"MIAs in Vietnam had one"
MIAs were exploited to demonize the Vietcong. If people don't hate communism, it's a very big threat to profits. There were guys missing in action in WWII also, but they didn't go on about how they were secretly still being held years after the war ended. They just said they were dead and moved on.
You don't need a fancy hack to install the software without agreeing to the EULA. Just leave the focus on the Accept button and utilize some lucky cat-like typing to get past it. There a lots of ways to encourage an accidental spacebar press.
I don't think any privacy activists will mind greater transparency in government. Privacy for the government isn't a privacy that should be promoted or protected in any free society.
You have two groups:
1) The government - has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force
2) The people - controlled by that government, but, hopefully, with enough of a democracy to keep the government from beating the liberty out of them with the police, military, judicial system, etc.
One of the most important tools in keeping that democracy working is knowing what the government is doing. Getting this level of information about the government and using the internet to dole it out to this degree is fantastic for the people.
"Kudos to the whistle-blowers within MediaDefender"
It wasn't a whistle blower. Some idiot used his Gmail password and Gmail email address to sign up for an account on a bittorrent tracker site that recognized his IP address as one of the ones associated with Media-Defender. So he basically gave his email and password to the enemy trying to sneak around in their services.
This is why I don't like non-lethal weapons in the hands of police. Drawing a lethal weapon means you've thought about the ramifications and decided it's necessary, or at least decided before hand that the situation might require deadly force even if you have to draw too fast to think. Tasers don't do that. You can pull them out for anyone and not have to worry about all that paper work for killing an innocent person. And here it's basically being used as a method of coercion.
ZAP "Put your hands behind your back or we'll inflict massive pain on you a second time." ZAP
I don't think we should have law enforcement determining when someone is worthy of doses of pain for non-compliance. It seems to me that cops, who frankly aren't known for their level headedness while arresting people, seem to err on the side of resisting arrest a little too often.
Is it worth saving a real violent criminal's life by giving the cops the power to pain him into submission rather than shooting him in the head if it means they also get to pain all the non-criminals they come across?
Expect to see many more instances of old women, protesters and children being abused by the police because they have a gun lite rather than a real gun.
Did I post too soon? I really hope at 4:00 PM what I thought didn't happen will happen. linux.dell.com is just the support side of it? That's a relief.
Wait. You mean I have to go to a special other website? linux.dell.com? This means you have to choose which operating system you want before you even begin. How the hell is some grandmother supposed to choose anything but Windows if there's no mention of Ubuntu anywhere on www.dell.com?
This is pathetic. I want to see Windows and Ubuntu next to one another on the choose operating system option menu so the consumers can see there are other options. This is depressing.
I think you mean to ask which of these is more likely: that someone at the RNC mistyped "com" as "org," or that a left-wing blog site fabricated 500 emails that when presented to White House officials were confirmed to be real?
The latter doesn't seem very likely when you realize that Palast took these to Rove for comment and they sent out a PR person to told them they were White House emails. She just said that they weren't caging lists but GOP donor lists, which is unlikely since there were things like homeless shelters on there in addition to the military bases.
Palast also sent the evidence to Congress. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go sending falsified documents to Congress.
Get your facts straight. This stuff isn't being fabricated.
Greg Palast suggested that they may have been sent to the wrong address on purpose by a secretary or something. This is some pretty sick shit. Any normal, moral person who witnessed Rove stripping the right to vote from minorities who are currently serving overseas would want to get the word out.
Don't forget that they did this when the Republicans were in charge of the congress, and they couldn't foresee any reason for that to change. If the GOP were still in the majority of the House and Senate, nobody would know about any of this even if they sent the emails directly to the New York Times.
Same thing here. My boss, who doesn't know the difference between a minimized program and a full computer crash, has told me he heard that Vista is crap. The notion that Vista sucks is definately reaching the general population.
But will the option be put in a pull down menu off the desktops and notebooks linked from the front page, or will you have to click a tiny, unobtrusive link on the bottom that says, "check out our Ubuntu computers" hidden behind the giant banners saying that Dell fellates Vista and recommends that you do the same?
This really doesn't count as enough for me before it's there in the select input tag next to the Microsoft products.
However, the company said its customers have been asking for XP as part of its IdeaStorm project The last time I checked Ideastorm, XP wasn't the most desired operating system...
If I asked you to come in my house, and provide me feedback on how my living room looks, and you responded "that's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen," then I would probably censure you and throw you out.
