Don't forget about Kopete for us crazy KDE users. It's got the standard AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo, plus Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and a plugin for using WinPopup messages.
There are a few people who belive that the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified that think that your name in all caps is the name of a legal fiction. I tried to understand the thinking behind that, but it involves conspiracy theories and a general detachment from reality. They also belive that the two letter postal code abbreviations for states represent different states than the ones that you write out longhand.
The writer of the movie plot must be able to fit it within the animated timeline up till now. introducing charactors for the first time is fine, but no bringing back the dead and killing them in different ways.
Well, almost every DBZ movie already out there defies that rule.
The framebuffer is just waiting for you to develop for it. Can't you hear it calling out to you? Maybe you should help a project like GTKFB, or maybe it might be intersting to port QT to the framebuffer. I'd love to see either mature. I'd pontificate a bit about what I don't like about X and even how eliminating X wouldn't eliminate DCOP at least (haven't done much with CORBA), but I use Ion as a window manager (it's rather cool to log in in under a second), and I have a midterm in ten minutes.
It should be apparent to you that humans no longer live according to the natural laws. We've evolved past living in the bodies we were born in, past living in the environment we were born in. I would suppose that we aren't even animals any more.
A lot of this type of thing makes you question what existence is, what consciousness is, and what your are. Are you your body? When you get an organ transplant do you become partially another person? What about receiving and donating blood even? Is there some kind of spirit that separates you from the not-you?
Does it become such of a problem if a person is blind if she can be given sight again? That sight would probably be better that any sight you or I could ever imagine. What if deaf people can be given their hearing back? Heck, ugly people can already become sexy.
Now, most people tell me that I simply watch too much anime, but one day I hope that the body can become irrelevant. I'm quite disgusted with the body I was given, and I'm excited at how many options are available for making it much more comfortable to live in.
From time to time I think that it would be a good idea to impose some kind of restriction on procreation. In most species of animals, not every member of the species may procreate. Maybe given a "purer" gene pool, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in, but it's debateable whether my mess is related to genetics at all.
The problem I always run into when trying various thought experiments where procreation is only limited to the select is what the criteria should be. Perhaps we should have a yearly near-deathmatch among males who wish to procreate in order to weed the weaklings out. The survivors could choose from among females that want to procreate on the basis of whom they think will be wildest in bed. That's a close approximation to how it's done in the animal kingdom, but it raises the question of whether the resulting traits would be a good direction for the species. You'd probably end up with a bunch of bimbos and jocks. Another situation would be a large fine for the privelege of marriage and therefore procreation, payable by each mate, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. It has several advantages, but do you really think that you want a world of Bill Gateses? Intelligence isn't enough to be successful; there's also a requirement of being underhanded and sometimes downright evil. I've also explored a few other interested situations, but I always come to the same conclusion: there's no good way of defining quality.
Additionally, evolution is a process, not a goal. The fallacy of those situations is the assumption that there's a knoweable outcome we can solve for. That just isn't true.
Is it that much of a problem that humans can modify their own bodies? I think that's a step in evolution, itself. Let's face it: you can't tell people to not reproduce. Humans have no instinctual pecking order that prevents all but the fittest from mating. The evolution now is being able to control our own bodies.
The only reason that management doesn't like linux is because there's no documentation about it that talks managementspeak. Linux doesn't claim to be some best practice or wave or the future, which all your systems will migrate to over the next five years. Linux isn't going to give the managment flowers and chocolates and take them out to a movie just to get in their pants. Linux knows that management are sluts, and linux doesn't like redundant buzzwords like proactive. Simply, linux works.
"Professionalism" is only concerned with looks. If Tux were Armani, then we'd be talking business, but it isn't. Managers are the most superfulous bastards I've ever had to deal with. They don't care whether something works or not, just that it looks good crashing. They're stuck in the dogma that paying more results in more quailty. There exists no concept of thinking; they only stuff their bras and wait for Mr. Right to come along. None care that he's an abusive jerk; he gives them sweet nothings in their ears. It's completely amazing to me that this system of thick-headed managers has been able to last as long as it has.
These backdoors, trojans, etc. are rendered useless by the backdoors, trojans, etc. the NSA placed in XP.
Well, I wouldn't doubt that they're the same thing. I mean, the government wants to illegally r007 people's b0x3n with their Magic Lantern (I mean, there's no way that anyone's ever going to bother to get a warrant to use this thing), but the government also still wants to look like the protectors of freedom and liberty. What better way to do that, than to blame the hooks that allow the government to remotely install Magic Lantern and have it slip under anti-virus radar on the terrorists? When it makes front page news that people start discovering mysterious packets being sent from their computers to phr33r.spook.gov, the government can turn around and blame it on the evil terrorists. It might take a little spin to explain why the packets are being sent to a U.S. government address, but I'm sure that our protectors of freedom and liberty can pull it off. After all, they destroyed a bunch of lives over keeping the Stelth Bomber that was tested out of Area 51 (I think) secret. At any rate, I wouldn't doubt that 1.) the trojans and whatnot exist and that 2.) the terrorists have nothing to do with it.
