I can agree with even all of that. However, I will deny the allusions to moral distinctions between censoring historical facts and not-glorifying them. In the US, we assert the moral principle that ethnic bigotry is wrong, and is prohibited by the 18th amendement to the Constitution. Selling Nazi memorabilia is OK unless it in fact or in principle discriminates against a minority.
What the french do not want is people developing an economy around fascination with Nazi history, which would become a scaffolding for social and political organizing. It is really about the differences between french and US societies. French political pluralism doesn't necessitate protecting minority political opinions and speech the way US homogeneity needs to protect its precious different perspectives. There's always going to be scads of freaks to season the variety of political thought in France. They don't necessarily need Nazis to stir the pot. Americans, however, need Nazis: we need to know for a fact that we haven't become them, because there they are, opposing us. Otherwise we can't be sure, can we?
France has no right to deny Americans the political parity that we crave. If France wants American culture (the Internet, case and point), they can take what we are giving and STFU.
Just to quell any doubts: I hate the Illinois Nazis...
Go read some Neitzsche. Ubermensch. Superman. The "next thing" greater than "human." What is the moral significance? what is the significance beyond morality as we know it?
We owe no greater purpose to our sense of meaning than to surpass ourselves. If you take this struggle outside the scope of a single individual lifetime, you have a family struggle, which is easily paralelled in social struggle, and further to that of humanity as a whole. We have intellect as a nominal means to transcend our situation. Transcendence is the function of intellect: getting past the natural (base) cause and effect.
Now: the dissapointed one speaks: "I looked for great men, and found only apes of their ideals." So you will recognise the superhuman beings by the fact that they are examples of our ideals, and not merely facimiles and approximations of them.
Of course, evolution is a process of mistakes that are left behind: what about the impossible dreams that are taken beyond what we know as their logical conclusions? The real horror isn't in the beings that we create who surpass us, but the near misses that tragically fail to even keep up.
What I don't understand is why they would make it easier to justify switching to Linux in a side-by-side comparison. Windows piracy is the number one barrier to Linux adoption outside of wealthy american homes and business.
Look at the FreeBSD Linux support: a kernel module and an ELF loader that support all the Linux syscalls and can decide at load time which flavor of syscall to implement. The runtime linker/loader knows to go to a certain directory tree to get Linux shared libraries, and Solaris will probably work much as the sparc 32/64 bit stuff works now.
"... Java and Flash plugins included - but that doesn't count, as they're both outdated..."
So bundle them and get over the issue!
The other thing to do is to make the browser render a page without the glaring applet hole when it doesn't load. Sometimes you're only missing an ad, and there's no good reason to regret that. The effect on Joe Q. User is that they are denied access to things that other people using other browsers can see. Can you blame them for making a mental note: "I'm missing out on something again." Give them a little status-bar icon that tells them that Flash or Java applets have been disabled, but call them viruses or spam. Make the icon link to a page or dialog that explains how their privacy can be violated and how these websites are unsafe.
The problem with this approach is that the people who produce and the people who consume these web pages are not the sophisticated crowd who value rich information content. The whizzy animated thingie makes things look more like they're diddling their TV than reading *gasp*. If you want those users, you need to make something that the web site production people can use to romance them: dancing bears. Oh: and you need to have MathML for academic work too..
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." --H.L. Mencken
Whether or not "getting high" in western culture is acceptable depends on whether or not the drug can be used to induce you into becoming more productive to feed your dependence on the buzz. If it's not addictive, it competes with (and beats) other drugs that are. If it makes you *less* productive, then you have much less to offer the producers the more you use their product.
If, for example, some analogue of marijuana had stimulant properties, making it fun to do menial factory work, then it would be OK. However, it would have to be easily distinguished from the old sit-around-and-giggle pot so that they wouldn't have to compete. The bottom line is that there needs to be a growth economy with a feedback reinforcement of the drug or capitalism will not tolerate it.
What Stallman (and the rest of us) are really up against is a system of state and corporate entitlements usually just called "Pork Barrel" politics in government. The real deal is that it goes on plenty in the corporate world. Insiders are executives with budgetary signing authority and their boards, legislators and public servants with budgetary control. Outsiders are people who hold jobs and low-interest bank accounts, buy shares of mutual funds/corporate bonds and pay taxes.
