I'm not sure I've ever heard people claim that "peer 2 peer file sharing promotes new music". If anything it's the opposite - you don't find music on p2p unless you go looking for it.
However the *internets* as a medium, primarily websites, e-mail, and linking, DO promote lesser known artists. Sharing music with a friend used to require physically handing over your own personal copy of a CD (or cassette) and hoping it doesn't get messed up. Or best case, recording a tape and handing it over physically.
Now, bands like The Minibosses which could takes years to spread through a niche audience using physical networks, can spread overnight by being linked to (and immediately listened to) from niche blogs.
p2p though? Hypothetically that made sense for a brief period of time between when the internet became popular and bands started putting up websites and myspace pages with music samples. But nowdays myspace, youtube, and band websites are how new music gets spread.
I don't know how much Aneesh is responsible for, but I've been pleasantly surprised by my home state's technology initiatives. We do pretty much everything online these days - DMV, property values, utilities, car taxes.
A number of years back the virginia state government charged you an extra ~$10 to make payments online, compared to sending the same credit card number to them in the mail to be processed by hand. That nonsense is long gone, thankfully.
You're jumping the gun a bit with this "taxing the wealthy" stuff. The OP just said he's ok with *taxing*. Right and left both agree with taxes and infrastructure and "helping people" in a general sense - the extent they're ok with is the difference.
The OP's point was not that he wants those things in *excess* (arguably the left's position), just that he is ok with those things existing, contrary to the extreme anarchist views of some libertarians.
His first sentence, "the government should do as little as necessary to keep the society functioning", makes it pretty clear he doesn't want those things in excess. Unless the right wants to do away with taxes and infrastructure altogether, the only things "left-liberal" on his list are not wanting the government in his bedroom, and government healthcare.
I have canceled installations on my Mac when they requested root access. That never happens on Windows.
I should add - "yet".
Vista has taken the short-term hit for every click causing a UAC prompt, but (hopefully) the next generation of Windows software will be designed to avoid UAC prompts by not requiring administrator access for things that shouldn't.
In a couple years, you'll see Windows users taking UAC prompts seriously, and perhaps even canceling that "britneyspears.jpg.exe" or adware install.
This is the key difference between Mac/Linux and Windows.
Windows has a long history of poor security policies, which most Windows software is written towards. When you run installs on Windows you fully expect it to require administrator access.
Linux and Mac have the same sort of UAC pop-ups, except very little software triggers it. The security policies have been around much longer. Users often don't even HAVE root access. So the software is (mostly) written with these things in mind.
I have canceled installations on my Mac when they requested root access. That never happens on Windows.
Cheapy crappy products are cheap and crappy, in regards to both hardware and software. If you like Windows software, and want reliable+fast hardware, it costs roughly the same as a Mac. Nothing to see here, move along.
I don't completely disbelieve you, but I seriously thought Vista would be good when I had to use it at work. I figured it's gotta fix problems from XP, and XP is already pretty good.
Instead it seems like every idiotic problem in XP was carried over to Vista, plus I found many more hugely annoying problems ADDED in Vista. Things like UAC prompts appearing behind windows, not being able to bring explorer windows to the front when clicking in the bottom right, not being able to get it to remember folder settings, ftp hanging and leaving explorer windows frozen on the screen until i would reboot, and so on.
The first time I used Vista was *after* Service Pack 1. I was especially disappointed =(
Now that they charge extra for downgrades, I think it's more of a disincentive to purchase new computers. Or people get their geek friends to carry over their old hard drive.
But yeah, your average "i double click the internet" user will be fine with Vista. And would be just as fine with Mac or Linux or Windows 98, for that matter. Hardly a compliment to Vista.
Mod parent up. For the vast majority of people, it's calories. Unless someone is not drinking soda and other high-calorie beverages, not eating junk food, and otherwise not eating excess calories is step #1 and is the only thing that matters for most people.
Even exercise has shown to be less of a factor than calories, for the same reason that soda is worse than candy. Exercise increases hunger while burning calories. Soda increases calories while not decreasing hunger.
Either way it comes down to calories, and almost anything else is just excuses or things that help/hurt appetite. (thus causing excess calorie consumption)
I'm a little afraid to read the OP you're responding to, but you're absolutely right. I cringe thinking of an admin showing a CFO a base64 mail spool. It took me a while to learn this too, but costs and results are all that matter to the people above you at most companies. This isn't really a bad thing either.
Not to mention, you could use an html image link to the company logo on the website if you're so scared to death of adding a tiny compressed logo to every e-mail...
