I think that's why they are being so heavy-handed about it. They aren't censoring content itself, which would imply they filter the content, let some through, and block "objectionable" content. That would be grievously expensive and impractical, and might threaten certain protections they now enjoy. They are choosing to no longer include newsgroup access in their bundle of internet access service to their customers, and although it's a shitty thing for them to do, I view as more of a consumer's rights affront than censorship per se. I'll bet that Verizon isn't handing out big fat rebates or lowing their rates to compensate customers.
The benefits to them? 1) - They get family-friendly PR from the censorphiles in power. 2) - They save the money they were paying for maintaining usenet infrastructure and bandwidth. 3) - By not exercising editorial control, I believe that they preserve legal protection from any "objectionable" content that does move across their network.
The funny thing is that what we know as English is essentially various old German dialects with a heavy French/latin influence, most of which happened over the past 1,000 years. Likely, English will still be spoken in 1,000 years only in the sense that what will be spoken then will likely be partly descended from our modern English, but largely or completely unrecognizable by us if we heard it or read it. Forget about 10,000 years from now.
I think he's referring to the Rosetta Stone (the artifact, not the language learning software hawked in airport kiosks). Three ancient languages on one tablet all saying the same thing provided a breakthrough in understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Of course, the idea of doing something similar is based on the idea that future explorers at the site would understand at least one of the languages inscribed, which brings us back to the old "how can we know they will be able to read it" question. Of course, increasing the number of languages used in the warning increases the chances that one of them can still be deciphered by future archaeologists.
Personally, I think the whole Yucca Mountain idea is dumb. As others have observed, we would be better off using the so-called "waste" as fuel in a more modern type of reactor which consumes the really nasty stuff to produce power, and leaves us with shorter-lived radioactive crap when we're done.
I generally agree with this and several other comments you've made here. But just to play devil's advocate... what about scarcity? If supply and demand set pricing in a market, controlling access to a piece of media reduces its availability. By controlling supply, theoretically they can get a higher price in return (ie, the TV ad spots will go for more than the web ads).
But as you pointed out, they, like many other traditional media outlets, have forgotten the demand side of the equation. If consumers have a greater expectation of content on demand, and Viacom's isn't there when they click on YouTube, any model based on controlling supply in the old-fashioned way falls apart. Out of sight == out of mind. In media, out of mind == out of business.
The article is not about individual job rights. It's about tax credits. If they take a tax credit for creating jobs in Florida, they'd damn well better keep those jobs there.
Sure. I got a 1 gig drive in 1995 that I thought would be all the digital storage I would ever need. Funny how that didn't work out the way I intended. Digital storage needs have been expanding rapidly for a long time. I don't see a slowdown anytime soon.
Granted, I've simplified things for the sake of being concise, but I stand by my point. Many guns make it into the black market via straw buyers. They are a distinct minority among gun owners. They may be "legal" in the technical sense that they can pass the checks, but they are obviously not law-abiding.
If the developer will not do it himself then I would encourage Sourceforge itself to remove the offending page. And thus the Chinese government would succeed in censoring the internet even beyond their borders. I sympathize with the position you are in, but I see no justification in curbing the world's content to suit your government's whimsy.
A car is an awesome responsibility, too. One moment of distraction, or a failure like a broken tie rod end, and you can kill several innocent bystanders.
With every right we exercise, there is responsibility that goes with it. Some responsibilities seem more intimidating than others.
That's the beauty of concealed carry. The mugger doesn't know for sure if you are carrying, but he knows you might be. Violent crime has been shown to decrease in US states which pass concealed carry laws. A small percentage of licensed owners decreases the crime rate for everyone.
I'd much prefer not having an ability to defend myself than to risk getting shot. Fine. That's you. No one says you have to carry, but guess what? You risk getting shot anyway. There is no way I can rationalize voluntarily giving up my right and ability to defend myself.
The Bill of Rights was specifically written to protect individual rights. Arms are to be borne by individuals for all rightful purposes including self-defense, which has a long history of protection under Common Law.
The biggest, most powerful police force in the world can't save you if they aren't there when you get assaulted, which by definition, they almost never are. All they can do after the fact is comfort your family, collect evidence, and try to find the perp. Small comfort.
The vast majority of legal gun owners (proper license, clean background, etc) in the US commits a disproportionally lower percentage of the violent crime. You have less to fear from them than the rest of society. Violent, armed criminals almost never own guns in compliance with the law, and so further restrictions won't help stop them from shooting you... but more restrictions will prevent you from defending yourself against them.
Re: Your last point, I'm all for naked tits in public.
