First off, for the record, I do agree - based on avialable data (never used filters myself) - that modern filtering software sux. But we need to find a better solution to the problem of pr0n in the libraries, instead of saying "this solution sucks so there's no problem".
That is the whole point of the issue. I - and zillion other people like me - have no beef with "advanced", "politically incorrect", etc... art, speach, whatever. The beef is, we don't want it to be paid for by our tax dollars.
For example, the now-infamous NYC fight between Rudy Guliani and the museum wasn't over the museum's right to display the stupid painting (and kill me if I consider that piece of s**t - pun intended - art), like all the librul noismakers made it sound. It was over the fact that said painting was displayed with PUBLIC FUNDS. They wanna do it in private museum - sure, i have no problem with that (other than wondering about sanity of the artist, critics and viewers). But I don't want my tax money used for it. This has NOTHING to do with First Amendement which deals with laws restricting speach - merely with not having to pay for it. Ditto NEA issue.
Arts should be like science - if you want to fund whatever you want, you either make it worth the money and submit a proposal to NSF, or seek private funding.
-DVK
P.S. Now let's see how far down this gets moderated in the name of freedom of speech;)
> You should be worrying about the 50% of your
> taxes that go straight to Pentagon and billions
> that are being wasted on NYC's Metrocard system.
So what exactly is your problem with 50% going to Pentagon? When you refuse to use the Internet (developed originally by DARPA, part of DoD, in case you didn't know), come back to me and we'll talk about money being wasted.
As for Metrocard, i adore it, it is way better than anything i've seen before. Although I'll admit to homicidal urges towards the smarty-pants who designed the user interface for some parts of the system;)
OK, first off, disclaimer - back in my young (and not so supid) years, in USSR, I've done my fair share of similar advantures. Even got a couple of scars to prove it;)
However, now that i'm grown up and more mature, i'm curious about two questions:
1) If one of these adventurers gets themselves maimed or G-d forbid killed, will their relatives sue the city (in case of NYC, quite likely) and will I - via my tax money - have to pay big time because "the city didn't provide adequate protection to them from their own actions".
2) Another consequence these folks don't consider when posting such info on the web - while most of them are probably more intelligent people who are capable of getting the thrill while avoiding death, what is some idjit reads the web site, decided to heroicaly follow directions, and gets himself offed by whatever danger it was that cause the site to be closed?
> And somehow these Capatalist Bastards are not
> fucking you?
Actually, no. See, I'm smart, talented and hard-working (err... workaholic;)
So, I can live the american dream (y'know, the "work hard, get paid for what you do, lather, rinse, repeat...") and be much better off under those evil greedy corporations than I was under benevolent leadership of CPSU.</sarcasm>
Yeah, US is in no way perfect. No, nobody's figured out a better way to live yet, and sure as hell didn't implement one that would work for a nation of over 50Mil people for over 100 years.
USA, to the best of my knowledge, has been taxing blank audio cassetes that way. The difference is, most of those cassetes were used for copying songs off CDs or radio or other tapes.
Hard drives *can* be used for pirating but are mostly used for other purposes, this is like taxing cars because some of them can be used as getaway vehicle in a bank robbery;)
Besides, with the margins they put on, it simply won't work, any neighbouring EU country will simply ship the hardware sans tax. Those socialist bastards[0] will simply tax their own sellers out of existance.
[0] i spent 17 years under socialism... so i figure i got full right to use the term;)
It seems that the biggest drawback to DVD-RAM or other such long term reliable storage is the fact that the camera gets bumped around.
Why not separate the storage from the camera? Have the camera store SOME amount in a couple-meg buffer (FlashCard? RAM?), and transmit the rest to a base containing the storage device. The base can be either wearable (say in backpack) and thus possible to connect via a wire or some short-distance network (Does Bluetooth have enough bandwidth?); or stationary, may be in a car, using other wireless network that is more long-distance.
I mean, picking up what your dog leaves behind is done by (hopefully) most urban dog-owners.
Porn viewing in and out of itself is a blessing to LOTS of people, and as for gross stuff, cops, doctors and undertakers probably see a LOT worse every day of their lives.
PR flacks existed long before the 'net and probably were universaly hated by any techies.
Chat room monitors is pretty new, but i'm not sure it's much worse than being a councelor in a teenage summer camp. Now, running Slashdot, that is likely a job from hell *snicker*
And lackeys existed long before technology, never mind computers, even in US of A.