The system directs all of our effort (power, like in physics class) into the system, which redistributes the effort to meet demands. The kids are watching the cookie jar. What do you think is going to happen? You tell people glass jars are better because whoever wants to can see what's inside, but that cuts off the middlemen who are snitching snacks (for each other, so they don't get caught with their own booty) and can't compete for survival based on merit alone. If the middlemen ban the glass jars should we be surprised?
Totally devoid of any knowledge which might help me validate the truth of anything in this flame, I can distill a claim from this piece which has universal value: egotism is a problem. Actually, I do remember JKH commenting on the FreeBSD experience in an interview that followed him taking the Apple job. He said that much of his energy in his most recent FreeBSD memory was spent refereeing egotistical contributors.
The real lesson to be drawn from this is that the FreeBSD code base effectively, systematically, inflates the egos of some programmers. This is a real and biting criticism of the FreeBSD project, and I say this as an ardent fan of FreeBSD. The system, specifically the development methodology, entertains and maybe promotes problems between collaborators. Free software is inherently a social phenomenon, and the social aspect is actually centrally important. The technology is only the subject and product of the society that creates it.
So, while the parent post appears to be just another BSD troll, I thought it probably deserved some credence and discussion for the light it shines on the social order of FreeBSD. I like it because ultimately it ask a good question: What is going on with the social aspect of FreeBSD?
The point I feel needs to be raised is that Software doesn't really directly add that much to individual people's lives. The real economic impact is how it affects the means of producing consumer goods and delivering services to those consumers and the supply chain. Whether the software was paid for in wages to a programmer or whether it was paid for in licensing fees does not change the fact of whether or not it has positive economic impact in use.
If the economy of using software does not exceed the economy of producing and distributing it, then software is a waste. If you don't have to pay as much to produce or distribute the software, then it gives you leeway in how productive software use needs to be.
Factory A makes widgets, and they contracted a Microsoft VAR to handle their data. They pay up front. They need to either be at 100 percent of their target productivity level with that system, or they need to pay finance costs of floating the expense of the VAR contract plus the installation costs.
Factory B makes widgets, and they used and modified some free software. They pay as they go to make the free software more productive, but they get to start with something and they only have to pay for installation costs. Their productivity only needs to cover the installation costs and whatever they pay for improvements is elective and ongoing. Also, if they are participating in the free software project, they get to enjoy the benefits of everyone else's participation too.
No, the data collection is over. They are done with the equipment they used to do that kind of data collection, but the experiment continues... (the insitutions that paid for the collection and the maintenance of the data get to do more analysis.)
The problem is that there isn't enough computing resources to allow more qualified people to do analysis that can identify all of the anomalies that are sitting there on all of those tapes. We will probably never get to fully scrape all of the physics out of the mountain of data they burn to tape. With more computers, there would be more analysis to justify better data collection to confirm the things we find. We have to get to it or pay to copy/refresh the old tapes before the data decays.
If you RTFA, the guy is whining about latency. Wireless, in this case 802.11, and specifically Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum digital transcievers often employ more than one forward-error-correcting protocol to get around the horrible bit-error-rates. For most packet traffic, a little latency is an acceptable price to guarantee that more packets pass their checksum. For streaming audio/video this is not so.
Not knowing exactly what was going on, I'm going to guess that his connection was really bursty, possibly due to other 802.11 traffic and also possibly multipath interference aggregation problems with many RF sources in the same band in a confined RF reflective space. If I were a latency-sensetive streaming protocol, I would buffer a little bit, and cut out a lot. I'm thinking I would probably flush a lot of bytes from my buffers because they got too old before I could assemble a meaningful blast of audio.
If this kind of thing sold access points, then 802.11 chipsets would have a sideband that tolerates more packet error and less delay. That would allow you to turn on "interference robustness" and still make a phone call because it doesn't use "interference robustness."
RTFA, and lets talk about whether her rowboat looks like a big seal silhouette from 50-80 feet below? Around South Africa photographers just dump a floating foam rubber seal dummy overboard and motor around in circles waiting for the strike.
The North Atlantic isn't as much of a great white shark buffet as the Cape of Good Hope, but cold water is where they live... I still think she looks like some giant Rapala.