Well...that depends on what you consider competition. If you're talking Exchange-look-a-likes, sure. But if your company is OK with a Good Reliable mail server with a separate calendaring app that integrates well with the mail app your company uses, you can get solutions dirt cheap or free.
I've configured a heck of a lot of unix mail servers, and I can't pretend any are as easy to setup and configure as Exchange. But every Exchange+Outlook solution I've used at a half dozen companies has been painfully slow and unreliable with piss-poor webmail. For how important mail is to most companies, I'm surprised they put up with Exchange.
I actually R'dTFA to check, and it doesn't seem to mention what the average grades are for the total population.
Saying "Facebook users get 3.0-3.5, non-users get 3.5-4.0" means something very different if the average is 3.25, versus if the average of all users is 3.75. Are facebooker users dumber than your average student, or are the few users who don't have a facebook account smarter than the average student?
Two people can clean a loo and they each lost an hour of their life. But a doctor lost years of his life to schooling, while the guy off cleaning the loo has very little loo-cleaning education or experience.
Why would anyone go to school to be a doctor (or DBA, etc.) if they could get paid the same amount of money to sit around cleaning loos (or filing papers)?
Your suggestion that there are a million people to clean the loo isn't exactly true (or important - hypothetically it only takes 1 more person than there are jobs to cut wages to 0). Regardless, we have minimum wage to prevent easy jobs in high supply and low demand from driving wages to 0. It seems like this has worked out fairly well, although I would agree that minimum wage probably has not kept up with inflation.
Not that I totally disagree, but you're acting as if how HARD someone works for 8 hours a day is the only factor in their salary and their stimulation of the economy.
That guy who sweats all day doing construction work for $8/hour, yeah, sure, he's working hard. But *ANYONE* capable of manual labor can do that.
What about a DBA who reads news sites 20 hours a week and does light computer work the other 20 hours? To you or me that seems easy, but try giving your construction worker an Oracle DB and ask him to optimize it. Good luck.
Hard is about training more than it is about sweat. The jobs that pay the most and require the least work are the ones that require years of (often expensive) training. A country with more highly-trained individuals is going to stimulate their economy more than a similar country full of day laborers.
A lot of responses are warning how you'll get a name-dictionary attack and your inbox will fill with spam. But if you can setup a catchall address, odds are you can figure out how to setup a filter and junk all e-mail that doesn't start with a unique string too. Dictionary name spam attacks are trivial to avoid.
chris@domain.com = real address chrisjunkAmazon@domain.com = amazon junk address president@domain.com = goes straight to trash, never seen
It's not that hard to use a character other than a plus. When each user can pick their own junkmail separation character, things will get a lot harder on spammers.
At a glance this would chew up too many addresses at the domain by allowing wildcards. But a work-around to prevent this would be to make each wildcard required to be at the, eg., 8th character. So maybe chris@gmail.com is your real address, and "chris123456newegg@gmail.com" is your fake address.
Any address beginning with "chris132456" still goes to you, but someone else could register "ChrisSmith@gmail.com" without conflicting with your wildcard. Then he could use "ChrisSmithBOBnewegg@gmail.com" as his junk address wildcard space.
This is already fairly trivial to do with Google Apps and some basic filters. But until Gmail adopts it with a pretty interface, yes, the + operator is way too easy for spammers to circumvent.
Another alternative I've heard is to have e-mail to the root address junked, and have a single authoritative + address. chris@gmail.com gets junked, chris+smith@gmail.com is your real address, and chris+newegg@gmail.com gets received at cris+smith@gmail.com. But this doesn't work so hot without a whitelist system, as the spammers can still knowingly append any random crap to the + and you'll still get it, while also making which address they found you from.
Yes, flat catchalls is a fairly bad idea due to brute force spam. However, if you want to get a little tricky, you can use a catchall+filtering to dump all of the address that don't match whatever expression you feel like.
The obvious one is to do a gmail-style + address, although you could use any character (even a letter) for it. If something matches "firstnameX" let it through, everything else gets junked.
I used to do this using TMDA for qmail when I ran my own mail server, using hyphens instead of +. I've migrated to Google Apps and use the catchall and filters on my inbox to keep it that way.
The only place I get spam from now is the idiots who don't know their own e-mail address who keep signing up for airline tickets and the iTunes store (credit card and all) using MY @gmail.com address.
One problem to keep in mind is that our justice system is not perfect. Supposedly a conviction should only happen when there's no reasonable doubt the suspect is guilty, right? But the number of people jailed (and even executed) for crimes they did not commit is astounding.
