At this point I don't like the thought of either approach. In the case of Microsoft's approach, adding a completely new scripting language, I can foresee another 10 years of attempts by them to lock web developers into using a Microsoft defined framework while at the same time making compliance within other browsers difficult. They will make sure that other browser development teams are always trying to hit a moving target and stretching their resources, while MS sits back with 10 times the developers and makes this new scripting language ever more integrated with whatever they are calling an operating system that year.
But I don't really like a "radical upgrade" approach as proposed by Mozilla either. While it is the lesser of two evils, I can foresee many many security issues, unless the radical upgrade is designed from the ground up with curtailing XSS vulnerabilities and the like in mind. Also, as we head blithely into a Web 2.0 world (never did find the RFC for "Web 2.0"), I see more and more processing dumped in the lap of the web client that has to render the web page. Where we used to begin to get annoyed at web pages that took more than a few seconds to load, somehow we are now okay with waiting 20-30 seconds for some Javascript heavy page to render in addition to the loading time. Not everyone out there writes good efficient Javascript code such as Google.
Let's fix what's broken with Javascript first. Let's make XSS attacks hellishly difficult to create and fix the sandbox that JS is always threatening to break out of. Sure, let's add an extension or two so that AJAX functionality has more inbuilt support, rather than being what it is now: a massive hack of XMLHttpRequest. Let's even work at simplifying handling of browser differences in the DOM and increase the efficiency of the interpreter for what is unfortunately a very clunky interpreted language.
But while we're doing this, let's not break it, okay? Not everyone out there is a typical Slashdotter. I know people who are very proud of having constructed their own websites in (awful non-compliant) HTML with a few Javascript bells and whistles too. If we give those people a "new and improved" scripting language that is much more difficult to write, then we take away something that made the web so exciting at its very start in the early 90s: the fact that anyone with just a small amount of technical knowledge could publish rich content to be viewed anywhere the Internet reached. I know, backwards compatibility can be a bitch at times.
that these clowns don't seem to understand copyright. Because they will be draining the financial resources of other clowns who don't understand copyright to launch lawsuits that are ultimately doomed to failure. Maybe not initially, but certainly at the appeals level. And building all kinds of nice precedents and case law while they are at it, more the better. Let's hope that by the time a battle comes along that IS important, that thanks to ambulance chasers like these there is a significant body of case law against the litigant.
BTW, for everyone who has mentioned the Googlebot, their Terms and Conditions specifically permit search engine spiders.
Actually, I doubt it was 111,111,111,111,111,111 because I don't believe the mantissa of those early calculators (or even most later ones) could handle that precision. Good guess though, since:
IANAL, but my own thoughts on it are that since I have paid the levy I am free to copy whatever music I want onto those blank CDs. I would be interested to know if the artists actually are getting the proceeds - if so then I would think this would be doubly bad for the Canadian mafiAA. After all, if the artists are getting paid then most mafiAA claims to the moral high road go out the window.
At the time the levy was imposed DVDs were not available as a storage medium for the mainstream. Now that it is time to update the laws I hear of not only DVDs being potentially included, but also iPods and other mp3 players, HDDs over a certain capacity, etc. I have a bit of a problem with HDDs because I believe the majority of them never see a copyrighted song file. But DVDs work for me.
All I have to say to the mafiAA concerning these levies and their unintended consequences is this: careful what you ask for - you just might get it.
I'm not sure it is the government imposing this on the Internet cafes. My suspicion is that the police have simply taken it upon themselves to arbitrarily force Internet cafes to install keyloggers. Get rid of the government and you still have the police there - and they would no doubt take advantage of the period of disorder to impose even more of their own rules.
Given the choice between out of control government and out of control police, I'll take government any day.
Based on what I read and what I know of the challenges involved, here's my guess as to a rough timeline for the next 50 years in space:
2010: Space shuttle retired
2014: New Orion vehicle mission to space station
2020: Moon landing by NASA
2027: Moon landing by China
2030: Privately owned shuttle equivalent
2031: Start construction of moon base
2035: Start construction of privately owned space station
2037: Manned Mars mission
2040: Permanent moon presence
2045: Construction of high earth orbit station
2050: "Space tug" type utility vehicle in use - first reusable vehicle permanently in space
2055: Permanent Mars presence proposed and reachable
2057: Testing of new drive types (ion perhaps) well underway
Looking beyond 2057 is futile. Perhaps even looking as far as 2057 is futile. I forget who it was that said this but perhaps it is apt: "The future is not only different from what we imagine, but different from what we CAN imagine."