In the US, the airwaves are legally public property. The FCC licenses bits of the spectrum in broadcast range defined areas for private and public use. This (theoreticallly) makes sure that no nasty people can spam the airwaves with, as an example: ultrawideband noise, and thus render RF communications useless. If you RTFA, the only recourse in a privatized spectrum without the FCC is to sue for trespass. Can you afford to sue the 800 lb. gorilla "stepping on" your spectrum?
The problems Declan McCullagh says the FCC leaves behind are not solved by abolishing the FCC. Ask HAMs if the FCC actually does anything right. Do we want to lose that with no promise of anything to gain? Solving the issues DM raises will require government intervention on the same scale (if not larger) than the current FCC.
The problem with the FCC is they have over-licensed a few corporate entities with too much of the spectrum. Clear Channel, for example... The US Military has switched to digital communications that share small portions of the sweetest RF bands, and the rest of it should be reclaimed for civil use. The FCC should be constrained by a constitutional ruling or specific legislation/amendment prohibiting them from rulemaking on the signal content. That would solve the "7 words" George Carlin whines about.
When you're done with that, then ask "is there anything left of the FCC worth keeping around?" DM's "I don't like this, therefore abolish it" is not clear thinking.
Eventually my persistent storage device will be solid state with ultra-efficient DRAM and integrated batteries, and my system RAM will be a big SRAM space. I will want to swap to DRAM.
I agree that passwords aren't optimal. I'm not trying to get into a security one-upmanship contest, but I like the idea of RSA challenge-response using a device that allows a human to read the challenge and decide whether to answer it by RSA signing a hash of the challenge.
This way, a person isn't exposing any secrets, and there is an opportunity to set up a trust relationship between a user and a service by saving the keys in a PKI directory. Also, the user has some idea that he isn't unwittingly signing a challenge put out by an impostor in the middle. It could be implemented on cell phones or PDAs or specialized devices with IRDA and/or Bluetooth/wireless USB.
Making this kind of argument is valid only if it is practical for people to use passwords from a maximum-entropy pool of acceptable passwords. Think about this for a second: what you are talking about, strictly speaking, is a cryptographic key. However, we keep using the term password. The difference is subtle but significant, and it is the crux of the issue in the article (RTFA). Passwords are a kind of word, used as a cryptographic key in this case. So, they are the intersection of the set of things that can be words and the set of things that can be cryptographic keys. If you get too strict with the definition of either of the two sets, you risk shrinking the intersection to a cryptographically insigificant number of brute-force attempts.
Rules like this do *not* make brute-forcing simpler. What we need is more like them. Instead of forcing people to use a selection of truly random numbers as passwords, we should have a cornucopia of different mnemmonic password generation algorithms with different inputs that are likely to differ greatly (in two dimensions) from person to person and over time. The total brute force guesses would be the UNION of all of those sets, and they would also meet human factors requirements. The way to improve cryptographic security of passwords is to *increase* freedom, and to discourage conformity. Specifically ruling out different password mnemmonics actually shrinks your pool of brute-force possibilities and thus weakens your scheme. It is acceptable for some people to use dictionary-weak passwords sometimes as long as there is a much greater likelihood at any one time that they will not.
The bigger the dictionary, the closer the attack comes to brute-force keyspace searching. GROW the dictionary to obtuse proportions!
It all boils down to human factors if you want to know what consumers will accept into their lives. When people shop, there are two kinds of shopping behavior. One, people *like* to shop, and they do a lot of evauation and touchy-feely "do I like this?" interaction with the product. Two, people have to buy toilet paper and toothpaste and they already know exactly what they want before they even see it on the shelf.
Online shopping will take over the second category, while it will never be able to compete with the viscerally entertaining act of picking a piece of fruit. Without adding any significant cost to the operation, online shopping can add significant value to the shopper's experience by economizing their time, and the savings from reduced inventory can be passed on to compete with the physical stores on price. The online store could track consumption rates for different products and make a shopping list for the consumer. Some stuff you would not buy regularly, but some stuff would be a predictable periodic purchase. You would want to review purchase orders for some of those regular items, but you could get some regular sundries ordered automatically.
There's a human-factors design angle for marketability, and there's also an ROI angle to the business model. The service is really supply chain inventory management for consumers. For producers, the service quantifies the risk for any given inventory level. The value added is the ability to meet demand with lower inventory levels. That is money. I'm sure there's more to it than that too..
