Hell, the waves from them passing is probably pushing the oily water *over* the booms, making them that much less effective. I think that 300 ft rule should have been put in place, and 300 yards would be better, likely.
Seriously - they're orange tubes of canvas filled with kitty litter and enough styrofoam to float (that's *my* guess, anyway.) Take three close-ups, shuffle them, and you wouldn't be able to tell which is which.
Perhaps that's what the reporters really want! They go swishing by, too fast, let their wake wash over the booms, and then report on how the booms are completely useless, and BP is just wasting more money.
Microsoft is not satisfied with getting nine women pregnant and getting a baby in a month - they think we should get 259 women pregnant, and get a baby in a day.
Somethings just *HAVE* to happen in sequence, and can't happen in parallel. You can't add x and y to get z *WHILE* you're adding z and w to get n.
Why is it "orange and purple" are automatically considered more professional than "brown"? Is it because it's a warm, welcoming color, reminiscent of freshly plowed ground, ready to grow crops? Is it because "flashy" is considered more important than "it works"?
Or has Ubuntu been taken over by flippin' LSU Tiger fans, and the menu will start getting all kinds of fake french suffixes and spellings applied to it? The brown of Ubuntu's current default Gnome theme goes so *VERY* well with my Enlightenment 16 theme (ShinyMetal). We don't *ALL* have to fall into Microsoft's Fisher-Pricing of the user interface!
One of the hard things about archiving these tweets is... do they get to archive the tweets that his tweets may be in reply to? How do they verify a bit.ly link actually pointed to what the expanded URL archived claimed to be? These are 140 character type-bites! There's no space to have internal context - the majority of their meaning is in all the tweets they reply to, and that reply to them!
Agreed! I started it up - and then went to pick the directory to look in for pictures... Unfortunately (Ubuntu 9.10), it's a drop-down that gives me my 2TB RAID array that I have mounted under my home directory, and "No cameras detected". At that point, it's trying to crawl down the directories of mirrors of old Linux installs. And it wants to move everything it finds into *ONE* directory?
The other story of the 20th Century was "Just-In-Time", which meant reserves and stockpiles have been kept as low as feasible. That would be another factor limiting acceptance of sail - we'd need larger stockpiles to ride out any delays. Honestly though, with satellite imaging, and computer control - there's no real reason sail travel should be any less controllable and predictable than using fossil fuels. And at the speeds involved, there wouldn't even need to be any major code to do image processing and interpretation on the ship itself (though with the computer needed to handle the rigging, and the need to monitor against potential collisions, should be enough to actually do the planning on ship... but coordination would be better from a central site and general directions relayed via satellite.)
Iran? Certainly not, but it doesn't matter because they don't have the technology and economy required to develop ASW. Their only hope is that someone else invents it and gives it to them (like the Russians or Chinese).
Um... You missed a news report - Iran launched a satellite of its own a few days ago.
Now, you're a jihadist terrorist organization that would like to make sure everyone follows your particular religious views (which includes you at the top, defining the rules, including the rules about what you can do that other people can't - see Sumptuary Laws)... What do you do to make sure *NOBODY* escapes - even if they try to escape into outer space? What do you do if you don't like their spy satellites watching you? What do you do if you think the other Great Satan is an alien from Outer Space and you want to keep him from attacking us? In sum - what do you do if you're batshit crazy and want to fuck up the world's future?
You launch a few satellites, that don't even have to be *THAT* reliable, as their whole purpose in the first place is to get up into the orbital area and explode, filling the LEO and Geosynch orbital ranges with steel shot 2-5mm in diameter.
Watch NASA have to send an emergency call to the ISS telling the astronauts to bail out *NOW* and land where-ever they can. Watch the mixmaster of debris turn the ISS into even *MORE* debris for the cause of Allah.
Or just launch a few big rocks, and pick where you deorbit them. Maybe not quite as explosive as your friendly nuke, but hella cheaper and not nearly as finicky about duds. And if you're not excessively concerned with accuracy (after all, you currently own just 5% of the US land surface, and most of it is unoccupied), toss the rocks past the moon for a gravity assist and get them coming down faster than escape velocity.
The whole problem with terrorism is that it's just too damn easy. People spook too easily.
Once upon a time, virtual memory meant *specifically* memory that was simulated by use of other resources, such as swap space on a hard drive, or even occasionally on tape. Perhaps we need a better term than "virtual" here, as apparently we're using it in several senses.
