That's the problem. No matter how tech-savvy an end user is, I never assume that they've done every last thing, or even if they think they have, that they did it correctly. For that matter, I never assume that anyone who previously handled a trouble call did their jobs correctly either. I've seen really stupid stuff slip through lower tiers because they made assumptions due to laziness or an irritable end user. The only thing that makes EVERYONE feel more stupid than going through the troubleshooting step by step when the end user thinks s/he's already done all the basics is to have a technician visit them onsite and find a loose power cord, monitor cable, or similar.
The only thing about this case that's clear, is that the details of the case are as clear as mud.
Firstly, there have been many conflicting accounts as to what the purpose of the scheme was, most seem to have been that the sole purpose was spying on Megan to see what she was saying about Lori's daughter, the ex-Best Friend Forever. It's hard to tell who was even sitting at the keyboard when Megan went off and committed suicide, it sort of puts a whole different light on things if it was the daughter just being cruel to one of her friends while masquerading as a boy. Unless the "known details" have changed, both Lori and her daughter, as well as the other young woman who set-up the account at Lori's request were all using the Josh account at different times.
I also wonder how Lori might've known that Megan was mentally unstable. Perhaps she did, but it's not like most families slap bumper stickers on their cars or hang banners at their homes that read, "My son/daughter is mentally ill!". That's typically a very private matter and you can't hold anyone culpable for not knowing what isn't public knowledge. And all this manipulation nonsense notwithstanding, children are cruel to each other. Some adults are real douchebags too, and it takes a really nasty sort to be cruel to kids. But no matter how cruel and mean the world is, a kid's first line of defense are the parents or guardians. What you don't appear to understand is that the law tends to view things in black and white. It typically only acknowledges the most direct lines of cause and effect.
If you stand on the roof of a building and egg someone on to jump off and they do, you are guilty of murder.
Oh really? Can you cite even a single example to establish a precedent? If not, then you're just making stuff up.
This woman did exactly the same thing, only via the internet. What's so damn hard to understand?
you don't know that. she could ahve easily be allowed a set amount of time. At 13 you should be getting a little less controlling over
your children.
A set amount of time for what? A set amount of time plopped in front of the television does not equate to meaningful supervision if you don't have the porno channels blocked or the kid has access to other inappropriate violent or sexual content.
Sure, they may have been happy she'd found a peer she was chatting with that made her happy. But online, you never trust anything. As I've stated in other comments, you just never trust ANYONE on the internet who you haven't met in person or spoken with on the phone with yourself, much less your kids or anyone you're responsible for. If I've learned anything about the internet over the past nearly two decades, it's that a rather large percentage of the people using the internet seem to fit into one of two categories...those who are obviously using a pseudonym and are guarded with their personal details, and those who seem to be genuine and open with their personal information, but that's only because they're someone else's persona and have nary an ounce of truth in that persona. Different gender, different age, different physical location, I figure you have roughly a 50-50 chance that a given is being honest about who they are online. I could be paranoid when it comes to people on the 'net, but is it truly paranoia when there is so much deception going on? I tend to think that from any given webpage or other internet service, there really aren't more than 3 degrees of separation to some sort of material that would be wildly inappropriate for minors or a predator who is targeting minors.
The internet has an "off" switch. There were a few conditions that made the situation what it was. There was Lori pretending to be a young boy. There was Megan believing the boy was who he said he was. There was Megan apparently being unsupervised on the internet.
Anyway. Are you saying if I was in a relationship with a conniving woman who manipulated me, toyed with my emotions, and then dumped me, and then a week or two after she left I became despondent and committed suicide, that she's therefore guilty of murder because she messed with my head? Please. Even if you kidnapped someone and tortured her, but released her and she committed suicide months later as a result of the psychological trauma, that's not murder. Psychological injuries are still injuries that need to be addressed so that they can heal, but there's still exactly one perpetrator and one victim when it comes to suicide, and they happen to be one and the same. They had a choice, and they made a choice.
You know what the first line of defense between kids and nasty adults who might try to manipulate and abuse them is?
PARENTS.
In this case it just happened that the manipulating adult happened to be some conniving woman next door. It could have just as easily been a 40-year-old pedophile posing as a young boy. There are so many things wrong with a picture where a child is interacting with --anyone-- on the internet in this manner and nobody seems to be supervising her or verifying that her friends are who they say they are, or that she hasn't been taught even the basic theory of not taking anything on the internet at face value.
Agreed. I don't like seeing these lynch mobs out trying to stick Lori with some sort of crime. It's ultimately about the rule of law, and not just making-up laws or trying to invent crimes to charge someone with just because that person is a despicable human being. There are a lot of people who may have contributed to the tragedy through their actions or inactions. People seem to want blood and a scapegoat. No matter what sort of scum Lori might be, scapegoating someone to make us all feel better doesn't solve anything.
