How about the 20 most annoying pages of a 500 page ad-laden javascript site? My vote goes to page number two. Of course, that's when I immediately closed my tab.
When there was a recent suicide at my university, they closed campus and sent the swat team to bust into classrooms because they mistook his fall-impact wounds for gunshot or stab wounds. Granted, I'm sure their campus topology is very different from ours.
I'm not sure what state Mindstorms is in now, but I imagine it's a lot better than back when I used it, back in the days of the IR programmer. I wasn't impressed with its "infinite possibilities", which were limited to three sensors and three motors unless you felt like shelling out a few hundred dollars for more kits.
There's no way I can remember everything I've thought of off the top of my head, but here goes:
- A much more hierarchical, flexible DNS system, that splits off the highest levels by jurisdiction and makes it easy to autocomplete or resolve overloaded/ambiguous names. This system should allow multiple root servers. - A replacement for TCP/IP that is much more intelligent for things such as congestion backoff and lost packets. - Obviously, IPv6 or an equivalent with an excessively large address space. - More encryption. I don't know exactly at what level - IPSEC, TLS, application... - A change in the de facto standards of how we handled web service authentication and email. I'm sick of the password + personal question mentality that so many sites have. Just give the entire population crypto devices and be done with it. Email should be whitelisted and access revocable, and services that rely on it should accept that.
It will be difficult to get the government to sign off on that without throwing a hissy fit, unless they have the keys in escrow. Which is actually the most likely result - the ISPs of either end could encrypt the traffic, and the government could step in and subpoena them (or whatever the appropriate official procedure is) for the content and/or the keys.
I heard somewhere that you can actually get good low-latency ping times from satellites that are not in geosychronous orbit, since they are then allowed to orbit at a lower altitude and fly over the continent. You just need to form a network of them since they'll be in the other hemisphere half the time.
I think it'll be interesting once we have enough orbital and interplanetary routing to warrant developing protocols that specifically deal with perpetually changing links with good convergence time. I can just imagine OMRP - Orbital Mechanics Routing Protocol, which tries to maintain a complete graph with every neighbor in the solar system but routers around the blinding sun.
> "I know my rights, know the people that defend those rights as best able, and am delighted that I have the right to "unpopular" speech..."
I find it ironic that you consider your speech to be unpopular compared to the OP. Both positions seem equally tiresome to me.
> "Personally, I think it's funny as hell that while they can gripe about my posts being flamebait or trolling, and even mod me down for it, they can't tell me WHY the OP was supposed to be "funny""
Very well, I will explain the humor of the joke.
This is Slashdot, a tech news website. People who read slashdot generally enjoy jokes based on esoteric technical knowledge. The OP was trying to be funny by making a pun on the word "routed", which in itself was not an attack on American soldiers, but made reference to their position in an undesireable predicament. The humor is in the form of a sort of dark pity combined with the exclusive attraction of an in-joke.
> ", or why I was supposed to accept it as such without debate."
You are not required to accept it as funny, nor has anyone asked that of you. The very nature of the joke makes it very unfunny to people who are directly impacted by its subject matter.
I'm afraid you will have to accept the fact that almost every joke that is worth telling will offend some fraction of the population. This time around it happened to be you. Slashdot, just like many other places on the net, has a history of making jokes that some would deem in poor taste (for example, the comments in pretty much every news obituary ever posted here).
Your link dropping doesn't address my argument; that article failed to convince me that satire and name calling can constitute libel. I'll do one better than you and actually quote something relevant from the linked page:
"In 1974, in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., (418 U.S. 323), the Supreme Court suggested that a plaintiff could not win a defamation suit when the statements in question were expressions of opinion rather than fact. In the words of the court, "under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea". However, the Court subsequently rejected the notion of a First Amendment opinion privilege, in Lorain Journal Co. v. Milkovich."
And - without doing any more research on that case as I have no interest in learning about it at this hour of night - I believe it's a shame they did overturn it. Anyway, I don't know what the applicable precedent is now, but my contention is that what the kids did *should* be allowed, not that it is necessarily not libel under the law.
