Equally, I would expect a photoeassy on the day in a life of a proctologist would similarly be immune from piracy. I think it was preemptively pirated under the name hello.jpg.
For those of you who haven't played the game, here's a brief description:
You are given a map (n by m grid). Each square has a number of democratic, republican and udecided voters. The total number of voters and their distribution across parties varies from square to square. The map is divided into four connected regions.
Mission 1: change the division such that each region contains between 640K and 650K voters. Fairly easy.
Mission 2: change the division, such that the above constraint is satisfied, and such that your party has at least 50% of the votes in three of the four regions. Takes a little while.
Mission 3: change the division maintaining roughly equal voter count, and such that each party wins two regions, with at least 55% of the votes for their guy. Didn't play.
(there are two more missions).
When presented with mission 2, I was a little... "This is fishy". When I completed it, I was a lot "OMFG... this is fucked". When presented with mission 3, I just couldn't believe what I read.
This is insane. I really ought to run off and check how voting districts are decided in my country, but I'm a little preoccupied preparing for exams... (yeah, that's an excuse; it's a valid one, but it's still an excuse).
You could do something almost good enough, though, that's done completely on the client side:
Let's say you're sending index.html. Take a hash of the page, put the hash early on the page.
In the bottom of the page, insert javascript code that removes the hash value, hashes the page, and compares it to the removed hash. If they mismatch, do an alert("warning: the page has been tampered with since it left Foocorp.com's servers."). The hash function doesn't have to be overly secure; here is actually a good time to write your own bad crypto.
The ISP would then have a hard time modifying the page, because they would have to generate the hash value of the modified page before seeing the page they want to modify only slightly.
They could, of course, buffer the whole page (if the server sends it out, or it could spoof your ACKs) and run the javascript on their modified version to compute the hash function. But how are they to know which functions to call? Include an infinite loop and some exploits that you never call yourself if you want to be really disruptive.
It's true that microsoft sells ergonomic keyboards. I think their most famous ones are the "split" or "natural hand" boards (that's the ones I know, and the names I know them under), i.e. the one I linked to.
The problem is that it's not a good keyboard design. If we stick to a (roughly) flat board with buttons on it, you first of all want more space between the hands, since that's how you hold them naturally. Second of all, you want vertically aligned keys (the unaligned keys is a holdover from typewriter manufacturing constraints).
Third of all, you want something that takes the shape and anatomy of the human hand into account. Your fingers don't have equal length. When you rest your palm, you tend to want to let your fingers "hang", being in rest at a lower place than the palm. Your thumb can do useful work besides just hitting the space bar.
Kinesis has made a quite good keyboard, taking the above considerations into account.
If you want to move away from the board-with-buttons, I've heard many good things about the datahand (sorry, couldn't find a picture from the makers).
On top of picking a good keyboard, you may want to pick a good keyboard layout. I'm very happy using dvorak, and I hear that people with RSI can type with less pain (some with no pain at all) on dvorak. Comparison: on qwerty, you move your fingers 15-20 miles per day, compared to 1 mile on dvorak for (I assume) the same workload.
For a longer explanation about dvorak, see dv zine. It's in my experience well worth the time spent learning a new keyboard layout.
So yeah, microsoft sells ergonomic keyboards, but you can get better elsewhere. I've tried both a microsoft ergonomic board and the kinesis, and the kinesis definitely wins any comparison hands down; except when you spill coke into one and not the other.
And I for one welcome our no longer just theoretically feasible new self-replicating plastic robot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground plastic caves.
I don't know too much about how other people work, but when I do something that requires me to be root, I know in advance that I need to be root, so I open a root term (or switch to it), do the work, and get out.
This is sharply contrasted with Vista: you are in the middle of doing something you want to do, and are interrupted with a security message that you didn't expect.
The first becomes a natural part of your workflow; the second becomes an unpredictable (and hence annoying) interruption of your workflow.
Also, on Linux, the set of things I do that requires me to be root is reasonably small and changes slowly. It's also mostly confined to administrative tasks.
I don't have first-hand experience, but my understanding is that on Vista, too many user-level applications have to ask for permission to do their job, which means that interrupting the user becomes a more common event.
Or they could mine your documents for data. We, the slashdot collective, has already agreed that "Do no evil" doesn't hold. However, this might be even too much for the evil parts of Google.
Just a random thought. Now, take that tin foil hat off.
The biggest is that the school system is not a great way to learn stuff. I remember (but bear in mind that I'm your average slashdotter, not your average person) at a fairly early age drawing 6x6 grids which taught be that 7 has probability 1/6. I remember my father drawing circles in the sand with dots in the center, explaining the basics of chemistry (and he's not a chemist), and me completely getting it.