I live in rural Ontario, approximately 3.5 miles from the nearest town (Dundalk: pop. 2,000) and approximately 1 mile beyond the DSL limit. No cable available. So I use a Ku-band satellite. I get a reliable 1Mbps downlink and 256kbps uplink.
As it so happens I DID install kubuntu on one of my machines here just 2 weeks ago. Via satellite Internet. It took about 75 minutes.
The speed-of-light (SL) latency (about 550ms) is a bit of a drag when dealing with large numbers of small files, but overall the speed is quite good. IP spoofing is used at the downlink point to avoid SL latency on every packet. I have 56kbps dial up for backup (which usually doesn't connect at more than 33.6 kbps) and there's no comparison. I'll take the satellite any day.
Perhaps all the people here that have been crapping all over satellite Internet are thinking of the previous state of the art. These days things are quite impressive. Check out Xplornet for the low end home/small business stuff, or Tachyon for high end enterprise type stuff.
At my company, we have taken to using our own expression(s) to avoid the confusion. Since we are in the computer industry we tend to deal with 1,024 far more than 1,000. So when the trillion vs. 2^40 byte issue first surfaced, for some reason we started calling 10^12 bytes a "trillobyte" (trillion bytes) vs. 2^40 bytes which is a "terabyte". I think it's because we liked the role "trilobytes" played in evolution. Then it spread - so we use millobyte for 10^6 and billobyte for 10^9. And I suppose we'll call 10^15 bytes a "quadrillobyte" not a "petabyte" when those numbers come into regular use in, say, 8 years or so.
BTW, I know that "millobyte" is too close to "millibyte", but we figure there can't be any confusion unles and until there is some use for 10^-3 bytes =.008 bits:P
From my own experience with flash drives made by several different manufacturers, my guess would be that they won't make your heat problem go away. I currently use about 10 flash drives on a frequent basis, all either 2GB or 4GB and from several different manufacturers. After writing, say, 1 GB of files to one of them I can tell you it is HOT to the touch. We're talking way more than 30 or 35 degrees C here - more like 50.
If you used flash for desktop storage right now I suspect a big array of flash drives - 20 x 2GB = 40GB for example - would really add to the cooling burden inside the case. Maybe as technology improves (i.e. circuitry gets smaller on the chips) the excess heat per unit of storage will drop. Or maybe it won't, like if instead of smaller circuitry we simply get more layers of the same within the chip.
Speed is a problem with flash too, but that should be easier to fix and is also off topic.
I have long thought that asteroid impact was responsible for the K-T Extinction Event, but as to other extinctions, I still don't really see them as cyclic with any real constant period. Add to that the fact that the largest such event ever, the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event appears to have been caused by massive volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps of Asia (itself caused by mantle plumes). What you are left with is an assortment of lesser events which, as measured by the marine biodiversity historically, don't really conform to much of a cyclic pattern at all.
Pure coincidence, similar to the fact that the spacing of the planets appears to roughly follow a simple polynomial formula - after ignoring the single glaring exception.
Well, sometimes there is an alternative, but not a great one. Where I live, there is no xDSL (we're >4 miles from the CO) and no cable TV. So I get my high speed Internet via satellite (Xplornet) - and so far after one year the service is quite good. I do have to put up with them filtering port 25, but I don't care too much about that since I just run exim on ports 2525 and 587 on my VPS hosts. I get 2Mbps - and the only REAL drag is the ~550ms speed-of-light latency. They use IP spoofing which speeds up transfers of large files, but a large collection of small files can be quite a bit slower than xDSL or cable.
Oh - no VPN or "Second Life" either (I'm shattered [NOT]).
As a Canadian who has some interest in these matters, I can tell you that there is at least one serious proposal for Internet regulation every couple of weeks. This week, it's licensing ISPs and demanding content be filtered. Two weeks ago, it was union demands that Canadian content regulation be enforced on YouTube and other online video services. (Broadcast media available in Canada must show at least 30% content developed in Canada). A month ago, it was yet another proposal to try and force Canadian companies to use the.CA TLD rather than.COM (fat chance).