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
* 2001-10-27 21:34:23 FBI wants to change the achitechture of the intern (articles,usa) (rejected)
* 2001-11-01 15:49:01 ID Card proposial sneaked into law at last minute (articles,usa) (rejected)
* 2001-11-14 17:14:45 Airports attempt to censor news about crash (articles,censorship) (rejected)
I've never really complained about/.'s lousy story choices before, but I mean, come on. Maybe I'm not the best journalist and maybe I didn't put all those articles in the proper categories, but I didn't see even similar articles make their way through. And then there's this. Wow. Scary. People acting stupid. That's original.
And that should be "FBI wants to change architechture of the internet."
Umm.. I would give Chrono Cross about 2/10, not 10/10. There were so many characters that if you replaced one in your party with another, nothing changed, not even what the characters say (well, except for crazy accents). I think that about half of the tracks on the OST are either remixes of the Chrono Trigger theme or Scars Left by Time. The plot was absolutely horrible: I spent over thirty-five hours bumbling about in Captain Planet rip-off miniquests and listening to characters spout Green Party policy (who I would then fight and then they would join my party). When I finally did beat what I thought was the final boss, the Time Devourer (omni-dragon), I was teleported back to Opassa Beach where the Crono, Marle, and Lucca yelled at Serge for being born for about fifteen minutes, revealing the real plot of the game, when I was whisked away to fight the real Time Devourer, which explained what happened to Schala half-way through Chrono Trigger when she disappears after activating the Mammon Machine. The fight with the real time-devourer was a unique concept, I'll give Squaresoft that, but if they pull something like the Chrono Cross (the artifact) again, they should at least leave more clues as to the sequence of elements to use. All in all, in spite of explaining a few mysteries about Chrono Trigger, the game was a huge disappointment for me.
No, you missed my point. When a user tries to save to A:/, they're drawing on past experience. The people I'm talking about don't even know to save to the A: drive in windows. Saving to/mnt/floppy as opposed to A:\ wouldn't make any difference to them.
Btw, you're right: Macs are easy. However, you wouldn't believe how many times I've had to try to figure out why a Windows user's computer is bluescreening on autoinsert, etc. Linux just works. People know how to type the letters I tell them to. GUIs are simply hard to explain -- I spent ten minutes one time trying to describe the location of the My Computer icon -- the user had moved it to the lower right hand side of the screen. With a CLI, the commands just work:/dev/fd0 always exists at/dev/fd0. modprobe floppy always loads the driver./mnt/floppy is the standard mount point. Even then, drive letters are on crack. Ever start telling a user that their CD rom is drive D: to discover that they have two hard drives, and it's actually drive E:? Face it -- the only reason that people are hooked on GUIs is because DOS sucked so bad that you had to use Windows to do anything. A good CLI like BASH is always easier to use than even the best GUI to a person with no experience.
Yeah, Mozart would never have composed The Magic Flute without copyright protection. Oh, wait...
He might have, and he might not have. If we can assume a world where copyright does not exist, then there's really no money that will get thrown around. When Mozard comes out with his new piece, all the conductors in Europe will shamelessly yoink a copy and get their orchestras to play it, taking the money for themselves. Now, that means that composing can only be done as a hobby.
But then again, copyright in Mozart's time != copyright in our time. Copyright probably only extended at most ten years for Mozard, but today it's over ninty-five! No one needs a ninty-five year copyright period! As one of my friends put it: "If you're not contributing anything new in ten years, you don't deserve to be making money."
Well, I Know Britney 'Jailbait' Spears wouldn't have done quite as well without Copyright law.
Britnet Spears is a whore who's selling point is her breast implants. <sarcasm>I wish my mom would've gotten me implants for my sixteenth birthday</sarcasm>. People see Spears because they want get a lap dance and jack off, so her income is as secure as any porn star at your local stripper's club, and it really isn't tied to her music at all.
Example: "How do I use a USB hard drive under Linux?" Answer: "modprobe usb-mass storage, and use the mount command (man mount)"
I don't see the problem with that, because it really is simple. If an average windows user had asked me this, I would have to say, "Insert the driver CD into the CDROM drive. It's the CD that came with your USB hard drive. Now, Autorun should launch the installer program. It didn't? Ok, go to My Computer. Double click it. Under My Computer, go to your CD-ROM drive. Which one? I dunno, try your D: drive. Yes, Double-click it. Now, there should be a program called SETUP -- double-click it. Now follow the insturction on-screen." (assume that user can do this, which they usually can't.) "Now, when Windows reboots, plug the hard drive in, and Windows should recognize it and set it up as your E: drive. Windows freezes whenever you plug it in?" etc. etc.
