Set the oven to the desired temperature. Return to TV. Return to kitchen as necessary to check oven's progress.
2. Visual method. Turn at least some of your attention away from the TV. Pick up some sort of pad or keyboard. Using visual tools, find the appropriate metaphor for your oven and select it. Find control for oven temperature and set it. Set alert message and link it to attainment of selected temperature. Return full attention to TV.
3. Voice method. Turn some attention away from TV. Say to your computer, "HAL, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and alert me when it has reached that temperature." Return full attention to the TV.
It is obvious from this example that voice is the most efficient method of communicating with your computer. And, all I had to do to make this true was to limit the question to how best to set the oven temperature!
It is clear to me that "voice versus visual" is the new religious war like vi versus emacs and MSWindows versus any other OS once were/still are.
Your explanation and question don't say what skills the kids are supposed to have at the end of the course. What are the objectives of the courses you offer? If you can clearly state the course objectives, then half of your pre-test would already be written. Just ask the students to complete tasks that they should be able to do at the end of the course(s), and make placement decisions based on how well they complete the requirements. Knowing your course objectives would also be necessary when selecting a computer-based programme for pre-testing, because the skills you are pre-testing for will have to match the skills you hope to transfer to the students.
I am also curious to know what you mean by "IT." Do you mean the ability to use a word processing application to write an essay, the ability to use a browser and search tools to research the essay, or the skills required to put together dynamic content on the school's web site? Or, are you teaching advanced networking and C/C++/Java, etc. programming?
I'm thinking this could lead to a market push toward larger, cheaper storage - and fast storage at that. If cards like these get popular, more and more people will use their computers to store programs they want to watch. This will increase demand for large, cheap, fast storage, which the market will try to meet. As manufacturers make more storage, they will improve production processes and decrease prices. This could end up being similar to how computer gaming served to improve video cards.
Sure, I understand, who wants to watch television on their computer, right? But still, there seems to be a market for TV tuner cards, so... That, and it would not surprise me to see a future in which either your TV has storage built in, or your TV and computer can share a storage volume (your PC saves to disk, you enjoy what you recorded in front of the TV in the family room).
On a related topic, Discover had an article back in June 1998 that reported on the use of FPGAs which reprogrammed themselves to learn how to better perform the task of differentiating tones. To find the article, search Discover.com's archives for "Evolving a Conscious Machine". The author's name is Gary Taubes.
You are assuming away any effect anonymous posters have, but they do, in fact, have an effect on the discussion. The fact that what you wrote was in response to an Anonymous Coward indicates that you thought AC's comments were at least credible enough to be commented on.
There is also the effect that comes from people passing on their impressions on an issue that they came by by simply scanning the tenor of comments rather than by any in-depth analysis. This could be referred to as a "gossip effect."
hussar
Re:Non NYTimes link and Defamation
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
You make a good point about the remarks not being first ruled as defamation. That fact would seem to me to be essential to any ruling to subpoena the identities of the poster. Without a judgement that an injury has occurred, how can you legally search for someone that caused the non-injury. In effect, they are being denounced (and potentially punished) for a "crime" that did not occur.
hussar
hussar
Expectation of accountability
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who posts online should have an expectation that he or she could be called on to defend what they have written. Just because what a person writes is posted on the Internet somewhere shouldn't give it any special priveleges in comparison to, for example, a letter to the editor or any other public pronouncement. That the courts could be used to find anonymous posters so that they can be fired, does at first glance seem to be an abuse. But, the posters should also not post without expecting that they can be held accountable for what they write. Anonymity is, in any case, an illusion supported by the tradeoff between the damage done by the statement made and the amount of resources the injured party is willing to spend to find out who caused the injury.
This is a topic that has caught my interest lately as well. What I am trying to do is use a Sony 8MB Memory Stick in a PCMCIA adapter card as an encrypted filesystem. I have only done some of the preliminary work (update bin_utils, compile loopback and encryption into the kernel, etc.), so I can't report on how well it worked yet. Has anybody tried this? I figure if it works, I can upgrade to a larger capacity memory stick. Memory sticks are easily carried and hidden, and right now I don't have over 64MB of files to encrypt, so I could conceivably get it all onto a memory stick.
Cheers,
hussar
Slashdot Mirror
I am part of the collateral damage.