Canadian governments at all levels love to float trial balloons such as this (as, I suspect, do governments everywhere). Fact is none of them ever really make it to the law books. Or in the occasional case where something silly does in fact make it into regulations, it is discovered to be silly and ignored from then onwards. An example? Because Canada spans 5 time zones, it is against the rules to broadcast interim election reports in those parts of the country where the polls have not closed. Theoretically, this includes Internet reports. But it is not enforced because regulators discovered, much to their annoyance, that servers in the Tonga Islands are not within the jurisdiction of the Canadian courts.
This will blow over, just like every other ill conceived Canadian government plan to stick its regulatory proboscis where it is not welcome.
Does Ontario mention how it is going to determine who the cyber bully is, in order to mete out this punishment? Are they going to magically determine that profile "jimmyisstupid444" is really little Johnny Smith, with the social networking sites and YouTube bending over backwards to give out confidential user information upon request of an Ontario teacher? Somehow I don't think so.
Kids aren't stupid, and they're not technical morons either. They know how to set up yet another throw away HotMail address and use it to create fake mySpace, FaceBook and YouTube profiles. Methinks the Ontario powers that be will see no drop in cyber bullying, but will find they no longer have anyone identifiable to punish.
Who determines if something is an "actual website"? Being of a (mildly) technical bent, I would say that any document, even a zero byte index.html, that is coughed up by some variety of server software if presented with an HTTP request - that is an actual website. But we all know that this would not be the interpretation placed on "actual website" if this wording actually became part of the rules.
As far as so called "domain tasting" goes, I prefer Bob Parsons' term "domain kiting" with all the same negative connotations associated with terms like "cheque kiting" (Bob Parsons is the founder/CEO of GoDaddy.com). To make it worse, domain kiting used to be available only to those with a large financial base to work with - generally in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But now, a few registrars (DynaDot comes to mind) have lowered the bar for entry so that people with as little as $500 can now engage in domain kiting. It is no wonder that it is so frustrating for new businesses to get online with a decent domain - we are seeing many many more domains such as "davestorontogardencentre.com" because better domains such as "davesgardens.com", "davesnursery.com" etc. are almost all owned by speculators.
is the ability to drop six figures for a device that does little more than allow people to advertise to me while wasting my time. I wonder how it would work out as a monitor? Because after having ditched television over 15 years ago, I am not about to pick up the habit again.
But, things TFA fails to mention include the fact that many speculators bought hundreds or thousands of.EU domains, over 20% of them don't resolve to anything, and within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of them snapped up in the initial "land rush" will expire.
Seriously. Anyone with mod points out there get ready to use them - there's going to be a lot of clicks on "Troll"
needed.
Ah, the evolution of math geekiness...
on
Wednesday Is Pi Day
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I recall a certain rivalry over memorizing digits of pi back in high school. Everyone was around the 2-3 hundred mark when one guy threw down the gauntlet - 500 digits. Well, I put the memorization effort into overdrive and reached about 2,500 before being "crowned" the undisputed school champ. (Yay!)
Interestingly, that fall in my frosh year at university, reciting pi turned up as a big contest among the first year math students. 2,500 was enough to take the crown at university also.
There is actually a very efficient way of memorizing strings of random digits one you get the hang of it - the key is groups of 5. The technique works well enough that 25 years later I still remember 500 digits. And the workout I gave my memory skills serves me well today still. Strings of digits are simple - tell me your phone number just once, etc.
100,000 - now that's impressive. I can tell you from experience, that memory will serve him well in chemistry, especially organic. More power to him!
The Canadian Social Insurance Number (SIN) is nine digits long, with the last digit being a check digit (uses IBM's old "12" system). Last time I checked, full dates were eight digits (well, at least for the next 7,992 years they are). Should be an easy matter to flag the corrupted records.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point I don't like the thought of either approach. In the case of Microsoft's approach, adding a completely new scripting language, I can foresee another 10 years of attempts by them to lock web developers into using a Microsoft defined framework while at the same time making compliance within other browsers difficult. They will make sure that other browser development teams are always trying to hit a moving target and stretching their resources, while MS sits back with 10 times the developers and makes this new scripting language ever more integrated with whatever they are calling an operating system that year.