Last time I checked murder was "any willful act, knowingly undertaken, which causes the death of another person."
That has to be one of the most creative definitions of "murder" that I've ever read. No, actually that's closer to "manslaughter". Even so, being cruel to someone is NOT manslaughter. You seem to be mistaking "committing an act" with "saying something". Manslaughter is pushing someone down some stairs on purpose, and having them die from the injuries. It's killing someone through gross negligence, recklessness, or even ambivalence, directly through one's own actions.
Nobody is responsible for the actions of anyone else, except in some cases where coercion is involved. You are responsible for your actions even if a person in a position of authority tells you to do something. You have the choice. The only real exception to this deals with children being taken-advantage of by authority figures they are expected to obey without question, such as police, pastors, and other people in a position of trust and authority. Megan believed that Lori was another child though, so it can't be claimed that Lori abused any authority in making cruel comments, suggesting she commit suicide. Hopefully Lori will never escape the legacy she's created for herself as an ugly, cruel, abusive, and manipulative wench. But it's a dangerous precedent to attempt to set, to hold any person accountable for what someone else does, just because someone is mean to someone who can't handle it when someone is mean to him/her. Part of living in human society is learning to cope with thugs, rude assholes, liars, thugs, and all manner of other people we'd rather not deal with.
Then, in the blink of an eye, it's all taken away.
Nothing was taken from her but an illusion. The internet is full of them. Was she vulnerable? Yeah, she sure was. She was preyed upon by an illusion of a friend. Things are rarely what they seem online. It's too easy to make up a name, to play a persona. None of this is to say that things that are real can't be spawned from the online medium, but we have a serious problem when kids or anyone else starts believing in the illusions without verifying them. Or when parents don't supervise a child who's at-risk in this enchanted forest of illusions and masquerade.
...for it is not a crime to suggest how other people should live their lives (or terminate them as the case may be). Lori Drew may be a manipulative shitbag, I think that much is pretty much agreed-upon. However, she obviously did not abuse her position of authority as an adult to put a child in harm's way. She was a cruel woman pretending to be a cruel child. Good lord people, if we locked-up every human being who says something cruel that might hurt someone else's feelings, there wouldn't be many people on the street.
I wonder why nobody has suggested the depressed child's parents might be responsible for this. They were in the same house as their daughter when she committed suicide. Did they do their due diligence when it comes to not just plopping the kid down in front of a computer and letting anonymous people on the internet babysit her? Did the psychologist who was helping her (I must assume Megan was undergoing counseling because she'd attempted suicide previously) just fail to address the internet relationships and activities that she was involved in?
It's a far greater concern to me, anyway, that parents dump their kids, unattended, on the internet. There were a few pretty young kids playing World of Warcraft when I was active, we had a 9-year-old boy in our guild (granted, that was just what he said, and to my knowledge none of us had met him, but he sounded young in voice communication so we didn't doubt his claims)...and while I mostly exercised restraint and watched my virtual mouth when he was around, this was a guild comprised mostly of young adults and he was exposed to a good bit of language and subject matter that most parents would freak-out over. That's one example, the internet is basically like a downtown area in a big city-- a mix of people, not all well-intentioned, businesses, red-light districts, social settings that are good for adults but not minors, and if parents don't supervise their kids' internet activities, they're endangering them.
Myspace's name has been in the middle of all this, there was an adult who was potentially a predator interacting with kids. I don't believe Lori is culpable in the death of the 13 year old, the girl made her own choices. However, Lori did misrepresent herself when she signed up for the account in such a way that she essentially defrauded both Myspace and the girl into believing she was someone who she was not. Her false statements resulted in her getting access she may have otherwise been barred from. I don't know the details about Myspace policies regarding minors or how (or even *if*, but I assume they are) they're segregated from adults, but the long and short of it is that Lori Drew tarnished Myspace's reputation through her fraud.
Most laptops fit easily in racks, and can be used either as consoles or VNC terminals. They can basically function as the poor man's rack KVM and display & I/O tray. Another thing more relevant to the first use is that OLD laptops still mostly have real serial ports and all, whereas those are getting harder and harder to find on new laptops.
I can only speak largely from my own experiences with end users, but most simply use Windows because it's what came on their computers. Many of them have trouble grasping the very notion that they have alternatives to Windows (some have mentioned to me that they, "had to throw away their old computer because they lost Windows," apparently referring to the recovery CD). There's a lot of inertia when it comes to changing things that somebody isn't knowledgeable about. Once they know, though, and are comfortable with their handful of critical applications, Windows is history.
