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I meant *unchecked*, not just "checked but possible to be unchecked".

this is because a cunning piece of software called TopText was automatically installed on your computer along with KaZaA

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

You're like one of those people that swears they hate Howard Stern, but listens every day.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Yeah, it will be worth lots of money some day.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Hey, it could be worse. At least it wasn't:

1. A repeat post.

and 2. A wrong headline.

Crap, I've been getting my news online-only for too long...


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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

1. Combine your homework papers and textbooks in a blender with a liter of milk, and a bit of sugar.
2. Boot up counterstrike.
3. Now you can drink your homework while playing counterstrike!

I sent Dell asking whether I could...

Where did you send Dell? To /dev/null?

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Unfortunately, deciding on issues only after they have become moot seems to be the habit of this Supreme Court. I had an example, but I can't seem to recall

You'll come up with the example after the point becomes moot. ;-)

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Geeks deal with computers better than people

Geeks aren't people? I know some of us really dig the Borg, but come on now...

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

It's an end note, not a signature.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Typical admin hard ass--"they should have prevented it themselves." No, the company should have made this OPTIONAL (not checked).

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

You mispelt "Part of the reason Windows virii are so widespread...." Ahem, misspelled. Since IIS has LESS marketshare then Apache one would expect... than, not then.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Katz paragraph:

In April, Princeton Professor Edward Felten, an encryption researcher, received a letter from record industry lawyers warning him that a paper he was about to present at a hacker conference -- the paper described the weaknesses of an encryption system -- could subject him to criminal actions under the DMCA. Felten withdrew the paper, and is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the DMCA on First Amendment grounds.

New York Times paragraph:

Increasingly, in the United States, this freedom has been lost. In April, for example, Edward Felten, a Princeton professor and encryption researcher, received a letter from recording industry lawyers warning him that a paper he was about to present at a conference -- it described the weaknesses of an encryption system -- could subject him to enforcement actions under the D.M.C.A.. Mr. Felten understood the threat and decided not to present his paper. Largely as a result of this experience, he is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on First Amendment grounds.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

From the article:

For now, technical limitations may temper any worries that a person's voice could be lifted without permission. To build the software that recreates unique voices -- which AT&T Labs is calling its "custom voice" product -- a person must first go to a studio where engineers record 10 to 40 hours of readings. Texts range from business news reports to nonsense babble.

The recordings are then chopped into fragments of sounds and sorted into databases. When the software processes a text, it retrieves the sounds and re-assembles them instantly to form entirely new sentences. In the case of long-dead celebrities, archival recordings could be used in the same way.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

www.webwasher.com works well for Windows browsers.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

That's the immigrant 8 ball. You likey some chicken flied lice with that?

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Oh yeah, Duchovny is off to a great start with Evolution.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

• Users that dutifully pay for their software (music, etc.)
• Those that blatantly pirate software (music, etc.) without regard for laws or companies
• Finally, and most relevant here, is the users that pirate software (music, etc.) if it's not too difficult.

• Clear subject lines, so spam sticks out like a sore thumb
• Kill filters to filter the most obnoxious spammers
• Loads of on-topic messages (i.e. preceding subject lines with "F*** spam!", then proceeding to dump lots of goodies

That's AFFECT, not effect.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

That's EXCEPT, not accept.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

It sounds to me like you're stereotyping a class of programmers based on one bad experience

Actually, you're both generalizing on insufficient evidence--he/she because of contact with a few old people that refused to learn, and you on the opposite.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle: that there are some old people that refuse to learn. However, there are also some young people that refuse to learn, making this whole exercise trivially true. That's what happens when we use anecdotal evidence; we get useless results.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

If you use an alternate address, it's not a problem. For example, I use "evol-psych@aaronshaver.com" for an evolutionary psychology mailing list to which I subscribe. If you own a domain with a decent webhost, you can make up new addresses for everything. I used "psy204@aaronshaver.com" as a temporary address for a class I attended last term.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Your post is in there somewhere too.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

It's not embarrassing if you're Radioactive Crotch Man.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

My university's campus blocks are filled with Dutch elm trees--there's no diversity at all. Sure enough, a fungal disease specific to that type of tree has spread throughout.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

You sound like those people that say, "Is it really worth X thousands of dollars for that audio equipment?" without hearing music on the equipment.

