In addition the clever people down at Google can hand edit the database when they feel someone is taking advantage of them. Most people seem to think Google is totally automated and can be ruthlessly gamed. This is obviously not true. Just ask BMW who got their page rank reduced to zero for feeding Google different pages than human visitors.
People also seem to think that Google is some kind of public utility and every page -has- to be listed, otherwise its some kind of crime.
I'd be surprised if this guy's blog doesn't get dropped from Google's index for abuse, if it hasn't already. (How smrt do you have to be to tell the world you're going to abuse a company? Quick, check YouTube to see if this guy has any self incriminating crime spree videos.)
Manned space flight is afraid of a few deaths? What evidence do you have?
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee die during a ground test and we still landed on the moon 2 years later.
Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliff died in the Challenger explosion and we were back riding the same design to orbit 2 years later.
We lost Rick Husband, William McCool, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon in the Colombia reentry. And again, 2 years later we're back in space on the same vehicle.
Just because you're too much of a wimp to risk your life doing something amazing and unique, don't condemn the rest of us to mediocrity.
I was raised on a farm, and although I've been living in some of the most modern urban locations on Earth for 15 years, there's a cultural gap between me and most people.
I remember when I was young, maybe ten years old, and I went in to town to play with some friends. They were playing some kind of neighborhood-wide hide and seek, tear-assing through everyone's backyards. I felt unable to play because the wholesale trespassing going on made me intensely uncomfortable. It still does.
Of course I was trained to shoot at age 8 and operate heavy machinery at 12, so there were other benefits as well.
Had these ordinary folks with an arcane hobby shown up on my father's farm he would have shot a warning shot across thier bow (12 gauge bird shot). He, however would have told them to stay where they were and to not move until the County Sheriff arrived to deal with them. At which point they'd get a free meal and room for the night in the pokey. You see my father, and every landowner in the county who had an ounce of smarts, knew the sheriff and his deputies pretty well and would be happy to do a favor for him (particularly if there would be a good story in it) and would always take his word against someone from out of the area. So even if these guys had called the law, it would have done them no good.
Had they gone up and rung the doorbell and asked, it may have been a no problem. But then again it might have. Depends on the season and where they wanted to go. If they wanted to go in the middle of a field and there were still crops in, there's no chance in hell, they could easily cause hundreds of dollars of crop damage. And likewise in a pasture where there are animals. Just because they are farmed animals does not mean they are domesticated. Getting run over by a cow isn't fun, and a sow can and will kill you if she senses a threat to her young.
I would be great to run this on my own trusted server, and would the be only way I might run the extension.
However I don't think Google should open source it in this case. Mostly because of my own needless paranoia. (But this is Slashdot so no one will notice.)
Why? What percentage of FF's user base runs their own server? We can only guess, but probably somewhere in the realm of 0.001%. Or less. (There are 1.4 bil internet users, you do the math.) So virtually no one is going to run their own server.
What a perfect opportunity for Lucky Nice Software Co! (A division of Lazy Nefarious Software Company.) LNSC sets up a server, pays some kid a few hundred bucks to put a custom front-end on it, pays another kid the same amount to set up a professional looking web site and then a little more to advertise. Add a long EULA that says they can store and rape all of your data and you've got a profitable business for little trouble and a small amount of capital.
An -now- it looks like something my Mom might use. And because it looks nice and legitimate and has been advertised it will be several orders of magnitude more popular than your version.
Sure, software isn't unique. If one person can do it, so can another. But there is making guns, and then there is selling guns to terrorists.
And in this case, there is one good alternative and another open source initiative that could replace (and supersede) it that you can contribute to. I encourage you to.
It seems to me setting up this simple rule would take massively less time than all of your posts to/. on the subject.
Your main complaint seems to be "There's not a button for it," but there -is- a button for it. That button is called "filters" and is there for the times when you can't find the "Easy Button".
Same goes for you Conversation View "problem". The solution is to copy sent messages to your in-box (or wherever). If you don't want to see your own messages in your in box, replace your In Box folder with a search folder that hides emails sent by you.
The whole thing would take less time than it took me to write this post.
Your original post started out as a proponent of TBird, your subsequent messages make either it or you look like a giant pain in the ass to deal with, when I'm guessing neither is really true.
I'm also put to mind of Getting Real. You can read the HTML version for free or pay $19 for a PDF and they've still sold tens of thousands of copies of the PDF, not to mention the paper version.
I was taking a Hypercard class at university back in... Probably 93. I believe the class was part of the Journalism dept (for either insightful or random reasons). One day about 1/2 way through the class the prof comes in breathless and excited. He shows us Mosaic, starts explaining how it works. Before the end of the day he's scrapped the curriculum and we've started leaning HTML. (Which at that time took about an afternoon). Hypercard 101 had effectively become a web design class.