I remember at age 14 (laughably late by slashdot standards) that a person I knew had written a program that played chess. Being a moderately skilled chess player at the time (1390), I thought that was awesomely cool and wanted to do that myself. That got me started writing C (I had dabbled in.bat "scripting" and javascript for ~2 years before that).
Where am I? Studying CS & Math. Doing the things I chose to study in my own time, not the things I discovered in school.
Contrast this with school. You're forced into confinement (it wasn't until grade 6 or 7 we were allowed to leave school grounds unsupervised) with a bunch of people that mistreat you horribly and wish you the worst, and another bunch of people who really don't give a rats ass. You're bored out of your mind in the classes that interest you because the material is easy and progress through it is slower than your pace. You're bored in the rest as well, because they don't interest you; the disinterest may arise merely from the fact that they are being forced upon you.
And I went to a private school... with the things my mother has said about public schools (and she's worked at one), I think I should be glad to not have attended one. On top of that, I hear the danish school system is better than the one in USA.
More edibles for cognition: John Taylor Gatto (English teacher) says that we he finds companies that don't mind having the kid do some work, the kids do more and better work than the paid staff. My ex-girlfriend (okay, so not completely an average slashdotter:D) has had the same experience (with her being the "kid", age ~15 at the time). This at least tells me that kids have an inherent drive to not waste their time. If that's true, then why are they so unmotivated to do schoolwork?
Not wanting to be completely off topic, the article says that work needs to be done on making math chic. The question is: who has the credibility and influence with kids to make math cool? For young kids, the parents have some influence, although not much in the "cool" department. For teens, it's mostly the peers (not the kinds who reset the connection). That's a network effects problem you have to solve. Who else? Rock stars? Quaterbacks? Miss teen south carolina (everywhere such as maps)? I mean, having math be the Hot Stuff wouldn't be bad, but it would imply (not just suggest, as the decline in maritime piracy has) the existence of the flying spaghetti monster.
(for those not picking up logician's humor, everything follows from a contradiction).
WINE is technically a 3rd party app. Everything is a 3rd party app on linux.
Take Debian and Ubuntu. An application is either made by debian, or made by ubuntu, or made upstream. If it's made by debian, it's 3rd party on ubuntu. If it's made by ubuntu, it's 3rd party on debian. If it's made upstream, it's 3rd party on both distros.
Isn't this what distros are more or less all about, packaging all the third parties' software in an easily-consumable form?... Or is 3rd party not defined in terms of origin, but in terms of installed-by-default or main vs. universe? The latter distinction doesn't exist on debian, and on debian the former excludes some projects created by the debian team.
However, when was there widespread use? I seem to recall that in 1992, the fax was in use, and friends of the family had one and used it. The first interweb came into existence in september 1993 (hint: ha-ha-only-serious). It has taken people some time getting used to it; some mothers more than others;)
Ooh, I have an idea. We could request only the parts of the file we actually need. Then we could probably do it in real time; the load on the master server will possible get too heavy, though. I know, our ISPs could cache local copies, and we could split the file into hierarchical chunks.
Write a standards-adherent CSS, and check that it works in firefox, konqueror, safari, elinks and $BROWSER. Then, write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Make apache return one or the other, depending on the user-agent string. Any reasons why this would be infeasible?
Especially now that Firefox has consumed around 15-20% of the market according to a number of analyst firms; that's nothing to sneeze at. Consider this tidbit: the danish IT- and telecomunnications comittee ("It- og telestyrelsen") considers 25% a strong market presence, subject to regulation. I know, browsers != copper wires, but it puts the figure into some kind of perspective.
I don't suggest regulating firefox, it is the small competitor; this in fact a rather sad statement about the market for browsers, but good on firefox:)
It's about time people started standing up to fraudulent ISPs. In most countries which have English as an official language, there is one dominant player on the internet market (or, if you're lucky, two or three equally fraudulent players).
It semes reasonable to assume that they benefit from traffic being sent on their network; otherwise, they wouldn't be selling traffic on them. Also, if you send any internet traffic, you will with high probability send traffic on the big players' networks.
Conclusion: if you use the internet, you will benefit evil evil ISPs. I don't know what the solution is, but winning a class-action lawsuit will just up your rates, so I don't see how this qualifies as standing up to them.
Maybe you can enlighten me? I don't mean to troll or bait flames.
And if they wind up losing the suit, and make some attempt to pass the cost onto their customers/victims it won't particularly matter to me, since I'll be using another ISP at that point. Well, ISTR that Bell Canada controls the backbone in canada, which means that if you use another ISP, you still go through Bell Canada's network. Also, in passing on the cost of the class-action lawsuit outcome, they might get the idea of upping the charges on their peering agreements, which means your ISP has to shell out some more money. Your money.
