Firstly, kudos to Dave Winer for getting this discussion going.
Winer didn't "get this discussion going". My cow-orkers have been very busy in this space for well over a year, and there's a huge pile of published work out there on far, far better ways of doing it.
There's got to be a better alternative to decentralized membership than MS Passport, and why not Dave to open up the new Frontier;)
Because Winer isn't smart enough. He never innovates; he takes something with a pre-existing moderately high profile (like RSS, like XML-RPC, like Passport) which has something small broken in it, fixes up the most glaring holes and then starts to pass it off as his own original work. As he's the best self-publicist this side of Steve Bennet (the flying cement mixer, not the CTO), gullible people who know no better believe him.
The trouble is that he's not bright enough to spot when something has a really major flaw in it. RSS 0.9 doesn't have semantics beyond the trivial ? - slap some extra XML on there. Server-based membership has a nasty link to M$oft ? - roll your own. Neither of these quick-fixes address the real underlying problem.
I don't understand why Dave poses the issue of privacy vs. publishing as mutually exclusive.
Because he can't see that publishing (and proof of rights, et al.) just doesn't require identification.
At least something like the xmlStorageSystem he describes *does* ensure that a public resource like member.xml is password protected.
How would that help in the Toysmart case? - the people who were entitled to have access to the data later sold it on. If you upload data, then it's no longer controllable. They'll either lose it through incompetence, or sell it for their own benefit.
The solution isn't to try and impose your external requests on someone else's housekeeping practices, it's to build a system instead that doesn't rely on disclosure of this information in the first place.
--
Information wants to be free
Data fancies being tied up and spanked by Troi
All of these services; Hailstorm, Passport, Davenet, have it entirely wrong. We just don't need any form of identification service.
Look at the "playing on-line media" scenario. The site operator needs to have proof that the consumer is entitled to the content. The consumer needs (sic) proof that the server is offering genuine RIAA-approved Metallica content, not that nasty communist MP3 stuff. The site operator also needs to obtain some token that proves they delivered content to the consumer (which the payment service will later honour). Neither of these requirements require anyone to identify themselves to another party. By PKI (which hasn't been rocket science for some years now) we can do all this.
my favorite idea would be a USB dongle-type device (or "token") that could be worn or carried on a keychain
Dallas Semiconductor have (IMHO) the best of such devices, as part of their iButton product range. It's a USB fob for iButtons. Hang it on your keyring and it's an iButton fob. Plug it into a laptop for a moment and it's a USB-connected authentication device (capable of running robust JavaCards). Plug it permanently into a desktop and it's a cheap iButton interface for static machines.
I'm no fan of "New Labour" - the party that treats Socialism like something that Tony Blair stepped in at the Durham Miner's Gala.
Blaming them for the National Curriculum is a bit strong though. Who was the group of neo-Stalinist centralisation freaks who invented it ? After all, why are they called "Baker Days", not "Blunkett Days" ? (or McGuiness days !)
This can't possibly be a good thing for Ximian. M$oft will squash them like a bug, simply because it's the only thing they know. Name a M$oft collaboration that has ended well for the partner ? Ashton-Tate ? OS/2 ? Anything related to J++ ?
M$oft DO NOT WANT O/S to succeed, or Ximian to succeed. If they're appearing to be helpful, it's only because they have some longer term plan to wipe out the competition. If Mono succeeds, then M$oft own it and can kill it (if you think they won;t be in control, then you're being naive). If it fails, then it was all the fault of "the cancer of Open Source" tm M$oft.
Another one with a half-baked grasp of history 8-(
the plutonium bombs (Little Boy and Trinity) were implosion devices
I assume "Little Boy" was just a typo, and to nit-pick, "Trinity" was the name of a test of a device called "Gadget".
because they were initially afraid they couldn't scare up enough plutonium
Your logic escapes me. They were worried about Pu shortage, so chose implosion ?
