Rob, Jeff, et al aren't here to edit people's submissions, the whole point of the site is to post links and host discussions.
That's a good point -- they certainly would need to spend more time selecting stories and less time editing stories than a traditional editor. However, if they were called "selectors" as a title, I'll bet that more confusion than benefit would be generated.
I don't think slashdot is feeling much heat from digg to be honest.
Besides which, consider the position of the two sites. It would *not* be that difficult to attach a digg-like system to Slashdot. Okay, it would take work for someone, but providing a "digg-like" view of all submissions would not be fundamentally opposed to the way Slashdot works.
On the other hand, Slashdot has spent years accruing users and building a community of technically-knowledgeable people. That's not quite as easy to build up. I would expect Digg to take years, just as Slashdot has, to reach the level of community that has developed around Slashdot.
If Slashdot and digg simply went head-to-head, each aiming at the other's strengths (Digg adds a better comment system, Slashdot provides user-selected articles), I'm pretty confident that Slashdot would win handily.
I don't use digg, but I do use reddit, which is sorta the same thing (but I think that digg uses an absolute count of votes to determine popularity, whereas reddit tries to figure out what you want with weighting on people who you vote similarly to). While reddit is fun, it's also definitely not a replacement for Slashdot.
You are welcome to disagree, and your points are all valid: some people can't see meaning through grammar error. But me, I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
If someone was really upset enough, it would probably be pretty easy for someone to provide a Greasemonkey plugin that applied spelling/grammar correction diffs from, oh, I dunno, an RSS feed. It's not as if this is a dead wood newspaper.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with spelling in the story summaries. Usually it is in the occasional post, if anywhere, that grammar becomes actually bad.
I think that it's more a problem of being grating to anyone used to conventional news sources, which expend a lot of resources on editing. The NYT is not going to have many grammatical errors (though my local newspaper *does* have said errors).
What's up guys? Why have you suddenly started "talking" to us? And for the record, I like it. I think there should be more direct communicaiton to your readers like this.
I like it too. It's nice that Slashdot has, y'know, a human side.
I think it's that Commander Taco got fed up over something or other, posted recently (The Beatles-Beatles criticism was the first in this series that I read), and discovered from the responses that Slashdot at large liked hearing from him.
It is *never* correct to link something like "click here" - unless you're linking to the Click Here(R) Inc. home page.
I wouldn't say that it is "incorrect" ("incorrect" relative to what set of requirements?). It could probably be better written to allow the text to flow more smoothly, true.
Spelling generally doesn't really matter that much, in terms of making yourself understood. IRC is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, but its users still make themselves understood.
However, only educated people who have spent a fair amount of time studying and reading (and thus, are probably at least reasonably well-to-do) are likely to be able to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. This means that there is an highly-visible tool that allows people to judge someone's rough socioeconomic status. Not surprisingly, people use this tool (perhaps even unconsciously). Also not surprisingly, people try to game the system, to come off as being more educated than they are, by having a few words of French or Latin or whatever to quote. It also means that parents of kids are likely to push them to have correct spelling and grammar so that they can pass informal, unconscious "test" for education level.
None of this is to directly solve a problem with grammar. It's just to deal artifacts of the way we judge people.
So the length of runs of wire that you can use become shorter. So it uses a little more power. So bandwidth capability decreases. Or, so people pay a higher price. Copper will never disappear; the shortage just means that people will have to turn to mining less rich/harder to refine deposits.
It's not even that bad, I'll bet. Think really closely about the article text:
In fact, residents of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. required an average of 170 kilograms of copper per person. Multiply that by overall population estimates of 10 billion people by 2100 and the world will require 1.7 billion metric tons of copper by that date--more than even the most generous estimate of available resources.
What do all three of these countries have in common? You got it -- really low average population density. Wanna bet that the typical Tokyo resident who lives three inches from the next resident doesn't need quite as much long-range power transmission infrastructure as the guy in North Dakota who lives ten miles from anyone?
It might sound like I'm trolling here but I honestly am not. I'd like someone to tell me what's good about that show. Maybe I'm missing the show's point or something?
