A) Is there even any mechanism to report problem users to the TypeKey admins? B) If there is, is it wise for the TypeKeys to ban first and investigate later? C) Why would banning by IP addresses by effective at the TypeKey level when it's already been proven to be ineffective at the individual weblog level? Spammers certainly don't restrict themselves to a single IP. I thought it was already well-established among those who are fighting comment spam that banning by IP address is pointless.
Blog spammers are starting by pursuing the low-hanging fruit. As more and more weblogs switch to central authentication systems like TypeKey, I expect that spammers will find it worthwhile to figure out how to spam using TypeKey accounts. If I'm wrong in thinking this, I still haven't heard a good reason from Six Apart or anyone else why that would be the case. I would be happy to be wrong about this, though.
but I turned off letting other sites know when I update and the online casion spam stopped.
I've seen this observation mentioned once before, and I'd like to see this explored further. It seems that spammers are harvesting URLs from sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs. I don't doubt that their finding blogs via Google searches, though, so turning off update notifications is probably a temporary solution at best.
This was also a showstopper for me; I passed on Textpattern for the same reason.
(As an aside, solid multiple blog and multiple user support is one of Movable Type's best features, and it irks me that so many MT plugin developers write their code under the assumption that every MT installation only has a single user.)
Captchas are currently great for weeding out automated spammers; unfortunately, they're also great at weeding out people who cannot see. This unnecessarily renders your site inaccessible to a portion of your audience. From a geekier perspective, this sort of assumption-laden web design runs completely contrary to the accessible, device-independent spirit of the original WWW.
Of course, since the blog you linked doesn't even work at all as I write this, maybe you're not concerned with accessibility for anyone!
http://blog.ziffdavis.com/seltzer
GET/seltzer HTTP/1.1
HTTP/1.x 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:39:46 GMT X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Cache-Control: private Content-Type: img/jpeg; charset=utf-8
Perhaps this was added in version 3.x, but you certainly can delete more than one comment at a time in Movable Type, and there is no need to "dig through" each post to find the latest comments, whatever the number. I believe that the comments page displays 20 comments at a time by default. It's unfortunate, though, that Six Apart pissed everyone off by licensing 3.x as they did, or more people would be taking advantage of 3.x's small but worthwhile improvements.
I agree with other posters that renaming the comment CGI handler is ineffective. It's ineffective because enough people have tried that technique that it has become worthwhile for spammers to work around it. Other potential solutions will probably end up with similar results. Want to stop spammers by forcing comment previews? Then the spammers will preview their comments. Want to stop spammers by throttling x number of comments per hour? Then you'll end up with exactly x number of comments, fewer legitimate comments, and you'll still have spam. Want to stop spammers by forcing a login from a central authentication server? Spammers will register their own accounts on that central authentication server, too. Etc.
I'm sorry to say that spam cannot be prevented, only mitigated. The best you can hope for is not having to manually delete every single comment you receive, as automated solutions weed out some (hopefully) high percentage of them. Meanwhile, any solution short of refusing comments altogether will eventually be defeated to some extent by spammers, assuming that enough people use that solution to make it worth the spammers' time and effort to defeat. One consequence of this is that switching from one popular blogging platform to another popular blogging platform is not going to save you from spam in the long run.
The parent post should be modded up as informative.
To add my own two cents, I used to run an email setup from my old home Linux box (using Courier for IMAP and qmail for SMTP), which I eventually began to ignore as I moved on to using email accounts from other providers. At some point, the qmail server went down and stayed that way for at least three days before I noticed. When I restarted the qmail server, the incoming email backlog (almost all spam) was so large that it overwhelmed my Linux box, sucking up the tiny amount of installed RAM (32MB) and filling up my tiny/var partition as the poor little machine tried to keep up with temporary spike in mail traffic. Ironically, I ended up temporarily disabling Spamassassin to ease the load on the machine's CPU.
Granted, I am not a mail administrator and never should have been running an SMTP server, especially on an underpowered server -- and there was probably any number of things I could have done to keep the machine running smoothly had I known better -- but the point is that temporarily shutting down your mail server will not reduce the overall amount of mail you receive, and in fact it may temporarily increase many times over the amount of mail that you receive in a short period of time. As the parent poster said, spammers generally use zombie MTAs or forged reply-to addresses, so bounces are ignored, and most legitimate SMTP servers will attempt to resend undeliverable messages for nearly a week.