Then again, the OS courses I took were in the 1980s, so that's probably in the ancient history course of today's CompSci curriculum.
Memory that was addressed somewhere other than sequentially was "remapped memory".
Though it hasn't been developed further, as far as I can tell, in the last 4 years - the Heroes of Might & Magic III mod "Wake of the Gods" http://wakeofthegods.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/ really deserves a lot of credit. Not only does it extend the basic game play, but it *ADDS* a scripting language that the original didn't have in any form, allowing for even *MORE* expansion. Map and Campaign editors are almost a given these days - but this one dives deeper, making changes that would almost seem to require the original source code.
Hard drives have gotten bigger, and bigger, and *BIGGER* over the last 20-30 years. But they don't *FEEL* that much faster. They've become wonders at streaming huge blobs of contiguous data out - so why do databases need huge steaming bloody chunks of RAM cache? Because the random access times *SUCK* and really haven't gotten that much better!
Capacity has gone from 5MB to 1TB, but spindle speeds have gone from 3600RPM - up to a max of??? 15K RPM for some really expensive drives? Track-to-Track seek hasn't gone up much. Neither has real nor manufacture's claimed throughput rates.
RAM hasn't nearly kept up with CPUs, either, but the disparity is nothing compared to the hold you get when you have to go after some data from the hard drive that isn't in the cache.
It's so bad, I strongly considered putting 3 4GB FLASH modules with IDE adapters (RAID5 - but I didn't study this to see if 2 8GB with RAID1 might be better, or other variations) into my new machine on the PATA header to act as the root drive, holding everything but/home,/var, and/tmp.
Sequential read speed is kinda nice, but I *do* need to do random accesses sometimes! I listen to my nice little 2TB RAID array all the time, as the heads move back and forth singing their little song.
dim ymax(screenwidth),ymin(screenwidth) For xtemp = xlower to xupper step xincr for ytemp = ylower to yupper step yincr compute z=f(xtemp,ytemp) (x,y)=transform(xtemp,ytemp,z) if yymax(x) then plot x,y : ymax(x) = y next ytemp, xtemp
Adjust your viewpoint for your 3D to 2D matrix so it plots from front to back.
Algorithm comes from an old book on doing 3D on an Apple ][ - it wasn't too hard to convert it to work on a TRS-80 Model I or a CoCo.
The problem is two-fold - 1 being damn sure you're actually firing *STRAIGHT* up in the air, and 2) a bullet isn't very heavy, and the slightest winds will push it to one side or another.
You might get hit - it does happen. I can't remember the actual figure, but if you were to fire an M-16 (AR-15 civilian version) as though it were a cannon, the round would land something like a mile away. See the ballistics people for the correct value. As a guesstimate, though, straight up, from an M16 with a muzzle velocity of 2,800ft/sec (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m16.htm), we get a maximum height of 23.2 miles ignoring air resistance (which can't be right, can it? Of course, since air resistance goes up by the square of the speed, air resistance really *isn't* negligible!) [I really need to do a review class on physics! It's been *WAY* too long!] Anyway, even if it only goes up a mile or two, that's plenty of time for wind to affect it.
Plus, on the way down, it's going to hit a "terminal velocity" where resistance from the wind matches the accelleration of gravity. This is likely to be significantly lower than muzzle velocity.
Actually, I think you're mixing up two different myths - the one about the bullet fired straight up (which isn't likely to hit you, but almost certainly would hurt you!) and the penny dropped from a great height (which still isn't that likely to hit you, but isn't that likely to kill you, either). The bullet being more aerodynamic, should have a much higher terminal velocity than the flat, fluttering penny.
Kinda interesting question, really - how high *would* it go, when everything's taken into account - how fast is a bullet's terminal velocity - and how long would it be up there? I'd figure even if it did come straight back down, you'd have time to get out of the way. And I wonder if a good high-velocity sniper rifle could put something in orbit around the moon???
Rosenberg is not just a fantasy writer - his Metzada Mercenary Corp stories (Not For Glory) tell of a hard-core military SciFi mercenary unit who would probably give Hammer's Slammers a run for their money.
Still another thing to do involves *three* polarizers. Place A & B at 90deg angle to each other - no light. Place C at 45deg angle in front of both - still no light. In back of both - still no light.