Because of black lists and a dial-up connection, I can not use my home server to send email to a friend of mine who uses earthlink or to subscribe to a number of SourceForge mailing lists. At work, I can not receive email from my wife or daughter, because they use web.de addresses
Neither my wife, my daughter nor I have had anything to do with spamming, yet we are limited in our ability to use the internet to communicate with each other or with our friends. This limitation is due to conditions which are almost completely out of our hands to control or to correct. Who is going to compensate us for our loss of use? Why are our rights sacrificed and written off as a necessary part of gaining a greater good?
Some here will no doubt argue that I should pressure my ISP to stop supporting spam. They want the anti-spammer's denial of service and use to rouse me to take up their cause. I should join them on the barricades. I am not going to do this because:
1) I don't have the time or resources to fight this.
2) I don't think my ISP has violated my rights. I think Julian Haight, et al. have violated my rights by taking from me functionality I have a valid reason to expect from my ISP.
3) I think that the anti-spammer's have held a huge kangaroo court in which I have been injustly tried and jailed.
For example:
The programs used to link mobile, wearable webcams to websites in real time.
The programs used to link normal appliances to web servers or the Internet.
Applications that take optical cues from their wearers and turn them into menu selections or mouse clicks.
Any speech recognition software that causes a computing machine to perform a function.
Any piece of software that provides us an interface with an appliance we don't yet own (or that only six people in the world now own or borrow).
Software on the edge is all around us. We need only become aware of the progress of evolution.
And just think of the possibilities when combined with those x-ray glasses you can get out of the back of comic books...
I may have grown complacent because I don't live in a country where a history of the web sites I search for can get me arrested (at least not yet), but I don't see the danger.
Information is not dangerous. It is how someone uses the information they have that makes that person - not the information - dangerous. (Ideas don't kill people; people kill people.)
It also bothers me that being concerned that someone else knows what sites I am searching for is a concession to the idea that there are sites I shouldn't visit.
I would love to see what their plan is for supporting members of the US Armed Forces and Foreign Service and US expats overseas. We get a number like this while in the US and then we are stationed outside the US. What happens then?
I am still waiting for about 50% of online merchants to figure out the APO/FPO system and how to mail me products. I would rather the Dept. of Commerce fix that problem first before they help telemarketers spam me no matter where on the globe I am.
And what about costs of the calls/transmissions? If I am in Southwest Asia and someone in the US calls my ENUM, who gets tagged for the long distance bill?
What will be interesting is the follow-on research to determine why the two cats (or any two cloned cats) are not the same. Using clones, they have removed the DNA as a variable. The differences that resulted must therefore be due to other factors. What the other factors are and how they effect the end result should then become the central question.
My guess is that the end analysis will be that these other factors are too many and too widely variable to be consistently controlled.
Actually, I am more worried about PETA attacking my Internet-aware oven with a virus that makes it refuse to cook meat.
Yes, I admit that a centrally located server with a bluetooth dongle would work for many people. I don't believe it would work in my case, because
1) I have no place to put a server centrally in my house and still have access to my DSL line. Unless I lay a new line, and that is one of the things I am trying to avoid in the first place. In the German house I live in, we originally only had one phone plug in a three story (cellar, ground floor and upper story) house, and this is not unusual here.
2) My server sits in the cellar. I have a wireless network set up, and on the ground floor in the living room I can get 11 Mbps. In the upper story, on the stairs, bandwidth drops to 2 Mbps. If I step into any of the upstairs rooms, the connection becomes pretty much unusable. The construction materials used in this house are not unusual at all for Germany, and it is built primarily out of concrete. Bad for wireless. The house isn't that large though, comparatively speaking. It has about 112 square meters of living area, including the small terrace outside (on which I get between 5 and 11 Mbps). I'm reasonably certain that bluetooth would fare even worse than wireless under these conditions. Unless of course, the data is carried part of the way by something else - such as powerline networking.
So, why not move my acces point to somewhere central in the house and go with wireless? Because I have yet to see a cell phone/handy that incorporates wireless, but bluetooth enabled handies are sprouting up all over - as are bluetooth hands-free head sets. How about the idea of a bluetooth hands-free head set that knows when to connect to my handy and when to use my home phoneline to make/receive a connection?
I think a powerline/bluetooth solution would work for a house like mine with its sturdy construction, a larger house where a "central server" is still a good bit away, or for a firm that is spread through a medium-sized building.
Last year I talked to a couple of powerline networking and bluetooth manufacturing firms at CeBIT 2002 in Hannover, Germany. I was trying to get an idea of what future products they were working on, because I think both technologies would work well with each other.