There was no shortage of Pu, and there was no real concern over this past the very early days. Once a production reactor was on-line (i.e. not just the early Chicago pile), Pu was more readily available than HEU. After all, Pu extraction is relatively simple. Under war conditions, where operator safety goes out of the window, it's almost easy. There was continued concern over HEU production, and this led to the implosion designs being continued with
explain Project Urchin?
I can't. I've never heard of "Project Urchin". "Urchins" were developed in the Manhattan project, but not under a project of that name. Is Urchin something else ?
Why is an Urchin significant to a Pu shortage anyway ? You need an initiator as a neutron source, but they're not a specific component that's only required by one particular configuration. The Urchin concept isn't revolutionary (although making a workable one is hard). It's even too obvious to be patentable (although not by the USPTO's standards). India used them (called "Flower") in their early '70s tests. If you believe the kooks (I don't), even the German bomb design (sic) used a Po/Be urchin.
Your legal argument is well-founded, but entirely misses the point.
The US Constitution, and the US Government, exists to serve the needs of "we, the people", not to further the aims of large corporates or a tiny minority of the very rich.
You claim that Anti-trust laws seek to punish success. Fine, I'm not arguing. What they exist to do is to defend the mass of the people, and if that includes defending them from someone extremely successful, then they should still continue this defence, even if that leads to an attack on that very success itself.
Anti-trust laws are not an attack on success per se, but they should never hesitate to be one, if that's what is required of them.
This is a facetious lawsuit. Any lawsuit launched by a big corporate (and US universities are some of the worst) will destroy the life of any normal human being who is targeted - even if they win. OTOH, they won't see a penny in damages, because the lawyer's bills alone will be enough to bankrupt the guy.
So why are they doing it ? There's no real reason why anyone can complain about an RC5 client, and in the vast noise of shop-at-work and corporate pr0n surfing, it's invisible. Secondly, it's an admin's to install RC5 and VirtuaGirl clients (on a sacrificial machine), because you can guarantee that a user somewhere will do it, and it's best to be forewarned about it.
I don't understand this at all, and I can only assume (with my paranoid hat on) that there's more to it than we're hearing.
...and of course, any admin's real power comes from the web proxy logs, and his boss' visits to farmsex.net (Hi Mike ! Still attending church regularly ? Still have that.25 IP address ? Still being a total bastard to your staff ?)
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb.
8-)
I probably had the most Meccano of any slashdotter. We lived in Liverpool, and my Dad's haulage company used to haul scrap metal away from Binns Road. I didn't have much that was correctly painted, but I had an awful lot of sheer weight of it !
I know you Londoners can't see beyond Watford, but how about remembering that there is life at the other end of the M4. If Accepting that UK transport policy is a poor joke everywhere, including London, you should how bad it gets North of Manchester. Tried to get to Ireland by ferry ? I can get to Belfast by going through Dublin (which is in a foreign country, for the benefit of non-locals) and then up by train more easily than I can get any sort of train to the Heysham ferry terminal (still in England). As for rail access to the other main ferry to NI, from Stranraer, then forget it from anywhere South of Glasgow. 6 hour quoted waits for a connection at a major city (Preston) on the "West Coast Main Line" ?
If Brief Encounter was to be filmed on this line again, then they could have raised kids before their next train arrived !
Try booking a train ticket from somewhere regional to one of the London airports. I can book a ticket from Waterloo to Charles de Gaulle airport, via Paris, but I can't get one from
Bristol to Heathrow (actually they'll sell you one, but it isn't valid in the mornings !).
The key phrase here appears to be "competition". I live in the UK, and I hate the legacy of Thatcher. Maybe it's all working wonderfully for you guys down under, but we're screwed.
How do you introduce competition in a railway system ? All we've seen are the train companies fighting to get out of each other's way and not compete on any services, a complete failure of the centralised group that maintains the fixed lines, failure of any through timetable, booking, or even ticket issuing services (don't expect to go in one side of London and out the other without queueing at least 3 times). Worst of all, we're now footing the bill for the directors of Railtrack to vote themselves massive pay increases when they've put up a poorer performance at management than the millienium dome.
