"Dear Customers,
Originally, airline flights carried doctors on board, in case of a medical emergency. This was back in the first days of the industry, when fur coats were de rigeur. We moved on, the fur coats became unfashionable and air travel became affordable for everyone, except the very poorest, people without a car for example. Today air travel is more affordable than ever thanks to the sterling efforts of the public. You have advanced the economy by agreeing to cram into smaller and smaller places, whilst paying less and less to fly at hundreds of miles through suffocatingly air in a thin metal tube filled with flammable liquid crammed next to several barely contained furnaces spewing fire. We salute your bravery and will continue to give you cheaper and cheaper flights through MinimalEngineering(TM).
From now on, if you're a light aircraft experienced pilot then you will automatically qualify for a 60% discount on all flights. Commercially qualified pilots will qualify for entirely free travel, on the basis that they step in if a pilot is not available due to sickness, emergency, staffing snafus, having a bit to much the night before, fancying the day off or any other reason.
For the cheapest flights, let the customers take the strain. It's the way!"
But, of course, that would sound faintly ridiculous.
That's the point, if autorun is enabled it is trivial, just take a bunch of automated linux installers on USB sticks, mark them "porn" and scatter them liberally around DC and a selection of military bases, it won't take long at all...
I need to look in a mirror and re-evaluate my life....
Actually, it's a very, very good troll that brings up some interesting points, so I'll bite.
The thrust of your argument is that older and/or non-company vended net software is dangerous when it comes to picking up viruses. There's an element of truth in that, a regularly patched system, be it *nix based or Windows is generally a good idea. This is, however, a different thing to having every possible update just for the sake of it. If I installed Windows and iTunes on my system simply because I *might* want to use them, or because everybody else has it, or because I saw an advert, then I'm opening myself up to new potential avenues of attack. Let's presume I only want to read the text on the internet....no pictures, no video, no Silverlight or whatever the latest thing is....I'd use a very bare-bones system, say Lynx running without a GUI, PDF support etc.
If there's nothing running scripts at a system level, for example no JS, Flash, Java plugins and the like, then that's multiple attack routes taken care of. Sure, the modern internet is very snazzy and all, but being able to "install and run our video codec" is asking for trouble if you just want to look at naughty ladies. Less is often more.
To be honest, neither have I. The last two machines I've got hold of (a Toshiba laptop and Asus netbook) had the stickers taken off while linux was installing....no problems at all.
The "Made For Windows" stickers went on the bin and a box of matches. That's just me though...I'll be happy to send you my next set.
Re:The originals really are something else
on
Homebrew Cray-1
·
· Score: 1
Troll? No, really, I meant every word. Out of everything in IT the one thing that's always bugged me is the Cray couch. I've no idea why it's there, and frankly a review of its comfort is the best I've had in 20-odd years. I'm not posting to complain about the troll, hell, I once got a -26 that I'm kind of proud of (and still stand by), I just don't want the OP thinking I was taking the piss. Seriously, most interesting Slashdot comment ever. Please contact me via my sig if you're in any doubt.
That's the nature of things - in the US there are groups who would call for the imprisonment of one of the UK's most (publicly) popular mathematicians, because he uses cannabis. In the Netherlands no criminal offence is committed if two fifteen year-olds have sex, but in the UK she's a victim and he's a statutory rapist. Standard state punishments of death in China and the US are illegal in the EU region, and in the UK you can (depending on circumstance) get a harsher sentence for dropping litter than you do for death by dangerous driving.
Lawyers, huh? Incidentally, in the UK we burn out the houses of paediatricians....well, they're paed-somethings, much as some in the US believe that all Muslim's believe in killing, despite Allah's repeated statements to the contrary. Sad but true.