What I would like to see is a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the wall socket to provide powerline network access to my home server to any bluetooth enabled device in the room. I should provide a straight through plug so I could still plug, say, a lamp into the socket. PDAs and TabletPCs could access the server through this bluetooth/powerline network, so for example, my PDA could automatically sync with my server when I walked into the house or into my home office. This set up might even be more secure due to the shorter range of bluetooth devices as compared to 802.11 wireless.
The powerline network would also help other technologies get a foothold. For example, I can see synergies in my refrigerator and pantry being intelligent enough to sense intelligent packaging and to be able tell how well stocked they were. (I don't want an Internet-enabled refrigerator though. That is like begging for trouble.) Using powerline networking, I could connect the 'frig to my server (hey, it has to be plugged in anyway!) and software on my server could combine the data from both refrigerator and pantry inventories to develop a shopping list transmitted/updated to my PDA automatically.
Personally, I think the Open Source community should jump on the home server bandwagon soon, and start providing a client/server API and applications that can be used by smart devices to connect via wireless/bluetooth/pwoerline networking to home servers. That is the future. Fighting the battle of the desktop is only of limited future use. The real battle, and the one that Linux and open source can win, is home servers that provide stable support to the intelligent devices finding their way into our homes and offices.
I guess I could have used as an example some other activity that I wouldn't want my attention drawn away from - coding, opening a beer, disarming a small thermonuclear device, you know, that kind of thing.
Excellent point about the picture of "misguided." The real point to what you are saying, though, I think, is that the definition of best interface depends on the message being sent.
Consider what user interface (voice or visual) is best when you want to have your computer preheat the oven to 400 degrees and notify you when the oven has reached the desired temperature. Add the additional condition that you want to do it while incurring the least distraction from the television show you are watching.
1. Current standard method. Get up, go into the kitchen. Set the oven to the desired temperature. Return to TV. Return to kitchen as necessary to check oven's progress.
2. Visual method. Turn at least some of your attention away from the TV. Pick up some sort of pad or keyboard. Using visual tools, find the appropriate metaphor for your oven and select it. Find control for oven temperature and set it. Set alert message and link it to attainment of selected temperature. Return full attention to TV.
3. Voice method. Turn some attention away from TV. Say to your computer, "HAL, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and alert me when it has reached that temperature." Return full attention to the TV.
It is obvious from this example that voice is the most efficient method of communicating with your computer. And, all I had to do to make this true was to limit the question to how best to set the oven temperature!
It is clear to me that "voice versus visual" is the new religious war like vi versus emacs and MSWindows versus any other OS once were/still are.
I am also curious to know what you mean by "IT." Do you mean the ability to use a word processing application to write an essay, the ability to use a browser and search tools to research the essay, or the skills required to put together dynamic content on the school's web site? Or, are you teaching advanced networking and C/C++/Java, etc. programming?
The article was by Gary Taubes, and it was in the June 1998 issue of Discover.
hussar
Sure, I understand, who wants to watch television on their computer, right? But still, there seems to be a market for TV tuner cards, so... That, and it would not surprise me to see a future in which either your TV has storage built in, or your TV and computer can share a storage volume (your PC saves to disk, you enjoy what you recorded in front of the TV in the family room).
hussar
On a related topic, Discover had an article back in June 1998 that reported on the use of FPGAs which reprogrammed themselves to learn how to better perform the task of differentiating tones. To find the article, search Discover.com's archives for "Evolving a Conscious Machine". The author's name is Gary Taubes.
hussar
You are assuming away any effect anonymous posters have, but they do, in fact, have an effect on the discussion. The fact that what you wrote was in response to an Anonymous Coward indicates that you thought AC's comments were at least credible enough to be commented on.
There is also the effect that comes from people passing on their impressions on an issue that they came by by simply scanning the tenor of comments rather than by any in-depth analysis. This could be referred to as a "gossip effect."
hussar
hussar
hussar
hussar
hussar
This is a topic that has caught my interest lately as well. What I am trying to do is use a Sony 8MB Memory Stick in a PCMCIA adapter card as an encrypted filesystem. I have only done some of the preliminary work (update bin_utils, compile loopback and encryption into the kernel, etc.), so I can't report on how well it worked yet. Has anybody tried this? I figure if it works, I can upgrade to a larger capacity memory stick. Memory sticks are easily carried and hidden, and right now I don't have over 64MB of files to encrypt, so I could conceivably get it all onto a memory stick. Cheers, hussar
hussar