Maybe privatisation with competition works (good luck to you if it does). The lessons of the UK though are that privatisation with fake competition is a failure, and that privatisation loses what little accountability there was in the first place.
When I was a lad (a mere 10 years ago), Lego came in lots of little pieces.
When I was a lad (a not so mere 30 years ago) Lego came in lots of little pieces and we made the same complaint about this "new fangled" stuff just appearing. There were windows that looked like windows, not square bricks ! I think it's an old "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" rant, and it's bogus.
Now my own son (6) plays with his Lego, and my old stuff. He just doesn't care what shape the bricks are; a roof tile makes just as good a piece of pizza as it does a computer console.
At his age, Lego isn't interesting as a construction toy. It's more about simple abstract constructs that are given meaning by their play context (if he says yesterday's castle tower is now a bus, then it's a bus). By the time he starts to think about it as an engineering problem solving tool (How do I find a thing that can reach sideways and have a hook on the end ?) he'll hopefully be too interested in using it to do the job, not worrying about the provenance of whether it's OK to make Giant Killer Roberts out of pink Belleville pieces.
Fire Control systems, and so on can be very large and complex.
Fire control systems are dead easy - if they didn't insist on using brain-dead languages from a few decades back, then they'd be up and running in no time. There are more lines of code running MS Flight Sim than there are in the F15 it's emulating.
And yes, I have written Coral 66
(just don't ask me to ever do it again)
Delphi as current best choice language ?
I wonder what Anders Hjelsberg would reckon ?
I'm serious here, not trolling. If you didn't have the millstone of M$oft's legacy codebase to support (for which C# is clearly the best choice in a lumpy world), would you rather use Delphi or C# ? Would Anders ?
I've made good money from nearly a decade of VB consultancy for suits. Haven't touched it in a year now, in favour of Java anbd JScript/ASP, and I'm loving it. My cow-orkers have got smarter, my clients have got smarter, and the projects are more interesting.
There's life outside M$oft platforms and tools, even in offices.
Even on M$oft platforms, there are better tools than VB.
Mid-90's, VB was useful because it was the only language out there that could be an OLE/COM client in a finite time, and without dumb coding errors making debugging hell. This is no longer true.
VB is still the best way to build simple apps around a Windows forms-based desktop app metaphor. If you still build these (nearly everyone else is building on the web), then it has a use.
Java is a logical choice for pretty well everything bespoke and not performance critical?
Absolutely.
I'm a researcher on RDF and Semantic Web apps, with a real-world site to build too. Most of our current work is IIS/ASP/JScript, and this is excruciating to work with compared to some of the newer stuff we've done (Servlets). The reason is simple, but compelling; availability of existing high-quality open sourced code libraries. The smartest people out there are building what I need, they're letting me use it, and they're doing it for Java.
SmartTag technology does in fact provide a significant benefit to casual web users
This is true, but naive.
There are many situations where a similar benefit can be obtained (targetted adverts in TV breaks), but not without a cost. The cost is either the over-emphasis of one aspect (the one behind the tag) when another might have been better, and
If I want to find "Home Insurance", then I should use a directory - not just choose the one deal on offer, chosen for me by Microsoft.
Make no mistake, this technology isn't about "helping people find stuff" (even if they're too dumb to work Google, the human race's most powerful ever creation for knowledge retrieval) -- it's just another channel for push advertising. These are blipverts, they're out of my control, and they can get the hell out of my web browser. What is "Debt advice" going to be smart-tagged to ? The local Citizen's Advice Bureau ? - or Honest Frank's Cheap Loans and Betting Shop ? Pay-for-placement behind Smart Tags is going to make you wish for the good old days of email spam !
Smart Tags have a big failing in that they're also extremely dumb. They do simple text recognition to recognise the concept they're attempting to match on, and that's just not good enough. Should the word "monopoly" be linked to "board games" or "anti-trust legislation" ?
Even with the best will in the world, I'm kind of curious how the Egyptians, with their technology, could have got a kite of that size to stay together in thirty mile an hour winds, let alone fly in any controlled fashion.
