Simple fact is, the best of minds among men should and do expect a return on their efforts that is as large as the benefits they
provide other men.
Hm... Sounds.... Utopian!
To be honest, if this were true in society, we'd have a lot of teachers who would be making a HELL of a lot more money than they are (and a lot more who would be starving). The problem is, our society does NOT pay "men" (ahem) based on the benefits they provide others, but rather on the benefits they can convince others they have provided. There is a subtle but very significant difference. If we lived in the society you describe, the leaders of RIAA would shrivel up from lack of food, and the artists would be twice as wealthy as they appear to be now (assuming that "art" is a "benefit"...hm....another can of worms opens when you ask someone to define "benefit).
Does the university not own the network you connect your computer to?
If it does, does it not have the right to restrict the means by which you can abuse that network?
In the right world, your computer would only be confiscated insofar as was necessary to prove your abuse; that may not be realistic in this world, but it's certainly the target I strove for when I worked as a University Sysadmin. Typically we didn't confiscate hardware, but then when I was in the trenches most students didn't own their own computers--they were provided by the University in dorm rooms as well as labs.
So how many of you have actually been University Sysadmins?
As a former sysadmin (and before that a former student hacker in trouble, so don't assume I don't know your side of the story), I can guarantee you that if everything is permissible in the name of free speech and I as sysadmin can't do anything to stop you, then the service you're going to end up with will be worthless. Because a few immature "l33t hax0r" types will make a point of abusing resources to the point where nothing more can be done.
If the University has any sense, they will have a grievance and arbitration board, and any actions by the staff considered overbroad or out of bounds can be taken before that board for appeal.
Of course I've actually argued with Mr. Kadie about these issues (MANY years ago) on public newsgroups. He seems to believe that every organization has the resources and the responsibility to follow rules as complex as the FBI's rules of engagement. Most Universities do not have that luxury.
And the fact remains that most of the loudest proponents on campus of "free speech uber alles" are also usually the last ones to actually exercise any responsibility in their behavior, and thereby poison the well for all their peers. Mr. Kadie's heart may be in the right place to insist on just treatment, but nonetheless, some thought needs to go into the issue as well; you can't just say that a University IT group of 3-8 people responsible for 5000 students have to follow the same due process that the police go through because 1) they don't have any legal obligation to do so and 2) there is no way they could be effective under such constraints.
Not quite. You can't get a dog to give spider's milk by the methods you describe.
Re:The Ganges: India's Sewer.
on
Spidergoats
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· Score: 1
The biggest problem with genetically modified rice? It can't reproduce. By DESIGN. To line corporate pockets. So people don't want to be locked into a food monopoly, just like most/.ers don't want to be locked into an OS monopoly. This is wrong? This is the product "ignorant, tree-hugging, unemployed,
sociology hippies"? I hardly think that's the whole story.
While I have some sympathy for a company wanting to make money off what they spent hard cash to develop, I have no sympathy for their claiming it's going to end world hunger (just as soon as the world pays up), since the whole problem is that if the world COULD pay up, they wouldn't be hungry, would they?
I see the sun come up after I go to sleep every day. Does that mean that my sleep causes the sun to come up?
One person's personal experience is hardly proof of causality. Did you even bother to read what I said? Hm, your friends went from weed to worse shit. I smoked weed and didn't go to worse shit (acid does not count as "worse shit" whatever bias you may have against it, as it shares things like not being addictive with pot, and has not even come close to destroying any part of my life). My personal experience is in direct contradiction to your own. Who's right?
My argument is that just because it's easy to assume that when b follows a that a caused it, it's hardly definitively proven to be so. Especially given the vast number of times (yourself included, apparently since you haven't gone on to "worse shit") that b DOESN'T follow a.
So are you saying that your friends went to coke etc only because of the weed, and not, as I hypothesized, because they realized that they'd been egregiously lied to about weed and assumed that meant that the other stuff was ok? Are you certain that you know their decision to do coke intimately enough to understand why they went from a to b?
As soon as you carry a baby and see how "easy" it is to "hand over" (not to mention the 9 months reminder of your rape) you'll have some credibility. In the meantime, your argument is specious--in your example you can hand over the baby immediately, at least compared to carrying a child to term. Also, it's worth noting that a baby in your house is hardly the invasion that a child in your body is going to be.
You won't mind this little implant I'm going to make you carry around for the next year, are you?
