I’m very surprised, but it appears that the new 20 dollar bills are not digitally signed by the treasury. If they can put a serial number on every one they can put a digital signature on them.

That given them more options for asserting a bill was counterfit and make any registry of suspect serial numbers more robust.

People seem to be alergic to digital signing, I wonder why?

The good news is that the lack of a digital signature on the currency will help the use of the currency as a new benchmark for the color copier industry.

This is the URL you need to delete comment #XX from blog# 1 on your movable type implementation.


http://...put.approprate.stuff.here.../mt.cgi?blog_id=1&_type=comment&__mode=delete&id=XX


Usefull when you want to delete a few hundred comments. Authentication is left as an exercise for the reader.

This works in my version, who knows about other versions.

You can search the full text of all of Amazon’s books, and look at the pages!.

It appears they beat these folks to it.

Libraries are facing a big displacement event.

Clay, in the midst of a nice posting teasing out the difference between interacte and publish made me laugh:

Dave Barry is in fact the perfect example. Dave Barry publishes a column online, using weblog software as his publishing platform, and his mode of

Tim Oren writes at the tail end of excellent posting on the business model of various choices Netscape made:

Moral of the story? It’s the business model more than the threat model that often dominates the real world of commercial security deployment. Grigg is right that if the actual threat had been analyzed, the focus would have been on the server (Willy Sutton: “That’s where the money is.”), not hypothetical packet sniffers. But that wouldn’t have created a client/server lock-in, so it didn’t fit the actual goals. Security designers – paranoids by trade – would be well advised to find an equivalently cynical business type to vet their ideas.

This is so true. It’s always advisable to look into motives. People tend to be very nieve about this, particularly specialists of one strip or another. I think one might go further and say that if you dig into the business model of the advocates of a proposed standard and find that it is driven entirely by noble virtues then you must step back and become concerned, not that they are being nieve, but that they run the risk of being coop’d by players who enter the market with a strong business model.

It is, of course, quite dangerous to try and look into motives. In fact some professions forswear it entirely. Just to pick one reason why it’s dangerous is that an entrepeur is often very fuzzy about his business model. He may have a primary model, but he always is juggleing a pool of options. He values these options because they give him the flexiblity to learn from the market as he goes forward. The outsider can’t see that information. The outsider can’t even see the list of options that the entrepenure is juggling; since the entrepeur is likely telling a simplified, but consistent, story about what’s happening so as not to confuse his audience.

While the pool of options are on the upside there is always a pool of risks haunting the emerging enterprise.

Of course it’s a good thing if you let all the professions have a chance to take a look at the worse case senarios around your whatever boondoggle your currently engaged in.

Which reminds me of an peice of paper they were handing out at a Real Estate open house once. This peice of paper adviced me that before making a bid on the property I would do well to consult with my own advisors. It then helpfully enumerated various advisors I might touch base with – in no particular order: pest inspectors, HVAC experts, structural engineers, title insurers, buyer real estate agent, geologist, … and on and on for maybe a good 40 or 60 kinds of expertise I might wish to bring to bear before making an offer on the house. This did not encourage confidence that the seller was being forthright.

In a further example of the mysterious ways of the dead we
have this obituary Bob Hope who died in 2003 by Vincent Canby who died in 2000.

&nbsp&nbsp– thanks

In the continuing series on discrimitory pricing and it’s desperate simulation of the rug trader in some foriegn bazzar’s attepts to get you to reveal what the product is really worth to you I present: Air, two dollars or free you decide!

I presume lots of other people have got to pondering how it seems quite inefficent for RSS clients to be polling RSS feed sites all the time. Various alternative designs come easily to mind. For example clients could register their interest and ask to have the updates pushed to them, sadly that’s a loser for various reasons.

Another idea is a hub scheme where clients go to some central authority that aggregates feeds. The clients could then do a single poll to update to all their subscriptions. This idea is workable. It does involve some protocol design to sketch out how clients query the server and how the returning update is pieced together. But the solution is unattractive. Hubs are problematic in what ought to be a peer to peer architecture. Introducing an intermediary just to save bandwidth is too high a price to pay.

That leads one to toward ideas that distribute the hub. Something that allows anybody to volunteer to do part of the work of the hub. Today I got to thinking that might be done reasonable easily if the volunteers were the existing RSS feed providers. This might well be overlaid on the current design much as color TV was overlaid on black and white.

Domain Name System queries do a trick. If you ask the server a question it may along with the answer to the question you’ve asked throw in the answer to a few other questions that it suspects you might need to ask in a moment. I suspect something similar might work for RSS feeds. If I ask blog X for it’s current feed it could reply “Well no changes to that, but you know I happen to have the feeds for A, B, and C here if you want ’em.”

Similarly when the client asks for the current feed it could enumerate other blogs it would like to have the feeds for, if they happen to be available.

A complete solution in this space would probably get complex fast. At minimum it would have much of the plumbing of the hub solution. In addition there are privacy challenges. You would like to conspire to keep the random client’s subscription list as secret as possible. It really isn’t blogger X’s business that I subscribe to blogger Y. But if I’m going to get blogger Y’s feed via blogger X then he’s sure to find out. That may make this entire scheme a nonstarter. It seems possible to keep X from finding out about my taste of Y when he doesn’t happen to cache Y’s feed; a couple double hashes will keep that secret.

I suspect things are going to proceed as is for quite while. Popular blogs will just have to live with all that random polling.

I enjoyed this list of why the trains are having trouble running on time in Britain. I think you could use this list pretty much any time you wanted to diagnose the “why we’re late” syndrome.

• The Hardware, lousy maintainance, insufficent capital budgets
• Managerial failure to adapte rapidly and flexibly
• Failure to prioritize the high value work so it is delayed by low value work.
• Congestion, i.e. 10 pounds in the 5 pound bag.
• No margin for error

Of course we all know that the way to get the trains to run on time is hire Benito Mussolini. No wait – we all know that the way to get the trains to run on time is to let all knowing, but invisible, hand of the market fix it. No wait – we all know the way to get the trains to run on time is to impose some standards.