..human trials for vaccines against both cocaine and nicotine are well under way.
Do they really think that a "vaccine" against nicotine is going to help people? If they're already addicted to nicotine for years and years, aren't they going to continue smoking and either make themselves really sick (as their immune systems attempt to fight off the nicotine) or just keep smoking away?
I may not be looking at the whole picture here, but isn't this sort of decision going to have a tower-of-babel-like effect? Are search engines going to be able to index sites using the alternative character sets? Isn't there at least some risk of two different sites at least appearing to have identical URLs? Or is this really an attempt by countries like Russia and China to selectively cut their populations off from the public internet while not in actuality doing so? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that American English should be imposed on the rest of the world (I'm not that guy!), but the system in place was founded on such and I see this really mucking up the works..
They can all bite me. What I do in my free time is not the business of my employer and never will be. To that end work and my "real" life are completely separate things. My privacy is not for sale for any price and never will be either.
I think you're missing my point. I'm neither for nor against the death penalty; it's not an optimal solution in any case because there have been many cases of new evidence being uncovered years later setting falsely accused people free, although on the other hand someone who is clearly guilty of heinous crimes should perhaps not be a burden on society for as long as they live. My point was that comparatively IMO putting these people to death is far more humane than putting them through what society has decided to put them through for the rest of their natural lives.
I have no sympathy for sex offenders, but at this rate why not just put sex offenders to death and be done with it? If you crowd an animal into smaller and smaller cages, starving it and/or torturing it, eventually the meekest, most mild-tempered and balanced animal is going to develop neuroses and sooner or later it'll either lash out viciously, or just lose it's will to live. Keep them in prison permanently, or put them to death, or find a way to "cure" them so they're safe to be living out in the world, but don't continually punish them once they're released from prison. It's just senseless violence and abuse in a different form.
Oh and by the way would someone define "sex offender" in the context of this article? If you use a broad definition of "sex offender" then someone who was arrested and prosecuted for streaking in their college days or for public urination may meet the criteria as a "sex offender".
I get what you're saying, but it doesn't change what I said originally. I have a permanent account on Livejournal. About a year or so ago I stopped posting anything at all important about my life, and even then there are no entries that are publically accessible. I have no plans to ever post anything important or sensitive about myself there, ever, and I don't recommend to anybody that they do so either.
Personally I think what will happen in 10, 20, or even 30 years..
News flash: they aren't going to last that long. Currently IMO the recording industry is trying to drag what's left of the broadcast radio industry down with them.
I don't know why anyone would store anything important or personally sensitive anywhere on the internet anyway, unless you store everything encrypted. I've had close friends of mine under standing orders for years running to never email me anything of a personally sensitive nature, or at least understand that if they do, transmitting it via the internet is completely insecure. I read more and more about "online apps" instead of local apps, and online data storage companies, and I have to roll my eyes because I have to assume that sooner or later someone, either criminals, the government, or the company itself, is going to go browsing through whatever you've got stored on their servers. Bottom line: You want privacy for your data? Store it locally, or better yet, offline.
The executable for Firefox is "firefox.exe", not "foxfire.exe", so I imagine that in the view of however the teacher in this case was monitoring (remotely? from his desk?) what executables were running on student's computers, it must have been flagged as an unknown application. Furthermore if Firefox was installed on the student's computers, then the student wouldn't have needed to bring in (as someone else suggested) a standalone version of Firefox, and the student would've been allowed to use an installed version of Firefox anyway. There's no way that a school should be allowing students to install or run foreign software, that way lie dragons! Of course if the computers in question allowed the student to execute a program from a flash drive or CDROM or from the public Internet, then the network setup and domain policies weren't set up very well either IMHO. It was poorly handled perhaps, but still it sounds to me like the teacher was following/enforcing school policy for student use of computers and was justified for assigning the student in question to detention for: 1) Violating school policy, and 2) Not following the directives of the teacher of that class.
How much power does a typical cellsite require? Is it small enough that they could use solar panels charging batteries, and would they have enough solar capacity to generate a surplus and sell some of that power back to the public power grid?
..so 3rd-world countries should become big server farms? Brilliant idea! More efficient, too: We've already outsourced most of our tech support and customer service jobs to India, may as well put the co-lo facilities there, too.:D
IMO there's nothing that would stop them from trying to confiscate them and sell them anyway. There's also the historical fact that some heads of government will actively stifle the flow of information and education because uneducated, uninformed peasants are easier to control than their more enlightened counterparts.
You probably can't teach them how to fish anyway, there's probably DRM attached to it and the RIAA will sue them for $120,000 per person taught to fish.
I think you have to give them both kinds of help to start with. You get hungry enough, and all you care about is that you're hungry. Take care of the immediate problem to give the long-term solution a chance to work.