Jailing or executing someone for a crime they didn't commit is quite bad already. Torturing someone to death though, is somehow much worse.
It's also pointless beyond cruel vengeance (probably not something we should encourage as a means of grieving). There's not much chance the fear of torture is going to stop that dead man from committing the same crime a second time.
Within the United States, in regards to United States citizens, the death penalty is legal. Torture is not. This has been the case since the founding of our country. There's no reason this should be any less valid in regards to prisoners and "enemies" who are not United States citizens.
That's cute and all that you think "loud music" refers to playing the radio a little loud and headbanging a bit. In regards to torture, that isn't what it refers to. It refers to playing painfully ear-splitting volumes of music for days on end. This causes sleep deprivation, migraines, and all sort of other goodies.
You may as well refer to water-boarding as "taking a dip in the tub" and pretend like it's all pathetic and cushy that we consider water-boarding to be torture.
A friend just found a bug in his (production) Java code, despite strict typing:
if(condition); {//Code that always happens due to bug }
Strict vs. loose typing has little effect on code quality. Testing+QA is how you avoid mistakes, not strict typing.
Strict typing only removes a small class of runtime errors. Which are then reintroduced due to strict typing (and compilation) being such a pain that most projects use loosely typed XML config files for an awful lot of "programming". Doh.
People looking for houses for sale take pictures thoughout neighborhoods. And of houses they like that ARENT for sale. Although, these days my wife sends me links to house pictures on Google Street View.
Posting pictures of public (and private) places on the internet is extremely common place. In 5 years most cameras will be storing geocode information with pictures too (a lot of cellphone camers and regular cameras already do this).
Even if you manage to ban Google Street view, you can search the geocode location and find the neighbors' kids' pictures of your backyard (with their friends in the foreground), as well as your front yard, the side of your house, probably the inside of your house...and so on.
A lot more worrisome than google driving down public roads, don't you think?
There are already cameras that save geocode information, along with apps that map these pictures from the internet to their real world location. And believe me, these pictures are and will be taken from private property, OF private property.
There is no good reason to ban google from taking pictures of streets. Having publicly accessible pictures of publicly accessible views is not a big deal. It's not even a small deal. It's just plain silly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I've ever heard people claim that "peer 2 peer file sharing promotes new music". If anything it's the opposite - you don't find music on p2p unless you go looking for it.
However the *internets* as a medium, primarily websites, e-mail, and linking, DO promote lesser known artists. Sharing music with a friend used to require physically handing over your own personal copy of a CD (or cassette) and hoping it doesn't get messed up. Or best case, recording a tape and handing it over physically.
Now, bands like The Minibosses which could takes years to spread through a niche audience using physical networks, can spread overnight by being linked to (and immediately listened to) from niche blogs.
p2p though? Hypothetically that made sense for a brief period of time between when the internet became popular and bands started putting up websites and myspace pages with music samples. But nowdays myspace, youtube, and band websites are how new music gets spread.
I don't know how much Aneesh is responsible for, but I've been pleasantly surprised by my home state's technology initiatives. We do pretty much everything online these days - DMV, property values, utilities, car taxes.
A number of years back the virginia state government charged you an extra ~$10 to make payments online, compared to sending the same credit card number to them in the mail to be processed by hand. That nonsense is long gone, thankfully.
You're jumping the gun a bit with this "taxing the wealthy" stuff. The OP just said he's ok with *taxing*. Right and left both agree with taxes and infrastructure and "helping people" in a general sense - the extent they're ok with is the difference.
The OP's point was not that he wants those things in *excess* (arguably the left's position), just that he is ok with those things existing, contrary to the extreme anarchist views of some libertarians.
His first sentence, "the government should do as little as necessary to keep the society functioning", makes it pretty clear he doesn't want those things in excess. Unless the right wants to do away with taxes and infrastructure altogether, the only things "left-liberal" on his list are not wanting the government in his bedroom, and government healthcare.
Sooo you're saying the right-conservative DISAGREE with:
-collecting taxes
-providing infrastructure
-helping people
-government health care
And AGREE with:
-government monitoring of who people sleep with
-government monitoring of what people smoke
?
Just checking.
I have canceled installations on my Mac when they requested root access. That never happens on Windows.
I should add - "yet".
Vista has taken the short-term hit for every click causing a UAC prompt, but (hopefully) the next generation of Windows software will be designed to avoid UAC prompts by not requiring administrator access for things that shouldn't.
In a couple years, you'll see Windows users taking UAC prompts seriously, and perhaps even canceling that "britneyspears.jpg.exe" or adware install.
This is the key difference between Mac/Linux and Windows.