What exactly is it that makes Microsoft think these particular people are the best? What does it matter if you can "afford them" or not?
The answer is: Microsoft has so much money that they know they can't possibly put it to work doing stuff that helps Microsoft. Some small amount of their working capital is invested in not doing stuff that hurts Microsoft (ie. the work that their competitors do). The reason people are concerned here is that Microsoft will be throwing some cash around to prevent the work of a few good people from reaching consumers (themselves).
I read a little bit of their technology briefs, and they are more conservative: it senses that it can't recover and sticks its arms out with slackened resistance to receive the floor softly.
What I want to see is that it can roll as well as it walks: as in taking a fall is just another walking technique. At the price they would have to charge, it should be able to take stairs as well as a human if not better...
Katas are what got me thinking. QRIO could be used to demonstrate katas, but I went a little further and thought, why not have them demonstrate katas cooperatively, and throw each other around, and why not program them to learn "tolerance" for uneven forces so they could perform the same techniques with humans (using the same theory that they proclaim enables "dynamic" walking). I slipped on down that slippery slope because I am fascinated by the art of engineering these things to do what we are challenged at ourselves.
I'll be impressed when robots like these can demonstrate Aikido: at the least, they should take ukemi (falls) gracefully and come out dancing. When I can throw it across the room and it can "walk the walk" we will have droids capable of autonomous operation.
Right as you are, as far as my feelings on the matter go, please try to go easy on the rest of them. Some people have a taste for the sharp prose, and those people will drill through a lot of thick crud to mine a little bit of truth or meaning out of the reading experience. They will also chew on thorny text and swallow coffee that is too hot: for the edifying experience.
For your sake and mine, I want to turn you on to the rest of them. The soft-headed comfort seeking couch potato wage slaves of the post-industrial free world do have potential, but you need to candy coat their medicine if you want them to swallow it. I believe they want to get better. I think that life itself is like a bitter pill, and they need help--coaching, cajoling, prodding, herding--before they will accept the fact that one should swallow the truth as quickly as you get it in your head. Be a facilitator.
The idea of a copyright is to make immaterial things behave like material things. The more people you tell the news to, the more news there is to go around. Songs work the same way. Apples and shiny rocks and teevees are all gone once they are given away. A song is not a shiny rock and it does not matter how many times people say it. The idea of a copyright is to make a song behave like a shiny rock. It takes imagination to treat a song like a shiny rock, but sooner or later we all have to wake up and stop pretending because our imagination will make us very unhappy if we let it.
If you're an American, don't bother replying to this post, Americans have no idea about cellular tech.
But what if I, lowly American cellular noob, have an appropriate question for your European cellular guru-ness?
Wouldn't it be better if us ignorant Americans could actually absorb some of your fantastic cellular genius? Then we wouldn't annoy you so much with our ignorance!
You come off as a pretender. There is another post from another person who claims to have parsed the manufacturer codes and serial number of the phone out of the IMEI.
Tell me this: is the IMEI stored in NVRAM? If it is: it would be a neat trick to put a new IMEI on the phone. Worst case, you would have to hook up some cusom bench equipment to the chip. An "untraceable" phone is worth more than a known stolen phone, which is exaggerated by "your local cell provider" when they react to the stolen phone report.
Well, with users like you making comments like this, and developers on either side either ignoring you or listening to you, which one do you think will get you your way?
I've read lots of good discussion on the importance of usability and human factors when they put out OO 1.0. Maybe you should make your comments on one of those lists?
Sun should run a big StarOffice CD giveaway program STAT!
All of these people being told by Microsoft that they have a choice to make! Who's going to make sure that people believe it?
because, obviously, building a global network has no associated fossil fuel costs, and once it's in place, the server and the client, not the mention the giant fuckoff network in between require no energy resources.
at least once the book is published, resource consumption is over. electronic media constantly requires energy--anything you might save upfront you make up on the back end.
I give you this: both dead-tree media and electronic media require energy in both production and distribution. However, that is moot because it doesn't help us discriminate between the dead-tree and electronic options. Besides the categorical question of whether something requires energy, why don't we ask "Is there a substantial difference between the amount or type of energy required by dead-tree and electronic media?