I haven't read Dvorak's article yet, or even 10% of the comments here.. but don't you have to wonder, based on history? There is a long history in many places of food and supplies intended for humanitarian aid being appropriated by the military, or the local militia, or by whoever it is that has the guns and therefore feels they have the right to make the rules and take what they want. What makes anyone think that OLPC will be any different? At the very least, how many families of the recipients of the laptops are going to take them away from the child intended to receive it and sell it off to buy food or whatever else they might decide is more important to them? I don't really like being cynical or want to be cynical about OLPC because I think it's a nice idea at it's core, but the real world is a much harsher place than that. Just like most systems of government, it all looks and works great on paper, but once you start letting large groups of live human beings run around in that system, it isn't long before it becomes not such a good thing.
Someone mentioned the phrase "the diamond age", which reminds me that just recently I re-read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Like that book, I'm sure that some people would like to believe and hope that OLPC becomes some sort of real-world manifestation of The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, educating children that otherwise wouldn't ever have a chance to get any sort of meaningful education, thus elevating them and unbinding them from what would otherwise be a life of very little meaning and potential. Unfortunately there are, and always have been, too many people in the world that understand that knowledge is power, and that in order to control the masses, one must stifle education and limit the flow of information; educated peasants are usually not very obedient peasants because they know they have other options.
I hope I'm wrong about all this. Only time will tell.
..and whiny entitled cries of "entertain me!" Blah blah blah.
Listen to the radio much lately? Or watch TV? Go to the movies? Most of what's being produced as a result of this "economic incentive" you speak of is total absolute crap.
..and don't be bringin' your "freeloading" bullshit around here either, laddy-boy. It's been a long, long time since ANYbody got ANYthing in this category for free. Commercial announcements not only for 15 minutes out of every hour, but embedded into the content as video "pop-ups", or overlaying the bottom quarter of the picture; product placement in television shows and movies. We pay extra for "expanded basic" channels on cable (Discovery, TLC, SciFi, etc) but we are still subjected to the same 15/45 ratio of commercials to program content; so we're paying twice for the same content? Where's the "freeloading" in that? To make matters worse, if television networks had their way, any sort of consumer recording device (VCR, DVD recorder, DVR, computer video capture, friggin' tape recorder even!) would be outlawed, being caught with one would ruin you financially for the rest of your life, all for sake of their bottom line.
..oh, and so far as this sense of entitlement you speak of? In my experience, there's a sense of "entitlement" that comes exclusively from having large amounts of disposable income, and it's magnitude is directly proportional to the amount of disposable income. You, you must be independently wealthy.:p
Signed,
Some Guy Who Doesn't Want To Take Out A 2nd Mortgage To Go See A FSCKING Movie
Anybody want to start a betting pool? My money says that there'll be software to remove the watermarks within a week of the technology being implemented.
..so when they all start mangling the file extensions, encrypting the files themselves with strong encryption, and just for good measure encapsulating them in a.zip or.rar or.tar or some other archive format, they're going to be able to catch all that, too? And when the next obfuscation scheme is created, that one too? And the next, and the next, ad infinitum?
..so if you reside in Canada and own TiVo, a VCR, or even an audio tape recorder, you go to jail? That's utterly preposterous and I'd wager it's utterly unenforcable, too. What would they expect people to do, throw all these devices in the trash? Did the Canadian government get time-warped back to the 1940's or something?
Wasn't there a story posted a while back about.pdf file exploits that were capable of compromising any machine they were opened on? Won't this technology they're planning just make that sort of exploit even easier? Some comment above mentioned a quote to the effect of "keep your data and your executables separate"; I concur. The last thing I want to ever have to worry about is whether a pdf file I downloaded from a chip manufacturer, or from a government agency, even, has had a trojan/virus/malware injected into it because some jerk was able to hack into their server and muck it up for everyone.
..and BTW, thanks to many who pimped 3rd-party pdf readers, I may just migrate to one of those; I've found acroread to be extremely slow and clunky on ANY machine, since about 3 or 4 major releases ago. It used to be reasonably small and fast, but lately it seems as slow and clunky as something written in javascript.:p After reading this story, I'm even less inclined to use the "native" reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they really think that a "vaccine" against nicotine is going to help people? If they're already addicted to nicotine for years and years, aren't they going to continue smoking and either make themselves really sick (as their immune systems attempt to fight off the nicotine) or just keep smoking away?
I may not be looking at the whole picture here, but isn't this sort of decision going to have a tower-of-babel-like effect? Are search engines going to be able to index sites using the alternative character sets? Isn't there at least some risk of two different sites at least appearing to have identical URLs? Or is this really an attempt by countries like Russia and China to selectively cut their populations off from the public internet while not in actuality doing so? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that American English should be imposed on the rest of the world (I'm not that guy!), but the system in place was founded on such and I see this really mucking up the works..
They can all bite me. What I do in my free time is not the business of my employer and never will be. To that end work and my "real" life are completely separate things. My privacy is not for sale for any price and never will be either.