As for the ubuntu forums, I've found them to be pretty friendly and helpful for the most part-- there are some less-than-kind, socially-inept geeks, but so long as someone is following the forum guidelines when posing questions (e.g., asking beginner questions in the beginner forums, paying attention to topics, and not being demanding or rude when asking for help), people will gladly help.
Out of curiosity, who appointed you the End User Advocate again? Just wondering.
I figure I'll let users figure things out for themselves and raise their complaints. Places like the Ubuntu forums are a good place for people, including new users, to air their complaints about the usability of the OS. I've helped a few of my friends through minor obstacles with Ubuntu, once they grasp the new way of doing old tasks, it's usually smooth sailing.
No, the point is that you may have some difficulties learning to do things a little differently, and you're projecting your lack of confidence onto Joe Sixpack. Most package management systems are fairly intuitive, and I haven't encountered many end users who struggled with them. It's different for you, you're a Windows power user. You're probably overwhelmed and don't know how to do all those things under a Linux-based OS yet. You're probably picturing trying to support so many different ways of doing things too and don't know where to begin on how to walk someone through, if that's your support mindset. Trust me, the learning curve is far quicker for folks who use only the basic applications than it is for the folks who have to re-learn how to do a good number of advanced tasks.
For what it's worth, I support in the neighborhood of 450 Windows workstations and servers at work. I run Linux at home. I help several acquaintances and family members out with their occasional Kubuntu questions. Most of them are utterly tech clueless, and I got tired of helping them clean-up malware-riddled Windows. They adapted well...
Non-operating: -1,000 ft to 40,000 ft (-300m to 12,190m)
It looks like it exceeded the humidity tolerances too, in the 6 months it was laying around in the dry lakebed. No wonder they had problems spinning it up...
If Torrentspy was incorporated, the corporation's officers would probably not be financially liable for judgements against the corp. On the other hand, who knows what legal tricks could get the fiscal liability transferred to them if they were prosecuted for criminal obstruction in their destruction of evidence. They played that aspect stupidly wrong, though by potentially opening themselves up to liability, they may have prevented the MPAA from going after users of the service (I probably wouldn't be that sort of a hero to protect mooches who weren't forking over fistfuls of cash for me to take the risk of such a massive fall). If they're not planning on getting back into business, why not just let the corp go legally bankrupt since it probably had almost no assets (such as patents, real estate, and equipment) to forfeit? The big thing would be to keep the officers' personal assets & capital clearly separate from the corp's assets & capital to keep the respective liabilities separate as well.
All bets may be off when it comes to an "illegal" business. But look at how things played out with the white collar frauds and other crimes committed by officers of MCI, Enron, and the like. Even when officers behaved in brazenly criminal ways, their ill-gotten profits were pretty much untouched as I understand it, they'll have their millions to enjoy when they get out of prison.
...where my SMTP server and email accounts begin. The Do Not Call registry, as well as the laws banning unsolicited faxes and telemarketing calls to mobile phones also operate on this principle.
On a related note, I wish those principles applied to my snail mailbox, I'm tired of dealing with all the junk mail. I'm about ready to go truly paperless and just take the darn thing down, because the postal service is only concerned about the money they make from bulk mailers and not whether I want that trash, which I have to dispose of. It takes far more effort and potential expense to deal with trash mail than spam, even. It's of course the USPS' choice, since they own the system and think it's fine and dandy. I treat it the same way, though, I don't even CONSIDER unsolicited commercial mail from anyone, it goes right into the trash. I don't even open them to sort out recyclable content.
While the train-wreck that is Darl is becoming more amusing by the trial, $CO's tactics are just getting silly. In Ars Technica's write-up of this trial, not only do they mention some of Darl's more interesting statements (such as him saying that "Linux is a copy of UNIX"), but the author also points out that SCO's current strategy seems to be that, while it doesn't own the trademarks it claimed it did, all its blustering that led to Microsoft and Sun coughing-up licensing cash was erroneous and the licenses were invalid, and therefore Novell isn't entitled to any of the money $CO collected. The only recourse Microsoft and Sun would then have would be to sue $CO over their losses.
I'm inclined to hope that tactic works. Does it seem to anyone else like $CO's execs may be on the hook for committing fraud by selling things they didn't own? In the real world, most times you sell stuff that doesn't belong to you (like counterfeit or pirated software), you go to PRISON for your efforts. So why shouldn't Darl and his pals wind up behind bars for extorting money out of companies for licenses they didn't own the rights to sell?
He clearly meant that, "Closed-source creates a license so that nobody can ever improve the software (implied: unless the original developer can be bothered)". He knows this all too well, having run Microsoft for the past nearly 3 decades. If there's one thing every Microsoft operating system has showed the world, it's that with Microsoft's closed-source software, nothing ever gets fixed unless Microsoft deigns acknowledge the problem and then gets around to make an effort to fix it. Nobody else can do this, since they don't have access to the source.