Place C *BETWEEN* A & B - WTF is that light doing coming through *NOW*????
Actually, I'd have no problem with this, except that I'd prefer that documentation on the existance of the bug be provided, along with known triggers and work-arounds. This is the problem I generally have with Microsoft; they will deny the problem, and if they do admit to it, bury the fix VERY deep inside of their "knowledgebase".
The simple fact is that someone has to be held responsible for certain types of content on the internet. It cannot be the hoster of the content, because that puts the material beyond the reach of the law; there is nothing to stop someone from hosting child pornography Outer Mongolia and hence avoiding the law.
It is not a simple fact; it is an opinion. Many people disagree. The Internet is making geography irrelevant with respect to content. True, someone can host child porn in Outer Mongolia, and until we have a planetary government, they would probably be clear. I don't necessarily see this as a problem, especially in light of continuing moves to expand what is claimed as child pornography. Who's definition of pornography do we use? Denmark's (Somewhere between 12 and 17, IIRC)? The US's? (18 or 21, sorta)? How about Iran's (No legal age. Women are evil and should never be seen.)?
There are plenty of laws to use to attack those who abuse children. Kidnapping, assault, rape, etc. A man taking pictures of cheerleaders at a football game, however, shouldn't.
The poster is where the responsibility lies; not the hosting site. And if you don't like that someone in another country doesn't have the same views you do with respect to some of these things, please consider moving to Pennsylvania and joining an Amish colony.
Therefore the only practical way of bringing things under the remit of the law is to make the ISP's responsible. They can do it. We have the technology to filter everything and so excuses about how the ISP's cannot filter everything on the internet are nonsense.
Obviously you don't read the YRO section; I'd suspect you have it in your "never let me see these articles" section.
I could post an image of a nude women here in the Slashdot comments, and no filter yet made would pick it up, since it would be an ASCII art. Image recognition software is, well, almost completely useless. And keyword-based blocking is hopeless; it blocks legitimate material almost as often as it blocks pornography. How many filters have caught up with the term pr0n, and how soon will they catch up with the next variation down the pipe, say pr0|\| ? Or nrop?
In fact, the ISP, in refusing to shut down customer's access to the group, may have been attempting to maintain their common-carrier status. Many arguments have been made that if they refuse to carry something, they become editors/publishers, rather than simply a connection.
And one of these days, I'll figure out just what the hell the problem is that people have with children seeing nude bodies. If they're old enough to give a damn about it, they *should* be being told about it. And I mean serious education, about the full range of interest, and not just the dry statistics on contraceptive failure rates, and a set of rules without any explanation for reasons behind them.
The best way forward is to make someone pay, Otherwise the Internet will become a lawless, chaotic domain that will undermine our lives.
No, the Internet will develop different laws. The violence associated with anarchy is not due to a lack of government, but due to too many people wanting to become a government.
Some argue that the internet has always been lawless, and worked well, but this does not apply anymore.
Says you. Again, opinion, one which I do not share.
Now the internet affects the real world, and it is not just academics that have access to it, but criminals, pornographers and common people too.
At least you recognize that criminals and pornographers are a disjoint set. However, I would suspect, at the current rate we're putting people in jail for consensual crimes (drug use), and a noticable tendency of late to ignore the rights of those who have completed their sentences for crimes, that "criminals" and "common people" will soon enough be the same group.
We must try and put a lid on things, to stop it from spiralling out of control.
To stop it from spiralling out of your control, or the control of people you like and agree with. It will control itself.
But you won't like it.
In fact, I find your views rather odd, considering your e-mail address. Do you believe the Burning Times can never return? Especially with some of the disturbing things President Bush(2) has done since he took office? (No, I voted for Harry Browne. It was as close as I could get to "None of the Above", since secret write-in votes are not available here.)
Audio-interactivity with a computer.... How do you spell Teddy Ruxspin? And two dozen other interactive toys?
And while we're at it, what about the French VideoTex (or whatever the hell they called it...)
I find nothing all that cool about it. It's like Access Software advertising on their first Tex Murphy game (what was that damn thing called? Something about Mars, IIRC) was the first game with "digitized voice" that didn't need a sound card.
Me, I wondered how they got away with that claim after listening to Big Five's Defense Command for many years on my TRS-80 Model I. Don't bitch to me about bloatware... My first machine had 4K RAM, 4K ROM, and some damn good games....