Now, if you ask me, the worst possible job is a low level tech support for some financial company.
Why? You get all the "benefits" of a tech support position, combined with being the bottom of the food chain for people who posess no technical knowledge (true for all lusers), proud of it (true for all lusers) and can fire you if they don't like the tone of your voice with one phone call (not likely in your average tech support position).
You all seem to be yelling "cops see 'hacker' and assime 'criminal' and that is wrong"
Well, how come all of you see "police" and assume "criminal" and "wrongly arrested" and "police state"?
So far, none of the people who posted "burn the police" messages have seen the site. May be he cracked into PBA site and stole policemen's home addresses and posted them, for all we know?
Stop being so trigger-happy and ganging up on people who every day risk their lives to make sure you can rant safely.
Oh, and anyone ranting about "lack of freedom in USA" is more than welcome to try living on other country. I did my 17-year stint in USSR. Unlike most of the yellers, I have some basis for making a judgement, and it isn't "USA is a police state".
I have never seen any mention of this being done,
but with the cost per pound of payload to ISS, would it have been possible to salvage some of the soon-to-be-drowned hardware and re-use it for one purpose or another on ISS? I'm sure it would be much cheaper to change the orbit of some parts
(or simply tow them with a shuttle) to get them close to ISS. Yes, the thing is way old, but some of the stuff must still be useable, for materials if no other purpose.
5.b. No substantial part of the activities of the Corporation shall be the carrying on of propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and the Corporation shall be empowered to make the election under 501 (h) of the Code.
What i'm not sure about is, how can ICANN be "independent", if it falls under US Law jusrisdiction, seing how it is a non-profit corporation organized within the framework of US law.
Regarding dispute itself, i'm somewhat surprized that ICANN acted this way (choosing submissions from some paying companies while refusing others), when their Bylaws, ARTICLE IV , Section 1: General Powers state: c) The Corporation shall not apply its standards, policies, procedures or practices inequitably or single out any particular party for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause, such as the promotion of effective competition.
I would say that granting some TLDs that benefit the companies which submitted them while rejecting others violates the above rule.
> They person who tripped over the line must've
> been running full force. We can yank on our cords
> quite hard and never pull them out.
That depends on how well the facilities people handle things. In our datacenters we have had quite a few emergencies when a big server's
power - even a major backup server - was accidentally kicked out (this is a major investement bamk, BTW), before someone hgh up the ladder didn't wake up and ordered things properly placed and protected against brute physical attack of a running person;)
If you think US of A is bad, you are very elcome to try out other places. As someone who immigrated to US, I can assure you you will likely deepy regret your decision. It may seem that someplace else the pastures are greener, but with
all its warts and dirt, US is still the best country to live in if you have enough will and drive to succeed.
To be perfectly honest, i find it strange when people whine about this or that problem in US.
This is the biggest benefit of our country - if you don't like something, you have the power to
change it.
OK, I won't comment on SDMI, however, what Kasich said re: B-2 is a *TOTAL* BS.
It's a stealth bomber.
Stealth != invisible.
Stealth means two things:
a) It has a low radar profile so it's hard to detect (and thus know when the bombs start falling or call the fighters)
b) It has low radar profile so the anti-aircraft
weaponry can't get a lock on it.
He may be correct in the political sense, but BS
argument is BS argument.
Quite honestly, i'm not sure who is further from reality - The Clown (my own name for Zhirinovsky), or the airhead mediot(s) at Excite.
"Russia...is struggling to catch up with economically-advanced countries on the use of new technologies, such as the Internet..."
OK, number one, since when did Internet become a *new* technology?;)
Number two - if you go ask ANYONE who has ever dealt with computer guys living in, or recently emigrated from, fUSSR [ and I don't mean script kiddies ], you would get a clear clue that on the average, they are at least as good as their counterparts in the West.
This partly has to do with the fact that, in general, math and science education in fUSSR was better than in the States, which easily compensated for any technology gaps.
I don't want to touch this Zhirinovsky discussion with a 10-foot soldering iron, but it unpleasantly amazed me how/. community happily started yelling "yes all russian hackers are uber-inferior to us!". I would have expected more mature attitude.
While I must say there is more to Russian anti-americanism than "reverse-anti-communism", I will second the vote for stratfor.com an EXCELLENT source of information, recommended to anyone who is interested in non-hyped, thoughtful commentary based on reality and not ideology.