Windows has a long history of poor security policies, which most Windows software is written towards. When you run installs on Windows you fully expect it to require administrator access.
Linux and Mac have the same sort of UAC pop-ups, except very little software triggers it. The security policies have been around much longer. Users often don't even HAVE root access. So the software is (mostly) written with these things in mind.
I have canceled installations on my Mac when they requested root access. That never happens on Windows.
Cheapy crappy products are cheap and crappy, in regards to both hardware and software. If you like Windows software, and want reliable+fast hardware, it costs roughly the same as a Mac. Nothing to see here, move along.
I don't completely disbelieve you, but I seriously thought Vista would be good when I had to use it at work. I figured it's gotta fix problems from XP, and XP is already pretty good.
Instead it seems like every idiotic problem in XP was carried over to Vista, plus I found many more hugely annoying problems ADDED in Vista. Things like UAC prompts appearing behind windows, not being able to bring explorer windows to the front when clicking in the bottom right, not being able to get it to remember folder settings, ftp hanging and leaving explorer windows frozen on the screen until i would reboot, and so on.
The first time I used Vista was *after* Service Pack 1. I was especially disappointed =(
Now that they charge extra for downgrades, I think it's more of a disincentive to purchase new computers. Or people get their geek friends to carry over their old hard drive.
But yeah, your average "i double click the internet" user will be fine with Vista. And would be just as fine with Mac or Linux or Windows 98, for that matter. Hardly a compliment to Vista.
Mod parent up. For the vast majority of people, it's calories. Unless someone is not drinking soda and other high-calorie beverages, not eating junk food, and otherwise not eating excess calories is step #1 and is the only thing that matters for most people.
Even exercise has shown to be less of a factor than calories, for the same reason that soda is worse than candy. Exercise increases hunger while burning calories. Soda increases calories while not decreasing hunger.
Either way it comes down to calories, and almost anything else is just excuses or things that help/hurt appetite. (thus causing excess calorie consumption)
I'm a little afraid to read the OP you're responding to, but you're absolutely right. I cringe thinking of an admin showing a CFO a base64 mail spool. It took me a while to learn this too, but costs and results are all that matter to the people above you at most companies. This isn't really a bad thing either.
Not to mention, you could use an html image link to the company logo on the website if you're so scared to death of adding a tiny compressed logo to every e-mail...
Well...that depends on what you consider competition. If you're talking Exchange-look-a-likes, sure. But if your company is OK with a Good Reliable mail server with a separate calendaring app that integrates well with the mail app your company uses, you can get solutions dirt cheap or free.
I've configured a heck of a lot of unix mail servers, and I can't pretend any are as easy to setup and configure as Exchange. But every Exchange+Outlook solution I've used at a half dozen companies has been painfully slow and unreliable with piss-poor webmail. For how important mail is to most companies, I'm surprised they put up with Exchange.
I actually R'dTFA to check, and it doesn't seem to mention what the average grades are for the total population.
Saying "Facebook users get 3.0-3.5, non-users get 3.5-4.0" means something very different if the average is 3.25, versus if the average of all users is 3.75. Are facebooker users dumber than your average student, or are the few users who don't have a facebook account smarter than the average student?
Two people can clean a loo and they each lost an hour of their life. But a doctor lost years of his life to schooling, while the guy off cleaning the loo has very little loo-cleaning education or experience.
Why would anyone go to school to be a doctor (or DBA, etc.) if they could get paid the same amount of money to sit around cleaning loos (or filing papers)?
Your suggestion that there are a million people to clean the loo isn't exactly true (or important - hypothetically it only takes 1 more person than there are jobs to cut wages to 0). Regardless, we have minimum wage to prevent easy jobs in high supply and low demand from driving wages to 0. It seems like this has worked out fairly well, although I would agree that minimum wage probably has not kept up with inflation.
Not that I totally disagree, but you're acting as if how HARD someone works for 8 hours a day is the only factor in their salary and their stimulation of the economy.
That guy who sweats all day doing construction work for $8/hour, yeah, sure, he's working hard. But *ANYONE* capable of manual labor can do that.
What about a DBA who reads news sites 20 hours a week and does light computer work the other 20 hours? To you or me that seems easy, but try giving your construction worker an Oracle DB and ask him to optimize it. Good luck.
Hard is about training more than it is about sweat. The jobs that pay the most and require the least work are the ones that require years of (often expensive) training. A country with more highly-trained individuals is going to stimulate their economy more than a similar country full of day laborers.