I am bloody well (snotty Yank doing brit impersonation) aware that I am suggesting that we cut out some middlemen in the interest of efficiency. If you are offended because you represent the middlemen, please help me understand how I have erred in thinking the middlemen are less efficient than the alternative. Tell me about the efficiencies of your middlemen or STFU.
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I can agree with even all of that. However, I will deny the allusions to moral distinctions between censoring historical facts and not-glorifying them. In the US, we assert the moral principle that ethnic bigotry is wrong, and is prohibited by the 18th amendement to the Constitution. Selling Nazi memorabilia is OK unless it in fact or in principle discriminates against a minority.
What the french do not want is people developing an economy around fascination with Nazi history, which would become a scaffolding for social and political organizing. It is really about the differences between french and US societies. French political pluralism doesn't necessitate protecting minority political opinions and speech the way US homogeneity needs to protect its precious different perspectives. There's always going to be scads of freaks to season the variety of political thought in France. They don't necessarily need Nazis to stir the pot. Americans, however, need Nazis: we need to know for a fact that we haven't become them, because there they are, opposing us. Otherwise we can't be sure, can we?
France has no right to deny Americans the political parity that we crave. If France wants American culture (the Internet, case and point), they can take what we are giving and STFU.
Just to quell any doubts: I hate the Illinois Nazis...
Go read some Neitzsche. Ubermensch. Superman. The "next thing" greater than "human." What is the moral significance? what is the significance beyond morality as we know it?
We owe no greater purpose to our sense of meaning than to surpass ourselves. If you take this struggle outside the scope of a single individual lifetime, you have a family struggle, which is easily paralelled in social struggle, and further to that of humanity as a whole. We have intellect as a nominal means to transcend our situation. Transcendence is the function of intellect: getting past the natural (base) cause and effect.
Now: the dissapointed one speaks: "I looked for great men, and found only apes of their ideals." So you will recognise the superhuman beings by the fact that they are examples of our ideals, and not merely facimiles and approximations of them. Of course, evolution is a process of mistakes that are left behind: what about the impossible dreams that are taken beyond what we know as their logical conclusions? The real horror isn't in the beings that we create who surpass us, but the near misses that tragically fail to even keep up.
What I don't understand is why they would make it easier to justify switching to Linux in a side-by-side comparison. Windows piracy is the number one barrier to Linux adoption outside of wealthy american homes and business.
Look at the FreeBSD Linux support: a kernel module and an ELF loader that support all the Linux syscalls and can decide at load time which flavor of syscall to implement. The runtime linker/loader knows to go to a certain directory tree to get Linux shared libraries, and Solaris will probably work much as the sparc 32/64 bit stuff works now.
The other thing to do is to make the browser render a page without the glaring applet hole when it doesn't load. Sometimes you're only missing an ad, and there's no good reason to regret that. The effect on Joe Q. User is that they are denied access to things that other people using other browsers can see. Can you blame them for making a mental note: "I'm missing out on something again." Give them a little status-bar icon that tells them that Flash or Java applets have been disabled, but call them viruses or spam. Make the icon link to a page or dialog that explains how their privacy can be violated and how these websites are unsafe.
The problem with this approach is that the people who produce and the people who consume these web pages are not the sophisticated crowd who value rich information content. The whizzy animated thingie makes things look more like they're diddling their TV than reading *gasp*. If you want those users, you need to make something that the web site production people can use to romance them: dancing bears. Oh: and you need to have MathML for academic work too..
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." --H.L. Mencken
Whether or not "getting high" in western culture is acceptable depends on whether or not the drug can be used to induce you into becoming more productive to feed your dependence on the buzz. If it's not addictive, it competes with (and beats) other drugs that are. If it makes you *less* productive, then you have much less to offer the producers the more you use their product.
If, for example, some analogue of marijuana had stimulant properties, making it fun to do menial factory work, then it would be OK. However, it would have to be easily distinguished from the old sit-around-and-giggle pot so that they wouldn't have to compete. The bottom line is that there needs to be a growth economy with a feedback reinforcement of the drug or capitalism will not tolerate it.