OC Remix called. They want the nineties (and late eighties) back, and/or are stuck in them;)
I agree with your point: video games is not the future of music distribution. I'm convinced it's not the future source of popular songs, either. However, it will remain a source of high-quality music; take for instance warcraft 3, or the ripoff-ees of Press Play on Tape. Or, going open source, listen to some music from Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Vegastrike or Sauerbraten.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you got reading and 'rithemtic sorted out ;)
For those of you who haven't played the game, here's a brief description:
You are given a map (n by m grid). Each square has a number of democratic, republican and udecided voters. The total number of voters and their distribution across parties varies from square to square. The map is divided into four connected regions.
Mission 1: change the division such that each region contains between 640K and 650K voters. Fairly easy.
Mission 2: change the division, such that the above constraint is satisfied, and such that your party has at least 50% of the votes in three of the four regions. Takes a little while.
Mission 3: change the division maintaining roughly equal voter count, and such that each party wins two regions, with at least 55% of the votes for their guy. Didn't play.
(there are two more missions).
When presented with mission 2, I was a little... "This is fishy". When I completed it, I was a lot "OMFG... this is fucked". When presented with mission 3, I just couldn't believe what I read.
This is insane. I really ought to run off and check how voting districts are decided in my country, but I'm a little preoccupied preparing for exams... (yeah, that's an excuse; it's a valid one, but it's still an excuse).
Hopefully only Clinton leaves lipstick on the joystick.
;)
No wait! That's Lewinsky...
You could do something almost good enough, though, that's done completely on the client side:
Let's say you're sending index.html. Take a hash of the page, put the hash early on the page.
In the bottom of the page, insert javascript code that removes the hash value, hashes the page, and compares it to the removed hash. If they mismatch, do an alert("warning: the page has been tampered with since it left Foocorp.com's servers."). The hash function doesn't have to be overly secure; here is actually a good time to write your own bad crypto.
The ISP would then have a hard time modifying the page, because they would have to generate the hash value of the modified page before seeing the page they want to modify only slightly.
They could, of course, buffer the whole page (if the server sends it out, or it could spoof your ACKs) and run the javascript on their modified version to compute the hash function. But how are they to know which functions to call? Include an infinite loop and some exploits that you never call yourself if you want to be really disruptive.
It's true that microsoft sells ergonomic keyboards. I think their most famous ones are the "split" or "natural hand" boards (that's the ones I know, and the names I know them under), i.e. the one I linked to.
The problem is that it's not a good keyboard design. If we stick to a (roughly) flat board with buttons on it, you first of all want more space between the hands, since that's how you hold them naturally. Second of all, you want vertically aligned keys (the unaligned keys is a holdover from typewriter manufacturing constraints).
Third of all, you want something that takes the shape and anatomy of the human hand into account. Your fingers don't have equal length. When you rest your palm, you tend to want to let your fingers "hang", being in rest at a lower place than the palm. Your thumb can do useful work besides just hitting the space bar.
Kinesis has made a quite good keyboard, taking the above considerations into account.
If you want to move away from the board-with-buttons, I've heard many good things about the datahand (sorry, couldn't find a picture from the makers).
On top of picking a good keyboard, you may want to pick a good keyboard layout. I'm very happy using dvorak, and I hear that people with RSI can type with less pain (some with no pain at all) on dvorak. Comparison: on qwerty, you move your fingers 15-20 miles per day, compared to 1 mile on dvorak for (I assume) the same workload.
For a longer explanation about dvorak, see dv zine. It's in my experience well worth the time spent learning a new keyboard layout.
So yeah, microsoft sells ergonomic keyboards, but you can get better elsewhere. I've tried both a microsoft ergonomic board and the kinesis, and the kinesis definitely wins any comparison hands down; except when you spill coke into one and not the other.
And I for one welcome our no longer just theoretically feasible new self-replicating plastic robot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground plastic caves.
I don't know too much about how other people work, but when I do something that requires me to be root, I know in advance that I need to be root, so I open a root term (or switch to it), do the work, and get out.
This is sharply contrasted with Vista: you are in the middle of doing something you want to do, and are interrupted with a security message that you didn't expect.
The first becomes a natural part of your workflow; the second becomes an unpredictable (and hence annoying) interruption of your workflow.
Also, on Linux, the set of things I do that requires me to be root is reasonably small and changes slowly. It's also mostly confined to administrative tasks.
I don't have first-hand experience, but my understanding is that on Vista, too many user-level applications have to ask for permission to do their job, which means that interrupting the user becomes a more common event.
Or they could mine your documents for data. We, the slashdot collective, has already agreed that "Do no evil" doesn't hold. However, this might be even too much for the evil parts of Google.
Just a random thought. Now, take that tin foil hat off.
There are problems beyond math.