I think it's kind of like Babylon 5.
Take a bunch of Star Trek fans. Take their beloved franchise and brutally drive it into the ground. They need something else sci-fi to latch onto...
Also, if you don't watch much TV (and you watched it particularly because a friend was talking about this), you may simply be complaining about TV in general. TV plots are, in general, pretty simplistic and bad. They're designed for the least-common-denominator, and they have a small fixed timeblock to set up, tell a story, and wrap up. They have to allow Average Joe to relate to them, they have to not be offensive, and they have to conform to a ton of other requirements.
Being a corporate IT security at large corporation I can tell you why google groups are blocked. If I am looking at porn on alt.binaries.erotica and a female co-worker walks up behind me she could sue for sexual harassment and say the company did not take adequate measures to prevent this situation.
My understanding is the hoopola about "if you don't block pornography, you're liable" is nonsense that's heavily propogated by vendors of filtering software. The case that claims about liability are based on is the '91 ruling in Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc. Here, the plaintiff was being directly targeted and porn was being publically pervasively placed throughout the workplace. That's a *far* cry from someone walking in and seeing a pornographic image on someone's computer monitor. That's even *further* away from a company being liable because they actually aren't buying a product to do filtering.
My impression is that most of the people that install these packages get sold a bill of goods by the filtering people "Lawsuits! Lawsuits!" The IT people pass the possibility of a lawsuit on up, some higher-up decides that the software is cheap insurance against a lawsuit, and buys it.
Frankly, companies don't need to worry about liability from not filtering porn (IANAL and all that). They might need to worry about employees being off-task (I mean, come on -- if you're browsing porn, you are *not* doing work). However, I've been incredibly frusterated by stuff in the past (like pages containing "wine" in the URL being blocked -- when I'm trying to look up constants in WINE's header files), with information about HTTP tunneling that I needed for writing some software that had to interoperate with a firewall being blocked (as "criminal activity", impressively enough, along with anything involving a "proxy"), and so forth. Companies aren't avoiding liability at all -- they're trying to control employees, and keep them from goofing off at work. I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything wrong with that that, but it's just not really a liability issue. I've seen people blow time chatting with their friends on non-work related stuff on AIM, and I can understand that there's a desire to not let the computer be an entertainment device.
However, I've got a much better solution. Have software that skims browsing history, flags anything suspicious, and allows an employee's boss to take a gander at it (if he really wants to). Oh, and *tell* the employee that you plan to do this -- the idea is to prevent abuse. I don't have a problem with my boss seeing a complete log of my at-work browsing history -- I do have a real problem with IT blocking things. I don't abuse my work connection, and it's really irritating to be treated as if I have because someone somewhere *has* done so.
Basically, I think that it's probably unreasonable to prevent the following types of Internet usage in a regular work environment, at least from a security/liability standpoint:
* Outbound TCP connections, other than maybe to port 25. The whole world is not HTTP.
* Requests to DNS servers other than the company one (why on *earth* do people do this?)
* Outbound SSH connections (a special case of the above that's particularly annoying -- sometimes I need to get at my addressbook or something else on my home computer). (There is a small potential security issue here in that someone could set up X11 port forwarding, and have a compromised outside box keylog or screenshot their workstation machine desktop) but goddamn it, the risk is awfully small and the loss of functionality enormous. This is not James Bond, and armies of ninja hackers are not out trying to take screenshots of desktops.
* Access to webpages. Good *God*. If you have to log them, fine, but for Chrissake, do not filter. It's *so* irritating.
Real security risks? Worms, dubious software that people intentionally install, people simply taking confidential (*actually* confidentially, not doc
I'm fine with the *client* buying QoS. I'd *love*, actually, to see ISPs sell classes of this service to residential users. Maybe you just have different packages with different QoS, maybe the ISP can look at the ToS bits in the IP packets, maybe they do some half-assed guesses based on port numbers used (where you get N megs of "high priority" QoS traffic per month, after which that traffic is treated as "regular priority").