What Stallman (and the rest of us) are really up against is a system of state and corporate entitlements usually just called "Pork Barrel" politics in government. The real deal is that it goes on plenty in the corporate world. Insiders are executives with budgetary signing authority and their boards, legislators and public servants with budgetary control. Outsiders are people who hold jobs and low-interest bank accounts, buy shares of mutual funds/corporate bonds and pay taxes.
The system directs all of our effort (power, like in physics class) into the system, which redistributes the effort to meet demands. The kids are watching the cookie jar. What do you think is going to happen? You tell people glass jars are better because whoever wants to can see what's inside, but that cuts off the middlemen who are snitching snacks (for each other, so they don't get caught with their own booty) and can't compete for survival based on merit alone. If the middlemen ban the glass jars should we be surprised?
Totally devoid of any knowledge which might help me validate the truth of anything in this flame, I can distill a claim from this piece which has universal value: egotism is a problem. Actually, I do remember JKH commenting on the FreeBSD experience in an interview that followed him taking the Apple job. He said that much of his energy in his most recent FreeBSD memory was spent refereeing egotistical contributors.
The real lesson to be drawn from this is that the FreeBSD code base effectively, systematically, inflates the egos of some programmers. This is a real and biting criticism of the FreeBSD project, and I say this as an ardent fan of FreeBSD. The system, specifically the development methodology, entertains and maybe promotes problems between collaborators. Free software is inherently a social phenomenon, and the social aspect is actually centrally important. The technology is only the subject and product of the society that creates it.
So, while the parent post appears to be just another BSD troll, I thought it probably deserved some credence and discussion for the light it shines on the social order of FreeBSD. I like it because ultimately it ask a good question: What is going on with the social aspect of FreeBSD?
The point I feel needs to be raised is that Software doesn't really directly add that much to individual people's lives. The real economic impact is how it affects the means of producing consumer goods and delivering services to those consumers and the supply chain. Whether the software was paid for in wages to a programmer or whether it was paid for in licensing fees does not change the fact of whether or not it has positive economic impact in use .
If the economy of using software does not exceed the economy of producing and distributing it, then software is a waste. If you don't have to pay as much to produce or distribute the software, then it gives you leeway in how productive software use needs to be.
Factory A makes widgets, and they contracted a Microsoft VAR to handle their data. They pay up front. They need to either be at 100 percent of their target productivity level with that system, or they need to pay finance costs of floating the expense of the VAR contract plus the installation costs.
Factory B makes widgets, and they used and modified some free software. They pay as they go to make the free software more productive, but they get to start with something and they only have to pay for installation costs. Their productivity only needs to cover the installation costs and whatever they pay for improvements is elective and ongoing. Also, if they are participating in the free software project, they get to enjoy the benefits of everyone else's participation too.
No, the data collection is over. They are done with the equipment they used to do that kind of data collection, but the experiment continues... (the insitutions that paid for the collection and the maintenance of the data get to do more analysis.)
The problem is that there isn't enough computing resources to allow more qualified people to do analysis that can identify all of the anomalies that are sitting there on all of those tapes. We will probably never get to fully scrape all of the physics out of the mountain of data they burn to tape. With more computers, there would be more analysis to justify better data collection to confirm the things we find. We have to get to it or pay to copy/refresh the old tapes before the data decays.
If you RTFA, the guy is whining about latency. Wireless, in this case 802.11, and specifically Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum digital transcievers often employ more than one forward-error-correcting protocol to get around the horrible bit-error-rates. For most packet traffic, a little latency is an acceptable price to guarantee that more packets pass their checksum. For streaming audio/video this is not so.
Not knowing exactly what was going on, I'm going to guess that his connection was really bursty, possibly due to other 802.11 traffic and also possibly multipath interference aggregation problems with many RF sources in the same band in a confined RF reflective space. If I were a latency-sensetive streaming protocol, I would buffer a little bit, and cut out a lot. I'm thinking I would probably flush a lot of bytes from my buffers because they got too old before I could assemble a meaningful blast of audio.
If this kind of thing sold access points, then 802.11 chipsets would have a sideband that tolerates more packet error and less delay. That would allow you to turn on "interference robustness" and still make a phone call because it doesn't use "interference robustness."
OK, take a deep breath. Now look at these:
RTFA, and lets talk about whether her rowboat looks like a big seal silhouette from 50-80 feet below? Around South Africa photographers just dump a floating foam rubber seal dummy overboard and motor around in circles waiting for the strike.