Practice, reasonable Egyptian technology, and living with a high failure rate.
I fly kites; mainly big single-line deltas. They use weird modern fabrics, but generally wooden poles - God's own composite material. Egypt had quite sophisticated fabric technology, certainly up to the task of making large kites. There's no reason why they couldn't have developed something like a Cody, or even a Peel - and either of those will lift me clean off the ground, even without pulleys.
Having a single sign-on has real benefits from the point of view of a non-technical user
Firstly, there's no need to "sign on" to anything. Authentication is what matters, not "signing on", not identification, and there's a whole pile of work out there on how to do this without either of the others. Why should you need to identify yourself to watch some web content, when instead you can simply demonstrate the right (which you might have paid for earlier) to view it ? Identification serves the marketers more than it serves the users; we don't need it, we don't want it, and they can shove it right up their IDispatchs!
Secondly, server-based sign-on has real problems. Microsoft Hailstorm is a complete crock; WTF should I use a server-based system to validate users before I serve them content when there are innumerable P2P systems that are as good, or even better ? If I do choose a server-based process (in some fit of madness), then why on earth should I use M$oft technology (or even services!), from a company that has a limited and so-far pathetic track record in supplying this sort of service ?
Thirdly, single-point "sign-on" is a potentially dangerous situation that only looks appealing threough laziness or lack of understanding. Compromising this one point invalidates all other services. If one of those is your credit card, then you could well find the situation of an eBay dispute over PayPal stopping you putting petrol in the car. How many/. readers run multiple CC's, just to avoid this sort of hassle ? I know I do.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, kudos to Dave Winer for getting this discussion going.
Winer didn't "get this discussion going". My cow-orkers have been very busy in this space for well over a year, and there's a huge pile of published work out there on far, far better ways of doing it.
There's got to be a better alternative to decentralized membership than MS Passport, and why not Dave to open up the new Frontier ;)
Because Winer isn't smart enough. He never innovates; he takes something with a pre-existing moderately high profile (like RSS, like XML-RPC, like Passport) which has something small broken in it, fixes up the most glaring holes and then starts to pass it off as his own original work. As he's the best self-publicist this side of Steve Bennet (the flying cement mixer, not the CTO), gullible people who know no better believe him.
The trouble is that he's not bright enough to spot when something has a really major flaw in it. RSS 0.9 doesn't have semantics beyond the trivial ? - slap some extra XML on there. Server-based membership has a nasty link to M$oft ? - roll your own. Neither of these quick-fixes address the real underlying problem.
I don't understand why Dave poses the issue of privacy vs. publishing as mutually exclusive.
Because he can't see that publishing (and proof of rights, et al.) just doesn't require identification.
At least something like the xmlStorageSystem he describes *does* ensure that a public resource like member.xml is password protected.
How would that help in the Toysmart case? - the people who were entitled to have access to the data later sold it on. If you upload data, then it's no longer controllable. They'll either lose it through incompetence, or sell it for their own benefit.
The solution isn't to try and impose your external requests on someone else's housekeeping practices, it's to build a system instead that doesn't rely on disclosure of this information in the first place.
--
Information wants to be free
Data fancies being tied up and spanked by Troi
All of these services; Hailstorm, Passport, Davenet, have it entirely wrong. We just don't need any form of identification service.
Look at the "playing on-line media" scenario. The site operator needs to have proof that the consumer is entitled to the content. The consumer needs (sic) proof that the server is offering genuine RIAA-approved Metallica content, not that nasty communist MP3 stuff. The site operator also needs to obtain some token that proves they delivered content to the consumer (which the payment service will later honour). Neither of these requirements require anyone to identify themselves to another party. By PKI (which hasn't been rocket science for some years now) we can do all this.
Think about proof, not about identification.