This would not be a bad thing. This would simply allow more intelligent use of the network. If something is going to be dropped and retransmitted, you bet your butt I want it to be a packet from my mail or FTP stream, and not that packet that Quake is relying on to let me know about a rocket headed my way. It means that people can buy low-quality bulk surplus bandwidth. This is, at least in theory, a win-win situation, because allocating network resources more intelligently means less waste, and the ISP can split those savings with the customer (possibly simply in the form of improved bandwidth).
QoS based on the *remote* end paying is a completely different story. This is not a good thing. This is a *bad* thing.
For most people, there is a significant barrier to switching ISPs (be it technical diffficulty or contracts or changing an email address or whatever). The ISP can exploit this to do things like cut a deal with a slightly-less-than-good search engine to provide faster access than their superior competition. Since they enjoy a good deal of lock-in with the customer, they can squeeze the application providers for some money. This is exactly the sort of bullshit that permeates the cell market (and how I'd love to see the cell providers forcibly turned into simple ISPs, where people can stick whatever ring tones and applications they'd like on their phone, and just have incentive to minimize network traffic usage).
This Bell South scheme will tend to encourage existing web service players to become more powerful and makes it rough for challengers to them to do anything -- unlike providing QoS determined by the *local user's* package. I can understand why Bell South doesn't charge their customers for QoS -- it's technically intimidating to most users (and all they'll hear is "not unlimited") and it doesn't let them hide costs. However, it's damned frusterating that they don't. *I*'d love to have Comcast provide me with the option to do QoS based on my own ToS bits, myself.
If you include company's logo in your video game without asking you are likely to get a nastygram from their lawyers insisting you remove it.
Is this actually the case?
I don't think that you can be prevented from using a logo, as long as you aren't claiming that your product is associated with that company. For example, if I made a game with an evil empire with big spaceships and I put a Microsoft logo on each of the big spaceships, I don't think that Microsoft has any legal grounds for making me remove them.
Spelling doesn't really matter *that* much, generally, in terms of making yourself understood. IRC is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, but its users still make themselves understood.
However, only educated people who have spent a fair amount of time studying and reading (and thus, are probably at least reasonably well-to-do) are likely to be able to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. This means that there is an highly-visible tool to try to judge someone's rough socioeconomic status. This means that people do so (perhaps even unconsciously). This means that other people immediately try to game the system, by having a few words of French or Latin or whatever to quote. It also means that parents of kids are likely to push them to have correct spelling and grammar so that they can pass informal, unconscious "test" for education level.
This same sort of social test happens all the time...just usually with English speakers trying to speak English, not Chinese speakers.
The patents chunk is still very significant. What it comes down to is that any developer can inadvertently effectively nullify a company's patents (at least WRT GPLv3 implementations, which can be shoehorned via a separate process model into allowing even non-GPLv3 software to do patented things).
The company I work for (very large) is dicey about even using software components under the MIT license, because they're unsure about the risks of this whole open source thing -- they require that a lawyer sign off an OK. Given their patent portfolio, I can almost guarantee that they would never allow a programmer to release anything under GPLv3.
As a matter of fact, I would be surprised if IBM does not have significant feedback on this.
If GPLv3 does go through, I could even see IBM spawning a child company just to produce open source software, to keep their patent portfolio secure.
Another point I'm interested in -- by my reading, the requirement to provide a free license is on a per-patent basis, *not* on a per-claim basis.
Many, many patents contain intentionally over-broad claims. Adding a claim only costs about $100 or so, plus lawyer's fees. If you have 30 claims, ranging from the absurdly broad to the unnecessarily narrow, if someone challenges your patent, they might only get 17 of the claims rejected -- so you still have almost as much IP as you theoretically could have had if you claimed the very maximum amount of IP you could get away with. If you had only two claims (one very broad, one very narrow), and the broad claim is rejected, you are left with only the narrow claim.
Under this GPLv3 draft, if my reading is correct, someone releasing software affected by a patent that is over-broad must provide a license providing free use of *all* claims of that patent. This is very significant if GPLv3 catches on. This means that all the patents out there with extremely broad claims will be effectively nullified by any of these companies that want to release GPLv3 software.