Synopsis: Corporations can use parts of their networks as gatekeepers using technology similar to botnets to validate and forward requests to the server, weeding-out bad requests. If it works, the implications could be that home users could possibly volunteer to take part in similar shields (and maybe form bulkheads between some routers?) in order to stop botnet traffic on a larger scale. This isn't about exploiting folks' machines to create an anti-botnet botnet.
Along the same lines of what this proposes for DDoS attacks, Blue Security had their ill-fated Blue Frog opt-in distributed solution that combated spam and disrupted the commercial operations of spammers. And it was only ill-fated because it apparently worked too well and made spammers turn their botnets against Blue Security in an attempt to kill the service, which resulted in that massive DDoS that disrupted Six Apart (because they were on the same host or used the same nameservers) for a few days too. If users don't take the initiative in enforcing some sort of order on the lawless internet, then it will continue to be a cesspool of spam, DDoS attacks, and the other malicious usages of botnets.
I recall that too, the way I saw it then, and still see it...computers compromised by the black hats created a lot of grief for everyone on the internet. There were two basic possibilities for compromised machines, to be infected by Blaster, or to be infected and patched by Welchia.
To hell with anyone who was indignant over being patched by Welchia. I don't care what any of their excuses may have been, if they're going to hang out in a public place, they HAVE to behave themselves. A rambling psychotic waving a broken bottle in a bus terminal may have some lame, imaginative excuse for not taking medications, but that doesn't absolve him of being a nuisance and a public menace who's disrupting the operations of the bus station. For the safety of everyone there, such an individual should either be thrown out or forced to take his medicine, in which case he'll likely function appropriately in the public venue. Welchia made unpatched retards on the internet take their damn medicine and play nice again.
Oh, please. You can't have "intelligent design" without an "intelligent designer" any more than you can have "creation" without a "creator". You're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes when you say I'm lying when I say, "blue is blue". ID is about theism, and it's promoted by theists, plain and simple.
More to you missing the point, biochemistry isn't exactly evolutionary biology, and you'd have to ask Behe what his agenda was and why he decided to pretend to be an expert in a field other than the one he studied. It's chemistry. Biochemists do NOT study living organisms or populations, they primarily analyze and synthesize molecules that are part of organisms or have effects on organisms, e.g., pharmaceuticals. A biochemist is to the life sciences what a jockey is to basketball. It's funny how almost everyone in the parade of ID "experts" is in a non-biological field. You wouldn't consult with a history professor on a legal matter, just saying someone is a "scientist" doesn't mean he possesses expertise in a tangentially-related discipline. This is evidenced in the way he and other pseudo-origins-experts speak on the subject of life sciences. There are plenty of ID proponents in physics and chemistry, but not in the life science disciplines, simply because, while the scientific method is largely the same through all branches, the subject matter and approach to research are substantially different.
I personally consider there to be many unknowns than are necessarily comfortable in the theory of macroevolution. They're interesting, I can't explain some of the chicken-before-egg paradoxes with cellular machinery. But there are down-to-Earth explanations for phenomena like punctuated equilibrium. Most simply, that there are multiple phenotypes coexisting within a population (consider human population, where we have different blood types, eye colors, skin colors, heights, and a host of trivial differences and non-lethal genetic defects), until some external pressure causes one or more phenotypes to suddenly be wiped-out, leaving only a subset, which may be significantly different than the general population was. They may have survived based on one trait that improved survivability dramatically, but any other morphological changes in that population would be part and parcel of the punctuation. Implying that the Hand of God (tm) had to be involved with such things is both unsupported by any evidence, but it's utterly unnecessary.
Being curious is what science is all about. Noticing interesting things or possible flaws in an existing theory and digging deep to answer them is how science gets done. I, for one, welcome interesting questions and objections to theories, regardless of who they're from. But it's antithetical to any of the sciences to fall back to supernatural explanations for those interesting things. Gravity isn't a magical force field. Chemistry isn't alchemy. Astronomy isn't astrology. And life science isn't about creators or intelligent designers. At least not until compelling evidence is produced as to the precise nature and existence of that being so it's not an unfalsifiable unknown entity.
There was an article last week about counterfeit motherboards. The problem is that, while it's easy to spot counterfeits made by people who are simply copying an item, it's nearly impossible to spot counterfeits produced by the OEM factory in China that the company outsourced manufacturing to. During the day, the assembly line produces legit products with serial numbers which are logged by Cisco; after hours, the same assembly line produces the same exact products, but the serial numbers are either duplicates or fakes. If that's the case with counterfeit Cisco equipment, it would take extensive knowledge of the product and cooperation from Cisco's record keeping department.