"In 1988, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, (485 U.S. 46), the Supreme Court ruled that a parody advertisement claiming Jerry Falwell had engaged in an incestuous act with his mother in an outhouse, while false, could not allow Falwell to win damages for emotional distress because the statement was so obviously ridiculous that it was clearly not true; an allegation believed by nobody, it was ruled, brought no liability upon the author. The court thus overturned a lower court's upholding of an award where the jury had decided against the claim of libel but had awarded damages for emotional distress."
Well, that's a bit closer to this case, although the decision wasn't about libel but about emotional distress. Again, I think that the same argument would be appropriate for libel, but I do not necessarily claim that that is legally true.
I will accept that the word Orwellian is not the most accurate description of the kind of control you described, but my point still stands.
> "This guy who is a suppossed specialist in computer crime apparently never spent time being a security admin for a network."
That became evident to me when I read this sentence:
"In stark contrast, experts in the field of computer crime and computer security are seemingly uninterested in probabilities. Computer experts rarely assess a risk of online harm as anything but, "significant," and they almost never compare different categories of harm for relative risk."
Which flies in the face of everything I learned from Secrets and Lies by Schneier. Security is nothing without considering multiple attack vectors and deciding which ones warrent additional protection.
> "The kids committed what may well have been libel, and they (as well as their parents) are about to find out what happens when you do that."
Free speech is the right to say to hell with somebody else. The fact that it's in the non-transient form of electronic publication should not make a difference (ethically speaking, not legally speaking, of course). A kid should have every right to say "fuck authority" to his classmates, regardless of whether it's in person, over an IM chat room, in a mailing list, or on a public blog.
And what you say about maintaining order and control in a school environment may be true, but it would take only a few word substitutions to make that paragraph read like an Orwellian nightmare.
No. The principal was made a fool of by a bunch of immature kids. One of the kids was put in remedial education as a result. I would say that these two events are not comparable in scale.
But does the RIAA own the exclusive rights to the song recordings, or are they shared between other parties (such as, dare I say, the artists themselves)? Remember that the "amnesty" they offered didn't protect against legal action from other stakeholders. In this case, the work can't be put into public domain just because one party abused their rights - wouldn't that be an undue deprivation of property for the other copyright holders? IANAL.
If, with the exception of slavery, we have failed to (or perhaps chosen not to) make such distinctions, what makes you think that this situation deserves an exception? What makes you think that eliminating gray areas in favor of giving everyone and everything either equal rights or no rights at all is desireable?
Do animals deserve the right to vote? Should elementary school students be allowed to get married? Are children property of their parents and should they be allowed to be beaten at will? If you can't answer yes to any of those then it's obvious that not everything/one should have or lack every right.
I've been a Nexuiz fan since the day after it came out; just after I discovered it on a linux gaming site I saw the post on slashdot announcing its release. I've been playing since then and it's still a very enjoyable game. Version 2.0 brought a number of performance enhancements, but unfortunately there seems to be some intermittent driver bug that's aggravated by Nexuiz and Nexuiz alone, on my university's standard issue Thinkpad T43p. It doesn't help adoption when every one you are physically around can't play the game reliably on their laptop.
I might disagree with the claim that it runs faster or more scaleably than any other game listed. Tremulous has consistently had better performance on both my machines. But for eye-candy and gameplay, Nex is definitely better. I remember when there were only 17 maps to choose from: nexdm01-16 + nexdmextra01. Now there are dozens, a bonus pack of some excellent maps I've never played before but understand are taken from other Quake games, and multiple gameplay modes (although IMO ctf is the only good alternative to deathmatch).
The biggest problem the game has had historically, from my point of view, has been the lack of American players. But in recent times we seem to always have a few people playing on this side of the Atlantic. If I only had more free time this semester I'd be playing a lot more myself. I would highly recommend for US citizens (or at least those of us in the northeast) the NY Standard Deathmatch server for some good by-the-books fragging, and the 70mm13's TECH server for ingenious, original maps that can show an expert player a good game.