I like most of the GPLv3, but I think that the patents bit may make it unacceptable -- the FSF has a *lot* of weight to throw around in the form of software under their license, but I think that they're being too ambitious in trying to fight software patents with the GPL. Unless, of course, my reading is incorrect.
I dunno. I know that you're thinking of a personal journal kept online by people, but consider that Slashdot could be considered a "blog", and that there is increasing use of corporate blogs. The DNS hierarchy is slow to adapt -- once we move to a new TLD, we're stuck with it for a while. The nature of what a blog even is, in the presence of new systems for social networking and so forth, is rapidly changing.
I'm not sure that search engines might be able to do a better job of identifying blogs than blog authors do, if there is indeed a link problem (for example, Groklaw is very different from a personal blog), then I would suggest that this is better addressed by the search engine maintainers.
For that matter, I'm not even certain that blogs are really over-weighted -- they seem to often be up-to-date and do a good job of spreading useful information.
Also, some sites are not dedicated blogs -- why stuff a blog in a different domain? I mean, sure, Verisign would love this (since they'd be able to rent additional domains), but ultimately I'm not sure that storing different content in different domains fits with the existing DNS scheme well.
It's because Netscape Navigator decided to fill in "www.foobar.com" for "foobar". That meant that if you wanted a short, memorable URL, you needed a.com domain.
A reasonable decision at the time, but with unfortunate consequences down the line.
Also, ".com" is two characters shorter than ".co.us".
I stopped using Tor after i realised, that more than 1/3 of it's exit nodes where (us-)navy machines.
Tor was developed by the US Navy. This is not a huge surprise -- DARPA and the ONR fund a lot of computer research, including security. Besides, if the federal government wanted to spy on you, it wouldn't be doing so via the Navy. That's the FBI's job.
Well, unless you don't live in the US. Then it's the CIA's job.
Well, this isn't really a TLD question, but I expect that Mr. Cerf knows his way around a name.
Currently, the most common scheme for addressing a document is a URL, which includes the location of that document (or, more likely, the location of the most recent revision of that document) on a server. This scheme has the drawback that URLs tend to break over time as organizations shift and directory structures change. This is a problem for those compiling bibliographies, where a valid reference to the original document is important. One approach to deal with this is content-based addressing, where the address of a document is derived from a hash of the document -- this allows any available copy of the document to be located. What is your opinion on the use of content-addressable naming, such as that implemented in edonkey and gnutella? Do you feel that use of content-based addresses will become more important? If so, do you believe that such addressing will be provided through a public system like DNS or through a private system like Google?
Step 1: Type "google" into URL bar. Watch as www.google.com appears (thanks to a Google I Feel Lucky search).
Step 2: Right click on the search text field, and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search".
Step 3: Enter "gg" into the Keyword field in the dialog that appears (and whatever you want in the Name field).
Step 4: You can now type "gg foobar" to Google for "foobar".
Konqueror does something similar with "gg:", not "gg ".
I believe that Firefox ships default with "google" as a Google search keyword (though it's been a long time since I've done a clean installation, so I'm not sure), and I believe that "wp foobar" now does a Wikipedia search for "foobar" by default.
If you want to have a quick search on Google Images with SafeSearch disabled (*without* having to log in -- yes, it is possible, even if Google makes it non-obvious how to do this), bookmark the following link and give it a keyword.
Why would it be beneficial to introduce an entirely new root-level subtree for storing Wikis?
I mean, there are many geocities pages out there too, but we don't introduct a.geocities.
If you have a hierarchical system like DNS, you introduce a new child to the root when none of the existing children are appropriate for storing said item. Wikis seem to be doing okay where they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Rob, Jeff, et al aren't here to edit people's submissions, the whole point of the site is to post links and host discussions.
That's a good point -- they certainly would need to spend more time selecting stories and less time editing stories than a traditional editor. However, if they were called "selectors" as a title, I'll bet that more confusion than benefit would be generated.
I don't think slashdot is feeling much heat from digg to be honest.