Okay. Swinging, wild-ass guess - (color depth)^(bitmap size) = total number of possible pictures. So a 255^2 bitmap @ 16 bit color (~65k colors) = 3.551938486e+312970 possible pictures. You'd better by all the world's disk storage. Creating all them wouldn't be a problem. Sifting through them would take forever.
Interesting ramifications:
- Theoretically, there should be enough similar pictures to create movie of a ball-kicking fight between Lennon and Bush.
- You would have just also recreated the entire world's supply of past and future porn, albeit thumbnailed down to 255*255, and limited to 65k color.
- You would have produced at least one picture of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, even if there wasn't one to begin with.
The validity of you statement depends strongly on the quality and accuracy of the articles in question. If the articles are mostly just "noise" then yes you are quiet right, but if the articles contain information pertinent to gaining a better understanding of the true character of a presidential candidate, information which might otherwise get buried by the whims of Big Media, then these bloggers are providing a service where our "free press" has failed us. I haven't read them all, but they appear to be mainstream articles. Whatever your opinion of their contents, it's not as if he is revealing information wasn't already available. What is annoying about this guy is that he is trying to turn up the volume on information to create noise, to follow your analogy.
Apparently he's miffed that we didn't all jump up and thank him for his stunt. I have zero respect for zealots like this guy, regardless of whether they are left or right. It's not because I disagree with his views (I do, but I can live with that), it's because there's just no reasoning with people like this. He's smarter than everyone else, so he's going to tell us all how to think by skewing the information we receive. Our country's politics have been poisoned by weasels like this. I hereby find him guilty of being a jerk, and sentence him to eternity handcuffed to Karl Rove. Oh yeah , and his internet access has been revoked, or at least restricted to something to help him with his manners.
We buy our milk in gallon jugs, but our soda in 2-liter bottles. However, if you buy soda in quantities less than 1 liter, the measurements switch over to ounces. Every ruler/tape measure/etc. I have had for the past 30 years has been dual-marked with inches and centimeters. Our toilets and urinals are marked "1 gallon / 3.8 liters per flush", and our speedometers are marked in both mph and kph. Engine displacement on new vehicles is noted in liters, while engine displacement on older muscle cars is still noted in cubic inches (as it should be). I have a socket wrench set that includes english and metric sockets.
So, we've been doing pretty well working with both at the same time for years. You mean to say the rest of the world can't keep up?;)
Yes, that's right. In response to an article about a proposed law in Sweden, the FP waited until the fourth word of his post (not including post title) to mention America. The fourth fucking word. Does he get modded offtopic? Noooo... his post is +5 interesting, and somewhere around 100+ comments so far have replied. Including this one.
Look, I get it, there's a lot of people here who hate Bush, blah, blah, blah. I'm not debating whether Bush is evil, or has eroded Constitutional rights, or hates cute little animals in ANWR, or whatever. You know why? Because that's not the point of the frickin' article, that's why.
The sad thing is, you can look in just about any article around here, and sooner or later the discussion devolves into the same thing: "Stupid Amerikuns luv there beer, gas guzzlin cars, gunz, and red meet all because of frickin' Bush, who is stealin our rites". That happening here makes about as much sense as a Linux kernel discussion spontaneously breaking out on the Huffington Post every day.
I'm not saying the FP doesn't have a point about the erosion of our Constitutional rights, and I enjoy reading some of the more thoughtful posts. I even get a chuckle out of some of the way-out tinfoil hat rants. I'm just sick of every discussion going down the same off-topic US-centric rabbit hole.
No wonder everyone else says that we here in the US can't seem to think outside our borders for more than a nanosecond.
People, for crying out loud, focus, will you? Does anyone here actually have much of anything to say about wiretapping in Sweden?
From TFA:
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman. From McGratten's blog:
We had a great chat, and the one question I had to think long and hard about was how code written by a woman would differ from that written by a man, and whether or not I'd be able to identify the gender of the author of a piece of code. This is nothing I'd ever thought about before, and given our strict coding standards at Ingres, our code is fairly androgynous. The Financial Times article that McGratten's blog links to also quotes the 80% figure.
If you publish shit based on psychic code-reading ability and made-up, pulled-out-of-your-unthinking-ass subjective factoids, you need to publish it as what it is - fiction.
Well, for one thing, we get more than just gasoline out of crude. We get diesel, home heating oil, various lubricants, etc. So rather than just replace part of the petrochem equation, this solution replaces all of it. It certainly fits well with our current energy model, if we can scale it up.
I wonder if we can get it to run off a waste stream like sewage? No need for wood chips then.
I get your point, but disagree with your method. Never sacrifice your character and integrity even on small matters, and even to make a good point. Teaching that others may be wrong, or at least may see things differently can be done more subtly and effectively.