#insert semantic_web.blah
my favorite idea would be a USB dongle-type device (or "token") that could be worn or carried on a keychain
Dallas Semiconductor have (IMHO) the best of such devices, as part of their iButton product range. It's a USB fob for iButtons. Hang it on your keyring and it's an iButton fob. Plug it into a laptop for a moment and it's a USB-connected authentication device (capable of running robust JavaCards). Plug it permanently into a desktop and it's a cheap iButton interface for static machines.
I'm no fan of "New Labour" - the party that treats Socialism like something that Tony Blair stepped in at the Durham Miner's Gala.
Blaming them for the National Curriculum is a bit strong though. Who was the group of neo-Stalinist centralisation freaks who invented it ? After all, why are they called "Baker Days", not "Blunkett Days" ? (or McGuiness days !)
Embrace and Extend
- Like a python, with a medieval torturer's rack.
This can't possibly be a good thing for Ximian. M$oft will squash them like a bug, simply because it's the only thing they know. Name a M$oft collaboration that has ended well for the partner ? Ashton-Tate ? OS/2 ? Anything related to J++ ?
M$oft DO NOT WANT O/S to succeed, or Ximian to succeed. If they're appearing to be helpful, it's only because they have some longer term plan to wipe out the competition. If Mono succeeds, then M$oft own it and can kill it (if you think they won;t be in control, then you're being naive). If it fails, then it was all the fault of "the cancer of Open Source" tm M$oft.
What was the last movie to use hydrothermal vents as a tie-in ?
-- Dennis Hopper's "Black Smokers" in Waterworld.
So that was a success then.
Another one with a half-baked grasp of history 8-(
the plutonium bombs (Little Boy and Trinity) were implosion devices
I assume "Little Boy" was just a typo, and to nit-pick, "Trinity" was the name of a test of a device called "Gadget".
because they were initially afraid they couldn't scare up enough plutonium
Your logic escapes me. They were worried about Pu shortage, so chose implosion ?
There was no shortage of Pu, and there was no real concern over this past the very early days. Once a production reactor was on-line (i.e. not just the early Chicago pile), Pu was more readily available than HEU. After all, Pu extraction is relatively simple. Under war conditions, where operator safety goes out of the window, it's almost easy. There was continued concern over HEU production, and this led to the implosion designs being continued with
explain Project Urchin?
I can't. I've never heard of "Project Urchin". "Urchins" were developed in the Manhattan project, but not under a project of that name. Is Urchin something else ?
Why is an Urchin significant to a Pu shortage anyway ? You need an initiator as a neutron source, but they're not a specific component that's only required by one particular configuration. The Urchin concept isn't revolutionary (although making a workable one is hard). It's even too obvious to be patentable (although not by the USPTO's standards). India used them (called "Flower") in their early '70s tests. If you believe the kooks (I don't), even the German bomb design (sic) used a Po/Be urchin.
Your legal argument is well-founded, but entirely misses the point.
The US Constitution, and the US Government, exists to serve the needs of "we, the people", not to further the aims of large corporates or a tiny minority of the very rich.
You claim that Anti-trust laws seek to punish success. Fine, I'm not arguing. What they exist to do is to defend the mass of the people, and if that includes defending them from someone extremely successful, then they should still continue this defence, even if that leads to an attack on that very success itself.
Anti-trust laws are not an attack on success per se, but they should never hesitate to be one, if that's what is required of them.
Any nation [...] can build a breeder reactor to make weapons-grade uranium.
If you don't have the first clue what you're blathering about, kindly shut the hell up.
Suddenly I don't like the way the last week's userfriendly.org is leading.
This is a facetious lawsuit. Any lawsuit launched by a big corporate (and US universities are some of the worst) will destroy the life of any normal human being who is targeted - even if they win. OTOH, they won't see a penny in damages, because the lawyer's bills alone will be enough to bankrupt the guy.
So why are they doing it ? There's no real reason why anyone can complain about an RC5 client, and in the vast noise of shop-at-work and corporate pr0n surfing, it's invisible. Secondly, it's an admin's to install RC5 and VirtuaGirl clients (on a sacrificial machine), because you can guarantee that a user somewhere will do it, and it's best to be forewarned about it.