If you were trying to persuade me to pay you money to hang out in your living room, rather than in your neighbor's living room, I would expect you to listen well to what I have to say and not ignore it because you don't like what you're hearing.
By the way, the complaint is that your expensive couch is uncomfortable. There is a comfortable couch, available at no cost, begging to be used. Use it, even if you have to rearrange the furniture a little.
But you're completely right about the owners of websites being able to do whatever they want to the information on them. It's just a stupid move for the above reasons.
If you were really interested in colonizing another planet, you'd want to minimize the amount of energy you expend traveling, because when you multiply it out by the distance you're going it's going to be big. It wouldn't be a very good idea to send a whole intelligent body in a ship. They're both immeasurably fragile relative to the destructive powers of the vast emptiness of space. You'd be better off sending data representing a state of an intelligent being without the ship, but that's even a ton of data if you're talking about transmitting it zillions of light years.
So what's the tiniest amount of data it would take to colonize another planet? Probably something like the tiniest essence of our life, like a molecule or two that have a unique tendency to try to make copies of themselves. Just ship the molecular configuration data off into a chunk of rock on the surface of just the right planet and wait a few million years (much less than it would take to physically get there) and you've just colonized another place on the other side of the universe.
Hey, wait! That sounds like something we think happened here, isn't it? Neat.
I think you interpreted your analogy poorly. If you want to use suburban neighborhoods, the analogy should go as follows:
If you live in a typical suburban neighborhood, there are 200 houses within a 30-minute walk, but you're not sure if they're inhabited. Also, many of the most productive members of your family are scientists, who have a deep desire to investigate everything investigatable about their world. How many households would you try to visit considering that you have never met another suburbanite in the history of your household, knowing that meeting them could answer some serious existential questions and would be the single most significant thing your family has ever done? Would it be worth the tremendous effort of your entire household (not civilization) to try to discover other households? You could certainly learn previously unlearnable things about your household by investigating their very alien perspective of you, once you found them.
Slashdot Mirror
"MIAs in Vietnam had one" MIAs were exploited to demonize the Vietcong. If people don't hate communism, it's a very big threat to profits. There were guys missing in action in WWII also, but they didn't go on about how they were secretly still being held years after the war ended. They just said they were dead and moved on.
You don't need a fancy hack to install the software without agreeing to the EULA. Just leave the focus on the Accept button and utilize some lucky cat-like typing to get past it. There a lots of ways to encourage an accidental spacebar press.
I don't think any privacy activists will mind greater transparency in government. Privacy for the government isn't a privacy that should be promoted or protected in any free society.
You have two groups:
1) The government - has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force
2) The people - controlled by that government, but, hopefully, with enough of a democracy to keep the government from beating the liberty out of them with the police, military, judicial system, etc.
One of the most important tools in keeping that democracy working is knowing what the government is doing. Getting this level of information about the government and using the internet to dole it out to this degree is fantastic for the people.
Bill Gate's checking account number and PIN can probably fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk, but I bet it's worth an awful lot despite its tiny size.
It seems to me that if that were really the case, it would mean no bill would ever work unless it had 100% support.
"Kudos to the whistle-blowers within MediaDefender"
It wasn't a whistle blower. Some idiot used his Gmail password and Gmail email address to sign up for an account on a bittorrent tracker site that recognized his IP address as one of the ones associated with Media-Defender. So he basically gave his email and password to the enemy trying to sneak around in their services.
This is why I don't like non-lethal weapons in the hands of police. Drawing a lethal weapon means you've thought about the ramifications and decided it's necessary, or at least decided before hand that the situation might require deadly force even if you have to draw too fast to think. Tasers don't do that. You can pull them out for anyone and not have to worry about all that paper work for killing an innocent person. And here it's basically being used as a method of coercion.
ZAP "Put your hands behind your back or we'll inflict massive pain on you a second time." ZAP
I don't think we should have law enforcement determining when someone is worthy of doses of pain for non-compliance. It seems to me that cops, who frankly aren't known for their level headedness while arresting people, seem to err on the side of resisting arrest a little too often.
Is it worth saving a real violent criminal's life by giving the cops the power to pain him into submission rather than shooting him in the head if it means they also get to pain all the non-criminals they come across?
Expect to see many more instances of old women, protesters and children being abused by the police because they have a gun lite rather than a real gun.
So all the hard work from the guys at http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/ was for nothing?
My favorite tech gadget is an insulin pump... so maybe a few hours?