Re:The originals really are something else
on
Homebrew Cray-1
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I've got mod points, but you're on a +5 already and the time taken to type this feels more worthwhile somehow.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've always wondered how comfy those seats were, nearly as much as I've wondered why the hell they were there in the first place. Well now I know, and will die ever so slightly happier because of it. That's the most interesting thing I have ever read on Slashdot and I salute you for it. "It was not comfy". Thank you sir.
Thing is, I prefer the standard Ubuntu layout to Windows, and that's from someone who grew up (as most of us did) with Windows. So can you hack Windows into behaving like Ubuntu, even at the GUI level? Can you? Really? No. QED.
My primary school teacher used to ask us to argue against things we believed..."nuclear weapons are a good and useful thing for humanity to have" was a memorable one. Most useful lessons I ever had at school I think.
It's got nothing to do with free speech, the fact that it's a blog is irrelevant. It could be a multi-million dollar social networking site, or the world's worst porn site, or a domain squatting site, or anything else. She's not being charged because she's got a blog, she's being charged because she's earning money from it, however little.
Me, I've got a couple of blogs with Google Ads on them, so far I've made the princely sum of £0.74, or around one US dollar. If I ever hit the magical £10 target I'll get a cheque from Google and I'll be liable to pay tax on it. What I say on those blogs is utterly irrelevant, I'm earning money and therefore must pay taxes according to (in my case) UK law.
Whether this is right is an entirely different matter, charging $300 simply to pay tax on a tiny income is nonsensical in my book, but please don't pretend this is some great moral outrage, it's just government being inefficient as usual.
Bingo. You can legitimately be arrested for something you haven't done, in fact the UK police will generally arrest you "on suspicion of x" if there isn't some pretty concrete evidence. In this case they could arrest you on suspicion of drink driving if they saw you take a gulp of beer and get in a car, brethalyse you, find you're well under the limit and send you on your way. No reason to get all social networking on your arse.
Agreed all round, with a caveat. I'm paid minimum wage in the UK (around $9/hr) and I frequently use the internet to learn about programming and computational science. Admittedly, it's never likely to turn me into a well rounded commercial coder, but that's not what I want. I want a FREE education at approximately university level. I can't afford £20k to do a degree that I won't use, that probably won't get me a job in the industry and will leave me burdened with repayments for a decade or more.
I want the information that's useful for my little projects and I can't afford to pay much, if anything. It's freely available. That's really cool. I might end up doing something computer based for a living eventually, but I'm certainly not going to spend two years income and five years with no income, that's SEVEN YEARS WAGES in effect, to be interested in something.
I partly agree, there are multiple factors which can skew this survey. Compatibility and multimedia capabilities are certainly included, if they have even a perceived value then they'll skew the graph.
But that's where I would differ. I don't think the perceived differences are right. Windows is just as good as Apple when it comes to photomanipulation for example, because they both run Photoshop, the commercial and industry standard, there's no big technical software difference. At the same time Linux and OSX are nearly identical, both being direct Unix descendants (OSX is certified Unix I believe?), they just have a different commercial/public ethos.
At the end of the day, I'm a sucker for linux, but it's still great to see a sister OS taking a chunk of the commercial market from a system that I've learned not to comment on. If you can't be nice...
The $25k pays for mining the ore, extracting the metals, drilling kilometres under the sea for the oil, polymerising it, designing the units, injection moulding and, yes, your job putting it all together. I'm guessing you didn't do all of that...but if you did, then yes, you should get a pay rise, or at least a funkier job title;)
You mean they're going to release a phone that doesn't have commercial lock-ins and a properly open source OS? Damn those commies to hell!
Seriously, I've been trying to find an open source *nix phone where you don't have to void the warranty to use it. If the Chinese make a decent one then I'll be buying it. Capitalism at its best people, Communists are allowed to play by Capitalist rules if they want to.:)
Erm....I can't view Facebook, due to having personal data and all, but there isn't a single comment in the link that doesn't look like a well crafted sub-parody. I suspect the linked article is a bit of shameless self-promotion akin to the ones you won't see on MY BLOG!!!!
