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Comment Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score 1) 158

Everything is a continuum.

That is an exaggeration. Things grow as a continuum, but they can get separated when the parts in the middle die off. You wind up with a branched structure because things really can get far enough separated that when the middle dies off they can't reconnect. For example, mammals really are distinct from other tetrapods because the forms that connected them died off and they've been developing in different directions ever since.

Comment Re:To what end? (Score 1) 219

"My impression, also from German newspapers etc., is that most germans including politicians are truely mad and are seriously considering to cool down relations with the USA."

As they should be, frankly the reaction seems inexplicably mild.

Can you imagine the reaction if the shoe was on the other foot? If this was a BD spy caught infiltrating the CIA?

A 'cool down' in relations would be a serious understatement.

Comment Re: haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 1) 68

"Over the years, I've done a lot of work with games and simulations for training."

OK. That really doesnt have anything to do with the web, however. Sure, the web can be used to deliver the project - that doesnt mean it has to actually run inside the browser. There is a HUGE difference.

"We could not have produced this educational game with just HTML."

I get where you are coming from but I still think it's far off the mark. The web is not a game platform, that is not it's purpose, so 'we could not do games this way' is not a very telling criticism.

You can use better tools to make the games, and use the web merely to deliver the game. Where is the problem with that?

It would NOT be slower, clunkier, or more prone to error. It could be done using exactly the same technologies in virtually exactly the same way - the only difference would be very slightly less easy to get it started, and in return for that, your browser is no longer a malware vector.

Or, it could be done using technologies better suited for the purpose, in which case I would expect the results to be less clunky, faster, and more stable - but the development process would be more expensive as well.

I get why you would want to use RAD to lower costs, just not why you see the tiny convenience of running in the browser automatically as worth the cost of turning the web into a malware distribution network.

Submission + - Senator Al Franken accuses AT+T of 'skirting' net neutrality rules (washingtonpost.com)

McGruber writes: In a letter to the U.S. Federal Communication Commission and the Department of Justice, Senator Al Franken warned that letting AT&T acquire Direct TV could turn AT&T into a gatekeeper to the mobile Internet. Franken also complained that AT&T took inappropriate steps to block Internet applications like Google Voice and Skype: "AT&T has a history of skirting the spirit, and perhaps the letter" of the government's rules on net neutrality, Franken wrote.

Comment Re:haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 0) 68

"An HTML-only web is great for relatively static content, but not so great for anything much beyond that. "

This sounds like nonsense to me, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you for *concrete* examples of what you are talking about. I have yet to be cited a single good example here - very often what is being done would work just fine in HTML, with less overhead, but the 'designers' just do not understand HTML, or have any desire to learn it, so they do things this way instead.

Certainly javascript can produce a slicker appearance and make certain things a bit smoother - but to do so it sacrifices device-independence and browser agnosticism - critical advantages that underlie the success of the web and whose loss can only undermine it.

Now if you build a proper web page, and then *enhance* it with javascript sanely, preserving graceful fallbacks, that would be fine. You can have your slick interface without sacrificing the web. And I can choose to avoid your slick interface so as not to sacrifice my security.

The 'designers' that cant be bothered to do that, and the suits that keep them employed, are the reason we cant have nice things. In this case, javascript.

"Is it so difficult to grok why you might want content to change on the client?"

Not difficult to understand why it was desired.

The point is it's harmful and been proven harmful, and far too harmful for the small advantages it brings to outweigh that.

It's funny.  Laugh.

Homestar Runner To Return Soon 57

An anonymous reader writes with good news for everyone who loves Strong Bad.Back in April, Homestar Runner got its first content update in over four years. It was the tiniest of updates and the site went quiet again shortly thereafter, but the Internet's collective 90s kid heart still jumped for joy...The site's co-creator, Matt Chapman, popped into an episode of The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show to chat about the history of Homestar — but in the last 15 minutes or so, they get to talking about its future. The too-long-didn't-listen version: both of the brothers behind the show really really want to bring it back. The traffic they saw from their itty-bitty April update suggests people want it — but they know that may very well be a fluke. So they're taking it slow.

Comment Re:Probable cause (Score 4, Insightful) 223

I have nothing to hide, except the pron from my wife (she found it already) so why would I care what the FBI does? They aren't going to act on any of this unless these people actually plan to do something criminal and in that case, they should.

If you think you have nothing to hide, you should probably spend a bit of time studying the history of the FBI. Leading an exemplary life has never been a protection from them, if they suspect you may be part of whatever conspiracy is popular at the time. A few decades ago, it was Communists, and having no connection to any Communist organization was never protection from them or their colleagues in organizations like HUAC. It's quite clear that the "anti-terrorist" push nowadays is no more concerned with whether you have anything to hide; if they need a scapegoat and you're handy (perhaps because your name is vaguely like some name on one of their lists), they'll go after you and make your life a hell on Earth.

Having "nothing to hide" is one of the most naive misconceptions going around, and has been for at least a century. Dig into the history of the FBI and assorted other similar organizations. Google can find a lot of it for you. Then come back and tell us again whether you have anything to hide.

(And they probably already have a copy of your pron collection, added to their own. ;-)

Comment Re:2-year CFLs (Score 1) 278

I wonder how much of that is because of the way you're using them. They give a lifespan estimate, but that's making some very broad assumptions about how you use them. Those estimates about how many years they'll last are based on you using it for so many hours per day but only turning it on a few times per day. If you turn the light on and off many times per day, as you might in a bathroom or if you're using an occupancy sensor, the filaments will wear out a lot sooner than the projected lifespan. If you're really turning the lights on and off a lot, LEDs are probably a better choice.