The main thing is that taking one illegal drug does not ipso facto mean you will take another. I've smoked pot & met uncle sid my share of times, but you won't see me looking for heroin or cocaine any time in my lifetime. Most people who hop from one to another are those who are sadly foolish enough to think that just because The Man lies about dope, he must be lying about all the rest of it, and it's all just as innocuous.
The gateway is not the drug, it's the proof that Uncle lied to you you when you don't grow horns from smoking dope.
Y'all haven't paid much attention to Mr. McNealy's commentary about Microsoft very often, have you? Remember, he's the guy talking about wishing he had the patent on N and T in congressional hearings. While I doubt he wrote the response, I'm sure his approach was followed.
Personally, I thought the response was pretty darn funny, but you're right, it wasn't very professional. Then again, when have any of us known Marketers to be especially concerned about "professional"?
Chuck asked for it, he got it, end of story. It might have done Sun some good to take the high road, but then again, I'm sure the funny factor counts for something too.
Didn't anyone follow the link that someone provided?
It only works with Win2000 and Win ME "without drivers" (which of course means the drivers are built in). No mention is made of any other OS, aside from "Work with today's popular operating systems"; however, that's immediately following the comments about Win2000 & WinME, so it could well be Marketing Speak for "M$ only".
Wasn't it Einstein who said that he didn't waste memory on things like his address or phone number, since he could always look them up in the phone book? So people don't memorize lots of things when they have PDA's to help them remember. You'd HOPE they might be using that brain capacity for something more interesting then....
Hm, can anyone say "disconnect the wires and go as fast as you want" then?
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
I guess I should be grateful that abusers are only slapped on the wrist then, eh? If they're so anxious to take a bullet for me, why the hell can't they keep their own ranks clean then?
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
Yeah, those cops & authorities, it's so unlikely that they'll abuse their power. The cop who stopped women leaving bars, made them strip and walk home, was a renegade.
Keep telling yourself that, and ignore the stories that came out about similar behavior in many other places around the US.
Ignore the fact that this particular cop has only had the most minimal of wrist slaps for his behavior.
Keep your head down, and when they come for you, none of us will be left to help you. Oh well.
eh...perhaps because that's the way it's being presented? Nah, that wouldn't have ANYTHING to do with it. If NASA wanted to say "this is just a demonstration, of course we would expect there to be limitations because of xyz obvious problems" they could easily have done so.
As for Karma Whoring, so sorry to those with sour grapes, but I just say what I think. Been at this for, oh, many months, and still ain't nowhere near massive Karma, so if I'm a KW I must suck pretty bad.
This new technology is significant in that neuroelectric control of computers can replace
computer keyboards, mice and joysticks for some uses
It's been stated flippantly by some other posters, but I really seriously hope none of these uses include safety-critical applications, either for the user or for the user's "clients" of whatever sort. The example of an airline pilot is a good one--is it really smart to think that a pilot will be able to keep his hand under *complete* control for the duration of a 4 hour cross country flight? Much less the much longer intercontinental flights? Can you imagine the difficulty of keeping your arm completely still during the period of stable flight? I suppose it wouldn't be *that* hard to cut in and out with the autopilot, but still....
Furthermore, one advantage sticks etc. have is they don't require you to be physically tethered to the control system. If a pilot today has some medical emergency, not only does the copilot have his/her own stick, but the pilot could be removed and any other person capable of flying the machine could very quickly take over. How long would it take 1) to move the electrodes and 2) train the neural net for another person?
This really does not seem like it would be a good technology for any kind of control system where you have human failsafes to protect safety.
An Anonymous Coward (wonder why anonymous?) wrote:
The fact is that Bess actually works remarkably well. The article states "This is the same dreary, censorious software
that can't distinguish between porn sites and poetry passages, not to mention intelligently discriminate between
breast-cancer education pages and breast-ogling sites." I don't know what software the article is referring to, but Bess
certainly can tell the difference. It's driven by the catagorization of sites by LIVE HUMAN BEINGS, who certainly
can tell the difference. (What a heinous job, by the way.) Furthermore, it is the schools and other customers, NOT
Bess or N2H2, who choose which categories to filter out. As far as the freedom/censorship issue -- Saying school
children should have unrestricted access to the internet is like saying every elementary school in America should have a
subscription to Penthouse. Please. FYI: N2H2 is a huge Linux / Perl company. These are your friends!