The local library that is acting as my ISP (2 hrs/ per day on 12 lines... No great bargain, even for free) is deep in the Bible Belt, so it's amazing that a filtering policy as enlightened as ours is is in place. All machines with exposed monitors are filtered, at all times. Adults can have an unfiltered account, that is only unfiltered on the in-desk machines. Parents can elect to deny their children access to the Internet, filtered-only access to the Internet, or unfiltered access to the Internet (of course, on those machines with submerged monitors). Personally, I say unfilter them all and let Bob sort them out, but I would like to keep the connectivity, so....
One of the other Slashdotters mentioned that we need to put out the anti-censorship message a little more forcefully. I have to agree. A couple of years ago, I posted a short essay against censorship, both as a celebration of National Banned Books Week (see the ALA homepage for more info on that) and as a some new content for the new website, since our system was just going online at the time. I dashed it off in 20 minutes or so, threw a couple of graphics on the page, and left it be... So, imagine my surprise when doing a vanity search, and up pops my name in a half-dozen places I wasn't expecting. People had quoted my little article. And started linking to it. And it was getting hits. Ok, so I expected 10 or 20 hits a month... No, 10 or 20 hits a day... Wow! A minor little page that doesn't say much of anything! There can't be too much out there about censorship, if I'm turning up that high on the search engines. So, I'm begging everyone: get your views out there. Post your ideas. Get my hitrate down where it belongs!
>>...Personally I hate the government and don't trust them with anything. That's why I vote Libertarian [note the.org:)]. And don't even tell me that I'm throwing away my vote..
>You're throwing away your vote. The only libertarian who are ever going to vote in Congress are going to be elected as Republicans, like Ron Paul (R-TX), who was previously the Libertarian candidate for President. If enough libertarians had his sense, they could actually accomplish something within the GOP.
Except that being in the GOP is antithetical to the idea of Libertarianism. In fact, at its deepest heart, being in the LP is antithetical to being a libertarian, but as you say, we have to work within reality.
When I vote LP, I am NOT throwing away my vote. If I simply failed to vote, THEN I would be throwing it away. But, by voting LP, I am voting None Of The Above, which is an entirely different matter. It's an active statement, rather than passive disinterest.
By the way, in many parts of the country, you cannot write in a ballot. If you were to attempt it, you would be required to get a form from the people checking registration, and then, with a strong possibility that you were the only one asking for such, your write-in is no longer secret.
In fact, I feel any kind of organized political parties are a serious distortion of the ideas of the founding fathers, and it was only after they were actually infected with running the government that they succumbed to the idea of parties.
Personally, I think anyone who feels like they need to run for political office, especially anyone who does so because they think others need their help in running their lives, is certifiably insane, and should be declared incompetent and confined for treatment. I'm too busy running my own life to try to run someone elses.
What do we do instead? Try the suggestion in James P. Hogan's Voyage to Yesteryear.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, the waves from them passing is probably pushing the oily water *over* the booms, making them that much less effective. I think that 300 ft rule should have been put in place, and 300 yards would be better, likely.
Seriously - they're orange tubes of canvas filled with kitty litter and enough styrofoam to float (that's *my* guess, anyway.) Take three close-ups, shuffle them, and you wouldn't be able to tell which is which.
Perhaps that's what the reporters really want! They go swishing by, too fast, let their wake wash over the booms, and then report on how the booms are completely useless, and BP is just wasting more money.
Microsoft is not satisfied with getting nine women pregnant and getting a baby in a month - they think we should get 259 women pregnant, and get a baby in a day.
Somethings just *HAVE* to happen in sequence, and can't happen in parallel. You can't add x and y to get z *WHILE* you're adding z and w to get n.
Why is it "orange and purple" are automatically considered more professional than "brown"? Is it because it's a warm, welcoming color, reminiscent of freshly plowed ground, ready to grow crops? Is it because "flashy" is considered more important than "it works"?
Or has Ubuntu been taken over by flippin' LSU Tiger fans, and the menu will start getting all kinds of fake french suffixes and spellings applied to it? The brown of Ubuntu's current default Gnome theme goes so *VERY* well with my Enlightenment 16 theme (ShinyMetal). We don't *ALL* have to fall into Microsoft's Fisher-Pricing of the user interface!