I have some nostalgia for Hypercard, but I don't think I touched a stack after that day.
Reading the summary I thought "If this is a publicity stunt, it's backfiring". It's freaking 2008, a cpu shouldn't be able to cook it's self. If it can, I'm not buying.
Last week the fan on my laptop failed (Intel Celeron). It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why the thing was suddenly running so slow (It runs quiet anyway). But it still ran. It ended up running for a day and half straight, under load, with no fan. Replaced the fan, all is good.
And this doesn't even take into account location IP filtering. I spend 3-6 months a year outside of the US. Virtually all pay entertainment services (except porn) block or filter access based on country. (Yes, I can proxy around them, but it's a pain in the ass and really slow.) A CD of a game I can pack in my luggage easily and play anywhere. There's a very significant chance (> 90% in my experience) that the game that I "bought" and played in the US would fail its call home from Japan.
CD based media -should- be dead, but there are unfortunately many stupid reasons to keep them around.
People are so hard on this article because, for the effort it's taken to write it, the author could have gone outside and planted a tree and done much much more for the environment in total than this article ever will.
Meh. We pay taxes for precisely this sort of thing.
Maybe you do.
If he wasn't marginally famous they wouldn't have spent 1/10th of that on the guy. The only way I could get a bill for $700,000 from the state is if I did an act of terrorism.
And by "other peoples' PCs" they of course mean the people who control Storm. The physical possessors of the computers have already given up ownership.
It's a real shame that this is being done by researchers and not security forces. The researchers are correct, it ain't their job. It should be done by people who we have already given the authority to trespass with cause.
Not going to happen. Sadly. I live in a place where violent crime is incredibly rare, but property crime is common. The most valuable things I own are the information on my computers, and yet there is no one that I can call if I'm attacked there.* Law enforcement has the technology of Wyatt Erp while the criminals have F22 with laser guided bombs and depleted uranium ammo.
I hope the researchers don't get brought up on charges, it would set a bad precedent. Since law enforcement will never get caught up, I'd like to see a law passed that gives immunity to this kind of action. If The Law is unwilling or unable to deal with a threat, they have to deputize citizens. Too bad The Law is unwilling to admit weakness or failure.
* Even if they steal my physical laptop there's only a minuscule chance that the police will do anything but take a report and notify me "if it turns up". Insurance will cover the physical loss, but not the potential repercussions of the loss (ID theft, proprietary business info, down time, etc.**)
** Yes, I encrypt but security is not an absolute.
Yes, most people's first 5.0+ is memorable. But looking at the "did you feel it" map is just silly. There are people reporting intensity VI (Strong) over a hundred miles from the epicenter. If you're more than 100 miles from a 5.x quake and you feel something moving you either a truck went by or you have gas.
(If a Midwesterner wants to get back at a Californian for being pussies about earthquakes, all they have to do is mention tornados. Or even just thunderstorms. On a business trip to Milwaukee two clients from CA literally crying and trying to hide under the hotel bed after a nearby lightning strike.)
At my school we got halfway through the American Revolution, then went straight to the summer break. When we came back in the fall we were studying WWII, leaving me to infer that the colonies had won independence.
I didn't even know there was an American civil war until I visited the south, where I found out it's still being fought.
Is all it does is send notifications? What the hell is the point of getting a message:
Jose sent you a link from Sally. Click here to view it
when the message is
Sushi Zone, 7:00!
Why not just send the message (or the image or whatever)?
If the point is to streamline social networking they soundly missed the point and doubled the traffic.
Disclaimer: I pretty much despise social networking and it's ilk for taking all of the substance out of interpersonal communication. But they do present interesting interface challenges.
Drivers should then be able to make a reasoned determination of how fast they should go based on road conditions, the condition of the car, traffic, etc.
I'm going to guess you're not in America where getting a license to drive is a right, not a privilege. I've been a fully licensed driver in the US since age 16 (22 years) and the only skills I've had to demonstrate is not being completely blind and able to get 70% or better on a 20 question multiple choice test. Once. 22 years ago.
Driver's training when I was a teen was a joke. We learned how to drive the back streets of a small town, honk at women and navigate a drive-through. We never even learned how to head-in park, much less parallel park or make a three point turn or not change lanes while eating a big mac and talking on the phone.
Thinking that we can make smart decisions about how fast is safe is giving us a lot of credit. Too much.
a number of companies won't install anything on their machines unless the files are cryptographically signed in some way
Sure! Just like my copy of Windows, OSX, Photoshop, Acrobat, Office, Toast, and... every other commercial application that I've ever had are cryptographi--
Oh, wait. Hell, even Firefox doesn't have a sig. to download.
I'm not saying the danger isn't there, but generally if someone has access to make nefarious changes to an archive, modifying the signature as well is pretty trivial, if not mandatory.