The North Atlantic isn't as much of a great white shark buffet as the Cape of Good Hope, but cold water is where they live... I still think she looks like some giant Rapala.
In the US, the airwaves are legally public property. The FCC licenses bits of the spectrum in broadcast range defined areas for private and public use. This (theoreticallly) makes sure that no nasty people can spam the airwaves with, as an example: ultrawideband noise, and thus render RF communications useless. If you RTFA, the only recourse in a privatized spectrum without the FCC is to sue for trespass. Can you afford to sue the 800 lb. gorilla "stepping on" your spectrum?
The problems Declan McCullagh says the FCC leaves behind are not solved by abolishing the FCC. Ask HAMs if the FCC actually does anything right. Do we want to lose that with no promise of anything to gain? Solving the issues DM raises will require government intervention on the same scale (if not larger) than the current FCC.
The problem with the FCC is they have over-licensed a few corporate entities with too much of the spectrum. Clear Channel, for example... The US Military has switched to digital communications that share small portions of the sweetest RF bands, and the rest of it should be reclaimed for civil use. The FCC should be constrained by a constitutional ruling or specific legislation/amendment prohibiting them from rulemaking on the signal content. That would solve the "7 words" George Carlin whines about.
When you're done with that, then ask "is there anything left of the FCC worth keeping around?" DM's "I don't like this, therefore abolish it" is not clear thinking.
Eventually my persistent storage device will be solid state with ultra-efficient DRAM and integrated batteries, and my system RAM will be a big SRAM space. I will want to swap to DRAM.
I agree that passwords aren't optimal. I'm not trying to get into a security one-upmanship contest, but I like the idea of RSA challenge-response using a device that allows a human to read the challenge and decide whether to answer it by RSA signing a hash of the challenge.
This way, a person isn't exposing any secrets, and there is an opportunity to set up a trust relationship between a user and a service by saving the keys in a PKI directory. Also, the user has some idea that he isn't unwittingly signing a challenge put out by an impostor in the middle. It could be implemented on cell phones or PDAs or specialized devices with IRDA and/or Bluetooth/wireless USB.
Making this kind of argument is valid only if it is practical for people to use passwords from a maximum-entropy pool of acceptable passwords. Think about this for a second: what you are talking about, strictly speaking, is a cryptographic key. However, we keep using the term password. The difference is subtle but significant, and it is the crux of the issue in the article (RTFA). Passwords are a kind of word, used as a cryptographic key in this case. So, they are the intersection of the set of things that can be words and the set of things that can be cryptographic keys. If you get too strict with the definition of either of the two sets, you risk shrinking the intersection to a cryptographically insigificant number of brute-force attempts.
Rules like this do *not* make brute-forcing simpler. What we need is more like them. Instead of forcing people to use a selection of truly random numbers as passwords, we should have a cornucopia of different mnemmonic password generation algorithms with different inputs that are likely to differ greatly (in two dimensions) from person to person and over time. The total brute force guesses would be the UNION of all of those sets, and they would also meet human factors requirements. The way to improve cryptographic security of passwords is to *increase* freedom, and to discourage conformity. Specifically ruling out different password mnemmonics actually shrinks your pool of brute-force possibilities and thus weakens your scheme. It is acceptable for some people to use dictionary-weak passwords sometimes as long as there is a much greater likelihood at any one time that they will not.
The bigger the dictionary, the closer the attack comes to brute-force keyspace searching. GROW the dictionary to obtuse proportions!
It all boils down to human factors if you want to know what consumers will accept into their lives. When people shop, there are two kinds of shopping behavior. One, people *like* to shop, and they do a lot of evauation and touchy-feely "do I like this?" interaction with the product. Two, people have to buy toilet paper and toothpaste and they already know exactly what they want before they even see it on the shelf.
Online shopping will take over the second category, while it will never be able to compete with the viscerally entertaining act of picking a piece of fruit. Without adding any significant cost to the operation, online shopping can add significant value to the shopper's experience by economizing their time, and the savings from reduced inventory can be passed on to compete with the physical stores on price. The online store could track consumption rates for different products and make a shopping list for the consumer. Some stuff you would not buy regularly, but some stuff would be a predictable periodic purchase. You would want to review purchase orders for some of those regular items, but you could get some regular sundries ordered automatically.