But I don't really like a "radical upgrade" approach as proposed by Mozilla either. While it is the lesser of two evils, I can foresee many many security issues, unless the radical upgrade is designed from the ground up with curtailing XSS vulnerabilities and the like in mind. Also, as we head blithely into a Web 2.0 world (never did find the RFC for "Web 2.0"), I see more and more processing dumped in the lap of the web client that has to render the web page. Where we used to begin to get annoyed at web pages that took more than a few seconds to load, somehow we are now okay with waiting 20-30 seconds for some Javascript heavy page to render in addition to the loading time. Not everyone out there writes good efficient Javascript code such as Google.
Let's fix what's broken with Javascript first. Let's make XSS attacks hellishly difficult to create and fix the sandbox that JS is always threatening to break out of. Sure, let's add an extension or two so that AJAX functionality has more inbuilt support, rather than being what it is now: a massive hack of XMLHttpRequest. Let's even work at simplifying handling of browser differences in the DOM and increase the efficiency of the interpreter for what is unfortunately a very clunky interpreted language.
But while we're doing this, let's not break it, okay? Not everyone out there is a typical Slashdotter. I know people who are very proud of having constructed their own websites in (awful non-compliant) HTML with a few Javascript bells and whistles too. If we give those people a "new and improved" scripting language that is much more difficult to write, then we take away something that made the web so exciting at its very start in the early 90s: the fact that anyone with just a small amount of technical knowledge could publish rich content to be viewed anywhere the Internet reached. I know, backwards compatibility can be a bitch at times.
that these clowns don't seem to understand copyright. Because they will be draining the financial resources of other clowns who don't understand copyright to launch lawsuits that are ultimately doomed to failure. Maybe not initially, but certainly at the appeals level. And building all kinds of nice precedents and case law while they are at it, more the better. Let's hope that by the time a battle comes along that IS important, that thanks to ambulance chasers like these there is a significant body of case law against the litigant.
BTW, for everyone who has mentioned the Googlebot, their Terms and Conditions specifically permit search engine spiders.
Meta keyword tags have been pretty much ignored for years. The only search engine I can think of that makes use of them still is Inktomi.
Actually, I doubt it was 111,111,111,111,111,111 because I don't believe the mantissa of those early calculators (or even most later ones) could handle that precision. Good guess though, since:
;)
111,111,111,111,111,111 = 3 * 3 * 7 * 11 * 13 * 19 * 37 * 52,579 * 333,667 (all factors are prime)
No, I suspect the number she was factoring was 1,000,000,001. Ten digits is about the largest mantissa I recall seeing back then, and of course:
1,000,000,001 = 7 * 11 * 13 * 19 * 52,579 (all factors are prime)
So - what's the prize???
IANAL, but my own thoughts on it are that since I have paid the levy I am free to copy whatever music I want onto those blank CDs. I would be interested to know if the artists actually are getting the proceeds - if so then I would think this would be doubly bad for the Canadian mafiAA. After all, if the artists are getting paid then most mafiAA claims to the moral high road go out the window.
At the time the levy was imposed DVDs were not available as a storage medium for the mainstream. Now that it is time to update the laws I hear of not only DVDs being potentially included, but also iPods and other mp3 players, HDDs over a certain capacity, etc. I have a bit of a problem with HDDs because I believe the majority of them never see a copyrighted song file. But DVDs work for me.
All I have to say to the mafiAA concerning these levies and their unintended consequences is this: careful what you ask for - you just might get it.
I'm not sure it is the government imposing this on the Internet cafes. My suspicion is that the police have simply taken it upon themselves to arbitrarily force Internet cafes to install keyloggers. Get rid of the government and you still have the police there - and they would no doubt take advantage of the period of disorder to impose even more of their own rules.
Given the choice between out of control government and out of control police, I'll take government any day.
Anything written by Steve Gibson.