OK, $64,000 question - where did these words (with all the bloody inaccuracies in the transliteration;) come from?
And the answer is: (yep, you guessed it): It's a song from "The Hunt for Red October" soundtrack. A Hollywood movie based on Tom Clancy novel (which is, in turn, inspired by a real event).
And the song is not Soviet or Russian, it's a "Hymn to the Red October", music by Basil Poledouris. More info at t his link.
(I must admit, that it *IS* a clever fake... I thought it's Soviet for the longest time, and I used to have quite a bit of knowlege of Soviet war music).
A customer was a victim? Ever thought that may be OTHER peoples are victims that FBI tried to protect?
Fact: I live in NYC (unfortunately) Fact: I have to work on Jan 1 08:00-20:00 shift, and the same Jan 2. Yeah, i'm one of those poor schmucks who have to actually suffer from this whole Y2K scare (as in a bunch of extra load culminating in 2 unpaid 12-hour shifts on-site during holidays). Fact: It takes me 1.5-2 hours on a NORMAL day to get to work. Fact: if this bozo "artist" and the likes of him and their irresponsible "self-expression" lead to riots in my city, and if that f&^ks up my life, I'd be perfectly happy to go pay him a visit and blow his head off for causing me grief.
The only fault i seee with FBI is that they didn't do it the proper way, so the bastard wouldn't be able to weasel out of it.
First, an on-topic comment. There are two main factors that may contribute to NSA loosing the lead - first, the decreased difference between theirs and their targets' capablities, which was very thoughfully analized in previous posts (nod to Erik); second reason is less technical. The increase in avialable information, even if you have the muscle to decipher it, is exponentially increasing the difficuly of analysing the raw data, both figuring out important signal from non-important one, and noticing how little pieces fit together - which often requires a human brain, which so far eluded Moore's law;)
Now, a bit further off-topic: from my experience, there's a lot of people in the community who percieve NSA to be the embodiment of evil, and much fewer who are cheering for them (or may be the former are simply more vocal?)
Well, wake up, boys and girls - NSA makes sure that you keep HAVING your so-much-cherished freedom. Most of their operations are directed outside US borders, at people whose aim is to harm US citizens or US interests. And when some juvenile sitting comfortably in his home in New York starts yelling "Let's cripple NSA!", just try to remember that their primary function is making sure that a lot of people (and yes, they exist) who want to rid the world of your presence can not do so, by providing your government with intelligence needed to protect your behind.
Oh, and that extra bit of info which their Cray didn't crunch because you think "nsa-triggering".sig is way cool and is a good way to spend Cray's CPU cycles, may well mean the difference between your young neighbour serving in the US Army coming home to parents or getting killed. Remember, in modern warfare, information and logistics is what wins the war.
Yes, the sinister "Mercury Rising" types are way more sexy to imagine, but guess what, for most part, NSA is inhabited by fellow geeks trying to do good things for their country.
-DVK, the intelligence-friendly geek Discalimer: I don't work for NSA, or US government in general (although I did get a job offer from No Such Agency while in college - had to turn them down for i'm-not-a-citizen yet reason;(
Slashdot Mirror
That is the whole point of the issue. I - and zillion other people like me - have no beef with "advanced", "politically incorrect", etc... art, speach, whatever. The beef is, we don't want it to be paid for by our tax dollars.
For example, the now-infamous NYC fight between Rudy Guliani and the museum wasn't over the museum's right to display the stupid painting (and kill me if I consider that piece of s**t - pun intended - art), like all the librul noismakers made it sound. It was over the fact that said painting was displayed with PUBLIC FUNDS. They wanna do it in private museum - sure, i have no problem with that (other than wondering about sanity of the artist, critics and viewers). But I don't want my tax money used for it. This has NOTHING to do with First Amendement which deals with laws restricting speach - merely with not having to pay for it. Ditto NEA issue.
Arts should be like science - if you want to fund whatever you want, you either make it worth the money and submit a proposal to NSF, or seek private funding.
-DVK
P.S. Now let's see how far down this gets moderated in the name of freedom of speech ;)
> taxes that go straight to Pentagon and billions
> that are being wasted on NYC's Metrocard system.
So what exactly is your problem with 50% going to Pentagon? When you refuse to use the Internet (developed originally by DARPA, part of DoD, in case you didn't know), come back to me and we'll talk about money being wasted.