> "You talk about big brother? Talking CCTV cameras are more pointedly "big brother" than any other initiative proposed by this illiberal, dishonest government."
Well here in the States we have perpetual war, which in my opinion is FAR more dangerous than any form of survallience, as it polarizes the public into monotonous supporters of Big Brother and full-fledged enemies of the state, eliminating all rational discourse.
The War on Terror scares me more than the terrorists. I do not mean the actual military actions of the US, but the vocabulary and attitude that's used to talk about it.
Normally I have a built up resistance to non-sequitors like that one, but the bag of chips actually had me laugh out loud enough for people around me to notice.
It's not necessarily a matter of how many applications can individually make use of multiple cores, but, assuming the kernel schedules them efficiently, how many applications do you feel like running at once.
> "Yeah, sorry to say but.. I think I know more about doing this than you."
Then I'm sorry if I was patronizing you, but I wasn't sure from your previous posts.
> "You can do MitM on ssl, ssh, tls, etc.. When your target requests a cert.. [...]"
Ok, so the system does rely on the user not accepting just anyone's assertion of authenticity. Perhaps with something like DNSSec the default action won't be to prompt the user with a confusing dialog, but to silently ignore the response unless configured otherwise.
> "[...] it doesn't matter what IP the DNS server replies to the target because the connection itself will use DNS settings of the proxy. [...]"
I guess the solution is if you're going to use a proxy, use something to secure http. Other non-web connections would still work properly, correct?
Slashdot Mirror
How about the 20 most annoying pages of a 500 page ad-laden javascript site? My vote goes to page number two. Of course, that's when I immediately closed my tab.
When there was a recent suicide at my university, they closed campus and sent the swat team to bust into classrooms because they mistook his fall-impact wounds for gunshot or stab wounds. Granted, I'm sure their campus topology is very different from ours.
% Ohhhh,
I'm a tumor I'm a tumor; I'm a tumor,
I'm a tumor I'm a tumor; I'm a tumor,
I'm a tumor I'm a tumor; I'm a tumor,
Tumor. %
It had to be sung.
It's not about being news, it's about presenting it in a way that communicates the danger to the people.
"Everybody RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! The Domain Name System is out of control! Bolt the doors shut, cannibalize your pets, and hug your children good bye!"
That ought to do it.
I'm not sure what state Mindstorms is in now, but I imagine it's a lot better than back when I used it, back in the days of the IR programmer. I wasn't impressed with its "infinite possibilities", which were limited to three sensors and three motors unless you felt like shelling out a few hundred dollars for more kits.
There's no way I can remember everything I've thought of off the top of my head, but here goes:
- A much more hierarchical, flexible DNS system, that splits off the highest levels by jurisdiction and makes it easy to autocomplete or resolve overloaded/ambiguous names. This system should allow multiple root servers.
- A replacement for TCP/IP that is much more intelligent for things such as congestion backoff and lost packets.
- Obviously, IPv6 or an equivalent with an excessively large address space.
- More encryption. I don't know exactly at what level - IPSEC, TLS, application...
- A change in the de facto standards of how we handled web service authentication and email. I'm sick of the password + personal question mentality that so many sites have. Just give the entire population crypto devices and be done with it. Email should be whitelisted and access revocable, and services that rely on it should accept that.
It will be difficult to get the government to sign off on that without throwing a hissy fit, unless they have the keys in escrow. Which is actually the most likely result - the ISPs of either end could encrypt the traffic, and the government could step in and subpoena them (or whatever the appropriate official procedure is) for the content and/or the keys.
My old neighbor was in the military. She was basically told that voting for Bush would bring her home sooner.
I heard somewhere that you can actually get good low-latency ping times from satellites that are not in geosychronous orbit, since they are then allowed to orbit at a lower altitude and fly over the continent. You just need to form a network of them since they'll be in the other hemisphere half the time.