If a newbie linux user had asked me and I might say "modprobe usb-mass-storage, and use the mount command. You don't know what modprobe is? It's a command that tells Linux to load a drive. The one you want is usb-mass-storage. Ok, now that that's loaded, make a directory under your mnt folder and call it 'usb-harddrive.' Just type 'mkdir/mnt/usb-harddrive' -- mkdir tells Linux to create a folder. Now, mount the usb device to the folder you just created with 'mount/dev/usbwhatever/mnt/usb-harddrive.' It can't find a filesystem? Do this: 'mkreiserfs/dev/usbwhatever.' While we're waiting you want to know what the last two commands do? mm... just accept that they do what they do for now -- we can set up a one-on-one session with later. Now, just type the mount command again. There. It works."
realEXPERT - click on that configure dial up icon on your desktop and follow the instructions.
Newbie - "What's an icon? Where's this icon? Do i double-click or single-click?" The Newbie middle-clicks it. "Nothing happened. I can't read instructions on screen." The newbie double-clicks and two windows appear. "Woah -- Windows are popping up all over the place. What do I do?!"
Yes, I know that we were all newbies at one point in time, but you have to remember that there are a lot of people who don't even try to figure out what all kinds of GUI stuff does. You can teach them if you want to, but it takes a lot of time and effort. People just learn how to go through the motions of using Outlook or Groupwise or whatever they need. It wouldn't really be too hard to teach them new motions, but Linux people unfortunatly are too concerned about the user understand abstract concepts that they just don't care about.
A lot of these people just didn't grow up with widgets, and have no clue what they're doing, regardless of what OS they're using. A few months ago, I got "hired" by one of my mom's coworkers to teacher her how to use MS Word and Windows in general. I found that I had to start from the basics -- she didn't even know what drag and drop is or what an icon or scrollbar is, so on screen help was pretty useless in addition to my "double click this icon." This was windows, mind you, but I found that she knew so little that I could have taught her how to use vim on a unix command line, and it would have been no different to her, because she simply knew nothing at all about any GUI or computer-related concepts.
Also recently my printer ran out of ink, so I had to mail my professor my essay. That would have worked fine, except for the fact that I wrote it in AbiWord, and he had MS Word. I gave him a link to the installed for win32, but he didn't know what to do with it. In fact, when he clicked it and a Save As... dialog popped up, he thought that he might be getting a virus a closed it (which is a lot better behavior than opening everyting under the sun, but still represents ignorance). The point is, even the userfriendliness of Windows wasn't enought to make up for a basic lack of knowledge he had about computers.
Really, the problem with Linux isn't it's userfriendliness -- Linux is a thousandfold more userfriendly than Windows simply because of the powerful command line -- i.e. you can use GUI if you want, or command line, or both. The entire problem is distribution. It was mentioned a while ago in one of the Microsoft v. DoJ articles here, but something that the DoJ really screwed up was focusing on the flimsy browser argument and totally ignoring the bootloader issue. The problem with Linux is that it just isn't distributed as any kind of boot option on most computers. It really isn't a problem of users being ignorant -- most users are so ignorant that they can easially switch (it's just the manager types that are addicted to MS) -- it's a problem of users not having the exposure.
In fact, being a girl myself, I have a theory about why girls don't like to use computers -- girls, being more language-oriented than visual-oriented, can understand CLIs better than GUIs. I mean, learning BASH as a second language and saying "find -name '.nautilus-metafile' | xargs rm" makes much more sense than using Windows' find utility and deleting from there, even through the two really are equivalent. If Linux could get more distribution, and if newbies could learn either or both CLI and GUI, which ever suits them, I think that there would be a huge increase in user base.
You can bet that it will be crippled in performance, pricing, and/or reliability so that companies can't consider it seriously.
What's even more, I can imagine Microshaft using some old GUI toolkit that no one uses like whater that crap RealPlayer is based on, and then blaming their inability to us a real toolkit like QT or GTK on Linux's supposed backwardness in GUIs. I mean, think about it. If your manager uses these horrible widgets in Office LX, or whatever it'd be called, do you think that he's going to stop to think: Wait a sec... these widgets suck because M$ sucks, not because there aren't pretty widgets available for Linux. If M$ writes any software for Linux, especially under these conditions, I guarantee that they'll try to make Linux look bad. "Now if you'd just use Windows XP, you'd be able to theme your whole interface."
That's exactly what capatilism is all about. Cutting corners: how little effort can you put into making the largest profit? How many people can you anally rape in the wages department before no one will work you for? How shitty of an excuse for software can you throw together and still have it look pretty and work for a few hours? Who cares if 36 solder is insufficient to guarantee safety? It works doesn't it? That's where the bottom line is: the almighty buck. Don't kid yourself -- capatilism has always been all about this shit and always will be.
It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Now, maybe I'm just ignorant because I've never really developed anything with the 640k barrier or had to haggle with XMS and EMS and other whatnot, but it seems to me that those bugfixes are needed because there's something else fundamentaly wrong with the code. IMO, sometimes you just have to rewrite, because your code is just fundamentally wrong.