One of the hard things about archiving these tweets is ... do they get to archive the tweets that his tweets may be in reply to? How do they verify a bit.ly link actually pointed to what the expanded URL archived claimed to be? These are 140 character type-bites! There's no space to have internal context - the majority of their meaning is in all the tweets they reply to, and that reply to them!
Agreed! I started it up - and then went to pick the directory to look in for pictures... Unfortunately (Ubuntu 9.10), it's a drop-down that gives me my 2TB RAID array that I have mounted under my home directory, and "No cameras detected". At that point, it's trying to crawl down the directories of mirrors of old Linux installs. And it wants to move everything it finds into *ONE* directory?
The other story of the 20th Century was "Just-In-Time", which meant reserves and stockpiles have been kept as low as feasible. That would be another factor limiting acceptance of sail - we'd need larger stockpiles to ride out any delays. Honestly though, with satellite imaging, and computer control - there's no real reason sail travel should be any less controllable and predictable than using fossil fuels. And at the speeds involved, there wouldn't even need to be any major code to do image processing and interpretation on the ship itself (though with the computer needed to handle the rigging, and the need to monitor against potential collisions, should be enough to actually do the planning on ship... but coordination would be better from a central site and general directions relayed via satellite.)
Iran? Certainly not, but it doesn't matter because they don't have the technology and economy required to develop ASW. Their only hope is that someone else invents it and gives it to them (like the Russians or Chinese).
Um... You missed a news report - Iran launched a satellite of its own a few days ago.
Now, you're a jihadist terrorist organization that would like to make sure everyone follows your particular religious views (which includes you at the top, defining the rules, including the rules about what you can do that other people can't - see Sumptuary Laws)... What do you do to make sure *NOBODY* escapes - even if they try to escape into outer space? What do you do if you don't like their spy satellites watching you? What do you do if you think the other Great Satan is an alien from Outer Space and you want to keep him from attacking us? In sum - what do you do if you're batshit crazy and want to fuck up the world's future?
You launch a few satellites, that don't even have to be *THAT* reliable, as their whole purpose in the first place is to get up into the orbital area and explode, filling the LEO and Geosynch orbital ranges with steel shot 2-5mm in diameter.
Watch NASA have to send an emergency call to the ISS telling the astronauts to bail out *NOW* and land where-ever they can. Watch the mixmaster of debris turn the ISS into even *MORE* debris for the cause of Allah.
Or just launch a few big rocks, and pick where you deorbit them. Maybe not quite as explosive as your friendly nuke, but hella cheaper and not nearly as finicky about duds. And if you're not excessively concerned with accuracy (after all, you currently own just 5% of the US land surface, and most of it is unoccupied), toss the rocks past the moon for a gravity assist and get them coming down faster than escape velocity.
The whole problem with terrorism is that it's just too damn easy. People spook too easily.
Because the poster didn't ask for simply a list of games - the poster asked for *best* games that work on a certain class of machines.
I'm thinking Slashdot needs a new moderation category: "Actually answers the original question", or maybe "On Topic".
Once upon a time, virtual memory meant *specifically* memory that was simulated by use of other resources, such as swap space on a hard drive, or even occasionally on tape. Perhaps we need a better term than "virtual" here, as apparently we're using it in several senses.
Then again, the OS courses I took were in the 1980s, so that's probably in the ancient history course of today's CompSci curriculum.
Memory that was addressed somewhere other than sequentially was "remapped memory".
Though it hasn't been developed further, as far as I can tell, in the last 4 years - the Heroes of Might & Magic III mod "Wake of the Gods" http://wakeofthegods.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/
really deserves a lot of credit. Not only does it extend the basic game play, but it *ADDS* a scripting language that the original didn't have in any form, allowing for even *MORE* expansion. Map and Campaign editors are almost a given these days - but this one dives deeper, making changes that would almost seem to require the original source code.
Except that it really doesn't help that much!
/home, /var, and /tmp.
Hard drives have gotten bigger, and bigger, and *BIGGER* over the last 20-30 years. But they don't *FEEL* that much faster. They've become wonders at streaming huge blobs of contiguous data out - so why do databases need huge steaming bloody chunks of RAM cache? Because the random access times *SUCK* and really haven't gotten that much better!
Capacity has gone from 5MB to 1TB, but spindle speeds have gone from 3600RPM - up to a max of??? 15K RPM for some really expensive drives? Track-to-Track seek hasn't gone up much. Neither has real nor manufacture's claimed throughput rates.