A lot of responses are warning how you'll get a name-dictionary attack and your inbox will fill with spam. But if you can setup a catchall address, odds are you can figure out how to setup a filter and junk all e-mail that doesn't start with a unique string too. Dictionary name spam attacks are trivial to avoid.
chris@domain.com = real address
chrisjunkAmazon@domain.com = amazon junk address
president@domain.com = goes straight to trash, never seen
It's not that hard to use a character other than a plus. When each user can pick their own junkmail separation character, things will get a lot harder on spammers.
At a glance this would chew up too many addresses at the domain by allowing wildcards. But a work-around to prevent this would be to make each wildcard required to be at the, eg., 8th character. So maybe chris@gmail.com is your real address, and "chris123456newegg@gmail.com" is your fake address.
Any address beginning with "chris132456" still goes to you, but someone else could register "ChrisSmith@gmail.com" without conflicting with your wildcard. Then he could use "ChrisSmithBOBnewegg@gmail.com" as his junk address wildcard space.
This is already fairly trivial to do with Google Apps and some basic filters. But until Gmail adopts it with a pretty interface, yes, the + operator is way too easy for spammers to circumvent.
Another alternative I've heard is to have e-mail to the root address junked, and have a single authoritative + address. chris@gmail.com gets junked, chris+smith@gmail.com is your real address, and chris+newegg@gmail.com gets received at cris+smith@gmail.com. But this doesn't work so hot without a whitelist system, as the spammers can still knowingly append any random crap to the + and you'll still get it, while also making which address they found you from.
Yes, flat catchalls is a fairly bad idea due to brute force spam. However, if you want to get a little tricky, you can use a catchall+filtering to dump all of the address that don't match whatever expression you feel like.
The obvious one is to do a gmail-style + address, although you could use any character (even a letter) for it. If something matches "firstnameX" let it through, everything else gets junked.
I used to do this using TMDA for qmail when I ran my own mail server, using hyphens instead of +. I've migrated to Google Apps and use the catchall and filters on my inbox to keep it that way.
The only place I get spam from now is the idiots who don't know their own e-mail address who keep signing up for airline tickets and the iTunes store (credit card and all) using MY @gmail.com address.
One problem to keep in mind is that our justice system is not perfect. Supposedly a conviction should only happen when there's no reasonable doubt the suspect is guilty, right? But the number of people jailed (and even executed) for crimes they did not commit is astounding.
Jailing or executing someone for a crime they didn't commit is quite bad already. Torturing someone to death though, is somehow much worse.
It's also pointless beyond cruel vengeance (probably not something we should encourage as a means of grieving). There's not much chance the fear of torture is going to stop that dead man from committing the same crime a second time.
Within the United States, in regards to United States citizens, the death penalty is legal. Torture is not. This has been the case since the founding of our country. There's no reason this should be any less valid in regards to prisoners and "enemies" who are not United States citizens.
That's cute and all that you think "loud music" refers to playing the radio a little loud and headbanging a bit. In regards to torture, that isn't what it refers to. It refers to playing painfully ear-splitting volumes of music for days on end. This causes sleep deprivation, migraines, and all sort of other goodies.
You may as well refer to water-boarding as "taking a dip in the tub" and pretend like it's all pathetic and cushy that we consider water-boarding to be torture.
A friend just found a bug in his (production) Java code, despite strict typing:
if(condition); //Code that always happens due to bug
{
}
Strict vs. loose typing has little effect on code quality. Testing+QA is how you avoid mistakes, not strict typing.
Strict typing only removes a small class of runtime errors. Which are then reintroduced due to strict typing (and compilation) being such a pain that most projects use loosely typed XML config files for an awful lot of "programming". Doh.
That's the town that the game/movie Silent Hill is set in, isn't it?
People looking for houses for sale take pictures thoughout neighborhoods. And of houses they like that ARENT for sale. Although, these days my wife sends me links to house pictures on Google Street View.
Posting pictures of public (and private) places on the internet is extremely common place. In 5 years most cameras will be storing geocode information with pictures too (a lot of cellphone camers and regular cameras already do this).
Even if you manage to ban Google Street view, you can search the geocode location and find the neighbors' kids' pictures of your backyard (with their friends in the foreground), as well as your front yard, the side of your house, probably the inside of your house...and so on.
A lot more worrisome than google driving down public roads, don't you think?
There are already cameras that save geocode information, along with apps that map these pictures from the internet to their real world location. And believe me, these pictures are and will be taken from private property, OF private property.
There is no good reason to ban google from taking pictures of streets. Having publicly accessible pictures of publicly accessible views is not a big deal. It's not even a small deal. It's just plain silly.