Based on what I read and what I know of the challenges involved, here's my guess as to a rough timeline for the next 50 years in space:
2010: Space shuttle retired
2014: New Orion vehicle mission to space station
2020: Moon landing by NASA
2027: Moon landing by China
2030: Privately owned shuttle equivalent
2031: Start construction of moon base
2035: Start construction of privately owned space station
2037: Manned Mars mission
2040: Permanent moon presence
2045: Construction of high earth orbit station
2050: "Space tug" type utility vehicle in use - first reusable vehicle permanently in space
2055: Permanent Mars presence proposed and reachable
2057: Testing of new drive types (ion perhaps) well underway
Looking beyond 2057 is futile. Perhaps even looking as far as 2057 is futile. I forget who it was that said this but perhaps it is apt: "The future is not only different from what we imagine, but different from what we CAN imagine."
I live in rural Ontario, approximately 3.5 miles from the nearest town (Dundalk: pop. 2,000) and approximately 1 mile beyond the DSL limit. No cable available. So I use a Ku-band satellite. I get a reliable 1Mbps downlink and 256kbps uplink.
As it so happens I DID install kubuntu on one of my machines here just 2 weeks ago. Via satellite Internet. It took about 75 minutes.
The speed-of-light (SL) latency (about 550ms) is a bit of a drag when dealing with large numbers of small files, but overall the speed is quite good. IP spoofing is used at the downlink point to avoid SL latency on every packet. I have 56kbps dial up for backup (which usually doesn't connect at more than 33.6 kbps) and there's no comparison. I'll take the satellite any day.
Perhaps all the people here that have been crapping all over satellite Internet are thinking of the previous state of the art. These days things are quite impressive. Check out Xplornet for the low end home/small business stuff, or Tachyon for high end enterprise type stuff.
At my company, we have taken to using our own expression(s) to avoid the confusion. Since we are in the computer industry we tend to deal with 1,024 far more than 1,000. So when the trillion vs. 2^40 byte issue first surfaced, for some reason we started calling 10^12 bytes a "trillobyte" (trillion bytes) vs. 2^40 bytes which is a "terabyte". I think it's because we liked the role "trilobytes" played in evolution. Then it spread - so we use millobyte for 10^6 and billobyte for 10^9. And I suppose we'll call 10^15 bytes a "quadrillobyte" not a "petabyte" when those numbers come into regular use in, say, 8 years or so.
.008 bits :P
BTW, I know that "millobyte" is too close to "millibyte", but we figure there can't be any confusion unles and until there is some use for 10^-3 bytes =
From my own experience with flash drives made by several different manufacturers, my guess would be that they won't make your heat problem go away. I currently use about 10 flash drives on a frequent basis, all either 2GB or 4GB and from several different manufacturers. After writing, say, 1 GB of files to one of them I can tell you it is HOT to the touch. We're talking way more than 30 or 35 degrees C here - more like 50.
If you used flash for desktop storage right now I suspect a big array of flash drives - 20 x 2GB = 40GB for example - would really add to the cooling burden inside the case. Maybe as technology improves (i.e. circuitry gets smaller on the chips) the excess heat per unit of storage will drop. Or maybe it won't, like if instead of smaller circuitry we simply get more layers of the same within the chip.
Speed is a problem with flash too, but that should be easier to fix and is also off topic.
I have long thought that asteroid impact was responsible for the K-T Extinction Event, but as to other extinctions, I still don't really see them as cyclic with any real constant period. Add to that the fact that the largest such event ever, the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event appears to have been caused by massive volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps of Asia (itself caused by mantle plumes). What you are left with is an assortment of lesser events which, as measured by the marine biodiversity historically, don't really conform to much of a cyclic pattern at all.
Pure coincidence, similar to the fact that the spacing of the planets appears to roughly follow a simple polynomial formula - after ignoring the single glaring exception.
The millions of people who upgrades to Vista!
Well, sometimes there is an alternative, but not a great one. Where I live, there is no xDSL (we're >4 miles from the CO) and no cable TV. So I get my high speed Internet via satellite (Xplornet) - and so far after one year the service is quite good. I do have to put up with them filtering port 25, but I don't care too much about that since I just run exim on ports 2525 and 587 on my VPS hosts. I get 2Mbps - and the only REAL drag is the ~550ms speed-of-light latency. They use IP spoofing which speeds up transfers of large files, but a large collection of small files can be quite a bit slower than xDSL or cable.
Oh - no VPN or "Second Life" either (I'm shattered [NOT]).
TFA vanished in the aether...