Take DOS, for example. Microsoft added Windows. Then they made a bootloader, added real multitasking, and called it Windows 95, which wasn't that bad. Then they made some fixes, and called it Windows 98, which supported newer hardware, but was more unstable. Then only God and the developers at Microsoft know what happened to Windows ME, but that's when the bugfixes started causing bugs themselves. I mean, plugging in a USB printer shouldn't freeze the entire system!
Microsoft knew that they had a fundamentally wrong approach to an OS, so they wrote NT, 2K, and are new phasing out ME in favor of XP. XP replaces ME because ME is crap. However, this dude doesn't seem to realize that his own company isn't following is "wisdom."
Maybe I'm just cynnical, but I wonder if there is some kind of ulterior motive here.
Ja, man. FM Radio. That's what the post was all about. You know, how insane the DMCA is?
Re:If only there were a way to hear music for free
on
Rent Music Over the Net
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It'd never work. These "multiple free streams" are clearly in violation of the DMCA. I mean, where's the copyright protection? If I want to give out copies of music I've heard over these "streams," as you've suggested, who's going to stop me? Surely, these "streams" will destroy the music industry! If we go sharing these "streams" around, artists won't get compensated for their work. Take away Mammon, and where's the motivation for original work like Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilaria, and the thousands of other pop stars with breast implants going to come from? What about proportionality? If these "streams" are "broadcast," as you say, then any number of people will be able to tune in, and artists will never get compensated based on who gets listened to the most. This is a very terrible idea. I'm thankful that these "streams" violate the DMCA -- I mean, where else are twleve year olds going to find pop stars to jack off to except the RIAA.
The is absolutely no reason that you need a computer for education. I mean, I passed the AP Computer Science AB exam with flying colors, and the only time I touched my computer to learn that stuff was to find out that the College Board web site sucks. (The AP Computer Science AB exam has nothing to do with programming -- it's all logic and computer science, the way it should be.) Why couldn't these schools buy another computer lab? I doubt that everyone needs to be on the internet at all times.
I dunno, but depending on how you harvest energy, could you start to force your body to metabolize more and lose weight? I mean, it would be uber31337 if I could lose weight by listening to MP3s, don't you think?
Morality is realative. The question is, "Is it legal to keep that twenty or that watch." And the answer is, yes! We live in a capatilism. Anally raping as many people as you can is what the system is all about.
But it isn't the idea of the FBI trying to use these tools that offends me. I expect them too, and I don't have anything to hide.
No, no, no!
What the FBI is doing here, while there is the possiblity that they will be honest and get court approved warranted before deploying this, it goes against why the FBI needs a warrant in the first place. They're supposed to present the warrant to you, so that you know what's going on! If you don't know what's going on, then you're screwed when they decide to lock you up, because you can't create very much of a case for your innocence if you're in jail.
I digress, but we have to face the facts. Justice has degraded to the point where you have to prove you are presumed guilty until proven innocent. That is actually not the government's fault, but rather the people's fault. Everyone needs a scapegoat, and the first person that the DOJ blames is as good as any. Stop delluding yourself with lofty notions of innocent until proven guilty and face reality.
I have lots of things to hide. The problem with letting any officer look at my information behind my back is that he is only human. He will, on a long enough timeline, tell other people that weren't supposed to know. Even if the information was obtained legally, it still gives me peace of mind to know how the information was leaked. As I said, I have lots of things to hide, and that's because I keep a diary. Contained therein are secrets that most people can't handle about another human being. (He's not Christian, oh no! He's not straight, oh no!).
If an officer were to come up to me right now and present me with a search warrant, I would take the warrant, and find for him exactly the information printed thereon. If he wants my root password, I'd tell him "d---," and I'd make sure that he had it in his notes properly. If he needed to have root ssh access to my machine, I'd kindly set it up for him. And when he has the information he needed, I'll trust that he'll leave me alone until he needs more. That is how it is supposed to work, in a calm, civilized, up front and honest manner.
Imagine a cracker getting his fingers on the FBI software and using that on my systems. Gee, thanks for not checking that, Symantec.
That is simply one inherent problem of law inforcement going behind people's backs. With wiretaps, it's nearly impossible for them to be hijacked, so it's not as objectionable as this. We all know how destitute computer security generally is -- do you really want a keylogging trojan on your computer, even if your antivirus software can identify it?
These corporations are only in a bind because they are trying to serve two masters: money and society. Will they appease the masses that are screaming "We want Big Brother!" or will they appease the people with the money who would like to stop Big Brother? It's their choice -- I really don't care. As long as I install software that doesn't have strange backends^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeatures that enable MSTDs (MicroSoft Transmitted Diseasees), I'm proof against the government's method of propogation. I know where my alliegences are, and corporations can go screw themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget about Kopete for us crazy KDE users. It's got the standard AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo, plus Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and a plugin for using WinPopup messages.
Personally, though, I use Psi with Jabber.