Consider the fact that many mail clients (Thunderbird included) integrate NNTP news reading already, which is very similar. RSS/Atom feeds, like NNTP newsgroups, are generally arranged topically (or by folder, or by web site...) and presented serially and chronologically; they lend themselves well to the interfaces typically used by mail clients, which, unlike web browsers, are designed not just for browsing data but for managing data. I personally don't think the web browser is a good client for consuming RSS/Atom feeds; the usage patterns of feeds and web pages are far too different. In fact, I never use Firefox's built-in RSS/Atom support.
I'm not so interested in jumping Mario across platforms, but if my reward was the opportunity to bitch-slap that annoyingly helpless Princess Toadstool, I might change my mind.
Personally, I'm happy to play Nintendo games and not be reminded of pimps, prostitution, and violence towards women. And hearing pimp slang from video game geeks is especially vexing, which is one of the many reasons why I don't have XBox Live.
My memory doesn't always serve me well, but Metroid Prime is the first Metroid game where I could sense anything like an appreciable storyline. What strike me as the Metroid series' most representative qualities would be its atmosphere of alienness and the frequently exhilarating feeling of exploration and discovery. The subdued soundtrack and near lack of verbal cues in the original Metroid lent the game a kind of elegance and abstraction that perfectly fit its alien setting. I think later games like Metroid Fusion, while still great fun, lost a little by grafting more overt storytelling elements onto the game. (As I mentioned, though, maybe my memory's not so good and I'm just idealizing the best parts of the earlier games.)
More generally (and this is not addressed to the parent post), I'm not sure why some gamers insist on the primacy of storytelling in games. In some cases, like the old Infocom games or brilliant RPGs like Planescape: Torment, a plot is indispensable, but there are games like Doom or Defender, in which the story is understood to be completely irrelevant. And then you have games like Go or Checkers, for which a story would be meaningless.
Because I know that Wilson Pickett, "In the Midnight Hour", Yanni, "In the Mirror", "Chicken Soup for Little Souls", or Martha Stewart's Halloween sounds haven't made it anywhere close to the Billboards TOP charts. Unless we were looking at a very large Top Billboard chart.
"In the Midnight Hour" hit the top of the R&B chart. It reached #26 (that is, the "top half") on the Billboard pop chart in 1965, though I do not know how long it stayed on the chart. It is still in heavy rotation to this day on oldies radio stations, and Wilson Pickett is still beloved by soul and R&B fans to this day. His music isn't junk by any means.
I'm sure your general point is more or less valid (though plenty of artistically and culturally valuable records never charted at all), but it pains me to see Wilson Pickett mentioned in the same breath as Yanni and Martha Stewart.
My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser.
Why was this post modded up? The author is clearly insane. If you want to minimize the browser, use the minimize button. If you want to close the browser, use the close button.
I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.
If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.
It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).
To my knowledge, RSS 1.0 is based on RDF. The two other major versions of RSS, 0.91 and 2.0, are not.
All told, there are at least 9 different versions of RSS, each slightly incompatible with the other:
There are 9 versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with various other versions. RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.
Wifi is nice, but speaking as a frequent traveller on the Texas highway system, I'd much prefer clean floors, stall doors, and soap in the Texas rest stops first.
Using IMAP, the mail 'stays' on the server, as you put it, regardless of the client. And like the other poster said, with a dedicated IMAP client, the messages, while permanently stored on the server, can be cached as local copies on the client.
If you want to tout the advantages of web-based clients, you want to talk about the fact that a user need only set up his mail client once, and then can access it anywhere there's a web browser. This is important for a good number of people who either don't have their own computers or are intimidated by dedicated clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mutt.
And after you've set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to "true," you should install the Show Failed URL extension so that the URL for the failed page will show in the address bar.
I really do wish this behavior would become default behavior soon, and I also wish that error page would get a makeover. This seems like a pretty big usability issue to me; I'm not sure why it hasn't received much attention from the developers.
I don't think you're cynical or paranoid for being suspicious or paranoid of this article, but...