But the real question is, do pirated versions of an overpriced OS diminish the user experience and 1337ness of having a luxury OS, or does the OS diminish the user experience sufficiently on its own?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem. No matter how tech-savvy an end user is, I never assume that they've done every last thing, or even if they think they have, that they did it correctly. For that matter, I never assume that anyone who previously handled a trouble call did their jobs correctly either. I've seen really stupid stuff slip through lower tiers because they made assumptions due to laziness or an irritable end user. The only thing that makes EVERYONE feel more stupid than going through the troubleshooting step by step when the end user thinks s/he's already done all the basics is to have a technician visit them onsite and find a loose power cord, monitor cable, or similar.
The only thing about this case that's clear, is that the details of the case are as clear as mud.
Firstly, there have been many conflicting accounts as to what the purpose of the scheme was, most seem to have been that the sole purpose was spying on Megan to see what she was saying about Lori's daughter, the ex-Best Friend Forever. It's hard to tell who was even sitting at the keyboard when Megan went off and committed suicide, it sort of puts a whole different light on things if it was the daughter just being cruel to one of her friends while masquerading as a boy. Unless the "known details" have changed, both Lori and her daughter, as well as the other young woman who set-up the account at Lori's request were all using the Josh account at different times.
I also wonder how Lori might've known that Megan was mentally unstable. Perhaps she did, but it's not like most families slap bumper stickers on their cars or hang banners at their homes that read, "My son/daughter is mentally ill!". That's typically a very private matter and you can't hold anyone culpable for not knowing what isn't public knowledge. And all this manipulation nonsense notwithstanding, children are cruel to each other. Some adults are real douchebags too, and it takes a really nasty sort to be cruel to kids. But no matter how cruel and mean the world is, a kid's first line of defense are the parents or guardians. What you don't appear to understand is that the law tends to view things in black and white. It typically only acknowledges the most direct lines of cause and effect.
If you stand on the roof of a building and egg someone on to jump off and they do, you are guilty of murder.Oh really? Can you cite even a single example to establish a precedent? If not, then you're just making stuff up.
This woman did exactly the same thing, only via the internet. What's so damn hard to understand?The law, apparently, but that's all you.
A set amount of time for what? A set amount of time plopped in front of the television does not equate to meaningful supervision if you don't have the porno channels blocked or the kid has access to other inappropriate violent or sexual content.
Sure, they may have been happy she'd found a peer she was chatting with that made her happy. But online, you never trust anything. As I've stated in other comments, you just never trust ANYONE on the internet who you haven't met in person or spoken with on the phone with yourself, much less your kids or anyone you're responsible for. If I've learned anything about the internet over the past nearly two decades, it's that a rather large percentage of the people using the internet seem to fit into one of two categories...those who are obviously using a pseudonym and are guarded with their personal details, and those who seem to be genuine and open with their personal information, but that's only because they're someone else's persona and have nary an ounce of truth in that persona. Different gender, different age, different physical location, I figure you have roughly a 50-50 chance that a given is being honest about who they are online. I could be paranoid when it comes to people on the 'net, but is it truly paranoia when there is so much deception going on? I tend to think that from any given webpage or other internet service, there really aren't more than 3 degrees of separation to some sort of material that would be wildly inappropriate for minors or a predator who is targeting minors.
The internet has an "off" switch. There were a few conditions that made the situation what it was. There was Lori pretending to be a young boy. There was Megan believing the boy was who he said he was. There was Megan apparently being unsupervised on the internet.
Anyway. Are you saying if I was in a relationship with a conniving woman who manipulated me, toyed with my emotions, and then dumped me, and then a week or two after she left I became despondent and committed suicide, that she's therefore guilty of murder because she messed with my head? Please. Even if you kidnapped someone and tortured her, but released her and she committed suicide months later as a result of the psychological trauma, that's not murder. Psychological injuries are still injuries that need to be addressed so that they can heal, but there's still exactly one perpetrator and one victim when it comes to suicide, and they happen to be one and the same. They had a choice, and they made a choice.
You know what the first line of defense between kids and nasty adults who might try to manipulate and abuse them is?
PARENTS.
In this case it just happened that the manipulating adult happened to be some conniving woman next door. It could have just as easily been a 40-year-old pedophile posing as a young boy. There are so many things wrong with a picture where a child is interacting with --anyone-- on the internet in this manner and nobody seems to be supervising her or verifying that her friends are who they say they are, or that she hasn't been taught even the basic theory of not taking anything on the internet at face value.
It's 4am. Do you know where your kids are?
Agreed. I don't like seeing these lynch mobs out trying to stick Lori with some sort of crime. It's ultimately about the rule of law, and not just making-up laws or trying to invent crimes to charge someone with just because that person is a despicable human being. There are a lot of people who may have contributed to the tragedy through their actions or inactions. People seem to want blood and a scapegoat. No matter what sort of scum Lori might be, scapegoating someone to make us all feel better doesn't solve anything.