As for Metrocard, i adore it, it is way better than anything i've seen before. Although I'll admit to homicidal urges towards the smarty-pants who designed the user interface for some parts of the system ;)
-DVK
However, now that i'm grown up and more mature, i'm curious about two questions:
1) If one of these adventurers gets themselves maimed or G-d forbid killed, will their relatives sue the city (in case of NYC, quite likely) and will I - via my tax money - have to pay big time because "the city didn't provide adequate protection to them from their own actions".
2) Another consequence these folks don't consider when posting such info on the web - while most of them are probably more intelligent people who are capable of getting the thrill while avoiding death, what is some idjit reads the web site, decided to heroicaly follow directions, and gets himself offed by whatever danger it was that cause the site to be closed?
-DVK
> fucking you?
Actually, no. See, I'm smart, talented and hard-working (err... workaholic ;)
So, I can live the american dream (y'know, the "work hard, get paid for what you do, lather, rinse, repeat...") and be much better off under those evil greedy corporations than I was under benevolent leadership of CPSU.</sarcasm>
Yeah, US is in no way perfect. No, nobody's figured out a better way to live yet, and sure as hell didn't implement one that would work for a nation of over 50Mil people for over 100 years.
-DVK
Hard drives *can* be used for pirating but are mostly used for other purposes, this is like taxing cars because some of them can be used as getaway vehicle in a bank robbery
Besides, with the margins they put on, it simply won't work, any neighbouring EU country will simply ship the hardware sans tax. Those socialist bastards[0] will simply tax their own sellers out of existance.
[0] i spent 17 years under socialism... so i figure i got full right to use the term ;)
-DVK
Why not separate the storage from the camera? Have the camera store SOME amount in a couple-meg buffer (FlashCard? RAM?), and transmit the rest to a base containing the storage device. The base can be either wearable (say in backpack) and thus possible to connect via a wire or some short-distance network (Does Bluetooth have enough bandwidth?); or stationary, may be in a car, using other wireless network that is more long-distance.
Just my .02
-DVK
Porn viewing in and out of itself is a blessing to LOTS of people, and as for gross stuff, cops, doctors and undertakers probably see a LOT worse every day of their lives.
PR flacks existed long before the 'net and probably were universaly hated by any techies.
Chat room monitors is pretty new, but i'm not sure it's much worse than being a councelor in a teenage summer camp. Now, running Slashdot, that is likely a job from hell *snicker*
And lackeys existed long before technology, never mind computers, even in US of A.
Now, if you ask me, the worst possible job is a low level tech support for some financial company. Why? You get all the "benefits" of a tech support position, combined with being the bottom of the food chain for people who posess no technical knowledge (true for all lusers), proud of it (true for all lusers) and can fire you if they don't like the tone of your voice with one phone call (not likely in your average tech support position).
-DVK
So far, none of the people who posted "burn the police" messages have seen the site. May be he cracked into PBA site and stole policemen's home addresses and posted them, for all we know?
Stop being so trigger-happy and ganging up on people who every day risk their lives to make sure you can rant safely.
Oh, and anyone ranting about "lack of freedom in USA" is more than welcome to try living on other country. I did my 17-year stint in USSR. Unlike most of the yellers, I have some basis for making a judgement, and it isn't "USA is a police state".
-DVK
-DVK
at http://www.icann.org/general/articles.htm read:
5.b. No substantial part of the activities of the Corporation shall be the carrying on of propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and the Corporation shall be empowered to make the election under 501 (h) of the Code.
What i'm not sure about is, how can ICANN be "independent", if it falls under US Law jusrisdiction, seing how it is a non-profit corporation organized within the framework of US law.
Regarding dispute itself, i'm somewhat surprized that ICANN acted this way (choosing submissions from some paying companies while refusing others), when their Bylaws, ARTICLE IV , Section 1: General Powers state:
c) The Corporation shall not apply its standards, policies, procedures or practices inequitably or single out any particular party for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause, such as the promotion of effective competition.
I would say that granting some TLDs that benefit the companies which submitted them while rejecting others violates the above rule.
#include IANAL.h
#include disclaimers.h
-DVK
> been running full force. We can yank on our cords
> quite hard and never pull them out.