Besides which, consider the position of the two sites. It would *not* be that difficult to attach a digg-like system to Slashdot. Okay, it would take work for someone, but providing a "digg-like" view of all submissions would not be fundamentally opposed to the way Slashdot works.
On the other hand, Slashdot has spent years accruing users and building a community of technically-knowledgeable people. That's not quite as easy to build up. I would expect Digg to take years, just as Slashdot has, to reach the level of community that has developed around Slashdot.
If Slashdot and digg simply went head-to-head, each aiming at the other's strengths (Digg adds a better comment system, Slashdot provides user-selected articles), I'm pretty confident that Slashdot would win handily.
I don't use digg, but I do use reddit, which is sorta the same thing (but I think that digg uses an absolute count of votes to determine popularity, whereas reddit tries to figure out what you want with weighting on people who you vote similarly to). While reddit is fun, it's also definitely not a replacement for Slashdot.
You are welcome to disagree, and your points are all valid: some people can't see meaning through grammar error. But me, I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
If someone was really upset enough, it would probably be pretty easy for someone to provide a Greasemonkey plugin that applied spelling/grammar correction diffs from, oh, I dunno, an RSS feed. It's not as if this is a dead wood newspaper.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with spelling in the story summaries. Usually it is in the occasional post, if anywhere, that grammar becomes actually bad.
I think that it's more a problem of being grating to anyone used to conventional news sources, which expend a lot of resources on editing. The NYT is not going to have many grammatical errors (though my local newspaper *does* have said errors).
What's up guys? Why have you suddenly started "talking" to us? And for the record, I like it. I think there should be more direct communicaiton to your readers like this.
I like it too. It's nice that Slashdot has, y'know, a human side.
I think it's that Commander Taco got fed up over something or other, posted recently (The Beatles-Beatles criticism was the first in this series that I read), and discovered from the responses that Slashdot at large liked hearing from him.
jamie's posting in here too, I notice.
It is *never* correct to link something like "click here" - unless you're linking to the Click Here(R) Inc. home page.
I wouldn't say that it is "incorrect" ("incorrect" relative to what set of requirements?). It could probably be better written to allow the text to flow more smoothly, true.
I'm going to repost my post from the other day:
Spelling generally doesn't really matter that much, in terms of making yourself understood. IRC is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, but its users still make themselves understood.
However, only educated people who have spent a fair amount of time studying and reading (and thus, are probably at least reasonably well-to-do) are likely to be able to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. This means that there is an highly-visible tool that allows people to judge someone's rough socioeconomic status. Not surprisingly, people use this tool (perhaps even unconsciously). Also not surprisingly, people try to game the system, to come off as being more educated than they are, by having a few words of French or Latin or whatever to quote. It also means that parents of kids are likely to push them to have correct spelling and grammar so that they can pass informal, unconscious "test" for education level.
None of this is to directly solve a problem with grammar. It's just to deal artifacts of the way we judge people.
So the length of runs of wire that you can use become shorter. So it uses a little more power. So bandwidth capability decreases. Or, so people pay a higher price. Copper will never disappear; the shortage just means that people will have to turn to mining less rich/harder to refine deposits.
It's not even that bad, I'll bet. Think really closely about the article text:
In fact, residents of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. required an average of 170 kilograms of copper per person. Multiply that by overall population estimates of 10 billion people by 2100 and the world will require 1.7 billion metric tons of copper by that date--more than even the most generous estimate of available resources.
What do all three of these countries have in common? You got it -- really low average population density. Wanna bet that the typical Tokyo resident who lives three inches from the next resident doesn't need quite as much long-range power transmission infrastructure as the guy in North Dakota who lives ten miles from anyone?
Having worked in corporate America for many years, let me assure you that such spending abuses are quite common there, too.
Cap company employee count.
10 kiloperson companies are asking for trouble.
It might sound like I'm trolling here but I honestly am not. I'd like someone to tell me what's good about that show. Maybe I'm missing the show's point or something?
I think it's kind of like Babylon 5.
Take a bunch of Star Trek fans. Take their beloved franchise and brutally drive it into the ground. They need something else sci-fi to latch onto...