That has to be one of the most creative definitions of "murder" that I've ever read. No, actually that's closer to "manslaughter". Even so, being cruel to someone is NOT manslaughter. You seem to be mistaking "committing an act" with "saying something". Manslaughter is pushing someone down some stairs on purpose, and having them die from the injuries. It's killing someone through gross negligence, recklessness, or even ambivalence, directly through one's own actions.
Nobody is responsible for the actions of anyone else, except in some cases where coercion is involved. You are responsible for your actions even if a person in a position of authority tells you to do something. You have the choice. The only real exception to this deals with children being taken-advantage of by authority figures they are expected to obey without question, such as police, pastors, and other people in a position of trust and authority. Megan believed that Lori was another child though, so it can't be claimed that Lori abused any authority in making cruel comments, suggesting she commit suicide. Hopefully Lori will never escape the legacy she's created for herself as an ugly, cruel, abusive, and manipulative wench. But it's a dangerous precedent to attempt to set, to hold any person accountable for what someone else does, just because someone is mean to someone who can't handle it when someone is mean to him/her. Part of living in human society is learning to cope with thugs, rude assholes, liars, thugs, and all manner of other people we'd rather not deal with.
Nothing was taken from her but an illusion. The internet is full of them. Was she vulnerable? Yeah, she sure was. She was preyed upon by an illusion of a friend. Things are rarely what they seem online. It's too easy to make up a name, to play a persona. None of this is to say that things that are real can't be spawned from the online medium, but we have a serious problem when kids or anyone else starts believing in the illusions without verifying them. Or when parents don't supervise a child who's at-risk in this enchanted forest of illusions and masquerade.
...for it is not a crime to suggest how other people should live their lives (or terminate them as the case may be). Lori Drew may be a manipulative shitbag, I think that much is pretty much agreed-upon. However, she obviously did not abuse her position of authority as an adult to put a child in harm's way. She was a cruel woman pretending to be a cruel child. Good lord people, if we locked-up every human being who says something cruel that might hurt someone else's feelings, there wouldn't be many people on the street.
I wonder why nobody has suggested the depressed child's parents might be responsible for this. They were in the same house as their daughter when she committed suicide. Did they do their due diligence when it comes to not just plopping the kid down in front of a computer and letting anonymous people on the internet babysit her? Did the psychologist who was helping her (I must assume Megan was undergoing counseling because she'd attempted suicide previously) just fail to address the internet relationships and activities that she was involved in?
It's a far greater concern to me, anyway, that parents dump their kids, unattended, on the internet. There were a few pretty young kids playing World of Warcraft when I was active, we had a 9-year-old boy in our guild (granted, that was just what he said, and to my knowledge none of us had met him, but he sounded young in voice communication so we didn't doubt his claims)...and while I mostly exercised restraint and watched my virtual mouth when he was around, this was a guild comprised mostly of young adults and he was exposed to a good bit of language and subject matter that most parents would freak-out over. That's one example, the internet is basically like a downtown area in a big city-- a mix of people, not all well-intentioned, businesses, red-light districts, social settings that are good for adults but not minors, and if parents don't supervise their kids' internet activities, they're endangering them.
Myspace's name has been in the middle of all this, there was an adult who was potentially a predator interacting with kids. I don't believe Lori is culpable in the death of the 13 year old, the girl made her own choices. However, Lori did misrepresent herself when she signed up for the account in such a way that she essentially defrauded both Myspace and the girl into believing she was someone who she was not. Her false statements resulted in her getting access she may have otherwise been barred from. I don't know the details about Myspace policies regarding minors or how (or even *if*, but I assume they are) they're segregated from adults, but the long and short of it is that Lori Drew tarnished Myspace's reputation through her fraud.
Most laptops fit easily in racks, and can be used either as consoles or VNC terminals. They can basically function as the poor man's rack KVM and display & I/O tray. Another thing more relevant to the first use is that OLD laptops still mostly have real serial ports and all, whereas those are getting harder and harder to find on new laptops.
I can only speak largely from my own experiences with end users, but most simply use Windows because it's what came on their computers. Many of them have trouble grasping the very notion that they have alternatives to Windows (some have mentioned to me that they, "had to throw away their old computer because they lost Windows," apparently referring to the recovery CD). There's a lot of inertia when it comes to changing things that somebody isn't knowledgeable about. Once they know, though, and are comfortable with their handful of critical applications, Windows is history.
As for the ubuntu forums, I've found them to be pretty friendly and helpful for the most part-- there are some less-than-kind, socially-inept geeks, but so long as someone is following the forum guidelines when posing questions (e.g., asking beginner questions in the beginner forums, paying attention to topics, and not being demanding or rude when asking for help), people will gladly help.