There are a few people who belive that the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified that think that your name in all caps is the name of a legal fiction. I tried to understand the thinking behind that, but it involves conspiracy theories and a general detachment from reality. They also belive that the two letter postal code abbreviations for states represent different states than the ones that you write out longhand.
The writer of the movie plot must be able to fit it within the animated timeline up till now. introducing charactors for the first time is fine, but no bringing back the dead and killing them in different ways.
Well, almost every DBZ movie already out there defies that rule.
The framebuffer is just waiting for you to develop for it. Can't you hear it calling out to you? Maybe you should help a project like GTKFB, or maybe it might be intersting to port QT to the framebuffer. I'd love to see either mature. I'd pontificate a bit about what I don't like about X and even how eliminating X wouldn't eliminate DCOP at least (haven't done much with CORBA), but I use Ion as a window manager (it's rather cool to log in in under a second), and I have a midterm in ten minutes.
It should be apparent to you that humans no longer live according to the natural laws. We've evolved past living in the bodies we were born in, past living in the environment we were born in. I would suppose that we aren't even animals any more.
A lot of this type of thing makes you question what existence is, what consciousness is, and what your are. Are you your body? When you get an organ transplant do you become partially another person? What about receiving and donating blood even? Is there some kind of spirit that separates you from the not-you?
Does it become such of a problem if a person is blind if she can be given sight again? That sight would probably be better that any sight you or I could ever imagine. What if deaf people can be given their hearing back? Heck, ugly people can already become sexy.
Now, most people tell me that I simply watch too much anime, but one day I hope that the body can become irrelevant. I'm quite disgusted with the body I was given, and I'm excited at how many options are available for making it much more comfortable to live in.
From time to time I think that it would be a good idea to impose some kind of restriction on procreation. In most species of animals, not every member of the species may procreate. Maybe given a "purer" gene pool, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in, but it's debateable whether my mess is related to genetics at all.
The problem I always run into when trying various thought experiments where procreation is only limited to the select is what the criteria should be. Perhaps we should have a yearly near-deathmatch among males who wish to procreate in order to weed the weaklings out. The survivors could choose from among females that want to procreate on the basis of whom they think will be wildest in bed. That's a close approximation to how it's done in the animal kingdom, but it raises the question of whether the resulting traits would be a good direction for the species. You'd probably end up with a bunch of bimbos and jocks. Another situation would be a large fine for the privelege of marriage and therefore procreation, payable by each mate, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. It has several advantages, but do you really think that you want a world of Bill Gateses? Intelligence isn't enough to be successful; there's also a requirement of being underhanded and sometimes downright evil. I've also explored a few other interested situations, but I always come to the same conclusion: there's no good way of defining quality.Additionally, evolution is a process, not a goal. The fallacy of those situations is the assumption that there's a knoweable outcome we can solve for. That just isn't true.
Is it that much of a problem that humans can modify their own bodies? I think that's a step in evolution, itself. Let's face it: you can't tell people to not reproduce. Humans have no instinctual pecking order that prevents all but the fittest from mating. The evolution now is being able to control our own bodies.
The only reason that management doesn't like linux is because there's no documentation about it that talks managementspeak. Linux doesn't claim to be some best practice or wave or the future, which all your systems will migrate to over the next five years. Linux isn't going to give the managment flowers and chocolates and take them out to a movie just to get in their pants. Linux knows that management are sluts, and linux doesn't like redundant buzzwords like proactive. Simply, linux works.
"Professionalism" is only concerned with looks. If Tux were Armani, then we'd be talking business, but it isn't. Managers are the most superfulous bastards I've ever had to deal with. They don't care whether something works or not, just that it looks good crashing. They're stuck in the dogma that paying more results in more quailty. There exists no concept of thinking; they only stuff their bras and wait for Mr. Right to come along. None care that he's an abusive jerk; he gives them sweet nothings in their ears. It's completely amazing to me that this system of thick-headed managers has been able to last as long as it has.
These backdoors, trojans, etc. are rendered useless by the backdoors, trojans, etc. the NSA placed in XP.
Well, I wouldn't doubt that they're the same thing. I mean, the government wants to illegally r007 people's b0x3n with their Magic Lantern (I mean, there's no way that anyone's ever going to bother to get a warrant to use this thing), but the government also still wants to look like the protectors of freedom and liberty. What better way to do that, than to blame the hooks that allow the government to remotely install Magic Lantern and have it slip under anti-virus radar on the terrorists? When it makes front page news that people start discovering mysterious packets being sent from their computers to phr33r.spook.gov, the government can turn around and blame it on the evil terrorists. It might take a little spin to explain why the packets are being sent to a U.S. government address, but I'm sure that our protectors of freedom and liberty can pull it off. After all, they destroyed a bunch of lives over keeping the Stelth Bomber that was tested out of Area 51 (I think) secret. At any rate, I wouldn't doubt that 1.) the trojans and whatnot exist and that 2.) the terrorists have nothing to do with it.