Also, if you don't watch much TV (and you watched it particularly because a friend was talking about this), you may simply be complaining about TV in general. TV plots are, in general, pretty simplistic and bad. They're designed for the least-common-denominator, and they have a small fixed timeblock to set up, tell a story, and wrap up. They have to allow Average Joe to relate to them, they have to not be offensive, and they have to conform to a ton of other requirements.
Being a corporate IT security at large corporation I can tell you why google groups are blocked. If I am looking at porn on alt.binaries.erotica and a female co-worker walks up behind me she could sue for sexual harassment and say the company did not take adequate measures to prevent this situation.
My understanding is the hoopola about "if you don't block pornography, you're liable" is nonsense that's heavily propogated by vendors of filtering software. The case that claims about liability are based on is the '91 ruling in Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc. Here, the plaintiff was being directly targeted and porn was being publically pervasively placed throughout the workplace. That's a *far* cry from someone walking in and seeing a pornographic image on someone's computer monitor. That's even *further* away from a company being liable because they actually aren't buying a product to do filtering.
My impression is that most of the people that install these packages get sold a bill of goods by the filtering people "Lawsuits! Lawsuits!" The IT people pass the possibility of a lawsuit on up, some higher-up decides that the software is cheap insurance against a lawsuit, and buys it.
Frankly, companies don't need to worry about liability from not filtering porn (IANAL and all that). They might need to worry about employees being off-task (I mean, come on -- if you're browsing porn, you are *not* doing work). However, I've been incredibly frusterated by stuff in the past (like pages containing "wine" in the URL being blocked -- when I'm trying to look up constants in WINE's header files), with information about HTTP tunneling that I needed for writing some software that had to interoperate with a firewall being blocked (as "criminal activity", impressively enough, along with anything involving a "proxy"), and so forth. Companies aren't avoiding liability at all -- they're trying to control employees, and keep them from goofing off at work. I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything wrong with that that, but it's just not really a liability issue. I've seen people blow time chatting with their friends on non-work related stuff on AIM, and I can understand that there's a desire to not let the computer be an entertainment device.
However, I've got a much better solution. Have software that skims browsing history, flags anything suspicious, and allows an employee's boss to take a gander at it (if he really wants to). Oh, and *tell* the employee that you plan to do this -- the idea is to prevent abuse. I don't have a problem with my boss seeing a complete log of my at-work browsing history -- I do have a real problem with IT blocking things. I don't abuse my work connection, and it's really irritating to be treated as if I have because someone somewhere *has* done so.
Basically, I think that it's probably unreasonable to prevent the following types of Internet usage in a regular work environment, at least from a security/liability standpoint:
* Outbound TCP connections, other than maybe to port 25. The whole world is not HTTP.
* Requests to DNS servers other than the company one (why on *earth* do people do this?)
* Outbound SSH connections (a special case of the above that's particularly annoying -- sometimes I need to get at my addressbook or something else on my home computer). (There is a small potential security issue here in that someone could set up X11 port forwarding, and have a compromised outside box keylog or screenshot their workstation machine desktop) but goddamn it, the risk is awfully small and the loss of functionality enormous. This is not James Bond, and armies of ninja hackers are not out trying to take screenshots of desktops.
* Access to webpages. Good *God*. If you have to log them, fine, but for Chrissake, do not filter. It's *so* irritating.
Real security risks? Worms, dubious software that people intentionally install, people simply taking confidential (*actually* confidentially, not doc
I think you mean iglou.com.
I'm fine with the *client* buying QoS. I'd *love*, actually, to see ISPs sell classes of this service to residential users. Maybe you just have different packages with different QoS, maybe the ISP can look at the ToS bits in the IP packets, maybe they do some half-assed guesses based on port numbers used (where you get N megs of "high priority" QoS traffic per month, after which that traffic is treated as "regular priority").
This would not be a bad thing. This would simply allow more intelligent use of the network. If something is going to be dropped and retransmitted, you bet your butt I want it to be a packet from my mail or FTP stream, and not that packet that Quake is relying on to let me know about a rocket headed my way. It means that people can buy low-quality bulk surplus bandwidth. This is, at least in theory, a win-win situation, because allocating network resources more intelligently means less waste, and the ISP can split those savings with the customer (possibly simply in the form of improved bandwidth).