.bat "scripting" and javascript for ~2 years before that).
:D) has had the same experience (with her being the "kid", age ~15 at the time). This at least tells me that kids have an inherent drive to not waste their time. If that's true, then why are they so unmotivated to do schoolwork?
The biggest is that the school system is not a great way to learn stuff. I remember (but bear in mind that I'm your average slashdotter, not your average person) at a fairly early age drawing 6x6 grids which taught be that 7 has probability 1/6. I remember my father drawing circles in the sand with dots in the center, explaining the basics of chemistry (and he's not a chemist), and me completely getting it.
I remember at age 14 (laughably late by slashdot standards) that a person I knew had written a program that played chess. Being a moderately skilled chess player at the time (1390), I thought that was awesomely cool and wanted to do that myself. That got me started writing C (I had dabbled in
Where am I? Studying CS & Math. Doing the things I chose to study in my own time, not the things I discovered in school.
Contrast this with school. You're forced into confinement (it wasn't until grade 6 or 7 we were allowed to leave school grounds unsupervised) with a bunch of people that mistreat you horribly and wish you the worst, and another bunch of people who really don't give a rats ass. You're bored out of your mind in the classes that interest you because the material is easy and progress through it is slower than your pace. You're bored in the rest as well, because they don't interest you; the disinterest may arise merely from the fact that they are being forced upon you.
And I went to a private school... with the things my mother has said about public schools (and she's worked at one), I think I should be glad to not have attended one. On top of that, I hear the danish school system is better than the one in USA.
More edibles for cognition: John Taylor Gatto (English teacher) says that we he finds companies that don't mind having the kid do some work, the kids do more and better work than the paid staff. My ex-girlfriend (okay, so not completely an average slashdotter
Not wanting to be completely off topic, the article says that work needs to be done on making math chic. The question is: who has the credibility and influence with kids to make math cool? For young kids, the parents have some influence, although not much in the "cool" department. For teens, it's mostly the peers (not the kinds who reset the connection). That's a network effects problem you have to solve. Who else? Rock stars? Quaterbacks? Miss teen south carolina (everywhere such as maps)? I mean, having math be the Hot Stuff wouldn't be bad, but it would imply (not just suggest, as the decline in maritime piracy has) the existence of the flying spaghetti monster.
(for those not picking up logician's humor, everything follows from a contradiction).
We have always been at war with the terroristic radical Islamic extremists
This is no longer an issue n00b.
Take Debian and Ubuntu. An application is either made by debian, or made by ubuntu, or made upstream. If it's made by debian, it's 3rd party on ubuntu. If it's made by ubuntu, it's 3rd party on debian. If it's made upstream, it's 3rd party on both distros.
Isn't this what distros are more or less all about, packaging all the third parties' software in an easily-consumable form?
Not trying to bee a buzzkill, but I don't think your jokes would fly with that audience.
Okay, email is older; I'll trust you on that.
;)
However, when was there widespread use? I seem to recall that in 1992, the fax was in use, and friends of the family had one and used it. The first interweb came into existence in september 1993 (hint: ha-ha-only-serious). It has taken people some time getting used to it; some mothers more than others
I think that's ultimately more relevant.
(mod parent informative)
Uniform density!
Ooh, I have an idea. We could request only the parts of the file we actually need. Then we could probably do it in real time; the load on the master server will possible get too heavy, though. I know, our ISPs could cache local copies, and we could split the file into hierarchical chunks.
;)
Hey, I oughta' write up an RFC on this
Here's an idea:
Write a standards-adherent CSS, and check that it works in firefox, konqueror, safari, elinks and $BROWSER. Then, write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Make apache return one or the other, depending on the user-agent string. Any reasons why this would be infeasible?
I don't suggest regulating firefox, it is the small competitor; this in fact a rather sad statement about the market for browsers, but good on firefox
It semes reasonable to assume that they benefit from traffic being sent on their network; otherwise, they wouldn't be selling traffic on them. Also, if you send any internet traffic, you will with high probability send traffic on the big players' networks.
Conclusion: if you use the internet, you will benefit evil evil ISPs. I don't know what the solution is, but winning a class-action lawsuit will just up your rates, so I don't see how this qualifies as standing up to them.
Maybe you can enlighten me? I don't mean to troll or bait flames.
OC Remix called. They want the nineties (and late eighties) back, and/or are stuck in them ;)
I agree with your point: video games is not the future of music distribution. I'm convinced it's not the future source of popular songs, either. However, it will remain a source of high-quality music; take for instance warcraft 3, or the ripoff-ees of Press Play on Tape. Or, going open source, listen to some music from Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Vegastrike or Sauerbraten.
That post makes no sense at all! You just posted an incoherent list of things that sound like they're a reply to something... ;)