Comment Re:Kids mix fine with LED's (Score 1) 278

Their energy savings is not that much better than CFLs...

That depends on what you consider "much better". The newer LED bulbs at big box retailers like Home Depot are now using around 1/3 less power than equivalent CFLs. That's not the same kind of savings you get from switching from incandescent to CFL, but it's still substantial. If power costs more than about $0.10/kW, they're probably worth the increased up-front cost.

Comment Re:haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 1) 68

"If you want the web to be useful, you should be pushing for only the most minimal use of Javascript."

When this crap first started getting pushed, a lot of us saw the potential problems coming and objected. We were assured it was only to be used to 'spice up' webpages, not to replace them.

Such assurances are obviously shit. If it's allowed to use it, then the lowest common denominator of self-proclaimed 'designers' can, will, and must overuse it. This overuse expands steadily and predictably until and unless there is effective pushback. Today we have reached the point where the typical corporate 'website' (and I use scare quotes because these things are NOT websites, at all) consists of hundreds of executable files, fetched from dozens of different servers, all of which the browser is expected to suck in and execute without so much as giving you a warning.

And contrary to the hilarious suggestion I see at the top of many many webpages today ("Enable Javascript for a better user experience") this does not bring with it any substantial improvements for the user. Quite the contrary, it results in a worse immediate experience (no, I didnt want a dozen popups, autoplaying video presentations, and a huge advertisement that floats over the text so I cannot see it!) and also in the longer term (like a week later when you discover that some random ad server sent your browser a rootkit and it happily executed it, oops!.)

But the point is history has proven this is a bad code drives out good situation. If it's allowed, it will take over, just like a weed.

Turn off javascript. See the web as it really is. And support the web that still exists, before it's too late.

Comment Re:say wha? (Score 4, Insightful) 68

"English translation: as usual, Flash is useless except as a vector for malware, viruses, trojans and keyloggers. Remove Flash from your system."

That's actually not quite true. Flash is a great way to develop simple games quickly and cheaply.

The problem isnt Flash itself (which is on the whole a fine product, used correctly) but the idea of using Flash as a substitute for a webpage, the installation of it as a browser plugin, and the auto-execution of it by the browser. None of that should be tolerated.

It's still possible to get a standalone flash interpreter and only feed it local, vetted files, which is really fine (or as close to fine as lots of other things you do every day, at least.)  But Adobe seems to be trying their best to discourage that and force everyone to use it as an auto-enabled browser component instead. The one way to use the program that causes major problems is also the one way they want you to use it.

Everyone who has been infected as a result of this should really get together and sue these arseholes, because money is the only language they understand.

Comment Re:haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 5, Insightful) 68

Excellent advice.

Expect to be flamed into oblivion by all the 'web devs' that cant be bothered to learn how HTML works and rely on this crap instead, though.

The web - the real web, the HTML web, appears to be shrinking at the moment. New content is often hidden behind some kind of opaque app crap for no apparent reason and with no actual webpage for fallback (thanks google!) and old content occasionally gets removed as well. Each time this happens, it makes it even harder and less likely to revive the healthy web we once built with such love and care.

And naturally the people that are making a profit on this crap will just keep right on cranking it out as long as that is true.

The real victims here are future generations, who should inherit that world-wide web, but are set to inherit something entirely different - and inferior in every way (when judged from the users perspective - from the perspective of big Advertising of course the story will be different, but we built this web for humans, not for marketing.)

Comment Re:Three years and counting (Score 1) 278

Sometimes, the cheapest and most efficient LED bulbs are in the blue end of the spectrum, especially when the color temperature doesn't matter too much - like a flashlight.

In that case, it's not so much the color temperature as it is the spectrum. The color temperature tells you what temperature of blackbody radiation your light source most closely resembles, but it doesn't tell you how closely it resembles it. Our eyes work best with light that has a distribution similar to blackbody radiation, i.e. with a wide, smooth distribution of wavelengths. If the distribution has sharp spikes, it can cause things to look the wrong color compared to what they're expected to look like. This is most obvious if you get one of the LED lights that uses a mix of pure red, green, and blue to simulate other colors; you can get something that looks like white if you look directly at the lights, but nothing they shine on looks right. That color shift is what CRI (color rendering index) is supposed to measure.

Lights have to have a CRI of at least 80 to qualify for Energy Star, which means that most household lights are now fairly decent. Cheaper lights and ones not intended for general illumination may go for higher efficiency at the cost of lower CRI, which is what you're probably noticing in the light from flashlights. High CRI (90+) lights are available, but they're usually a bit more expensive and less efficient.

Comment Re:Dirty power (Score 1) 278

Generally speaking, anything with lots of parts has more points of failures.

Maybe that's true in general, but in the specific case of lighting, incandescent lights obviously have a much shorter life span than CFLs or LEDs. There's plenty of reason to think that incandescent lights do badly with power spikes. My experience is that they're a lot more likely to fail when you turn the light on than any other time, which suggests susceptibility to power surges. It's just that replacing dead incandescent lights is a regular activity, so the occasional failure due to power spikes is much less noticeable than for a light you expect to replace once or twice a decade.

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