QoS based on the *remote* end paying is a completely different story. This is not a good thing. This is a *bad* thing.
For most people, there is a significant barrier to switching ISPs (be it technical diffficulty or contracts or changing an email address or whatever). The ISP can exploit this to do things like cut a deal with a slightly-less-than-good search engine to provide faster access than their superior competition. Since they enjoy a good deal of lock-in with the customer, they can squeeze the application providers for some money. This is exactly the sort of bullshit that permeates the cell market (and how I'd love to see the cell providers forcibly turned into simple ISPs, where people can stick whatever ring tones and applications they'd like on their phone, and just have incentive to minimize network traffic usage).
This Bell South scheme will tend to encourage existing web service players to become more powerful and makes it rough for challengers to them to do anything -- unlike providing QoS determined by the *local user's* package. I can understand why Bell South doesn't charge their customers for QoS -- it's technically intimidating to most users (and all they'll hear is "not unlimited") and it doesn't let them hide costs. However, it's damned frusterating that they don't. *I*'d love to have Comcast provide me with the option to do QoS based on my own ToS bits, myself.
If you include company's logo in your video game without asking you are likely to get a nastygram from their lawyers insisting you remove it.
Is this actually the case?
I don't think that you can be prevented from using a logo, as long as you aren't claiming that your product is associated with that company. For example, if I made a game with an evil empire with big spaceships and I put a Microsoft logo on each of the big spaceships, I don't think that Microsoft has any legal grounds for making me remove them.
It's not as funny as it might seem.
Spelling doesn't really matter *that* much, generally, in terms of making yourself understood. IRC is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, but its users still make themselves understood.
However, only educated people who have spent a fair amount of time studying and reading (and thus, are probably at least reasonably well-to-do) are likely to be able to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. This means that there is an highly-visible tool to try to judge someone's rough socioeconomic status. This means that people do so (perhaps even unconsciously). This means that other people immediately try to game the system, by having a few words of French or Latin or whatever to quote. It also means that parents of kids are likely to push them to have correct spelling and grammar so that they can pass informal, unconscious "test" for education level.
This same sort of social test happens all the time...just usually with English speakers trying to speak English, not Chinese speakers.
The patents chunk is still very significant. What it comes down to is that any developer can inadvertently effectively nullify a company's patents (at least WRT GPLv3 implementations, which can be shoehorned via a separate process model into allowing even non-GPLv3 software to do patented things).
The company I work for (very large) is dicey about even using software components under the MIT license, because they're unsure about the risks of this whole open source thing -- they require that a lawyer sign off an OK. Given their patent portfolio, I can almost guarantee that they would never allow a programmer to release anything under GPLv3.
As a matter of fact, I would be surprised if IBM does not have significant feedback on this.
If GPLv3 does go through, I could even see IBM spawning a child company just to produce open source software, to keep their patent portfolio secure.
Another point I'm interested in -- by my reading, the requirement to provide a free license is on a per-patent basis, *not* on a per-claim basis.
Many, many patents contain intentionally over-broad claims. Adding a claim only costs about $100 or so, plus lawyer's fees. If you have 30 claims, ranging from the absurdly broad to the unnecessarily narrow, if someone challenges your patent, they might only get 17 of the claims rejected -- so you still have almost as much IP as you theoretically could have had if you claimed the very maximum amount of IP you could get away with. If you had only two claims (one very broad, one very narrow), and the broad claim is rejected, you are left with only the narrow claim.
Under this GPLv3 draft, if my reading is correct, someone releasing software affected by a patent that is over-broad must provide a license providing free use of *all* claims of that patent. This is very significant if GPLv3 catches on. This means that all the patents out there with extremely broad claims will be effectively nullified by any of these companies that want to release GPLv3 software.
I like most of the GPLv3, but I think that the patents bit may make it unacceptable -- the FSF has a *lot* of weight to throw around in the form of software under their license, but I think that they're being too ambitious in trying to fight software patents with the GPL. Unless, of course, my reading is incorrect.