Once you've had a taste of broadband Internet access, DVD movies, CD audio--you'll never want to go back to using the older format it replaced.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

I believe kcbrown's point was that virus writers could do something productive instead of just trashing computers.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

As much as I liked earlier versions of SuSE, I'm rather disappointed that recent used a sticky sweet, user-friendly interface. It seems the more graphical distributions become dumbed-down.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Where was everyone before the DMCA got through congress? Isn't it funny how people get riled up about something after it's an active law? And, no, whining on Slashdot doesn't count as "doing something about it."
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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

"Reform" presupposes that there's some kind of objective measure of moral progress, which there's not. Nice try.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

If you don't mind waiting an hour to connect to EFnet, then discovering that there's no nick or channel registration, and nicknames are limited to 9 characters, then sure, go for EFnet.

If you want a good IRC network, on the other hand, try DALnet, diapers or no.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

I suppose he may have just hit the wrong line in the box but I don't see anything nearby that would make sense...

You're not suggesting that Katz writes his articles using something like a paint-by-numbers are you?

Topic: [Freedom | Privacy | Geeks | Hackers]
Tone: [Fear-mongering | Slobbering praise]
Length: [Long | Ridiculously long | Just skim this one, boys]
(Submit)

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

You can find anything on IRC--legal, illegal, bizarre, cool--just do a /list on DALnet and you'll be set.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

It seems, like enormous Flash ads in web pages, that proprietary formats are the "wave of the future" for music and video online. I remember recently when Media Player popped up asking if I wanted to download the latest update which included content protection schemes.

I'm no peer-to-peer sharing fanatic, I just don't want to bother with a zillion custom formats to play music and videos. I want to be able to easily back up, say, my music collection, without the hassle of some proprietary software.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

Sorry, but when I see "shock the monkey to win" in a banner at the top of the page...err, no thanks.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

• In Kindergarten, schools store coloring books in locked rooms so kids won't get the originals--the originals are used to make copies in which the kids can actually color.
• In lower grade school, various excercise sheets are copied for the class. I was about ten years old when the teacher first layed out the details of the Xeroxing laws. (It was something like "no more than 30 pages or 10%, whichever is lower, may be Xeroxed in more than 10 copies for classroom use.") They then announced that they're now breaking this rule to give us an education.
• At university, teachers compile their own anthologies of Xerox pages from books, placing them next to the Xerox machines for student use. Teachers said: "We could compile an official anthology, but that would cost a lot more. You are only allowed to read Xeroxed anthologies here. If you were to Xerox them for home use, we wouldn't know about that, though."

It's interesting that you say:

Morality is a personal issue...

While at the same time making moral prescriptions that are supposed to apply to everyone:

The only things that should be taught are issues that are beyond common politics...

By the way, you should try to find anything that's "universially accepted as morally wrong"--even acts like murder have many exceptions.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

And some encoders sound like dog shit on all forms of music.

What exactly does dogshit sound like?

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

There's some story about a skeptical Muslim leader only being persuaded to adopt radio after someone demonstrated that it could broadcast the Koran.

Perhaps, we could do something similar for the Internet in Afghanistan--show the Taliban that it can be used to broadcast their propaganda. In this way, people can take advantage of the greater access to post anti-Taliban material, communicate with the outside world, and so on.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

It's ironic that Slashdot is thinking of micropayments or subscriptions when users contribute most of the actual content in the form of comments. (Consider also that top comments are spelled correctly and use proper grammar.)

On the other hand, Slashdot does contribute the Slash engine, however, they're asking us to pay for the news, not the code.

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Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/

A tabbed browser interface--that's a great idea. It would be similar to the mIRC client where, as you point out, one can easily ignore junk windows.

Microsoft IE programmers: are you reading this post? If so, then add this tab feature, and remove that frustrating Media Bar in IE 6. It pops up even when I've told it to use Winamp to play Shoutcast streams.

Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com