Out of curiosity, who appointed you the End User Advocate again? Just wondering.
I figure I'll let users figure things out for themselves and raise their complaints. Places like the Ubuntu forums are a good place for people, including new users, to air their complaints about the usability of the OS. I've helped a few of my friends through minor obstacles with Ubuntu, once they grasp the new way of doing old tasks, it's usually smooth sailing.
No, the point is that you may have some difficulties learning to do things a little differently, and you're projecting your lack of confidence onto Joe Sixpack. Most package management systems are fairly intuitive, and I haven't encountered many end users who struggled with them. It's different for you, you're a Windows power user. You're probably overwhelmed and don't know how to do all those things under a Linux-based OS yet. You're probably picturing trying to support so many different ways of doing things too and don't know where to begin on how to walk someone through, if that's your support mindset. Trust me, the learning curve is far quicker for folks who use only the basic applications than it is for the folks who have to re-learn how to do a good number of advanced tasks.
For what it's worth, I support in the neighborhood of 450 Windows workstations and servers at work. I run Linux at home. I help several acquaintances and family members out with their occasional Kubuntu questions. Most of them are utterly tech clueless, and I got tired of helping them clean-up malware-riddled Windows. They adapted well...
1.11.1: Ambient Temperature
1.11.4: Altitude
It looks like it exceeded the humidity tolerances too, in the 6 months it was laying around in the dry lakebed. No wonder they had problems spinning it up...
First off, IANAL...
If Torrentspy was incorporated, the corporation's officers would probably not be financially liable for judgements against the corp. On the other hand, who knows what legal tricks could get the fiscal liability transferred to them if they were prosecuted for criminal obstruction in their destruction of evidence. They played that aspect stupidly wrong, though by potentially opening themselves up to liability, they may have prevented the MPAA from going after users of the service (I probably wouldn't be that sort of a hero to protect mooches who weren't forking over fistfuls of cash for me to take the risk of such a massive fall). If they're not planning on getting back into business, why not just let the corp go legally bankrupt since it probably had almost no assets (such as patents, real estate, and equipment) to forfeit? The big thing would be to keep the officers' personal assets & capital clearly separate from the corp's assets & capital to keep the respective liabilities separate as well.
All bets may be off when it comes to an "illegal" business. But look at how things played out with the white collar frauds and other crimes committed by officers of MCI, Enron, and the like. Even when officers behaved in brazenly criminal ways, their ill-gotten profits were pretty much untouched as I understand it, they'll have their millions to enjoy when they get out of prison.
...where my SMTP server and email accounts begin. The Do Not Call registry, as well as the laws banning unsolicited faxes and telemarketing calls to mobile phones also operate on this principle.
On a related note, I wish those principles applied to my snail mailbox, I'm tired of dealing with all the junk mail. I'm about ready to go truly paperless and just take the darn thing down, because the postal service is only concerned about the money they make from bulk mailers and not whether I want that trash, which I have to dispose of. It takes far more effort and potential expense to deal with trash mail than spam, even. It's of course the USPS' choice, since they own the system and think it's fine and dandy. I treat it the same way, though, I don't even CONSIDER unsolicited commercial mail from anyone, it goes right into the trash. I don't even open them to sort out recyclable content.
While the train-wreck that is Darl is becoming more amusing by the trial, $CO's tactics are just getting silly. In Ars Technica's write-up of this trial, not only do they mention some of Darl's more interesting statements (such as him saying that "Linux is a copy of UNIX"), but the author also points out that SCO's current strategy seems to be that, while it doesn't own the trademarks it claimed it did, all its blustering that led to Microsoft and Sun coughing-up licensing cash was erroneous and the licenses were invalid, and therefore Novell isn't entitled to any of the money $CO collected. The only recourse Microsoft and Sun would then have would be to sue $CO over their losses.
I'm inclined to hope that tactic works. Does it seem to anyone else like $CO's execs may be on the hook for committing fraud by selling things they didn't own? In the real world, most times you sell stuff that doesn't belong to you (like counterfeit or pirated software), you go to PRISON for your efforts. So why shouldn't Darl and his pals wind up behind bars for extorting money out of companies for licenses they didn't own the rights to sell?
Look up CIDR addressing.
nm
He clearly meant that, "Closed-source creates a license so that nobody can ever improve the software (implied: unless the original developer can be bothered)". He knows this all too well, having run Microsoft for the past nearly 3 decades. If there's one thing every Microsoft operating system has showed the world, it's that with Microsoft's closed-source software, nothing ever gets fixed unless Microsoft deigns acknowledge the problem and then gets around to make an effort to fix it. Nobody else can do this, since they don't have access to the source.