I dunno. I know that you're thinking of a personal journal kept online by people, but consider that Slashdot could be considered a "blog", and that there is increasing use of corporate blogs. The DNS hierarchy is slow to adapt -- once we move to a new TLD, we're stuck with it for a while. The nature of what a blog even is, in the presence of new systems for social networking and so forth, is rapidly changing.
I'm not sure that search engines might be able to do a better job of identifying blogs than blog authors do, if there is indeed a link problem (for example, Groklaw is very different from a personal blog), then I would suggest that this is better addressed by the search engine maintainers.
For that matter, I'm not even certain that blogs are really over-weighted -- they seem to often be up-to-date and do a good job of spreading useful information.
Also, some sites are not dedicated blogs -- why stuff a blog in a different domain? I mean, sure, Verisign would love this (since they'd be able to rent additional domains), but ultimately I'm not sure that storing different content in different domains fits with the existing DNS scheme well.
I can guess at the answer to that.
.com domain.
It's because Netscape Navigator decided to fill in "www.foobar.com" for "foobar". That meant that if you wanted a short, memorable URL, you needed a
A reasonable decision at the time, but with unfortunate consequences down the line.
Also, ".com" is two characters shorter than ".co.us".
I stopped using Tor after i realised, that more than 1/3 of it's exit nodes where (us-)navy machines.
Tor was developed by the US Navy. This is not a huge surprise -- DARPA and the ONR fund a lot of computer research, including security. Besides, if the federal government wanted to spy on you, it wouldn't be doing so via the Navy. That's the FBI's job.
Well, unless you don't live in the US. Then it's the CIA's job.
This is easy under Linux:
# ifconfig eth0 hw ether [new MAC address]
However, I've no idea of what the userspace program under Windows is to do this.
Incidently, this breaks a (rather silly) 802.11 security proposal I've heard that relies on people not being able to modify their MAC address.
You're MAC address isn't used outside of your subnet.
I've heard (privacy-invasive) proposals for ramming it into the low bits in an IPv6 address.
Awww...I just realized that he's taking question from CircleID, not Slashdot. Oh, well.
Well, this isn't really a TLD question, but I expect that Mr. Cerf knows his way around a name.
Currently, the most common scheme for addressing a document is a URL, which includes the location of that document (or, more likely, the location of the most recent revision of that document) on a server. This scheme has the drawback that URLs tend to break over time as organizations shift and directory structures change. This is a problem for those compiling bibliographies, where a valid reference to the original document is important. One approach to deal with this is content-based addressing, where the address of a document is derived from a hash of the document -- this allows any available copy of the document to be located. What is your opinion on the use of content-addressable naming, such as that implemented in edonkey and gnutella? Do you feel that use of content-based addresses will become more important? If so, do you believe that such addressing will be provided through a public system like DNS or through a private system like Google?
With Firefox:
Step 1: Type "google" into URL bar. Watch as www.google.com appears (thanks to a Google I Feel Lucky search).
Step 2: Right click on the search text field, and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search".
Step 3: Enter "gg" into the Keyword field in the dialog that appears (and whatever you want in the Name field).
Step 4: You can now type "gg foobar" to Google for "foobar".
Konqueror does something similar with "gg:", not "gg ".
I believe that Firefox ships default with "google" as a Google search keyword (though it's been a long time since I've done a clean installation, so I'm not sure), and I believe that "wp foobar" now does a Wikipedia search for "foobar" by default.
If you want to have a quick search on Google Images with SafeSearch disabled (*without* having to log in -- yes, it is possible, even if Google makes it non-obvious how to do this), bookmark the following link and give it a keyword.
Why would it be beneficial to introduce an entirely new root-level subtree for storing Wikis?
.geocities.
I mean, there are many geocities pages out there too, but we don't introduct a
If you have a hierarchical system like DNS, you introduce a new child to the root when none of the existing children are appropriate for storing said item. Wikis seem to be doing okay where they are.
Heck, you don't need Vint Cert to shoot down .xxx.