It doesn't get any better than this.....
They shut it down, they're pandering to federal government.
The don't shut it down, they're supporting terrorists.
They shut it down, they're giving in to Big Money over an independent 'net.
They don't shut it down and they're aiding and abetting anti-American behaviour.
They shut it down, they're Killing Free Speech.
They don't shut it down and they're......well, to be honest I could go off on 101 diatribes.
I've got great Slashdot karma, my comments have a pretty high average, hell...I don't even have to watch adverts or even give them money....and yet I have this weird feeling that I fundamentally disagree with both sides of Slashdot arguments, On both a mathematical and psychological level, this worries me.
Not in the UK it hasn't. It's certainly not on a massive scale, and it's maybe or maybe not due to a democratic system, but they're present nonetheless. I'd point to Cuba as a non-democratic country that has, on occasion, put both the US and the UK to shame when it comes to a state care system. Both democratic and non-democratic systems can bring many benefits and many harms, and without doubt neither is a panacea.
To defend your point, if this was an issue of resources rather than control then China would selectively block high resource traffic first, streamed video, flash intensive sites and the like. Google, on the other hand, generally offer a stupidly high processor-usage-to-data ratio that blocking them seems unproductive.
Newton's laws don't explain the precession of orbits - a non-circular orbit doesn't repeat over and over again, it slowly moves around the centre of mass of the system due to it being "tweaked" by relativistic effects when it's closer/further from a circular orbit. The effect is most pronounced from our point of view in Mercury's orbit as it's quite deep in the Sun's gravity well. Arthur Eddington, whilst investigating Einstein's work on SR, wrote to him asking whether SR explained Mercury's precession...turns out it did so pretty much perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a way out of this headline, and one only.
"Dear Customers, Originally, airline flights carried doctors on board, in case of a medical emergency. This was back in the first days of the industry, when fur coats were de rigeur. We moved on, the fur coats became unfashionable and air travel became affordable for everyone, except the very poorest, people without a car for example. Today air travel is more affordable than ever thanks to the sterling efforts of the public. You have advanced the economy by agreeing to cram into smaller and smaller places, whilst paying less and less to fly at hundreds of miles through suffocatingly air in a thin metal tube filled with flammable liquid crammed next to several barely contained furnaces spewing fire. We salute your bravery and will continue to give you cheaper and cheaper flights through MinimalEngineering(TM).
From now on, if you're a light aircraft experienced pilot then you will automatically qualify for a 60% discount on all flights. Commercially qualified pilots will qualify for entirely free travel, on the basis that they step in if a pilot is not available due to sickness, emergency, staffing snafus, having a bit to much the night before, fancying the day off or any other reason.
For the cheapest flights, let the customers take the strain. It's the way!"
But, of course, that would sound faintly ridiculous.
You just described Topher Brink's setup...you forgot the arcade games and fridges though.
That's the point, if autorun is enabled it is trivial, just take a bunch of automated linux installers on USB sticks, mark them "porn" and scatter them liberally around DC and a selection of military bases, it won't take long at all...
I need to look in a mirror and re-evaluate my life....
Actually, it's a very, very good troll that brings up some interesting points, so I'll bite.
The thrust of your argument is that older and/or non-company vended net software is dangerous when it comes to picking up viruses. There's an element of truth in that, a regularly patched system, be it *nix based or Windows is generally a good idea. This is, however, a different thing to having every possible update just for the sake of it. If I installed Windows and iTunes on my system simply because I *might* want to use them, or because everybody else has it, or because I saw an advert, then I'm opening myself up to new potential avenues of attack. Let's presume I only want to read the text on the internet....no pictures, no video, no Silverlight or whatever the latest thing is....I'd use a very bare-bones system, say Lynx running without a GUI, PDF support etc.