I think you're missing my point. I'm neither for nor against the death penalty; it's not an optimal solution in any case because there have been many cases of new evidence being uncovered years later setting falsely accused people free, although on the other hand someone who is clearly guilty of heinous crimes should perhaps not be a burden on society for as long as they live. My point was that comparatively IMO putting these people to death is far more humane than putting them through what society has decided to put them through for the rest of their natural lives.
I'm going to assume that site is not for real, or I'll end up in prison myself -- for murder. :p
Oh and by the way would someone define "sex offender" in the context of this article? If you use a broad definition of "sex offender" then someone who was arrested and prosecuted for streaking in their college days or for public urination may meet the criteria as a "sex offender".
I get what you're saying, but it doesn't change what I said originally. I have a permanent account on Livejournal. About a year or so ago I stopped posting anything at all important about my life, and even then there are no entries that are publically accessible. I have no plans to ever post anything important or sensitive about myself there, ever, and I don't recommend to anybody that they do so either.
Maybe everyone should've just stopped whining and paid the tea tax as well, eh?
News flash: they aren't going to last that long. Currently IMO the recording industry is trying to drag what's left of the broadcast radio industry down with them.
I don't know why anyone would store anything important or personally sensitive anywhere on the internet anyway, unless you store everything encrypted. I've had close friends of mine under standing orders for years running to never email me anything of a personally sensitive nature, or at least understand that if they do, transmitting it via the internet is completely insecure. I read more and more about "online apps" instead of local apps, and online data storage companies, and I have to roll my eyes because I have to assume that sooner or later someone, either criminals, the government, or the company itself, is going to go browsing through whatever you've got stored on their servers. Bottom line: You want privacy for your data? Store it locally, or better yet, offline.
The executable for Firefox is "firefox.exe", not "foxfire.exe", so I imagine that in the view of however the teacher in this case was monitoring (remotely? from his desk?) what executables were running on student's computers, it must have been flagged as an unknown application. Furthermore if Firefox was installed on the student's computers, then the student wouldn't have needed to bring in (as someone else suggested) a standalone version of Firefox, and the student would've been allowed to use an installed version of Firefox anyway. There's no way that a school should be allowing students to install or run foreign software, that way lie dragons! Of course if the computers in question allowed the student to execute a program from a flash drive or CDROM or from the public Internet, then the network setup and domain policies weren't set up very well either IMHO. It was poorly handled perhaps, but still it sounds to me like the teacher was following/enforcing school policy for student use of computers and was justified for assigning the student in question to detention for: 1) Violating school policy, and 2) Not following the directives of the teacher of that class.
I'm glad to see some signs of intelligent life out there, perhaps the MPAA and RIAA will take the hint too?
Bastards. I hope they get the crap sued out of them by ALL the owners of the web pages they're (in essence) altering the content of.
How much power does a typical cellsite require? Is it small enough that they could use solar panels charging batteries, and would they have enough solar capacity to generate a surplus and sell some of that power back to the public power grid?
..so 3rd-world countries should become big server farms? Brilliant idea! More efficient, too: We've already outsourced most of our tech support and customer service jobs to India, may as well put the co-lo facilities there, too. :D
IMO there's nothing that would stop them from trying to confiscate them and sell them anyway. There's also the historical fact that some heads of government will actively stifle the flow of information and education because uneducated, uninformed peasants are easier to control than their more enlightened counterparts.
You probably can't teach them how to fish anyway, there's probably DRM attached to it and the RIAA will sue them for $120,000 per person taught to fish.
I think you have to give them both kinds of help to start with. You get hungry enough, and all you care about is that you're hungry. Take care of the immediate problem to give the long-term solution a chance to work.
Someone mentioned the phrase "the diamond age", which reminds me that just recently I re-read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age . Like that book, I'm sure that some people would like to believe and hope that OLPC becomes some sort of real-world manifestation of The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, educating children that otherwise wouldn't ever have a chance to get any sort of meaningful education, thus elevating them and unbinding them from what would otherwise be a life of very little meaning and potential. Unfortunately there are, and always have been, too many people in the world that understand that knowledge is power, and that in order to control the masses, one must stifle education and limit the flow of information; educated peasants are usually not very obedient peasants because they know they have other options.
I hope I'm wrong about all this. Only time will tell.
Listen to the radio much lately? Or watch TV? Go to the movies? Most of what's being produced as a result of this "economic incentive" you speak of is total absolute crap.
Signed,
Some Guy Who Doesn't Want To Take Out A 2nd Mortgage To Go See A FSCKING Movie
Anybody want to start a betting pool? My money says that there'll be software to remove the watermarks within a week of the technology being implemented.
Can't stop the signal, Mal..
..so if you reside in Canada and own TiVo, a VCR, or even an audio tape recorder, you go to jail? That's utterly preposterous and I'd wager it's utterly unenforcable, too. What would they expect people to do, throw all these devices in the trash? Did the Canadian government get time-warped back to the 1940's or something?
Shouldn't that be cosmodrome ?