That depends on how well the facilities people handle things. In our datacenters we have had quite a few emergencies when a big server's power - even a major backup server - was accidentally kicked out (this is a major investement bamk, BTW), before someone hgh up the ladder didn't wake up and ordered things properly placed and protected against brute physical attack of a running person ;)
-DVK
To be perfectly honest, i find it strange when people whine about this or that problem in US. This is the biggest benefit of our country - if you don't like something, you have the power to change it.
Why??? If i was on a desert island, with a computer, and there was females around, i'd want to STAY, not build a boat ;)
-DVK
OK, I won't comment on SDMI, however, what Kasich said re: B-2 is a *TOTAL* BS. It's a stealth bomber. Stealth != invisible. Stealth means two things: a) It has a low radar profile so it's hard to detect (and thus know when the bombs start falling or call the fighters) b) It has low radar profile so the anti-aircraft weaponry can't get a lock on it. He may be correct in the political sense, but BS argument is BS argument.
"Russia...is struggling to catch up with economically-advanced countries on the use of new technologies, such as the Internet..."
OK, number one, since when did Internet become a *new* technology? ;)
Number two - if you go ask ANYONE who has ever dealt with computer guys living in, or recently emigrated from, fUSSR [ and I don't mean script kiddies ], you would get a clear clue that on the average, they are at least as good as their counterparts in the West.
This partly has to do with the fact that, in general, math and science education in fUSSR was better than in the States, which easily compensated for any technology gaps.
I don't want to touch this Zhirinovsky discussion with a 10-foot soldering iron, but it unpleasantly amazed me how /. community happily started yelling "yes all russian hackers are uber-inferior to us!". I would have expected more mature attitude.
-DVK
While I must say there is more to Russian anti-americanism than "reverse-anti-communism",
I will second the vote for stratfor.com
an EXCELLENT source of information, recommended to anyone who is interested in non-hyped, thoughtful commentary based on reality and not ideology.
And the answer is: (yep, you guessed it):
It's a song from "The Hunt for Red October" soundtrack. A Hollywood movie based on Tom Clancy novel (which is, in turn, inspired by a real event).
And the song is not Soviet or Russian, it's a "Hymn to the Red October", music by Basil Poledouris. More info at t his link.
(I must admit, that it *IS* a clever fake... I thought it's Soviet for the longest time, and I used to have quite a bit of knowlege of Soviet war music).
-Cheers,
Daniel
A customer was a victim?
Ever thought that may be OTHER peoples are victims that FBI tried to protect?
Fact: I live in NYC (unfortunately)
Fact: I have to work on Jan 1 08:00-20:00 shift, and the same Jan 2. Yeah, i'm one of those poor schmucks who have to actually suffer from this whole Y2K scare (as in a bunch of extra load culminating in 2 unpaid 12-hour shifts on-site during holidays).
Fact: It takes me 1.5-2 hours on a NORMAL day to get to work.
Fact: if this bozo "artist" and the likes of him and their irresponsible "self-expression" lead to riots in my city, and if that f&^ks up my life, I'd be perfectly happy to go pay him a visit and blow his head off for causing me grief.
The only fault i seee with FBI is that they didn't do it the proper way, so the bastard wouldn't be able to weasel out of it.
Now, a bit further off-topic: from my experience, there's a lot of people in the community who percieve NSA to be the embodiment of evil, and much fewer who are cheering for them (or may be the former are simply more vocal?)
Well, wake up, boys and girls - NSA makes sure that you keep HAVING your so-much-cherished freedom. Most of their operations are directed outside US borders, at people whose aim is to harm US citizens or US interests.
And when some juvenile sitting comfortably in his home in New York starts yelling "Let's cripple NSA!", just try to remember that their primary function is making sure that a lot of people (and yes, they exist) who want to rid the world of your presence can not do so, by providing your government with intelligence needed to protect your behind.
Oh, and that extra bit of info which their Cray didn't crunch because you think "nsa-triggering" .sig is way cool and is a good way to spend Cray's CPU cycles, may well mean the difference between your young neighbour serving in the US Army coming home to parents or getting killed. Remember, in modern warfare, information and logistics is what wins the war.
Yes, the sinister "Mercury Rising" types are way more sexy to imagine, but guess what, for most part, NSA is inhabited by fellow geeks trying to do good things for their country.
-DVK, the intelligence-friendly geek ;(
Discalimer: I don't work for NSA, or US government in general (although I did get a job offer from No Such Agency while in college - had to turn them down for i'm-not-a-citizen yet reason