Slashdot Mirror
A government agency applying some scientific method the the efficacy of law?
Just the concept blows me away.
In addition the clever people down at Google can hand edit the database when they feel someone is taking advantage of them. Most people seem to think Google is totally automated and can be ruthlessly gamed. This is obviously not true. Just ask BMW who got their page rank reduced to zero for feeding Google different pages than human visitors.
People also seem to think that Google is some kind of public utility and every page -has- to be listed, otherwise its some kind of crime.
I'd be surprised if this guy's blog doesn't get dropped from Google's index for abuse, if it hasn't already. (How smrt do you have to be to tell the world you're going to abuse a company? Quick, check YouTube to see if this guy has any self incriminating crime spree videos.)
Manned space flight is afraid of a few deaths? What evidence do you have?
Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee die during a ground test and we still landed on the moon 2 years later.
Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliff died in the Challenger explosion and we were back riding the same design to orbit 2 years later.
We lost Rick Husband, William McCool, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon in the Colombia reentry. And again, 2 years later we're back in space on the same vehicle.
Just because you're too much of a wimp to risk your life doing something amazing and unique, don't condemn the rest of us to mediocrity.
I was raised on a farm, and although I've been living in some of the most modern urban locations on Earth for 15 years, there's a cultural gap between me and most people.
I remember when I was young, maybe ten years old, and I went in to town to play with some friends. They were playing some kind of neighborhood-wide hide and seek, tear-assing through everyone's backyards. I felt unable to play because the wholesale trespassing going on made me intensely uncomfortable. It still does.
Of course I was trained to shoot at age 8 and operate heavy machinery at 12, so there were other benefits as well.
Had these ordinary folks with an arcane hobby shown up on my father's farm he would have shot a warning shot across thier bow (12 gauge bird shot). He, however would have told them to stay where they were and to not move until the County Sheriff arrived to deal with them. At which point they'd get a free meal and room for the night in the pokey. You see my father, and every landowner in the county who had an ounce of smarts, knew the sheriff and his deputies pretty well and would be happy to do a favor for him (particularly if there would be a good story in it) and would always take his word against someone from out of the area. So even if these guys had called the law, it would have done them no good.
Had they gone up and rung the doorbell and asked, it may have been a no problem. But then again it might have. Depends on the season and where they wanted to go. If they wanted to go in the middle of a field and there were still crops in, there's no chance in hell, they could easily cause hundreds of dollars of crop damage. And likewise in a pasture where there are animals. Just because they are farmed animals does not mean they are domesticated. Getting run over by a cow isn't fun, and a sow can and will kill you if she senses a threat to her young.
I would be great to run this on my own trusted server, and would the be only way I might run the extension.
However I don't think Google should open source it in this case. Mostly because of my own needless paranoia. (But this is Slashdot so no one will notice.)
Why? What percentage of FF's user base runs their own server? We can only guess, but probably somewhere in the realm of 0.001%. Or less. (There are 1.4 bil internet users, you do the math.) So virtually no one is going to run their own server.
What a perfect opportunity for Lucky Nice Software Co! (A division of Lazy Nefarious Software Company.) LNSC sets up a server, pays some kid a few hundred bucks to put a custom front-end on it, pays another kid the same amount to set up a professional looking web site and then a little more to advertise. Add a long EULA that says they can store and rape all of your data and you've got a profitable business for little trouble and a small amount of capital.
An -now- it looks like something my Mom might use. And because it looks nice and legitimate and has been advertised it will be several orders of magnitude more popular than your version.
Sure, software isn't unique. If one person can do it, so can another. But there is making guns, and then there is selling guns to terrorists.
And in this case, there is one good alternative and another open source initiative that could replace (and supersede) it that you can contribute to. I encourage you to.
It seems to me setting up this simple rule would take massively less time than all of your posts to /. on the subject.
Your main complaint seems to be "There's not a button for it," but there -is- a button for it. That button is called "filters" and is there for the times when you can't find the "Easy Button".
Same goes for you Conversation View "problem". The solution is to copy sent messages to your in-box (or wherever). If you don't want to see your own messages in your in box, replace your In Box folder with a search folder that hides emails sent by you.
The whole thing would take less time than it took me to write this post.
Your original post started out as a proponent of TBird, your subsequent messages make either it or you look like a giant pain in the ass to deal with, when I'm guessing neither is really true.
I'm also put to mind of Getting Real. You can read the HTML version for free or pay $19 for a PDF and they've still sold tens of thousands of copies of the PDF, not to mention the paper version.
And yet everyone says security by obscurity isn't security at all.
I was taking a Hypercard class at university back in... Probably 93. I believe the class was part of the Journalism dept (for either insightful or random reasons). One day about 1/2 way through the class the prof comes in breathless and excited. He shows us Mosaic, starts explaining how it works. Before the end of the day he's scrapped the curriculum and we've started leaning HTML. (Which at that time took about an afternoon). Hypercard 101 had effectively become a web design class.