RAM hasn't nearly kept up with CPUs, either, but the disparity is nothing compared to the hold you get when you have to go after some data from the hard drive that isn't in the cache.
It's so bad, I strongly considered putting 3 4GB FLASH modules with IDE adapters (RAID5 - but I didn't study this to see if 2 8GB with RAID1 might be better, or other variations) into my new machine on the PATA header to act as the root drive, holding everything but
Sequential read speed is kinda nice, but I *do* need to do random accesses sometimes! I listen to my nice little 2TB RAID array all the time, as the heads move back and forth singing their little song.
Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, was the voyage through the universe documentary done in conjunction with PBS. Contact is the novel.
dim ymax(screenwidth),ymin(screenwidth)
For xtemp = xlower to xupper step xincr
for ytemp = ylower to yupper step yincr
compute z=f(xtemp,ytemp)
(x,y)=transform(xtemp,ytemp,z)
if yymax(x) then plot x,y : ymax(x) = y
next ytemp, xtemp
Adjust your viewpoint for your 3D to 2D matrix so it plots from front to back.
Algorithm comes from an old book on doing 3D on an Apple ][ - it wasn't too hard to convert it to work on a TRS-80 Model I or a CoCo.
> It is a good thing, however that not all predictions come true.
Damn straight! "Now all restaurants are Taco Bell."
That movie has too many right predictions already!
The problem is two-fold - 1 being damn sure you're actually firing *STRAIGHT* up in the air, and 2) a bullet isn't very heavy, and the slightest winds will push it to one side or another.
, we get a maximum height of 23.2 miles ignoring air resistance (which can't be right, can it? Of course, since air resistance goes up by the square of the speed, air resistance really *isn't* negligible!) [I really need to do a review class on physics! It's been *WAY* too long!] Anyway, even if it only goes up a mile or two, that's plenty of time for wind to affect it.
You might get hit - it does happen. I can't remember the actual figure, but if you were to fire an M-16 (AR-15 civilian version) as though it were a cannon, the round would land something like a mile away. See the ballistics people for the correct value. As a guesstimate, though, straight up, from an M16 with a muzzle velocity of 2,800ft/sec (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m16.htm)
Plus, on the way down, it's going to hit a "terminal velocity" where resistance from the wind matches the accelleration of gravity. This is likely to be significantly lower than muzzle velocity.
Actually, I think you're mixing up two different myths - the one about the bullet fired straight up (which isn't likely to hit you, but almost certainly would hurt you!) and the penny dropped from a great height (which still isn't that likely to hit you, but isn't that likely to kill you, either). The bullet being more aerodynamic, should have a much higher terminal velocity than the flat, fluttering penny.
Kinda interesting question, really - how high *would* it go, when everything's taken into account - how fast is a bullet's terminal velocity - and how long would it be up there? I'd figure even if it did come straight back down, you'd have time to get out of the way. And I wonder if a good high-velocity sniper rifle could put something in orbit around the moon???
Rosenberg is not just a fantasy writer - his Metzada Mercenary Corp stories (Not For Glory) tell of a hard-core military SciFi mercenary unit who would probably give Hammer's Slammers a run for their money.
Still another thing to do involves *three* polarizers. Place A & B at 90deg angle to each other - no light. Place C at 45deg angle in front of both - still no light. In back of both - still no light.
Place C *BETWEEN* A & B - WTF is that light doing coming through *NOW*????
Actually, I'd have no problem with this, except that I'd prefer that documentation on the existance of the bug be provided, along with known triggers and work-arounds. This is the problem I generally have with Microsoft; they will deny the problem, and if they do admit to it, bury the fix VERY deep inside of their "knowledgebase".
The simple fact is that someone has to be held responsible for certain types of content on the internet. It cannot be the hoster of the content, because that puts the material beyond the reach of the law; there is nothing to stop someone from hosting child pornography Outer Mongolia and hence avoiding the law.
It is not a simple fact; it is an opinion. Many people disagree. The Internet is making geography irrelevant with respect to content. True, someone can host child porn in Outer Mongolia, and until we have a planetary government, they would probably be clear. I don't necessarily see this as a problem, especially in light of continuing moves to expand what is claimed as child pornography. Who's definition of pornography do we use? Denmark's (Somewhere between 12 and 17, IIRC)? The US's? (18 or 21, sorta)? How about Iran's (No legal age. Women are evil and should never be seen.)?