I think it'll be interesting once we have enough orbital and interplanetary routing to warrant developing protocols that specifically deal with perpetually changing links with good convergence time. I can just imagine OMRP - Orbital Mechanics Routing Protocol, which tries to maintain a complete graph with every neighbor in the solar system but routers around the blinding sun.
> "I know my rights, know the people that defend those rights as best able, and am delighted that I have the right to "unpopular" speech..."
I find it ironic that you consider your speech to be unpopular compared to the OP. Both positions seem equally tiresome to me.
> "Personally, I think it's funny as hell that while they can gripe about my posts being flamebait or trolling, and even mod me down for it, they can't tell me WHY the OP was supposed to be "funny""
Very well, I will explain the humor of the joke.
This is Slashdot, a tech news website. People who read slashdot generally enjoy jokes based on esoteric technical knowledge. The OP was trying to be funny by making a pun on the word "routed", which in itself was not an attack on American soldiers, but made reference to their position in an undesireable predicament. The humor is in the form of a sort of dark pity combined with the exclusive attraction of an in-joke.
> ", or why I was supposed to accept it as such without debate."
You are not required to accept it as funny, nor has anyone asked that of you. The very nature of the joke makes it very unfunny to people who are directly impacted by its subject matter.
I'm afraid you will have to accept the fact that almost every joke that is worth telling will offend some fraction of the population. This time around it happened to be you. Slashdot, just like many other places on the net, has a history of making jokes that some would deem in poor taste (for example, the comments in pretty much every news obituary ever posted here).
Best wishes.
Your link dropping doesn't address my argument; that article failed to convince me that satire and name calling can constitute libel. I'll do one better than you and actually quote something relevant from the linked page:
"In 1974, in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., (418 U.S. 323), the Supreme Court suggested that a plaintiff could not win a defamation suit when the statements in question were expressions of opinion rather than fact. In the words of the court, "under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea". However, the Court subsequently rejected the notion of a First Amendment opinion privilege, in Lorain Journal Co. v. Milkovich."
And - without doing any more research on that case as I have no interest in learning about it at this hour of night - I believe it's a shame they did overturn it. Anyway, I don't know what the applicable precedent is now, but my contention is that what the kids did *should* be allowed, not that it is necessarily not libel under the law.
"In 1988, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, (485 U.S. 46), the Supreme Court ruled that a parody advertisement claiming Jerry Falwell had engaged in an incestuous act with his mother in an outhouse, while false, could not allow Falwell to win damages for emotional distress because the statement was so obviously ridiculous that it was clearly not true; an allegation believed by nobody, it was ruled, brought no liability upon the author. The court thus overturned a lower court's upholding of an award where the jury had decided against the claim of libel but had awarded damages for emotional distress."
Well, that's a bit closer to this case, although the decision wasn't about libel but about emotional distress. Again, I think that the same argument would be appropriate for libel, but I do not necessarily claim that that is legally true.
I will accept that the word Orwellian is not the most accurate description of the kind of control you described, but my point still stands.
> "This guy who is a suppossed specialist in computer crime apparently never spent time being a security admin for a network."
That became evident to me when I read this sentence:
"In stark contrast, experts in the field of computer crime and computer security are seemingly uninterested in probabilities. Computer experts rarely assess a risk of online harm as anything but, "significant," and they almost never compare different categories of harm for relative risk."
Which flies in the face of everything I learned from Secrets and Lies by Schneier. Security is nothing without considering multiple attack vectors and deciding which ones warrent additional protection.
> "The kids committed what may well have been libel, and they (as well as their parents) are about to find out what happens when you do that."
Free speech is the right to say to hell with somebody else. The fact that it's in the non-transient form of electronic publication should not make a difference (ethically speaking, not legally speaking, of course). A kid should have every right to say "fuck authority" to his classmates, regardless of whether it's in person, over an IM chat room, in a mailing list, or on a public blog.
And what you say about maintaining order and control in a school environment may be true, but it would take only a few word substitutions to make that paragraph read like an Orwellian nightmare.