If there's nothing running scripts at a system level, for example no JS, Flash, Java plugins and the like, then that's multiple attack routes taken care of. Sure, the modern internet is very snazzy and all, but being able to "install and run our video codec" is asking for trouble if you just want to look at naughty ladies. Less is often more.
To be honest, neither have I. The last two machines I've got hold of (a Toshiba laptop and Asus netbook) had the stickers taken off while linux was installing....no problems at all.
The "Made For Windows" stickers went on the bin and a box of matches. That's just me though...I'll be happy to send you my next set.
Troll? No, really, I meant every word. Out of everything in IT the one thing that's always bugged me is the Cray couch. I've no idea why it's there, and frankly a review of its comfort is the best I've had in 20-odd years. I'm not posting to complain about the troll, hell, I once got a -26 that I'm kind of proud of (and still stand by), I just don't want the OP thinking I was taking the piss. Seriously, most interesting Slashdot comment ever. Please contact me via my sig if you're in any doubt.
That's the nature of things - in the US there are groups who would call for the imprisonment of one of the UK's most (publicly) popular mathematicians, because he uses cannabis. In the Netherlands no criminal offence is committed if two fifteen year-olds have sex, but in the UK she's a victim and he's a statutory rapist. Standard state punishments of death in China and the US are illegal in the EU region, and in the UK you can (depending on circumstance) get a harsher sentence for dropping litter than you do for death by dangerous driving.
Lawyers, huh? Incidentally, in the UK we burn out the houses of paediatricians....well, they're paed-somethings, much as some in the US believe that all Muslim's believe in killing, despite Allah's repeated statements to the contrary. Sad but true.
I've got mod points, but you're on a +5 already and the time taken to type this feels more worthwhile somehow.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've always wondered how comfy those seats were, nearly as much as I've wondered why the hell they were there in the first place. Well now I know, and will die ever so slightly happier because of it. That's the most interesting thing I have ever read on Slashdot and I salute you for it. "It was not comfy". Thank you sir.
(And I'm being utterly sincere here.)
Psychic posts are easy too...this one is actually blank for example.
Thing is, I prefer the standard Ubuntu layout to Windows, and that's from someone who grew up (as most of us did) with Windows. So can you hack Windows into behaving like Ubuntu, even at the GUI level? Can you? Really? No. QED.
My primary school teacher used to ask us to argue against things we believed..."nuclear weapons are a good and useful thing for humanity to have" was a memorable one. Most useful lessons I ever had at school I think.
This. Has. Nothing. To. Do. With. Blogging.
It's got nothing to do with free speech, the fact that it's a blog is irrelevant. It could be a multi-million dollar social networking site, or the world's worst porn site, or a domain squatting site, or anything else. She's not being charged because she's got a blog, she's being charged because she's earning money from it, however little.
Me, I've got a couple of blogs with Google Ads on them, so far I've made the princely sum of £0.74, or around one US dollar. If I ever hit the magical £10 target I'll get a cheque from Google and I'll be liable to pay tax on it. What I say on those blogs is utterly irrelevant, I'm earning money and therefore must pay taxes according to (in my case) UK law.
Whether this is right is an entirely different matter, charging $300 simply to pay tax on a tiny income is nonsensical in my book, but please don't pretend this is some great moral outrage, it's just government being inefficient as usual.
You can have all my mod points next time I get some.
Next: Murdoch sues the UK town of Scunthorpe...
Bingo. You can legitimately be arrested for something you haven't done, in fact the UK police will generally arrest you "on suspicion of x" if there isn't some pretty concrete evidence. In this case they could arrest you on suspicion of drink driving if they saw you take a gulp of beer and get in a car, brethalyse you, find you're well under the limit and send you on your way. No reason to get all social networking on your arse.
There's nothing wrong with 5+2=7=9-2 as a mathematical statement. It's not a traditional equation, but it's fine as a statement.