Bah. Friends like that I can do without. Until I hear of an objective study that shows how well it works, the assertions of someone who can't even bother to name themself don't carry much weight. As far as the "subscription to Penthouse" analogy goes, pound sand. Children should not be allowed unsupervised access to the internet, but arbitrarily filtering URLs when typically such filters are only about 50% effective is ridiculous. It leads parents to believe that their children are being monitored in whatever way they want, when in fact they have access to the neighbor's Penthouse subscription. Whoopty difference that makes. Either you teach the children what's right and trust them to make good choices (and watch for the inevitable giggling etc that indicates trouble), or you don't put them on the internet, period.
Re:what is wrong with the idea ?
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 1
Don't you think if it was that easy, at least ONE company would be doing it right? Cluetrain about to hit you: none of them do it right.
Previous poster said that adoption was hard. As if that was a justification for the ethical nightmares of human cloning (which btw isn't particularly easy either, even if it were legal).
Slashdot Mirror
Hm... Sounds.... Utopian!
To be honest, if this were true in society, we'd have a lot of teachers who would be making a HELL of a lot more money than they are (and a lot more who would be starving). The problem is, our society does NOT pay "men" (ahem) based on the benefits they provide others, but rather on the benefits they can convince others they have provided. There is a subtle but very significant difference. If we lived in the society you describe, the leaders of RIAA would shrivel up from lack of food, and the artists would be twice as wealthy as they appear to be now (assuming that "art" is a "benefit"...hm....another can of worms opens when you ask someone to define "benefit).
If it does, does it not have the right to restrict the means by which you can abuse that network?
In the right world, your computer would only be confiscated insofar as was necessary to prove your abuse; that may not be realistic in this world, but it's certainly the target I strove for when I worked as a University Sysadmin. Typically we didn't confiscate hardware, but then when I was in the trenches most students didn't own their own computers--they were provided by the University in dorm rooms as well as labs.
If they'd just give us reasonable, ubiquitous means of strong encryption on our email, it wouldn't be an issue, would it?
As a former sysadmin (and before that a former student hacker in trouble, so don't assume I don't know your side of the story), I can guarantee you that if everything is permissible in the name of free speech and I as sysadmin can't do anything to stop you, then the service you're going to end up with will be worthless. Because a few immature "l33t hax0r" types will make a point of abusing resources to the point where nothing more can be done.
If the University has any sense, they will have a grievance and arbitration board, and any actions by the staff considered overbroad or out of bounds can be taken before that board for appeal.
Of course I've actually argued with Mr. Kadie about these issues (MANY years ago) on public newsgroups. He seems to believe that every organization has the resources and the responsibility to follow rules as complex as the FBI's rules of engagement. Most Universities do not have that luxury.
And the fact remains that most of the loudest proponents on campus of "free speech uber alles" are also usually the last ones to actually exercise any responsibility in their behavior, and thereby poison the well for all their peers. Mr. Kadie's heart may be in the right place to insist on just treatment, but nonetheless, some thought needs to go into the issue as well; you can't just say that a University IT group of 3-8 people responsible for 5000 students have to follow the same due process that the police go through because 1) they don't have any legal obligation to do so and 2) there is no way they could be effective under such constraints.
Not quite. You can't get a dog to give spider's milk by the methods you describe.
While I have some sympathy for a company wanting to make money off what they spent hard cash to develop, I have no sympathy for their claiming it's going to end world hunger (just as soon as the world pays up), since the whole problem is that if the world COULD pay up, they wouldn't be hungry, would they?
One person's personal experience is hardly proof of causality. Did you even bother to read what I said? Hm, your friends went from weed to worse shit. I smoked weed and didn't go to worse shit (acid does not count as "worse shit" whatever bias you may have against it, as it shares things like not being addictive with pot, and has not even come close to destroying any part of my life). My personal experience is in direct contradiction to your own. Who's right?
My argument is that just because it's easy to assume that when b follows a that a caused it, it's hardly definitively proven to be so. Especially given the vast number of times (yourself included, apparently since you haven't gone on to "worse shit") that b DOESN'T follow a.
So are you saying that your friends went to coke etc only because of the weed, and not, as I hypothesized, because they realized that they'd been egregiously lied to about weed and assumed that meant that the other stuff was ok? Are you certain that you know their decision to do coke intimately enough to understand why they went from a to b?
I suspect not.
You won't mind this little implant I'm going to make you carry around for the next year, are you?
The main thing is that taking one illegal drug does not ipso facto mean you will take another. I've smoked pot & met uncle sid my share of times, but you won't see me looking for heroin or cocaine any time in my lifetime. Most people who hop from one to another are those who are sadly foolish enough to think that just because The Man lies about dope, he must be lying about all the rest of it, and it's all just as innocuous.
The gateway is not the drug, it's the proof that Uncle lied to you you when you don't grow horns from smoking dope.
