I'd imagine this is a fairly easy mistake to make, albeit one of those head-slapping "oh my god" fallacies that one would try pretty carefully to avoid if one knew there were more than one town named "Sydney" on this Earth.
Technology can certainly make planning air travel (slightly) easier, but not when you check your common sense and organic brain power at the gate. A twenty-one year old German tourist planned to take a trip to Sydney, Australia, but wound up 8,077 miles off-course — headed instead for the small oil town of Sydney, Montana, after mistyping his destination into a flight booking Web site. The man didn't notice anything was wrong until he was about to board a flight from Portland to chilly Montana, dressed in summer vacation clothes. Not only did the man trust the website a little too completely, his mother didn't notice the mistake because she trusted her son's techno savvy, saying he was "usually good with computers." Good with computers perhaps — but apparently not so good at the simple task of actually reading his itinerary.
"Oops".
Here's another example of the entertainment industry being stupid: claiming that they lose $244 million from the transfer of certain copyrighted material in China, and then in the same article admitting that the material in question isn't even available commercially in China. How can you lose out on potential sales, when there's no potential for sale?
Yes, the transfers are illegal.
But no, arguing that point with lies is not legal either. The Techdirt article wisely points out, as usual, that the industry would probably be far better off letting this go as they then get freely generated interest for American content that the Chinese public would otherwise not see.
Of course, 'allowing' your copyrighted works to be copied freely would be negligence and could lose the MPAA the right to go after anyone for "copyright theft", so…
I do bash Microsoft (and in particular, Windows) fairly frequently. Sometimes it's justified and sometimes I'm just ranting. But whatever the case, whenever the word 'security' is mentioned alongside 'Windows', people generally begin to switch off.
Why?
Because it's the same old moan. "Windows isn't secure". "Windows has too many bugs". "Windows is poorly written". I believe all these things to be true, but there are excuses: for one, Windows is the consumer OS of choice so naturally it's a delicious treat for script kiddies looking to score a few cool points by finding a new buffer overrun bug.
But that doesn't change the fact that the bugs are there.
Anyway more to the point, after much Vista-hating I eventually came to the decision that I ought to give the thing ago. After all, it was (at least originally) a kernel rewrite with potentially a lot of flaws fixed. Actually, it's not so much the individual flaws but the potential for them. A better-written system from the ground-up is likely to have less flaws exposed as time goes on than one which has been cobbled together from patches of 8-bit, 16-bit and then 32-bit software over 20 years.
So I was ready for the idea that Vista might change Microsoft's reputation for 'security'. Naturally, I wasn't entirely surprised to find that this will probably not be the case, as Vista is showing up to be more or less just as insecure as XP was.
Now I just feel sorry for all the punters who bought Gates's and Ballmer's incessant droning about how Vista — and that's still a ridiculous name for an OS — would hold up to today's expectations of integrity.
Well, I feel sorry for all the punters who bought Gates's and Ballmer's OS… pretty though it is.
Some things just never change.
This article over at TechDirt really highlights some of the biggest hurdles that consumers run into when trying to decide on a decent ISP to subscribe to. 'Unlimited' services which really aren't unlimited, with "fair usage policies" and quiet bandwidth limits are all the rage these days… but seriously, how long can this last?
Over the past couple of years, a bunch of ISPs have started (usually quietly) applying traffic shaping efforts to slow down your high bandwidth applications like BitTorrent. This is part of what the whole network neutrality debate is about, but this has more to do with the ISPs trying to keep out services that use up more bandwidth then they budgeted for.
What it really represents is the inability of ISPs to recognize a simple fact: if you offer people bandwidth, they'll figure out ways to use it. The ISPs got into this big race with each other, and all promised unlimited bandwidth at cheap prices, making the calculation that the demand for bandwidth wouldn't increase very much, and most people wouldn't use very much at all.
They were wrong. But, rather than admit that they made a mistake, they suddenly pretend that the "all you can eat" broadband they sold you is something different — one where they can arbitrarily limit what you can do with that bandwidth. They sold you one thing, with the belief that you wouldn't actually use it, and now that you are, they're shoving in place temporary fixes to stop you from using what they sold you.
Of course, there are many who believe the whole thing is simply a ruse to try to charge everyone more money, a concept that gained steam when a loose-lipped CTO from Qwest admitted that file sharing traffic isn't actually much of a burden for them, and he didn't understand other ISPs claiming it was such a problem.