Did I post too soon? I really hope at 4:00 PM what I thought didn't happen will happen. linux.dell.com is just the support side of it? That's a relief.
I don't see it...
Wait. You mean I have to go to a special other website? linux.dell.com? This means you have to choose which operating system you want before you even begin. How the hell is some grandmother supposed to choose anything but Windows if there's no mention of Ubuntu anywhere on www.dell.com?
This is pathetic. I want to see Windows and Ubuntu next to one another on the choose operating system option menu so the consumers can see there are other options. This is depressing.
I think you mean to ask which of these is more likely: that someone at the RNC mistyped "com" as "org," or that a left-wing blog site fabricated 500 emails that when presented to White House officials were confirmed to be real?
The latter doesn't seem very likely when you realize that Palast took these to Rove for comment and they sent out a PR person to told them they were White House emails. She just said that they weren't caging lists but GOP donor lists, which is unlikely since there were things like homeless shelters on there in addition to the military bases.
Palast also sent the evidence to Congress. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go sending falsified documents to Congress.
Get your facts straight. This stuff isn't being fabricated.
Greg Palast suggested that they may have been sent to the wrong address on purpose by a secretary or something. This is some pretty sick shit. Any normal, moral person who witnessed Rove stripping the right to vote from minorities who are currently serving overseas would want to get the word out.
Don't forget that they did this when the Republicans were in charge of the congress, and they couldn't foresee any reason for that to change. If the GOP were still in the majority of the House and Senate, nobody would know about any of this even if they sent the emails directly to the New York Times.
Same thing here. My boss, who doesn't know the difference between a minimized program and a full computer crash, has told me he heard that Vista is crap. The notion that Vista sucks is definately reaching the general population.
But will the option be put in a pull down menu off the desktops and notebooks linked from the front page, or will you have to click a tiny, unobtrusive link on the bottom that says, "check out our Ubuntu computers" hidden behind the giant banners saying that Dell fellates Vista and recommends that you do the same?
This really doesn't count as enough for me before it's there in the select input tag next to the Microsoft products.
That's why it only affected local files... they were within the event horizon of the terrible design singularity.
The last time I checked Ideastorm, XP wasn't the most desired operating system...
After reading through that, it seems like a propable source for lots of the ideas in Mike Judge's Idiocracy.
If I asked you to come in my house, and provide me feedback on how my living room looks, and you responded "that's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen," then I would probably censure you and throw you out.
If you were trying to persuade me to pay you money to hang out in your living room, rather than in your neighbor's living room, I would expect you to listen well to what I have to say and not ignore it because you don't like what you're hearing.
By the way, the complaint is that your expensive couch is uncomfortable. There is a comfortable couch, available at no cost, begging to be used. Use it, even if you have to rearrange the furniture a little.
But you're completely right about the owners of websites being able to do whatever they want to the information on them. It's just a stupid move for the above reasons.
If you were really interested in colonizing another planet, you'd want to minimize the amount of energy you expend traveling, because when you multiply it out by the distance you're going it's going to be big. It wouldn't be a very good idea to send a whole intelligent body in a ship. They're both immeasurably fragile relative to the destructive powers of the vast emptiness of space. You'd be better off sending data representing a state of an intelligent being without the ship, but that's even a ton of data if you're talking about transmitting it zillions of light years.
So what's the tiniest amount of data it would take to colonize another planet? Probably something like the tiniest essence of our life, like a molecule or two that have a unique tendency to try to make copies of themselves. Just ship the molecular configuration data off into a chunk of rock on the surface of just the right planet and wait a few million years (much less than it would take to physically get there) and you've just colonized another place on the other side of the universe.
Hey, wait! That sounds like something we think happened here, isn't it? Neat.
I think you interpreted your analogy poorly. If you want to use suburban neighborhoods, the analogy should go as follows:
If you live in a typical suburban neighborhood, there are 200 houses within a 30-minute walk, but you're not sure if they're inhabited. Also, many of the most productive members of your family are scientists, who have a deep desire to investigate everything investigatable about their world. How many households would you try to visit considering that you have never met another suburbanite in the history of your household, knowing that meeting them could answer some serious existential questions and would be the single most significant thing your family has ever done? Would it be worth the tremendous effort of your entire household (not civilization) to try to discover other households? You could certainly learn previously unlearnable things about your household by investigating their very alien perspective of you, once you found them.
Just put a mirror on Mars and look at it through a really powerful telescope.
But you're violating the law. It'd be nice if people could practice fair use above the counter for legitimate purposes.