No. The principal was made a fool of by a bunch of immature kids. One of the kids was put in remedial education as a result. I would say that these two events are not comparable in scale.
But does the RIAA own the exclusive rights to the song recordings, or are they shared between other parties (such as, dare I say, the artists themselves)? Remember that the "amnesty" they offered didn't protect against legal action from other stakeholders. In this case, the work can't be put into public domain just because one party abused their rights - wouldn't that be an undue deprivation of property for the other copyright holders? IANAL.
If, with the exception of slavery, we have failed to (or perhaps chosen not to) make such distinctions, what makes you think that this situation deserves an exception? What makes you think that eliminating gray areas in favor of giving everyone and everything either equal rights or no rights at all is desireable?
Do animals deserve the right to vote? Should elementary school students be allowed to get married? Are children property of their parents and should they be allowed to be beaten at will? If you can't answer yes to any of those then it's obvious that not everything/one should have or lack every right.
Well, the whole suit was just a means of controlling their stock price, so sueing themselves seems like the next logical step.
That one is always flying around the CS2 class I TA, but only the first line. I'll have to recommend the second to them.
There's also the simple gag about using a little something to avoid getting littered with stds.
Hello fellow Nexer.
I've been a Nexuiz fan since the day after it came out; just after I discovered it on a linux gaming site I saw the post on slashdot announcing its release. I've been playing since then and it's still a very enjoyable game. Version 2.0 brought a number of performance enhancements, but unfortunately there seems to be some intermittent driver bug that's aggravated by Nexuiz and Nexuiz alone, on my university's standard issue Thinkpad T43p. It doesn't help adoption when every one you are physically around can't play the game reliably on their laptop.
I might disagree with the claim that it runs faster or more scaleably than any other game listed. Tremulous has consistently had better performance on both my machines. But for eye-candy and gameplay, Nex is definitely better. I remember when there were only 17 maps to choose from: nexdm01-16 + nexdmextra01. Now there are dozens, a bonus pack of some excellent maps I've never played before but understand are taken from other Quake games, and multiple gameplay modes (although IMO ctf is the only good alternative to deathmatch).
The biggest problem the game has had historically, from my point of view, has been the lack of American players. But in recent times we seem to always have a few people playing on this side of the Atlantic. If I only had more free time this semester I'd be playing a lot more myself. I would highly recommend for US citizens (or at least those of us in the northeast) the NY Standard Deathmatch server for some good by-the-books fragging, and the 70mm13's TECH server for ingenious, original maps that can show an expert player a good game.
No, I like my monolithic kernels represented as big monoliths.
Really, I thought that much would be fairly obvious.
> "You talk about big brother? Talking CCTV cameras are more pointedly "big brother" than any other initiative proposed by this illiberal, dishonest government."
Well here in the States we have perpetual war, which in my opinion is FAR more dangerous than any form of survallience, as it polarizes the public into monotonous supporters of Big Brother and full-fledged enemies of the state, eliminating all rational discourse.
The War on Terror scares me more than the terrorists. I do not mean the actual military actions of the US, but the vocabulary and attitude that's used to talk about it.
Normally I have a built up resistance to non-sequitors like that one, but the bag of chips actually had me laugh out loud enough for people around me to notice.
It's not necessarily a matter of how many applications can individually make use of multiple cores, but, assuming the kernel schedules them efficiently, how many applications do you feel like running at once.
> "Yeah, sorry to say but.. I think I know more about doing this than you."
Then I'm sorry if I was patronizing you, but I wasn't sure from your previous posts.
> "You can do MitM on ssl, ssh, tls, etc.. When your target requests a cert.. [...]"
Ok, so the system does rely on the user not accepting just anyone's assertion of authenticity. Perhaps with something like DNSSec the default action won't be to prompt the user with a confusing dialog, but to silently ignore the response unless configured otherwise.
> "[...] it doesn't matter what IP the DNS server replies to the target because the connection itself will use DNS settings of the proxy. [...]"
I guess the solution is if you're going to use a proxy, use something to secure http. Other non-web connections would still work properly, correct?