There are plenty of laws to use to attack those who abuse children. Kidnapping, assault, rape, etc. A man taking pictures of cheerleaders at a football game, however, shouldn't.
The poster is where the responsibility lies; not the hosting site. And if you don't like that someone in another country doesn't have the same views you do with respect to some of these things, please consider moving to Pennsylvania and joining an Amish colony.
Therefore the only practical way of bringing things under the remit of the law is to make the ISP's responsible. They can do it. We have the technology to filter everything and so excuses about how the ISP's cannot filter everything on the internet are nonsense.
Obviously you don't read the YRO section; I'd suspect you have it in your "never let me see these articles" section.
I could post an image of a nude women here in the Slashdot comments, and no filter yet made would pick it up, since it would be an ASCII art. Image recognition software is, well, almost completely useless. And keyword-based blocking is hopeless; it blocks legitimate material almost as often as it blocks pornography. How many filters have caught up with the term pr0n, and how soon will they catch up with the next variation down the pipe, say pr0|\| ? Or nrop?
In fact, the ISP, in refusing to shut down customer's access to the group, may have been attempting to maintain their common-carrier status. Many arguments have been made that if they refuse to carry something, they become editors/publishers, rather than simply a connection.
And one of these days, I'll figure out just what the hell the problem is that people have with children seeing nude bodies. If they're old enough to give a damn about it, they *should* be being told about it. And I mean serious education, about the full range of interest, and not just the dry statistics on contraceptive failure rates, and a set of rules without any explanation for reasons behind them.
The best way forward is to make someone pay, Otherwise the Internet will become a lawless, chaotic domain that will undermine our lives.
No, the Internet will develop different laws. The violence associated with anarchy is not due to a lack of government, but due to too many people wanting to become a government.
Some argue that the internet has always been lawless, and worked well, but this does not apply anymore.
Says you. Again, opinion, one which I do not share.
Now the internet affects the real world, and it is not just academics that have access to it, but criminals, pornographers and common people too.
At least you recognize that criminals and pornographers are a disjoint set. However, I would suspect, at the current rate we're putting people in jail for consensual crimes (drug use), and a noticable tendency of late to ignore the rights of those who have completed their sentences for crimes, that "criminals" and "common people" will soon enough be the same group.
We must try and put a lid on things, to stop it from spiralling out of control.
To stop it from spiralling out of your control, or the control of people you like and agree with. It will control itself.
But you won't like it.
In fact, I find your views rather odd, considering your e-mail address. Do you believe the Burning Times can never return? Especially with some of the disturbing things President Bush(2) has done since he took office? (No, I voted for Harry Browne. It was as close as I could get to "None of the Above", since secret write-in votes are not available here.)
Audio-interactivity with a computer.... How do you spell Teddy Ruxspin? And two dozen other interactive toys?
And while we're at it, what about the French VideoTex (or whatever the hell they called it...)
I find nothing all that cool about it. It's like Access Software advertising on their first Tex Murphy game (what was that damn thing called? Something about Mars, IIRC) was the first game with "digitized voice" that didn't need a sound card.
Me, I wondered how they got away with that claim after listening to Big Five's Defense Command for many years on my TRS-80 Model I. Don't bitch to me about bloatware... My first machine had 4K RAM, 4K ROM, and some damn good games....
My first hint that something was wrong was the site's homepage, which consists of a poor quality jpg resized up, just to make things REALLY bad.
Personally, I think the patents will nuke themselves.
Yeppers, folks, it's a serial number. We've got two that we're making comparisons of.
...
Code39 1 23 1 23 1 23
.ahb6. C3nZ CNjY CxfX. #000 111 222
.ahb6. ChbW D3D3 DNz2. #333 444 555
.ahb6. Dxv1 Dhr0 E3T7. #666 777 888
.ahb6. ENP6 #999
.ahb6. aGic aqeb aaaa. #aaa bbb ccc
.ahb6. bWCh bGyg bquf. #ddd eee fff
.ahb6. baqe cWSl cGOk. #ggg hhh iii
.ahb6. cqKj caGi dW8p. #jjj kkk lll
.ahb6. dG4o dq0n daWm. #mmm nnn ooo
.ahb6. eXmt eHis erer. #ppp qqq rrr
.ahb6. ebaq fXCx fHyw. #sss ttt uuu
.ahb6. fruv fbqu gXSB. #vvv www xxx
.ahb6. gHOA grKz z2DN. #yyy zzz $$$
.ahb6. BgXS y2nJ zMzM. #/// %%%
.ahb6. AgHO BM5U Bw1T. #+++ ---
SNs:
.C3 n Z C3 n Z C3 n X E3 n Z E3 n Y CN n X
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 8 0 0 8 0 1 1 0 2
.C3 n Z C3 n Z C3 n X E3 n Z Dh D 0 CN n X
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 8 0 0 7 4 7 1 0 2
.ahb6.bWChbGygbquf.