Unfortunately since they're all at it, I for one can't see a reason why this would ever change: especially as long as there's a generally accepted (and oft assumed) relationship that goes (high bandwidth usage) == (illegal file-sharing) == (bad), whether you paid for access to that bandwidth or not.
There have been more than a few promises of 'flying cars' bounding around over the last few years, what with Moller's Skycar and the odd Google Earth illusion.
But none have seemed quite so sleek and practical as the Transition. Billed as more of a 'roadable aircraft' than a flying car, it has wings which one would simply fold up for road use.
Not 'if' but 'how'
29-year-old Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich has all but raised $3m for developing his award-winning design, and suggests a drivable prototype may be on the roads and in the skies by 2008. The real question is, will we be able to take off from the middle lane on the M42, or will we need to make our way to an airport to get in the air?
After almost a year of unchallenged operation, a DC++ filesharing hub running within the virtual walls of the University of Nottingham's internal residential network has been scared into closure by the owners of said network.
Several students reported receiving Cease and Desist notices under their doors this morning. Some others were reportedly visited by burly men in black coats accompanied by their Hall Managers, delivering the documents personally. The notice gives each person 24 hours to, well, cease and desist, or risk being barred from using the University's internal network.
It is no surprise that the University's Information Services team finally sprung to action: in fact the question may be, what took so long? It was fairly common knowledge amongst hub operators that representatives of IS were using the DC++ hub themselves: some observing, some partaking.
It therefore seems likely that TPTB were aware of the operation for some time. Whether it has taken this long to mount an offensive or if pressure was applied from higher up is as yet undetermined.
Of course, there is little doubt that piracy on the internet should probably be vanquished (although that's not to say that the media industry is necessarily justified in its claims of financial loss). But what is by far the clearest is that the operation of a Peer-To-Peer system within the University's network is in breach of the Terms of Service, as agreed to by students when they decide they'd like to use IS's network provision in their study rooms: not that they have much choice, as IS operates a total monopoly on such chargeable services.
Better CommunicationÂ
The student body recently received a formal response to an organised campaign, the intent of which was to highlight inconsistencies in the quality of service provided by the Uni's network team.
A lot of promises were made about improvements, but the most important distinguishing feature of the campaign and the response is the overwhelming potential for a true dialogue being opened up between IS and the students who are made to buy their services.
Hopefully, the stark events of 8th December will not sour these burgeoning relations.
Meanwhile, those students who used the hub solely as a way to keep in touch with their peers online may be hard-pressed to find another meeting place, since the use of most third-party mass communications media is impractical through the fortified walls of the University's internal network.
A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, has revealed that the number of the beast is not 666 after all.
"This is a very nice piece to find," Dr. Aitken said. "Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast."
The tiny fragment of 1,500-year-old papyrus is written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and contains a key passage from the Book of Revelation. Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the "number of the beast", or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book’s apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.
"This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we've found of that passage," Dr. Aitken said. "It's probably about 100 years before any other version."
The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.
"It just shows you that when you study something as cryptic and mystic as the Book of Revelation there's an almost unlimited number of interpretations."
Yet when I sit down with a serious Christian, I'm told that believing the Bible (as currently interpreted) to be hard fact is no more ridiculous than "believing what scientists tell you".
Sure, it doesn't matter too much if the devil's number isn't quite what we thought it was, but it's a little concerning that so many thousands of people are putting blind faith in something that has been proven to be not entirely accurate: even if you don't read the Good Book as a group of metaphors of life best practices, as admittedly a lot of Christians do.
The book is thought to have been written by the disciple John and according to the King James Bible, the traditional translation of the passage reads: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."
But Dr. Aitken said that translation was drawn from much later versions of the New Testament than the fragment found in Oxyrhynchus. "When we're talking about the early biblical texts, we're always talking about copies and they are copies made, at best, 150 to 200 years after [the original] was written," she said.
"They can have mistakes in the copying, changes for political or theological reasons … it's like a detective story piecing it all together."
Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone's name, she said.
"It's a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero."
Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. "It's a very political document," Dr. Aitken said. "It's a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it's written in coded language and riddles."
It's yet more evidence that not only can the authenticity of the current English versions of the Bible be disputed, but even the originals were most likely not without some hidden agenda.