I have some nostalgia for Hypercard, but I don't think I touched a stack after that day.
Reading the summary I thought "If this is a publicity stunt, it's backfiring". It's freaking 2008, a cpu shouldn't be able to cook it's self. If it can, I'm not buying.
Last week the fan on my laptop failed (Intel Celeron). It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why the thing was suddenly running so slow (It runs quiet anyway). But it still ran. It ended up running for a day and half straight, under load, with no fan. Replaced the fan, all is good.
Don't want to scare you but "real reality", the real thing with no approximations, is the thing that happens all the time everywhere.
You don't even have to learn any math to enjoy it.
Looks like you've got a lot of work to do.
Agreed.
And this doesn't even take into account location IP filtering. I spend 3-6 months a year outside of the US. Virtually all pay entertainment services (except porn) block or filter access based on country. (Yes, I can proxy around them, but it's a pain in the ass and really slow.) A CD of a game I can pack in my luggage easily and play anywhere. There's a very significant chance (> 90% in my experience) that the game that I "bought" and played in the US would fail its call home from Japan.
CD based media -should- be dead, but there are unfortunately many stupid reasons to keep them around.
People are so hard on this article because, for the effort it's taken to write it, the author could have gone outside and planted a tree and done much much more for the environment in total than this article ever will.
Maybe you do.
If he wasn't marginally famous they wouldn't have spent 1/10th of that on the guy. The only way I could get a bill for $700,000 from the state is if I did an act of terrorism.
My first thought is that this would provide great protection for criminals. "Dammit, I stole a known criminal's ID and I can't use it anywhere!"
How do I get on the list?
And by "other peoples' PCs" they of course mean the people who control Storm. The physical possessors of the computers have already given up ownership.
It's a real shame that this is being done by researchers and not security forces. The researchers are correct, it ain't their job. It should be done by people who we have already given the authority to trespass with cause.
Not going to happen. Sadly. I live in a place where violent crime is incredibly rare, but property crime is common. The most valuable things I own are the information on my computers, and yet there is no one that I can call if I'm attacked there.* Law enforcement has the technology of Wyatt Erp while the criminals have F22 with laser guided bombs and depleted uranium ammo.
I hope the researchers don't get brought up on charges, it would set a bad precedent. Since law enforcement will never get caught up, I'd like to see a law passed that gives immunity to this kind of action. If The Law is unwilling or unable to deal with a threat, they have to deputize citizens. Too bad The Law is unwilling to admit weakness or failure.
* Even if they steal my physical laptop there's only a minuscule chance that the police will do anything but take a report and notify me "if it turns up". Insurance will cover the physical loss, but not the potential repercussions of the loss (ID theft, proprietary business info, down time, etc.**)
** Yes, I encrypt but security is not an absolute.
Yes, most people's first 5.0+ is memorable. But looking at the "did you feel it" map is just silly. There are people reporting intensity VI (Strong) over a hundred miles from the epicenter. If you're more than 100 miles from a 5.x quake and you feel something moving you either a truck went by or you have gas.
(If a Midwesterner wants to get back at a Californian for being pussies about earthquakes, all they have to do is mention tornados. Or even just thunderstorms. On a business trip to Milwaukee two clients from CA literally crying and trying to hide under the hotel bed after a nearby lightning strike.)
At my school we got halfway through the American Revolution, then went straight to the summer break. When we came back in the fall we were studying WWII, leaving me to infer that the colonies had won independence.
I didn't even know there was an American civil war until I visited the south, where I found out it's still being fought.
If the point is to streamline social networking they soundly missed the point and doubled the traffic.
Disclaimer: I pretty much despise social networking and it's ilk for taking all of the substance out of interpersonal communication. But they do present interesting interface challenges.
Driver's training when I was a teen was a joke. We learned how to drive the back streets of a small town, honk at women and navigate a drive-through. We never even learned how to head-in park, much less parallel park or make a three point turn or not change lanes while eating a big mac and talking on the phone.
Thinking that we can make smart decisions about how fast is safe is giving us a lot of credit. Too much.
Sure! Just like my copy of Windows, OSX, Photoshop, Acrobat, Office, Toast, and... every other commercial application that I've ever had are cryptographi--
Oh, wait. Hell, even Firefox doesn't have a sig. to download.
I'm not saying the danger isn't there, but generally if someone has access to make nefarious changes to an archive, modifying the signature as well is pretty trivial, if not mandatory.
The only problem is that blue light ruins your night vision, which would conceivably cause more accidents.
If it was that fun, wouldn't more people be using it?
If it was really a simulation of a "4-year old" it should pass the Touring test easily.
I suspect however it mostly passes the flying penis and furry test.