Thirdly, the technical details are obviously wrong. Formatting hard drives? Deleting files? That is so 1980's. Today's virus writers are obsessed with the social interface: how to confuse people into clicking the attachment.
It's not uncommon for mainstream media writers to get the technical details wrong. However, your criticism suggests to me that you didn't read the article. The subjects of the story talk about how deleting files and formatting hard drives is no longer commonplace, and how they must become amateur psychologists to fool people into executing their code.
The bit about Visual Basic did make me laugh, though.
Forthly, the timing. A long, detailed investigation into youthful virus writers just as the worst ever virus hits the Internet, with no mention of mafia connections, of zombie spam engines, of "sorry, andy, but this was just my job",...? WTF?
Timeliness isn't coincidence in the world of journalism; it's almost always intentional. This story was probably written last year, when, as the story notes, a slew of email worms were in abundance, then held to be published (with some last-minute updating) after January's big email worm, when it would be timely.
What you want are the Lego Designer and Inventor series sets. They consist chiefly of traditional Lego bricks, include several designs in each set, and, by God, they don't seem to be advertisements for anything! The pieces are versatile, and you should be able to use them to build many models not envisioned by the original builders. The product line leads up very nicely to the Technic sets (which were called "Expert Builder" sets when I was a kid).
If I had more disposable income, I would buy up every set in this series.
I don't know what all the smartass comments about cassette tapes are about... I still keep a cassette deck around to play the odd mix tape, but taping radio to cassette is obviously not the solution you're looking for.
What you want, of course, is a Tivo-like consumer device for time-shifting radio shows. This is entirely reasonable. I want one, too. There are several community and college radio shows in my area that I miss every week because of work, and such a solution would be ideal for my situation. Anyway, I don't know of a Tivo-like device for radio, but FM tuners for your PC aren't too hard to find, and given some spare GBs of hard drive space, it's easy enough to cook up a solution:
If I weren't lucky enough to live in a city with good college and community radio stations, I certainly wouldn't look to the radio to find new music to enjoy. And yet I think I would still find more than enough new music via friends, zines, local record stores, and -- oh yes -- weblogs and peer-to-peer file sharing networks. More bluntly, I look to other music fans for new music rather than to Clear Channel, et al.
On that note, I haven't tried satellite radio, so I can't judge it, but I must admit that reading about the promise of hundreds of radio stations immediately brings to mind the wasteland of mediocrity that is cable television. But I would be happy to be wrong.
That's why I'm hoping that private, encrypted p2p systems like WASTE or Foldershare take off! I don't think either of those systems are quite ready for mass acceptance, but they certainly point in the right direction -- private, encrypted file sharing networks that anybody can use.
People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.
Jobs may be right about this, but for the life of me I can't understand why. I see mp3s and the like as fundamentally different than 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, and any other physical media. When I buy an LP or a CD, I don't just buy the music, but I buy the physical artifact that includes the record itself, the record sleeve, and the liner notes. An mp3 is just the song. Sure, the music is most important, but I'm not willing to pay as much for the music alone, certainly not a dollar a song. I am willing to pay a fixed rate to download as many songs as I want (emusic was brilliant in this regard until they changed their rates). This is because I still regard mp3s as a complementary mode of listening to music, not a replacement for a record collection. I won't pay a premium for mp3s, because I use mp3s to sample music for later purchase in physical format.
I'm afraid that I'm probably in a minority here... I'm interested in hearing what others think about all this.
The Internet (domain names, top-tier nameservers, nameserver software,
web and e-mail server software, all markup documents) runs on english, there's no way to i18n it without opening up a world of hurt. (emphasis mine)
Huh? You better not tell the W3C, who have put a great deal of work into i18n support for web protocols and markup languages. You better not tell your browser maker, the majority of whom includes support for multiple character encodings and the HTTP Accept-Language header. You better not tell Google, who have localized their search interface to support an impressive number of languages, using the HTTP Accept-Language header that your browser sends to determine which language to present. In fact, you better ignore the thousands, if not millions, of documents on the web right now that include non-English content, and the existing infrastructure that serves and presents those documents.
I can't speak for DNS or the email infrastructure, but the WWW is already internationalized.