One night after dinner my dad started perhaps the geekiest tradition of all times. A friend had given him a hardcover, 2-volume set of famous quotations. Every night he would ask my brother, sister, or myself to pick one of the books, find a quote, read it, offer an interpretation, either agree or disagree with the author, and say why. Conversation would then go around the table, as everyone else got their chance to do the same. When he first tried it, we resisted. It was weird. It was embarrassing. But after awhile, we got to like it.
Critical thinking involves so much more than simple distrust of others.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's why they are being so heavy-handed about it. They aren't censoring content itself, which would imply they filter the content, let some through, and block "objectionable" content. That would be grievously expensive and impractical, and might threaten certain protections they now enjoy. They are choosing to no longer include newsgroup access in their bundle of internet access service to their customers, and although it's a shitty thing for them to do, I view as more of a consumer's rights affront than censorship per se. I'll bet that Verizon isn't handing out big fat rebates or lowing their rates to compensate customers.
The benefits to them? 1) - They get family-friendly PR from the censorphiles in power. 2) - They save the money they were paying for maintaining usenet infrastructure and bandwidth. 3) - By not exercising editorial control, I believe that they preserve legal protection from any "objectionable" content that does move across their network.
Pan doesn't have built-in SSL support, but try using it with stunnel4.
Howto for Ubuntu is here.
The funny thing is that what we know as English is essentially various old German dialects with a heavy French/latin influence, most of which happened over the past 1,000 years. Likely, English will still be spoken in 1,000 years only in the sense that what will be spoken then will likely be partly descended from our modern English, but largely or completely unrecognizable by us if we heard it or read it. Forget about 10,000 years from now.
I think he's referring to the Rosetta Stone (the artifact, not the language learning software hawked in airport kiosks). Three ancient languages on one tablet all saying the same thing provided a breakthrough in understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Of course, the idea of doing something similar is based on the idea that future explorers at the site would understand at least one of the languages inscribed, which brings us back to the old "how can we know they will be able to read it" question. Of course, increasing the number of languages used in the warning increases the chances that one of them can still be deciphered by future archaeologists.
Personally, I think the whole Yucca Mountain idea is dumb. As others have observed, we would be better off using the so-called "waste" as fuel in a more modern type of reactor which consumes the really nasty stuff to produce power, and leaves us with shorter-lived radioactive crap when we're done.
I generally agree with this and several other comments you've made here. But just to play devil's advocate ... what about scarcity? If supply and demand set pricing in a market, controlling access to a piece of media reduces its availability. By controlling supply, theoretically they can get a higher price in return (ie, the TV ad spots will go for more than the web ads).
But as you pointed out, they, like many other traditional media outlets, have forgotten the demand side of the equation. If consumers have a greater expectation of content on demand, and Viacom's isn't there when they click on YouTube, any model based on controlling supply in the old-fashioned way falls apart. Out of sight == out of mind. In media, out of mind == out of business.
The article is not about individual job rights. It's about tax credits. If they take a tax credit for creating jobs in Florida, they'd damn well better keep those jobs there.
Sure. I got a 1 gig drive in 1995 that I thought would be all the digital storage I would ever need. Funny how that didn't work out the way I intended. Digital storage needs have been expanding rapidly for a long time. I don't see a slowdown anytime soon.
Where is Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing?
Granted, I've simplified things for the sake of being concise, but I stand by my point. Many guns make it into the black market via straw buyers. They are a distinct minority among gun owners. They may be "legal" in the technical sense that they can pass the checks, but they are obviously not law-abiding.
A car is an awesome responsibility, too. One moment of distraction, or a failure like a broken tie rod end, and you can kill several innocent bystanders.
With every right we exercise, there is responsibility that goes with it. Some responsibilities seem more intimidating than others.
The Bill of Rights was specifically written to protect individual rights. Arms are to be borne by individuals for all rightful purposes including self-defense, which has a long history of protection under Common Law.
The biggest, most powerful police force in the world can't save you if they aren't there when you get assaulted, which by definition, they almost never are. All they can do after the fact is comfort your family, collect evidence, and try to find the perp. Small comfort.
... but more restrictions will prevent you from defending yourself against them.
The vast majority of legal gun owners (proper license, clean background, etc) in the US commits a disproportionally lower percentage of the violent crime. You have less to fear from them than the rest of society. Violent, armed criminals almost never own guns in compliance with the law, and so further restrictions won't help stop them from shooting you
Re: Your last point, I'm all for naked tits in public.