There's a human-factors design angle for marketability, and there's also an ROI angle to the business model. The service is really supply chain inventory management for consumers. For producers, the service quantifies the risk for any given inventory level. The value added is the ability to meet demand with lower inventory levels. That is money. I'm sure there's more to it than that too..
What exactly is it that makes Microsoft think these particular people are the best? What does it matter if you can "afford them" or not?
The answer is: Microsoft has so much money that they know they can't possibly put it to work doing stuff that helps Microsoft. Some small amount of their working capital is invested in not doing stuff that hurts Microsoft (ie. the work that their competitors do). The reason people are concerned here is that Microsoft will be throwing some cash around to prevent the work of a few good people from reaching consumers (themselves).
I read a little bit of their technology briefs, and they are more conservative: it senses that it can't recover and sticks its arms out with slackened resistance to receive the floor softly.
What I want to see is that it can roll as well as it walks: as in taking a fall is just another walking technique. At the price they would have to charge, it should be able to take stairs as well as a human if not better...
Katas are what got me thinking. QRIO could be used to demonstrate katas, but I went a little further and thought, why not have them demonstrate katas cooperatively, and throw each other around, and why not program them to learn "tolerance" for uneven forces so they could perform the same techniques with humans (using the same theory that they proclaim enables "dynamic" walking). I slipped on down that slippery slope because I am fascinated by the art of engineering these things to do what we are challenged at ourselves.
I'll be impressed when robots like these can demonstrate Aikido: at the least, they should take ukemi (falls) gracefully and come out dancing. When I can throw it across the room and it can "walk the walk" we will have droids capable of autonomous operation.
Right as you are, as far as my feelings on the matter go, please try to go easy on the rest of them. Some people have a taste for the sharp prose, and those people will drill through a lot of thick crud to mine a little bit of truth or meaning out of the reading experience. They will also chew on thorny text and swallow coffee that is too hot: for the edifying experience.
For your sake and mine, I want to turn you on to the rest of them. The soft-headed comfort seeking couch potato wage slaves of the post-industrial free world do have potential, but you need to candy coat their medicine if you want them to swallow it. I believe they want to get better. I think that life itself is like a bitter pill, and they need help--coaching, cajoling, prodding, herding--before they will accept the fact that one should swallow the truth as quickly as you get it in your head. Be a facilitator.
The idea of a copyright is to make immaterial things behave like material things. The more people you tell the news to, the more news there is to go around. Songs work the same way. Apples and shiny rocks and teevees are all gone once they are given away. A song is not a shiny rock and it does not matter how many times people say it. The idea of a copyright is to make a song behave like a shiny rock. It takes imagination to treat a song like a shiny rock, but sooner or later we all have to wake up and stop pretending because our imagination will make us very unhappy if we let it.
But what if I, lowly American cellular noob, have an appropriate question for your European cellular guru-ness? Wouldn't it be better if us ignorant Americans could actually absorb some of your fantastic cellular genius? Then we wouldn't annoy you so much with our ignorance!
You come off as a pretender. There is another post from another person who claims to have parsed the manufacturer codes and serial number of the phone out of the IMEI.
Tell me this: is the IMEI stored in NVRAM? If it is: it would be a neat trick to put a new IMEI on the phone. Worst case, you would have to hook up some cusom bench equipment to the chip. An "untraceable" phone is worth more than a known stolen phone, which is exaggerated by "your local cell provider" when they react to the stolen phone report.
Well, with users like you making comments like this, and developers on either side either ignoring you or listening to you, which one do you think will get you your way?
I've read lots of good discussion on the importance of usability and human factors when they put out OO 1.0. Maybe you should make your comments on one of those lists?
Sun should run a big StarOffice CD giveaway program STAT! All of these people being told by Microsoft that they have a choice to make! Who's going to make sure that people believe it?
I am bloody well (snotty Yank doing brit impersonation) aware that I am suggesting that we cut out some middlemen in the interest of efficiency. If you are offended because you represent the middlemen, please help me understand how I have erred in thinking the middlemen are less efficient than the alternative. Tell me about the efficiencies of your middlemen or STFU.