Personally, I thought the response was pretty darn funny, but you're right, it wasn't very professional. Then again, when have any of us known Marketers to be especially concerned about "professional"?
Chuck asked for it, he got it, end of story. It might have done Sun some good to take the high road, but then again, I'm sure the funny factor counts for something too.
It only works with Win2000 and Win ME "without drivers" (which of course means the drivers are built in). No mention is made of any other OS, aside from "Work with today's popular operating systems"; however, that's immediately following the comments about Win2000 & WinME, so it could well be Marketing Speak for "M$ only".
Wasn't it Einstein who said that he didn't waste memory on things like his address or phone number, since he could always look them up in the phone book? So people don't memorize lots of things when they have PDA's to help them remember. You'd HOPE they might be using that brain capacity for something more interesting then....
No no no no. That's a "GEEK" tragedy.
Hm, can anyone say "disconnect the wires and go as fast as you want" then?
I guess I should be grateful that abusers are only slapped on the wrist then, eh? If they're so anxious to take a bullet for me, why the hell can't they keep their own ranks clean then?
Keep telling yourself that, and ignore the stories that came out about similar behavior in many other places around the US.
Ignore the fact that this particular cop has only had the most minimal of wrist slaps for his behavior.
Keep your head down, and when they come for you, none of us will be left to help you. Oh well.
As for Karma Whoring, so sorry to those with sour grapes, but I just say what I think. Been at this for, oh, many months, and still ain't nowhere near massive Karma, so if I'm a KW I must suck pretty bad.
This new technology is significant in that neuroelectric control of computers can replace computer keyboards, mice and joysticks for some uses
It's been stated flippantly by some other posters, but I really seriously hope none of these uses include safety-critical applications, either for the user or for the user's "clients" of whatever sort. The example of an airline pilot is a good one--is it really smart to think that a pilot will be able to keep his hand under *complete* control for the duration of a 4 hour cross country flight? Much less the much longer intercontinental flights? Can you imagine the difficulty of keeping your arm completely still during the period of stable flight? I suppose it wouldn't be *that* hard to cut in and out with the autopilot, but still....
Furthermore, one advantage sticks etc. have is they don't require you to be physically tethered to the control system. If a pilot today has some medical emergency, not only does the copilot have his/her own stick, but the pilot could be removed and any other person capable of flying the machine could very quickly take over. How long would it take 1) to move the electrodes and 2) train the neural net for another person?
This really does not seem like it would be a good technology for any kind of control system where you have human failsafes to protect safety.
Just because the technology was SCARCE doesn't mean it wasn't OBVIOUS.
looks like the market is already punishing them for their stupidity. (I can dream, can't I?) http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=gwrx&d=1y
Interesting how the NT and Linux graphs are complementary. Must be a fixed pool of script kiddies, and they got distracted there for a bit by Linux.
The fact is that Bess actually works remarkably well. The article states "This is the same dreary, censorious software that can't distinguish between porn sites and poetry passages, not to mention intelligently discriminate between breast-cancer education pages and breast-ogling sites." I don't know what software the article is referring to, but Bess certainly can tell the difference. It's driven by the catagorization of sites by LIVE HUMAN BEINGS, who certainly can tell the difference. (What a heinous job, by the way.) Furthermore, it is the schools and other customers, NOT Bess or N2H2, who choose which categories to filter out. As far as the freedom/censorship issue -- Saying school children should have unrestricted access to the internet is like saying every elementary school in America should have a subscription to Penthouse. Please. FYI: N2H2 is a huge Linux / Perl company. These are your friends!
Bah. Friends like that I can do without. Until I hear of an objective study that shows how well it works, the assertions of someone who can't even bother to name themself don't carry much weight. As far as the "subscription to Penthouse" analogy goes, pound sand. Children should not be allowed unsupervised access to the internet, but arbitrarily filtering URLs when typically such filters are only about 50% effective is ridiculous. It leads parents to believe that their children are being monitored in whatever way they want, when in fact they have access to the neighbor's Penthouse subscription. Whoopty difference that makes. Either you teach the children what's right and trust them to make good choices (and watch for the inevitable giggling etc that indicates trouble), or you don't put them on the internet, period.
Don't you think if it was that easy, at least ONE company would be doing it right? Cluetrain about to hit you: none of them do it right.
But I'm cuter than cerebunny!!!!!
Previous poster said that adoption was hard. As if that was a justification for the ethical nightmares of human cloning (which btw isn't particularly easy either, even if it were legal).