Okay. Swinging, wild-ass guess - (color depth)^(bitmap size) = total number of possible pictures. So a 255^2 bitmap @ 16 bit color (~65k colors) = 3.551938486e+312970 possible pictures. You'd better by all the world's disk storage. Creating all them wouldn't be a problem. Sifting through them would take forever.
Interesting ramifications:
- Theoretically, there should be enough similar pictures to create movie of a ball-kicking fight between Lennon and Bush.
- You would have just also recreated the entire world's supply of past and future porn, albeit thumbnailed down to 255*255, and limited to 65k color.
- You would have produced at least one picture of a second shooter on the grassy knoll, even if there wasn't one to begin with.
Jeez, if you had just posted this yesterday, when I had mod points.
Apparently he's miffed that we didn't all jump up and thank him for his stunt. I have zero respect for zealots like this guy, regardless of whether they are left or right. It's not because I disagree with his views (I do, but I can live with that), it's because there's just no reasoning with people like this. He's smarter than everyone else, so he's going to tell us all how to think by skewing the information we receive. Our country's politics have been poisoned by weasels like this. I hereby find him guilty of being a jerk, and sentence him to eternity handcuffed to Karl Rove. Oh yeah , and his internet access has been revoked, or at least restricted to something to help him with his manners.
I prefer masking tape. That way, when I write my data on it with a sharpie, it doesn't smudge as easily as it does on duct or transparent tape.
We buy our milk in gallon jugs, but our soda in 2-liter bottles. However, if you buy soda in quantities less than 1 liter, the measurements switch over to ounces. Every ruler/tape measure/etc. I have had for the past 30 years has been dual-marked with inches and centimeters. Our toilets and urinals are marked "1 gallon / 3.8 liters per flush", and our speedometers are marked in both mph and kph. Engine displacement on new vehicles is noted in liters, while engine displacement on older muscle cars is still noted in cubic inches (as it should be). I have a socket wrench set that includes english and metric sockets.
;)
So, we've been doing pretty well working with both at the same time for years. You mean to say the rest of the world can't keep up?
What do the Swiss have to do with it?
Yes, that's right. In response to an article about a proposed law in Sweden, the FP waited until the fourth word of his post (not including post title) to mention America. The fourth fucking word. Does he get modded offtopic? Noooo ... his post is +5 interesting, and somewhere around 100+ comments so far have replied. Including this one.
Look, I get it, there's a lot of people here who hate Bush, blah, blah, blah. I'm not debating whether Bush is evil, or has eroded Constitutional rights, or hates cute little animals in ANWR, or whatever. You know why? Because that's not the point of the frickin' article, that's why.
The sad thing is, you can look in just about any article around here, and sooner or later the discussion devolves into the same thing: "Stupid Amerikuns luv there beer, gas guzzlin cars, gunz, and red meet all because of frickin' Bush, who is stealin our rites". That happening here makes about as much sense as a Linux kernel discussion spontaneously breaking out on the Huffington Post every day.
I'm not saying the FP doesn't have a point about the erosion of our Constitutional rights, and I enjoy reading some of the more thoughtful posts. I even get a chuckle out of some of the way-out tinfoil hat rants. I'm just sick of every discussion going down the same off-topic US-centric rabbit hole. No wonder everyone else says that we here in the US can't seem to think outside our borders for more than a nanosecond.
People, for crying out loud, focus, will you? Does anyone here actually have much of anything to say about wiretapping in Sweden?
How does "nothing I'd ever thought about before" and "fairly androgynous" code add up to "at least 80 per cent of the time"?
If you publish shit based on psychic code-reading ability and made-up, pulled-out-of-your-unthinking-ass subjective factoids, you need to publish it as what it is - fiction.
You're just begging to be rickrolled to a NSFW hermaphrodite pron site with curiosity like that.
Well, for one thing, we get more than just gasoline out of crude. We get diesel, home heating oil, various lubricants, etc. So rather than just replace part of the petrochem equation, this solution replaces all of it. It certainly fits well with our current energy model, if we can scale it up.
I wonder if we can get it to run off a waste stream like sewage? No need for wood chips then.
I get your point, but disagree with your method. Never sacrifice your character and integrity even on small matters, and even to make a good point. Teaching that others may be wrong, or at least may see things differently can be done more subtly and effectively.
One night after dinner my dad started perhaps the geekiest tradition of all times. A friend had given him a hardcover, 2-volume set of famous quotations. Every night he would ask my brother, sister, or myself to pick one of the books, find a quote, read it, offer an interpretation, either agree or disagree with the author, and say why. Conversation would then go around the table, as everyone else got their chance to do the same. When he first tried it, we resisted. It was weird. It was embarrassing. But after awhile, we got to like it.
Critical thinking involves so much more than simple distrust of others.