I don't understand this at all, and I can only assume (with my paranoid hat on) that there's more to it than we're hearing.
...and of course, any admin's real power comes from the web proxy logs, and his boss' visits to farmsex.net (Hi Mike ! Still attending church regularly ? Still have that .25 IP address ? Still being a total bastard to your staff ?)
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb.
8-)
I probably had the most Meccano of any slashdotter. We lived in Liverpool, and my Dad's haulage company used to haul scrap metal away from Binns Road. I didn't have much that was correctly painted, but I had an awful lot of sheer weight of it !
Some of it was red & green tartan too !
Reading is practically _in_ London.
I know you Londoners can't see beyond Watford, but how about remembering that there is life at the other end of the M4. If Accepting that UK transport policy is a poor joke everywhere, including London, you should how bad it gets North of Manchester. Tried to get to Ireland by ferry ? I can get to Belfast by going through Dublin (which is in a foreign country, for the benefit of non-locals) and then up by train more easily than I can get any sort of train to the Heysham ferry terminal (still in England). As for rail access to the other main ferry to NI, from Stranraer, then forget it from anywhere South of Glasgow. 6 hour quoted waits for a connection at a major city (Preston) on the "West Coast Main Line" ?
If Brief Encounter was to be filmed on this line again, then they could have raised kids before their next train arrived !
Try booking a train ticket from somewhere regional to one of the London airports. I can book a ticket from Waterloo to Charles de Gaulle airport, via Paris, but I can't get one from Bristol to Heathrow (actually they'll sell you one, but it isn't valid in the mornings !).
(I know nothing about NZ electricity).
The key phrase here appears to be "competition". I live in the UK, and I hate the legacy of Thatcher. Maybe it's all working wonderfully for you guys down under, but we're screwed.
How do you introduce competition in a railway system ? All we've seen are the train companies fighting to get out of each other's way and not compete on any services, a complete failure of the centralised group that maintains the fixed lines, failure of any through timetable, booking, or even ticket issuing services (don't expect to go in one side of London and out the other without queueing at least 3 times). Worst of all, we're now footing the bill for the directors of Railtrack to vote themselves massive pay increases when they've put up a poorer performance at management than the millienium dome.
Maybe privatisation with competition works (good luck to you if it does). The lessons of the UK though are that privatisation with fake competition is a failure, and that privatisation loses what little accountability there was in the first place.
When I was a lad (a not so mere 30 years ago) Lego came in lots of little pieces and we made the same complaint about this "new fangled" stuff just appearing. There were windows that looked like windows, not square bricks ! I think it's an old "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" rant, and it's bogus.
Now my own son (6) plays with his Lego, and my old stuff. He just doesn't care what shape the bricks are; a roof tile makes just as good a piece of pizza as it does a computer console.
At his age, Lego isn't interesting as a construction toy. It's more about simple abstract constructs that are given meaning by their play context (if he says yesterday's castle tower is now a bus, then it's a bus). By the time he starts to think about it as an engineering problem solving tool (How do I find a thing that can reach sideways and have a hook on the end ?) he'll hopefully be too interested in using it to do the job, not worrying about the provenance of whether it's OK to make Giant Killer Roberts out of pink Belleville pieces.
--
I read it on the 'net, it must be true.
Mr Cranky. Another film review site.
Funny, bitchy, and beating on Barney.
Fire Control systems, and so on can be very large and complex.
Fire control systems are dead easy - if they didn't insist on using brain-dead languages from a few decades back, then they'd be up and running in no time. There are more lines of code running MS Flight Sim than there are in the F15 it's emulating.
And yes, I have written Coral 66
(just don't ask me to ever do it again)
Use a decent language/environment, like Delphi.
Delphi as current best choice language ?
I wonder what Anders Hjelsberg would reckon ?
I'm serious here, not trolling. If you didn't have the millstone of M$oft's legacy codebase to support (for which C# is clearly the best choice in a lumpy world), would you rather use Delphi or C# ?
Would Anders ?