Hear, hear. While I do think that the situation under the Bush administration is gravely worse than the Clinton administration, I also wish that more of my fellow liberals and progressives had enough historical memory to recall that the Clinton administration did not always do the right thing in the name of peace or civil liberties. For starters, I'll mention two wrongs that I haven't forgotten: 1) the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, which thankfully passed with most of its wiretapping provisions removed, but did curtail the rights of immigrants and aliens (remember, this was in response to the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City), and 2) the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, a politically motivated act of violence that should bring shame to every American.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Is there even any mechanism to report problem users to the TypeKey admins?
B) If there is, is it wise for the TypeKeys to ban first and investigate later?
C) Why would banning by IP addresses by effective at the TypeKey level when it's already been proven to be ineffective at the individual weblog level? Spammers certainly don't restrict themselves to a single IP. I thought it was already well-established among those who are fighting comment spam that banning by IP address is pointless.
Blog spammers are starting by pursuing the low-hanging fruit. As more and more weblogs switch to central authentication systems like TypeKey, I expect that spammers will find it worthwhile to figure out how to spam using TypeKey accounts. If I'm wrong in thinking this, I still haven't heard a good reason from Six Apart or anyone else why that would be the case. I would be happy to be wrong about this, though.
I've seen this observation mentioned once before, and I'd like to see this explored further. It seems that spammers are harvesting URLs from sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs. I don't doubt that their finding blogs via Google searches, though, so turning off update notifications is probably a temporary solution at best.
This was also a showstopper for me; I passed on Textpattern for the same reason.
(As an aside, solid multiple blog and multiple user support is one of Movable Type's best features, and it irks me that so many MT plugin developers write their code under the assumption that every MT installation only has a single user.)
Captchas are currently great for weeding out automated spammers; unfortunately, they're also great at weeding out people who cannot see. This unnecessarily renders your site inaccessible to a portion of your audience. From a geekier perspective, this sort of assumption-laden web design runs completely contrary to the accessible, device-independent spirit of the original WWW.
Of course, since the blog you linked doesn't even work at all as I write this, maybe you're not concerned with accessibility for anyone!
Perhaps this was added in version 3.x, but you certainly can delete more than one comment at a time in Movable Type, and there is no need to "dig through" each post to find the latest comments, whatever the number. I believe that the comments page displays 20 comments at a time by default. It's unfortunate, though, that Six Apart pissed everyone off by licensing 3.x as they did, or more people would be taking advantage of 3.x's small but worthwhile improvements.
I agree with other posters that renaming the comment CGI handler is ineffective. It's ineffective because enough people have tried that technique that it has become worthwhile for spammers to work around it. Other potential solutions will probably end up with similar results. Want to stop spammers by forcing comment previews? Then the spammers will preview their comments. Want to stop spammers by throttling x number of comments per hour? Then you'll end up with exactly x number of comments, fewer legitimate comments, and you'll still have spam. Want to stop spammers by forcing a login from a central authentication server? Spammers will register their own accounts on that central authentication server, too. Etc.
I'm sorry to say that spam cannot be prevented, only mitigated. The best you can hope for is not having to manually delete every single comment you receive, as automated solutions weed out some (hopefully) high percentage of them. Meanwhile, any solution short of refusing comments altogether will eventually be defeated to some extent by spammers, assuming that enough people use that solution to make it worth the spammers' time and effort to defeat. One consequence of this is that switching from one popular blogging platform to another popular blogging platform is not going to save you from spam in the long run.
The parent post should be modded up as informative.
/var partition as the poor little machine tried to keep up with temporary spike in mail traffic. Ironically, I ended up temporarily disabling Spamassassin to ease the load on the machine's CPU.
To add my own two cents, I used to run an email setup from my old home Linux box (using Courier for IMAP and qmail for SMTP), which I eventually began to ignore as I moved on to using email accounts from other providers. At some point, the qmail server went down and stayed that way for at least three days before I noticed. When I restarted the qmail server, the incoming email backlog (almost all spam) was so large that it overwhelmed my Linux box, sucking up the tiny amount of installed RAM (32MB) and filling up my tiny
Granted, I am not a mail administrator and never should have been running an SMTP server, especially on an underpowered server -- and there was probably any number of things I could have done to keep the machine running smoothly had I known better -- but the point is that temporarily shutting down your mail server will not reduce the overall amount of mail you receive, and in fact it may temporarily increase many times over the amount of mail that you receive in a short period of time. As the parent poster said, spammers generally use zombie MTAs or forged reply-to addresses, so bounces are ignored, and most legitimate SMTP servers will attempt to resend undeliverable messages for nearly a week.