Agreed all round, with a caveat. I'm paid minimum wage in the UK (around $9/hr) and I frequently use the internet to learn about programming and computational science. Admittedly, it's never likely to turn me into a well rounded commercial coder, but that's not what I want. I want a FREE education at approximately university level. I can't afford £20k to do a degree that I won't use, that probably won't get me a job in the industry and will leave me burdened with repayments for a decade or more.
I want the information that's useful for my little projects and I can't afford to pay much, if anything. It's freely available. That's really cool. I might end up doing something computer based for a living eventually, but I'm certainly not going to spend two years income and five years with no income, that's SEVEN YEARS WAGES in effect, to be interested in something.
I partly agree, there are multiple factors which can skew this survey. Compatibility and multimedia capabilities are certainly included, if they have even a perceived value then they'll skew the graph.
But that's where I would differ. I don't think the perceived differences are right. Windows is just as good as Apple when it comes to photomanipulation for example, because they both run Photoshop, the commercial and industry standard, there's no big technical software difference. At the same time Linux and OSX are nearly identical, both being direct Unix descendants (OSX is certified Unix I believe?), they just have a different commercial/public ethos.
At the end of the day, I'm a sucker for linux, but it's still great to see a sister OS taking a chunk of the commercial market from a system that I've learned not to comment on. If you can't be nice...
Devil's Advocate:
;)
The $25k pays for mining the ore, extracting the metals, drilling kilometres under the sea for the oil, polymerising it, designing the units, injection moulding and, yes, your job putting it all together. I'm guessing you didn't do all of that...but if you did, then yes, you should get a pay rise, or at least a funkier job title
You mean they're going to release a phone that doesn't have commercial lock-ins and a properly open source OS? Damn those commies to hell!
:)
Seriously, I've been trying to find an open source *nix phone where you don't have to void the warranty to use it. If the Chinese make a decent one then I'll be buying it. Capitalism at its best people, Communists are allowed to play by Capitalist rules if they want to.
Erm....I can't view Facebook, due to having personal data and all, but there isn't a single comment in the link that doesn't look like a well crafted sub-parody. I suspect the linked article is a bit of shameless self-promotion akin to the ones you won't see on MY BLOG!!!!
Whoops.
Seriously, there's far better parodies out there. The Onion for instance, or even better, Tom Chiver's non-parody blog...
It doesn't get any better than this..... They shut it down, they're pandering to federal government. The don't shut it down, they're supporting terrorists. They shut it down, they're giving in to Big Money over an independent 'net. They don't shut it down and they're aiding and abetting anti-American behaviour. They shut it down, they're Killing Free Speech. They don't shut it down and they're......well, to be honest I could go off on 101 diatribes. I've got great Slashdot karma, my comments have a pretty high average, hell...I don't even have to watch adverts or even give them money....and yet I have this weird feeling that I fundamentally disagree with both sides of Slashdot arguments, On both a mathematical and psychological level, this worries me.
Bazinga. There go my points, but hey, totally worth it.
Not in the UK it hasn't. It's certainly not on a massive scale, and it's maybe or maybe not due to a democratic system, but they're present nonetheless. I'd point to Cuba as a non-democratic country that has, on occasion, put both the US and the UK to shame when it comes to a state care system. Both democratic and non-democratic systems can bring many benefits and many harms, and without doubt neither is a panacea.
To defend your point, if this was an issue of resources rather than control then China would selectively block high resource traffic first, streamed video, flash intensive sites and the like. Google, on the other hand, generally offer a stupidly high processor-usage-to-data ratio that blocking them seems unproductive.
Newton's laws don't explain the precession of orbits - a non-circular orbit doesn't repeat over and over again, it slowly moves around the centre of mass of the system due to it being "tweaked" by relativistic effects when it's closer/further from a circular orbit. The effect is most pronounced from our point of view in Mercury's orbit as it's quite deep in the Sun's gravity well. Arthur Eddington, whilst investigating Einstein's work on SR, wrote to him asking whether SR explained Mercury's precession...turns out it did so pretty much perfectly.