Get a clue.
I've made good money from nearly a decade of VB consultancy for suits. Haven't touched it in a year now, in favour of Java anbd JScript/ASP, and I'm loving it. My cow-orkers have got smarter, my clients have got smarter, and the projects are more interesting.
VB is still the best way to build simple apps around a Windows forms-based desktop app metaphor. If you still build these (nearly everyone else is building on the web), then it has a use.
Wake up and smell the coffee.
Java is a logical choice for pretty well everything bespoke and not performance critical?
Absolutely.
I'm a researcher on RDF and Semantic Web apps, with a real-world site to build too. Most of our current work is IIS/ASP/JScript, and this is excruciating to work with compared to some of the newer stuff we've done (Servlets). The reason is simple, but compelling; availability of existing high-quality open sourced code libraries. The smartest people out there are building what I need, they're letting me use it, and they're doing it for Java.
SmartTag technology does in fact provide a significant benefit to casual web users
This is true, but naive.
There are many situations where a similar benefit can be obtained (targetted adverts in TV breaks), but not without a cost. The cost is either the over-emphasis of one aspect (the one behind the tag) when another might have been better, and
If I want to find "Home Insurance", then I should use a directory - not just choose the one deal on offer, chosen for me by Microsoft.
Make no mistake, this technology isn't about "helping people find stuff" (even if they're too dumb to work Google, the human race's most powerful ever creation for knowledge retrieval) -- it's just another channel for push advertising. These are blipverts, they're out of my control, and they can get the hell out of my web browser. What is "Debt advice" going to be smart-tagged to ? The local Citizen's Advice Bureau ? - or Honest Frank's Cheap Loans and Betting Shop ? Pay-for-placement behind Smart Tags is going to make you wish for the good old days of email spam !
Smart Tags have a big failing in that they're also extremely dumb. They do simple text recognition to recognise the concept they're attempting to match on, and that's just not good enough. Should the word "monopoly" be linked to "board games" or "anti-trust legislation" ?
Last time Christmas Island dealt with big Western hardware, the British were nuking them. USA did it to Bikini and Eniwetok, UK chose Christmas.
Nowadays there's a casino on Christmas, which means foreign tourists, prostitution and wiping out the local population with HIV.
Being a launch site isn't such a bad option.
Even with the best will in the world, I'm kind of curious how the Egyptians, with their technology, could have got a kite of that size to stay together in thirty mile an hour winds, let alone fly in any controlled fashion.
Practice, reasonable Egyptian technology, and living with a high failure rate.
I fly kites; mainly big single-line deltas. They use weird modern fabrics, but generally wooden poles - God's own composite material. Egypt had quite sophisticated fabric technology, certainly up to the task of making large kites. There's no reason why they couldn't have developed something like a Cody, or even a Peel - and either of those will lift me clean off the ground, even without pulleys.
Having a single sign-on has real benefits from the point of view of a non-technical user
Firstly, there's no need to "sign on" to anything. Authentication is what matters, not "signing on", not identification, and there's a whole pile of work out there on how to do this without either of the others. Why should you need to identify yourself to watch some web content, when instead you can simply demonstrate the right (which you might have paid for earlier) to view it ? Identification serves the marketers more than it serves the users; we don't need it, we don't want it, and they can shove it right up their IDispatchs!
Secondly, server-based sign-on has real problems. Microsoft Hailstorm is a complete crock; WTF should I use a server-based system to validate users before I serve them content when there are innumerable P2P systems that are as good, or even better ? If I do choose a server-based process (in some fit of madness), then why on earth should I use M$oft technology (or even services!), from a company that has a limited and so-far pathetic track record in supplying this sort of service ?
Thirdly, single-point "sign-on" is a potentially dangerous situation that only looks appealing threough laziness or lack of understanding. Compromising this one point invalidates all other services. If one of those is your credit card, then you could well find the situation of an eBay dispute over PayPal stopping you putting petrol in the car. How many /. readers run multiple CC's, just to avoid this sort of hassle ? I know I do.