As a Canadian who has some interest in these matters, I can tell you that there is at least one serious proposal for Internet regulation every couple of weeks. This week, it's licensing ISPs and demanding content be filtered. Two weeks ago, it was union demands that Canadian content regulation be enforced on YouTube and other online video services. (Broadcast media available in Canada must show at least 30% content developed in Canada). A month ago, it was yet another proposal to try and force Canadian companies to use the .CA TLD rather than .COM (fat chance).
Canadian governments at all levels love to float trial balloons such as this (as, I suspect, do governments everywhere). Fact is none of them ever really make it to the law books. Or in the occasional case where something silly does in fact make it into regulations, it is discovered to be silly and ignored from then onwards. An example? Because Canada spans 5 time zones, it is against the rules to broadcast interim election reports in those parts of the country where the polls have not closed. Theoretically, this includes Internet reports. But it is not enforced because regulators discovered, much to their annoyance, that servers in the Tonga Islands are not within the jurisdiction of the Canadian courts.
This will blow over, just like every other ill conceived Canadian government plan to stick its regulatory proboscis where it is not welcome.
Does Ontario mention how it is going to determine who the cyber bully is, in order to mete out this punishment? Are they going to magically determine that profile "jimmyisstupid444" is really little Johnny Smith, with the social networking sites and YouTube bending over backwards to give out confidential user information upon request of an Ontario teacher? Somehow I don't think so.
Kids aren't stupid, and they're not technical morons either. They know how to set up yet another throw away HotMail address and use it to create fake mySpace, FaceBook and YouTube profiles. Methinks the Ontario powers that be will see no drop in cyber bullying, but will find they no longer have anyone identifiable to punish.
Who determines if something is an "actual website"? Being of a (mildly) technical bent, I would say that any document, even a zero byte index.html, that is coughed up by some variety of server software if presented with an HTTP request - that is an actual website. But we all know that this would not be the interpretation placed on "actual website" if this wording actually became part of the rules.
As far as so called "domain tasting" goes, I prefer Bob Parsons' term "domain kiting" with all the same negative connotations associated with terms like "cheque kiting" (Bob Parsons is the founder/CEO of GoDaddy.com). To make it worse, domain kiting used to be available only to those with a large financial base to work with - generally in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But now, a few registrars (DynaDot comes to mind) have lowered the bar for entry so that people with as little as $500 can now engage in domain kiting. It is no wonder that it is so frustrating for new businesses to get online with a decent domain - we are seeing many many more domains such as "davestorontogardencentre.com" because better domains such as "davesgardens.com", "davesnursery.com" etc. are almost all owned by speculators.
Sorry. Won't even consider it after Sony rootkitted my dad's computer.
is the ability to drop six figures for a device that does little more than allow people to advertise to me while wasting my time. I wonder how it would work out as a monitor? Because after having ditched television over 15 years ago, I am not about to pick up the habit again.
Does that mean it's now good bait to use for phishing?
But, things TFA fails to mention include the fact that many speculators bought hundreds or thousands of .EU domains, over 20% of them don't resolve to anything, and within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of them snapped up in the initial "land rush" will expire.
More about it here in The Daily Domainer.
Seriously. Anyone with mod points out there get ready to use them - there's going to be a lot of clicks on "Troll" needed.
I recall a certain rivalry over memorizing digits of pi back in high school. Everyone was around the 2-3 hundred mark when one guy threw down the gauntlet - 500 digits. Well, I put the memorization effort into overdrive and reached about 2,500 before being "crowned" the undisputed school champ. (Yay!)
Interestingly, that fall in my frosh year at university, reciting pi turned up as a big contest among the first year math students. 2,500 was enough to take the crown at university also.
There is actually a very efficient way of memorizing strings of random digits one you get the hang of it - the key is groups of 5. The technique works well enough that 25 years later I still remember 500 digits. And the workout I gave my memory skills serves me well today still. Strings of digits are simple - tell me your phone number just once, etc.
100,000 - now that's impressive. I can tell you from experience, that memory will serve him well in chemistry, especially organic. More power to him!
The Canadian Social Insurance Number (SIN) is nine digits long, with the last digit being a check digit (uses IBM's old "12" system). Last time I checked, full dates were eight digits (well, at least for the next 7,992 years they are). Should be an easy matter to flag the corrupted records.