.ahb6 Code 39 ?39
.aaer Codabar CRR
.CNf7 Code128 128
.fHmc UPC-A UPA
.fGj2 UPC-A(5) ?15
.fGjX UPC-A(2) ?12
.fHmg UPC-E UPE
.fGz2 UPC-E(5) ?55
.fGzX UPC-E(2) ?52
.bNjW EAN/JAN13 ?13
.bNb2 EAN/JAN13(5) ?35
.bNbX EAN/JAN13(2) ?32
Note that it does Code128, so it does handle the
complete ASCII character set, we believe. The question marks above are probably lower-case letters.
I'm sorry, but this post totally misses the point of the Hellmouth reports. The families of the victims were hardly the only victims.
I hope I'm not the first to point this out, but one of the leading opponents to filtering software is the ALA - American Library Association (http://www.ala.org). Check their website for more information on why.
The local library that is acting as my ISP (2 hrs/ per day on 12 lines... No great bargain, even for free) is deep in the Bible Belt, so it's amazing that a filtering policy as enlightened as ours is is in place. All machines with exposed monitors are filtered, at all times. Adults can have an unfiltered account, that is only unfiltered on the in-desk machines. Parents can elect to deny their children access to the Internet, filtered-only access to the Internet, or unfiltered access to the Internet (of course, on those machines with submerged monitors). Personally, I say unfilter them all and let Bob sort them out, but I would like to keep the connectivity, so....
One of the other Slashdotters mentioned that we need to put out the anti-censorship message a little more forcefully. I have to agree. A couple of years ago, I posted a short essay against censorship, both as a celebration of National Banned Books Week (see the ALA homepage for more info on that) and as a some new content for the new website, since our system was just going online at the time. I dashed it off in 20 minutes or so, threw a couple of graphics on the page, and left it be... So, imagine my surprise when doing a vanity search, and up pops my name in a half-dozen places I wasn't expecting. People had quoted my little article. And started linking to it. And it was getting hits. Ok, so I expected 10 or 20 hits a month... No, 10 or 20 hits a day... Wow! A minor little page that doesn't say much of anything! There can't be too much out there about censorship, if I'm turning up that high on the search engines. So, I'm begging everyone: get your views out there. Post your ideas. Get my hitrate down where it belongs!
>>...Personally I hate the government and don't trust them with anything. That's why I vote Libertarian [note the .org :)]. And don't even tell me that I'm throwing away my vote..
>You're throwing away your vote. The only libertarian who are ever going to vote in Congress are going to be elected as Republicans, like Ron Paul (R-TX), who was previously the Libertarian candidate for President. If enough libertarians had his sense, they could actually accomplish something within the GOP.
Except that being in the GOP is antithetical to the idea of Libertarianism. In fact, at its deepest heart, being in the LP is antithetical to being a libertarian, but as you say, we have to work within reality.
When I vote LP, I am NOT throwing away my vote. If I simply failed to vote, THEN I would be throwing it away. But, by voting LP, I am voting None Of The Above, which is an entirely different matter. It's an active statement, rather than passive disinterest.
By the way, in many parts of the country, you cannot write in a ballot. If you were to attempt it, you would be required to get a form from the people checking registration, and then, with a strong possibility that you were the only one asking for such, your write-in is no longer secret.
In fact, I feel any kind of organized political parties are a serious distortion of the ideas of the founding fathers, and it was only after they were actually infected with running the government that they succumbed to the idea of parties.
Personally, I think anyone who feels like they need to run for political office, especially anyone who does so because they think others need their help in running their lives, is certifiably insane, and should be declared incompetent and confined for treatment. I'm too busy running my own life to try to run someone elses.
What do we do instead? Try the suggestion in James P. Hogan's Voyage to Yesteryear.