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
/.'s lousy story choices before, but I mean, come on. Maybe I'm not the best journalist and maybe I didn't put all those articles in the proper categories, but I didn't see even similar articles make their way through. And then there's this. Wow. Scary. People acting stupid. That's original.
* 2001-10-27 21:34:23 FBI wants to change the achitechture of the intern (articles,usa) (rejected)
* 2001-11-01 15:49:01 ID Card proposial sneaked into law at last minute (articles,usa) (rejected)
* 2001-11-14 17:14:45 Airports attempt to censor news about crash (articles,censorship) (rejected)
I've never really complained about
And that should be "FBI wants to change architechture of the internet."
Umm.. I would give Chrono Cross about 2/10, not 10/10. There were so many characters that if you replaced one in your party with another, nothing changed, not even what the characters say (well, except for crazy accents). I think that about half of the tracks on the OST are either remixes of the Chrono Trigger theme or Scars Left by Time. The plot was absolutely horrible: I spent over thirty-five hours bumbling about in Captain Planet rip-off miniquests and listening to characters spout Green Party policy (who I would then fight and then they would join my party). When I finally did beat what I thought was the final boss, the Time Devourer (omni-dragon), I was teleported back to Opassa Beach where the Crono, Marle, and Lucca yelled at Serge for being born for about fifteen minutes, revealing the real plot of the game, when I was whisked away to fight the real Time Devourer, which explained what happened to Schala half-way through Chrono Trigger when she disappears after activating the Mammon Machine. The fight with the real time-devourer was a unique concept, I'll give Squaresoft that, but if they pull something like the Chrono Cross (the artifact) again, they should at least leave more clues as to the sequence of elements to use. All in all, in spite of explaining a few mysteries about Chrono Trigger, the game was a huge disappointment for me.
No, you missed my point. When a user tries to save to A:/, they're drawing on past experience. The people I'm talking about don't even know to save to the A: drive in windows. Saving to /mnt/floppy as opposed to A:\ wouldn't make any difference to them.
Btw, you're right: Macs are easy. However, you wouldn't believe how many times I've had to try to figure out why a Windows user's computer is bluescreening on autoinsert, etc. Linux just works. People know how to type the letters I tell them to. GUIs are simply hard to explain -- I spent ten minutes one time trying to describe the location of the My Computer icon -- the user had moved it to the lower right hand side of the screen. With a CLI, the commands just work: /dev/fd0 always exists at /dev/fd0. modprobe floppy always loads the driver. /mnt/floppy is the standard mount point. Even then, drive letters are on crack. Ever start telling a user that their CD rom is drive D: to discover that they have two hard drives, and it's actually drive E:? Face it -- the only reason that people are hooked on GUIs is because DOS sucked so bad that you had to use Windows to do anything. A good CLI like BASH is always easier to use than even the best GUI to a person with no experience.
Yeah, Mozart would never have composed The Magic Flute without copyright protection. Oh, wait...
He might have, and he might not have. If we can assume a world where copyright does not exist, then there's really no money that will get thrown around. When Mozard comes out with his new piece, all the conductors in Europe will shamelessly yoink a copy and get their orchestras to play it, taking the money for themselves. Now, that means that composing can only be done as a hobby.
But then again, copyright in Mozart's time != copyright in our time. Copyright probably only extended at most ten years for Mozard, but today it's over ninty-five! No one needs a ninty-five year copyright period! As one of my friends put it: "If you're not contributing anything new in ten years, you don't deserve to be making money."
Well, I Know Britney 'Jailbait' Spears wouldn't have done quite as well without Copyright law.
Britnet Spears is a whore who's selling point is her breast implants. <sarcasm>I wish my mom would've gotten me implants for my sixteenth birthday</sarcasm>. People see Spears because they want get a lap dance and jack off, so her income is as secure as any porn star at your local stripper's club, and it really isn't tied to her music at all.
Example: "How do I use a USB hard drive under Linux?" Answer: "modprobe usb-mass storage, and use the mount command (man mount)"
I don't see the problem with that, because it really is simple. If an average windows user had asked me this, I would have to say, "Insert the driver CD into the CDROM drive. It's the CD that came with your USB hard drive. Now, Autorun should launch the installer program. It didn't? Ok, go to My Computer. Double click it. Under My Computer, go to your CD-ROM drive. Which one? I dunno, try your D: drive. Yes, Double-click it. Now, there should be a program called SETUP -- double-click it. Now follow the insturction on-screen." (assume that user can do this, which they usually can't.) "Now, when Windows reboots, plug the hard drive in, and Windows should recognize it and set it up as your E: drive. Windows freezes whenever you plug it in?" etc. etc.