Consider the fact that many mail clients (Thunderbird included) integrate NNTP news reading already, which is very similar. RSS/Atom feeds, like NNTP newsgroups, are generally arranged topically (or by folder, or by web site...) and presented serially and chronologically; they lend themselves well to the interfaces typically used by mail clients, which, unlike web browsers, are designed not just for browsing data but for managing data. I personally don't think the web browser is a good client for consuming RSS/Atom feeds; the usage patterns of feeds and web pages are far too different. In fact, I never use Firefox's built-in RSS/Atom support.
I'm not so interested in jumping Mario across platforms, but if my reward was the opportunity to bitch-slap that annoyingly helpless Princess Toadstool, I might change my mind.
Personally, I'm happy to play Nintendo games and not be reminded of pimps, prostitution, and violence towards women. And hearing pimp slang from video game geeks is especially vexing, which is one of the many reasons why I don't have XBox Live.
Metroid is about the story, mainly.
My memory doesn't always serve me well, but Metroid Prime is the first Metroid game where I could sense anything like an appreciable storyline. What strike me as the Metroid series' most representative qualities would be its atmosphere of alienness and the frequently exhilarating feeling of exploration and discovery. The subdued soundtrack and near lack of verbal cues in the original Metroid lent the game a kind of elegance and abstraction that perfectly fit its alien setting. I think later games like Metroid Fusion, while still great fun, lost a little by grafting more overt storytelling elements onto the game. (As I mentioned, though, maybe my memory's not so good and I'm just idealizing the best parts of the earlier games.)
More generally (and this is not addressed to the parent post), I'm not sure why some gamers insist on the primacy of storytelling in games. In some cases, like the old Infocom games or brilliant RPGs like Planescape: Torment, a plot is indispensable, but there are games like Doom or Defender, in which the story is understood to be completely irrelevant. And then you have games like Go or Checkers, for which a story would be meaningless.
"In the Midnight Hour" hit the top of the R&B chart. It reached #26 (that is, the "top half") on the Billboard pop chart in 1965, though I do not know how long it stayed on the chart. It is still in heavy rotation to this day on oldies radio stations, and Wilson Pickett is still beloved by soul and R&B fans to this day. His music isn't junk by any means.
I'm sure your general point is more or less valid (though plenty of artistically and culturally valuable records never charted at all), but it pains me to see Wilson Pickett mentioned in the same breath as Yanni and Martha Stewart.
My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser.
Why was this post modded up? The author is clearly insane. If you want to minimize the browser, use the minimize button. If you want to close the browser, use the close button.
I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.
If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.
It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).
Wifi is nice, but speaking as a frequent traveller on the Texas highway system, I'd much prefer clean floors, stall doors, and soap in the Texas rest stops first.
Using IMAP, the mail 'stays' on the server, as you put it, regardless of the client. And like the other poster said, with a dedicated IMAP client, the messages, while permanently stored on the server, can be cached as local copies on the client.
If you want to tout the advantages of web-based clients, you want to talk about the fact that a user need only set up his mail client once, and then can access it anywhere there's a web browser. This is important for a good number of people who either don't have their own computers or are intimidated by dedicated clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mutt.
I really do wish this behavior would become default behavior soon, and I also wish that error page would get a makeover. This seems like a pretty big usability issue to me; I'm not sure why it hasn't received much attention from the developers.
That said, I'm very happy with the 0.8 release!
I don't think you're cynical or paranoid for being suspicious or paranoid of this article, but...
Thirdly, the technical details are obviously wrong. Formatting hard drives? Deleting files? That is so 1980's. Today's virus writers are obsessed with the social interface: how to confuse people into clicking the attachment.
It's not uncommon for mainstream media writers to get the technical details wrong. However, your criticism suggests to me that you didn't read the article. The subjects of the story talk about how deleting files and formatting hard drives is no longer commonplace, and how they must become amateur psychologists to fool people into executing their code.