Synopsis: Corporations can use parts of their networks as gatekeepers using technology similar to botnets to validate and forward requests to the server, weeding-out bad requests. If it works, the implications could be that home users could possibly volunteer to take part in similar shields (and maybe form bulkheads between some routers?) in order to stop botnet traffic on a larger scale. This isn't about exploiting folks' machines to create an anti-botnet botnet.
Along the same lines of what this proposes for DDoS attacks, Blue Security had their ill-fated Blue Frog opt-in distributed solution that combated spam and disrupted the commercial operations of spammers. And it was only ill-fated because it apparently worked too well and made spammers turn their botnets against Blue Security in an attempt to kill the service, which resulted in that massive DDoS that disrupted Six Apart (because they were on the same host or used the same nameservers) for a few days too. If users don't take the initiative in enforcing some sort of order on the lawless internet, then it will continue to be a cesspool of spam, DDoS attacks, and the other malicious usages of botnets.
I recall that too, the way I saw it then, and still see it...computers compromised by the black hats created a lot of grief for everyone on the internet. There were two basic possibilities for compromised machines, to be infected by Blaster, or to be infected and patched by Welchia.
To hell with anyone who was indignant over being patched by Welchia. I don't care what any of their excuses may have been, if they're going to hang out in a public place, they HAVE to behave themselves. A rambling psychotic waving a broken bottle in a bus terminal may have some lame, imaginative excuse for not taking medications, but that doesn't absolve him of being a nuisance and a public menace who's disrupting the operations of the bus station. For the safety of everyone there, such an individual should either be thrown out or forced to take his medicine, in which case he'll likely function appropriately in the public venue. Welchia made unpatched retards on the internet take their damn medicine and play nice again.
Oh, please. You can't have "intelligent design" without an "intelligent designer" any more than you can have "creation" without a "creator". You're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes when you say I'm lying when I say, "blue is blue". ID is about theism, and it's promoted by theists, plain and simple.
More to you missing the point, biochemistry isn't exactly evolutionary biology, and you'd have to ask Behe what his agenda was and why he decided to pretend to be an expert in a field other than the one he studied. It's chemistry. Biochemists do NOT study living organisms or populations, they primarily analyze and synthesize molecules that are part of organisms or have effects on organisms, e.g., pharmaceuticals. A biochemist is to the life sciences what a jockey is to basketball. It's funny how almost everyone in the parade of ID "experts" is in a non-biological field. You wouldn't consult with a history professor on a legal matter, just saying someone is a "scientist" doesn't mean he possesses expertise in a tangentially-related discipline. This is evidenced in the way he and other pseudo-origins-experts speak on the subject of life sciences. There are plenty of ID proponents in physics and chemistry, but not in the life science disciplines, simply because, while the scientific method is largely the same through all branches, the subject matter and approach to research are substantially different.
I personally consider there to be many unknowns than are necessarily comfortable in the theory of macroevolution. They're interesting, I can't explain some of the chicken-before-egg paradoxes with cellular machinery. But there are down-to-Earth explanations for phenomena like punctuated equilibrium. Most simply, that there are multiple phenotypes coexisting within a population (consider human population, where we have different blood types, eye colors, skin colors, heights, and a host of trivial differences and non-lethal genetic defects), until some external pressure causes one or more phenotypes to suddenly be wiped-out, leaving only a subset, which may be significantly different than the general population was. They may have survived based on one trait that improved survivability dramatically, but any other morphological changes in that population would be part and parcel of the punctuation. Implying that the Hand of God (tm) had to be involved with such things is both unsupported by any evidence, but it's utterly unnecessary.
Being curious is what science is all about. Noticing interesting things or possible flaws in an existing theory and digging deep to answer them is how science gets done. I, for one, welcome interesting questions and objections to theories, regardless of who they're from. But it's antithetical to any of the sciences to fall back to supernatural explanations for those interesting things. Gravity isn't a magical force field. Chemistry isn't alchemy. Astronomy isn't astrology. And life science isn't about creators or intelligent designers. At least not until compelling evidence is produced as to the precise nature and existence of that being so it's not an unfalsifiable unknown entity.
There was an article last week about counterfeit motherboards. The problem is that, while it's easy to spot counterfeits made by people who are simply copying an item, it's nearly impossible to spot counterfeits produced by the OEM factory in China that the company outsourced manufacturing to. During the day, the assembly line produces legit products with serial numbers which are logged by Cisco; after hours, the same assembly line produces the same exact products, but the serial numbers are either duplicates or fakes. If that's the case with counterfeit Cisco equipment, it would take extensive knowledge of the product and cooperation from Cisco's record keeping department.
But the real question is, do pirated versions of an overpriced OS diminish the user experience and 1337ness of having a luxury OS, or does the OS diminish the user experience sufficiently on its own?