If a newbie linux user had asked me and I might say "modprobe usb-mass-storage, and use the mount command. You don't know what modprobe is? It's a command that tells Linux to load a drive. The one you want is usb-mass-storage. Ok, now that that's loaded, make a directory under your mnt folder and call it 'usb-harddrive.' Just type 'mkdir /mnt/usb-harddrive' -- mkdir tells Linux to create a folder. Now, mount the usb device to the folder you just created with 'mount /dev/usbwhatever /mnt/usb-harddrive.' It can't find a filesystem? Do this: 'mkreiserfs /dev/usbwhatever.' While we're waiting you want to know what the last two commands do? mm... just accept that they do what they do for now -- we can set up a one-on-one session with later. Now, just type the mount command again. There. It works."
realEXPERT - click on that configure dial up icon on your desktop and follow the instructions.
Newbie - "What's an icon? Where's this icon? Do i double-click or single-click?" The Newbie middle-clicks it. "Nothing happened. I can't read instructions on screen." The newbie double-clicks and two windows appear. "Woah -- Windows are popping up all over the place. What do I do?!"
Yes, I know that we were all newbies at one point in time, but you have to remember that there are a lot of people who don't even try to figure out what all kinds of GUI stuff does. You can teach them if you want to, but it takes a lot of time and effort. People just learn how to go through the motions of using Outlook or Groupwise or whatever they need. It wouldn't really be too hard to teach them new motions, but Linux people unfortunatly are too concerned about the user understand abstract concepts that they just don't care about.
A lot of these people just didn't grow up with widgets, and have no clue what they're doing, regardless of what OS they're using. A few months ago, I got "hired" by one of my mom's coworkers to teacher her how to use MS Word and Windows in general. I found that I had to start from the basics -- she didn't even know what drag and drop is or what an icon or scrollbar is, so on screen help was pretty useless in addition to my "double click this icon." This was windows, mind you, but I found that she knew so little that I could have taught her how to use vim on a unix command line, and it would have been no different to her, because she simply knew nothing at all about any GUI or computer-related concepts.
Also recently my printer ran out of ink, so I had to mail my professor my essay. That would have worked fine, except for the fact that I wrote it in AbiWord, and he had MS Word. I gave him a link to the installed for win32, but he didn't know what to do with it. In fact, when he clicked it and a Save As... dialog popped up, he thought that he might be getting a virus a closed it (which is a lot better behavior than opening everyting under the sun, but still represents ignorance). The point is, even the userfriendliness of Windows wasn't enought to make up for a basic lack of knowledge he had about computers.
Really, the problem with Linux isn't it's userfriendliness -- Linux is a thousandfold more userfriendly than Windows simply because of the powerful command line -- i.e. you can use GUI if you want, or command line, or both. The entire problem is distribution. It was mentioned a while ago in one of the Microsoft v. DoJ articles here, but something that the DoJ really screwed up was focusing on the flimsy browser argument and totally ignoring the bootloader issue. The problem with Linux is that it just isn't distributed as any kind of boot option on most computers. It really isn't a problem of users being ignorant -- most users are so ignorant that they can easially switch (it's just the manager types that are addicted to MS) -- it's a problem of users not having the exposure.
In fact, being a girl myself, I have a theory about why girls don't like to use computers -- girls, being more language-oriented than visual-oriented, can understand CLIs better than GUIs. I mean, learning BASH as a second language and saying "find -name '.nautilus-metafile' | xargs rm" makes much more sense than using Windows' find utility and deleting from there, even through the two really are equivalent. If Linux could get more distribution, and if newbies could learn either or both CLI and GUI, which ever suits them, I think that there would be a huge increase in user base.
You can bet that it will be crippled in performance, pricing, and/or reliability so that companies can't consider it seriously.
What's even more, I can imagine Microshaft using some old GUI toolkit that no one uses like whater that crap RealPlayer is based on, and then blaming their inability to us a real toolkit like QT or GTK on Linux's supposed backwardness in GUIs. I mean, think about it. If your manager uses these horrible widgets in Office LX, or whatever it'd be called, do you think that he's going to stop to think: Wait a sec... these widgets suck because M$ sucks, not because there aren't pretty widgets available for Linux. If M$ writes any software for Linux, especially under these conditions, I guarantee that they'll try to make Linux look bad. "Now if you'd just use Windows XP, you'd be able to theme your whole interface."
And if you don't like it, try living in a non-capitalist society for a while...
I did. There's one called Germany that I rather liked. You know, where they have sane laws instead of Anything-Goes Matrial Arts Mammon Worship
it's not good capatilism
That's exactly what capatilism is all about. Cutting corners: how little effort can you put into making the largest profit? How many people can you anally rape in the wages department before no one will work you for? How shitty of an excuse for software can you throw together and still have it look pretty and work for a few hours? Who cares if 36 solder is insufficient to guarantee safety? It works doesn't it? That's where the bottom line is: the almighty buck. Don't kid yourself -- capatilism has always been all about this shit and always will be.
It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Now, maybe I'm just ignorant because I've never really developed anything with the 640k barrier or had to haggle with XMS and EMS and other whatnot, but it seems to me that those bugfixes are needed because there's something else fundamentaly wrong with the code. IMO, sometimes you just have to rewrite, because your code is just fundamentally wrong.