The bit about Visual Basic did make me laugh, though.
Forthly, the timing. A long, detailed investigation into youthful virus writers just as the worst ever virus hits the Internet, with no mention of mafia connections, of zombie spam engines, of "sorry, andy, but this was just my job",...? WTF?
Timeliness isn't coincidence in the world of journalism; it's almost always intentional. This story was probably written last year, when, as the story notes, a slew of email worms were in abundance, then held to be published (with some last-minute updating) after January's big email worm, when it would be timely.
Just my $0.02.
What you want are the Lego Designer and Inventor series sets. They consist chiefly of traditional Lego bricks, include several designs in each set, and, by God, they don't seem to be advertisements for anything! The pieces are versatile, and you should be able to use them to build many models not envisioned by the original builders. The product line leads up very nicely to the Technic sets (which were called "Expert Builder" sets when I was a kid).
If I had more disposable income, I would buy up every set in this series.
I don't know what all the smartass comments about cassette tapes are about... I still keep a cassette deck around to play the odd mix tape, but taping radio to cassette is obviously not the solution you're looking for.
What you want, of course, is a Tivo-like consumer device for time-shifting radio shows. This is entirely reasonable. I want one, too. There are several community and college radio shows in my area that I miss every week because of work, and such a solution would be ideal for my situation. Anyway, I don't know of a Tivo-like device for radio, but FM tuners for your PC aren't too hard to find, and given some spare GBs of hard drive space, it's easy enough to cook up a solution:
I've been meaning to do this myself for a while.
If I weren't lucky enough to live in a city with good college and community radio stations, I certainly wouldn't look to the radio to find new music to enjoy. And yet I think I would still find more than enough new music via friends, zines, local record stores, and -- oh yes -- weblogs and peer-to-peer file sharing networks. More bluntly, I look to other music fans for new music rather than to Clear Channel, et al.
On that note, I haven't tried satellite radio, so I can't judge it, but I must admit that reading about the promise of hundreds of radio stations immediately brings to mind the wasteland of mediocrity that is cable television. But I would be happy to be wrong.
That's why I'm hoping that private, encrypted p2p systems like WASTE or Foldershare take off! I don't think either of those systems are quite ready for mass acceptance, but they certainly point in the right direction -- private, encrypted file sharing networks that anybody can use.
Jobs may be right about this, but for the life of me I can't understand why. I see mp3s and the like as fundamentally different than 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, and any other physical media. When I buy an LP or a CD, I don't just buy the music, but I buy the physical artifact that includes the record itself, the record sleeve, and the liner notes. An mp3 is just the song. Sure, the music is most important, but I'm not willing to pay as much for the music alone, certainly not a dollar a song. I am willing to pay a fixed rate to download as many songs as I want (emusic was brilliant in this regard until they changed their rates). This is because I still regard mp3s as a complementary mode of listening to music, not a replacement for a record collection. I won't pay a premium for mp3s, because I use mp3s to sample music for later purchase in physical format.
I'm afraid that I'm probably in a minority here... I'm interested in hearing what others think about all this.
Huh? You better not tell the W3C, who have put a great deal of work into i18n support for web protocols and markup languages. You better not tell your browser maker, the majority of whom includes support for multiple character encodings and the HTTP Accept-Language header. You better not tell Google, who have localized their search interface to support an impressive number of languages, using the HTTP Accept-Language header that your browser sends to determine which language to present. In fact, you better ignore the thousands, if not millions, of documents on the web right now that include non-English content, and the existing infrastructure that serves and presents those documents.
I can't speak for DNS or the email infrastructure, but the WWW is already internationalized.
Hear, hear. While I do think that the situation under the Bush administration is gravely worse than the Clinton administration, I also wish that more of my fellow liberals and progressives had enough historical memory to recall that the Clinton administration did not always do the right thing in the name of peace or civil liberties. For starters, I'll mention two wrongs that I haven't forgotten: 1) the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, which thankfully passed with most of its wiretapping provisions removed, but did curtail the rights of immigrants and aliens (remember, this was in response to the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City), and 2) the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, a politically motivated act of violence that should bring shame to every American.