Take DOS, for example. Microsoft added Windows. Then they made a bootloader, added real multitasking, and called it Windows 95, which wasn't that bad. Then they made some fixes, and called it Windows 98, which supported newer hardware, but was more unstable. Then only God and the developers at Microsoft know what happened to Windows ME, but that's when the bugfixes started causing bugs themselves. I mean, plugging in a USB printer shouldn't freeze the entire system!
Microsoft knew that they had a fundamentally wrong approach to an OS, so they wrote NT, 2K, and are new phasing out ME in favor of XP. XP replaces ME because ME is crap. However, this dude doesn't seem to realize that his own company isn't following is "wisdom."
Maybe I'm just cynnical, but I wonder if there is some kind of ulterior motive here.
Ja, man. FM Radio. That's what the post was all about. You know, how insane the DMCA is?
It'd never work. These "multiple free streams" are clearly in violation of the DMCA. I mean, where's the copyright protection? If I want to give out copies of music I've heard over these "streams," as you've suggested, who's going to stop me? Surely, these "streams" will destroy the music industry! If we go sharing these "streams" around, artists won't get compensated for their work. Take away Mammon, and where's the motivation for original work like Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilaria, and the thousands of other pop stars with breast implants going to come from? What about proportionality? If these "streams" are "broadcast," as you say, then any number of people will be able to tune in, and artists will never get compensated based on who gets listened to the most. This is a very terrible idea. I'm thankful that these "streams" violate the DMCA -- I mean, where else are twleve year olds going to find pop stars to jack off to except the RIAA.
The is absolutely no reason that you need a computer for education. I mean, I passed the AP Computer Science AB exam with flying colors, and the only time I touched my computer to learn that stuff was to find out that the College Board web site sucks. (The AP Computer Science AB exam has nothing to do with programming -- it's all logic and computer science, the way it should be.) Why couldn't these schools buy another computer lab? I doubt that everyone needs to be on the internet at all times.
IANAgeneticist, but what if these animal-halves that you start creating are sentient?
I dunno, but depending on how you harvest energy, could you start to force your body to metabolize more and lose weight? I mean, it would be uber31337 if I could lose weight by listening to MP3s, don't you think?
It is morally wrong to keep it.
Morality is realative. The question is, "Is it legal to keep that twenty or that watch." And the answer is, yes! We live in a capatilism. Anally raping as many people as you can is what the system is all about.
Raise Hell and be a patriot.
And get arrested for being a terrorist sympathizer
But it isn't the idea of the FBI trying to use these tools that offends me. I expect them too, and I don't have anything to hide.
No, no, no!
What the FBI is doing here, while there is the possiblity that they will be honest and get court approved warranted before deploying this, it goes against why the FBI needs a warrant in the first place. They're supposed to present the warrant to you, so that you know what's going on! If you don't know what's going on, then you're screwed when they decide to lock you up, because you can't create very much of a case for your innocence if you're in jail.
I digress, but we have to face the facts. Justice has degraded to the point where you have to prove you are presumed guilty until proven innocent. That is actually not the government's fault, but rather the people's fault. Everyone needs a scapegoat, and the first person that the DOJ blames is as good as any. Stop delluding yourself with lofty notions of innocent until proven guilty and face reality.
I have lots of things to hide. The problem with letting any officer look at my information behind my back is that he is only human. He will, on a long enough timeline, tell other people that weren't supposed to know. Even if the information was obtained legally, it still gives me peace of mind to know how the information was leaked. As I said, I have lots of things to hide, and that's because I keep a diary. Contained therein are secrets that most people can't handle about another human being. (He's not Christian, oh no! He's not straight, oh no!).
If an officer were to come up to me right now and present me with a search warrant, I would take the warrant, and find for him exactly the information printed thereon. If he wants my root password, I'd tell him "d---," and I'd make sure that he had it in his notes properly. If he needed to have root ssh access to my machine, I'd kindly set it up for him. And when he has the information he needed, I'll trust that he'll leave me alone until he needs more. That is how it is supposed to work, in a calm, civilized, up front and honest manner.
Imagine a cracker getting his fingers on the FBI software and using that on my systems. Gee, thanks for not checking that, Symantec.
That is simply one inherent problem of law inforcement going behind people's backs. With wiretaps, it's nearly impossible for them to be hijacked, so it's not as objectionable as this. We all know how destitute computer security generally is -- do you really want a keylogging trojan on your computer, even if your antivirus software can identify it?
These corporations are only in a bind because they are trying to serve two masters: money and society. Will they appease the masses that are screaming "We want Big Brother!" or will they appease the people with the money who would like to stop Big Brother? It's their choice -- I really don't care. As long as I install software that doesn't have strange backends^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeatures that enable MSTDs (MicroSoft Transmitted Diseasees), I'm proof against the government's method of propogation. I know where my alliegences are, and corporations can go screw themselves.