No, state governments are not in the habit of posting your home address, but other people occaisionally find the need to include information about you on a site you don't control. Schools are notorious for this, IME. Lists of students with phone numbers and email addresses are not uncommon to find online. If you've ever done anything noteworthy enough to find a place in the local paper, chances are you will never get that information off of the internet, as it gets copied over and over and archived.
It is almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another web server, it is likely that your "secret" URL is in the referer tag, and it can be stored and possibly published by the other web server in its referer log. So, if there is a link to your "secret" web server or page on the web anywhere, it is likely that Googlebot and other "web crawlers" will find it.
If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.
It wasn't always so black and white, public or not. Back in the day I could have a personal website known only to me and a few friends. Maybe certain industrious investigators could discover it, but not many would. Now, I have to assume that any information I would put there is public knowledge, easily accessible by anyone who knows my name.
As a kind of parlor trick, I amuse myself and give my friends the willies just using Google and telling them about themselves. With only a nickname or an email address, I can find phone numbers, addresses, and past histories. Frequently, much this information was not placed on the net by the person themselves or is no longer under their control.
I completely agree that Google has had a net positive effect on how we use the net, but you can't ignore the impact it's had on privacy. There's no correct answer here; the easier it is for you to find information, the easier it is to find information about you.
One small exception: Oregon has no state sales tax. In Washington, at least, if you show a valid ID that proves you live in Oregon (or a few other places), you don't have to pay the sales tax. Link
Alright guy, I'm wrong and I admit it. I guess I've been doing bad, bad things when I report the sales tax on my new mobo. I'm sure the cops will be here any moment.
Not as such (yet). If the two parties are in different states, no sales tax applies. If you're in different counties in the same state, only the common state tax applies. The state taxes applies as long as the company maintains a presence in your state. So a company may have stores in several states and charge the appropriate tax for customers in those states.
The states are in quite an uproar about this, as it's quite common for people to buy stuff from out of state for the specific purpose of avoiding sales tax. I do it all the time when it comes to buying expensive computer parts where the tax would be more than the extra shipping.
In this day and age, yes, a unified installshield kind of app is badly needed.
What is it about Linux that makes this so hard? Nullsoft, the people who made Winamp and then were bought by AOL, made their own open source installation/packaging program for Windows. They're just 15 or so people and they did it in their spare time from coding Winamp.
Now, I'm no coder, but why is it any harder to do the same on Linux? Of course it is harder, which is obvious from the amount of work that's put into the problem; but why does it need to be?
If I pirate Microsoft software, do you think Microsoft will stand by and let the big name OEMs sell computers which (according to them) facilitate piracy? I don't have a say, but Microsoft does.
End result: You do not get your $850 computer to run Linux on, because I could get the same $850 computer and run pirated Windows on it. Microsoft is more than willing to sacrifice the former to prevent the latter. It's a win-win situation that they have no incentive to change.
Yeah, people will buy the $850 machine, but -- get this -- they're still not going to run Linux. Linux desktop users are in the vast minority. 90% of the people who pick up the cheaper machine are still going to want to run Windows. Microsoft will claim that the 90% are just going to install a pirated version of Windows. And you know what? They're not really wrong. I know plenty of people who would buy the Linux machine and install a pirated copy of Windows.
Does this mean they're justified in charging those 10% Linux users the "Microsoft Tax"? I can't really say, but I know what RMS will say and I know what Microsoft will say. But then, who gets to decide? Microsoft. Because RMS sure as hell isn't going to pay the OEMs the difference to license full price versions of Windows.
I don't think his point was "all anyone needs is a $30 case" but "if all you need is a $30 case, don't spend $150 on a fancy looking case". Of course there are good reasons to buy an high-end case, but most cases designed for looks aren't much better than the El Cheapo case you can get from your local computer store.
you could, you know, leave the network cable unplugged until it's all secure...
Which only leaves me with less of an incentive to switch, when I already have free reign on the net in reasonably secure environment with Windows 2000. General security issues aside, a Windows box in the hands of an experienced user is more secure than a Linux box in the hands of an inexperienced one. And the time to become experienced is more likely measured in weeks or months. Sure, you can make a new Red Hat install secure enough to host/. within a few hours, but it'll take me a bit longer.
What, desktop users don't get the much-touted benefits of open source software? We're just stuck with Microsoft because the people in charge of the OSS movement don't want to change any more than Microsoft does? Linux isn't for me, but neither is Windows. I use Windows now because it's a lot closer to what is for me than Linux, but that doesn't mean I'm statisfied.
For myself, I was really happy with BeOS. I found it to be the happy medium between a hardcore roll-your-own OS like Linux and the don't-touch-that attitude of Windows. When Be died, I moved back to Windows because Linux has little to offer me. I've messed around with it in the past, but I've found I spend more time learning to use the system rather than using it.
With Be gone, I'm not left with many options. I could take the plunge into Linux, hope my box doesn't get rooted in the time it takes me to figure out how to secure it, or I could stick with Windows and be pushed around by Microsoft. I have hope for distros like Mandrake, but I find they're often incomplete. If I want do Linux right, I have to get down in there and screw around with stuff I don't know how to use.
The deciding issue is whether my reluctance to trudge through Linux is matched by Microsoft's attempts to control what I can do with my computer. Does my ignorance prevent me from doing what I want in Linux more so than Microsoft does in Windows? I have a feeling things will swing the other way about the time Windows 2000 ceases to be a viable option or when distros like Mandrake become mature enough that I can trust it to handle the small stuff.
I forgot to mention that just covers the MPAA or the RIAA. If you're talking about the police or the FBI, your little notice doesn't mean anything. If you try to sue Officer Joe because he caught you with kiddie porn when the server says cops have to disconnect from the server, the court will laugh in your face and promptly throw you in jail.
Think about it: If cops were held responsible for agreements they made in the process of an undercover investigation, imagine how many drug buys would be proceeded by a contract that says, "I am not a cop. Signed: ___________"
Doesn't this fall under the "you have to tell me if you're a cop" myth propogated among prostitutes? The MPAA could argue that despite your MOTD legalese, the IRC server is a public environment and that information on the network is publicly accessible. So, it doesn't matter how they got it, even if they broke your TOS to get it, because it's public knowledge anyway.
Of course, IANAL and what I just said bears no relation to the actual law.
Does the MPAA really think they can get away with this?!
Yes. And so far, it looks like they have. Remember, they're not threatening to sue anyone who's sharing infringing material. They're threatening to sue ISPs for not disconnecting said people, which is worse in my view. The ISP hasn't done anything wrong, can't verify that you've done anything wrong, but they'll do whatever the MPAA tells them to do to avoid a costly lawsuit.
Re:another good example of lying through statistic
on
Mac Users May Be Smarter
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You know, I hate to break out the trusty Slashdot insult, but did anyone read the article? Beyond the headline, which is indeed a troll, the article does not claim that Mac users are smarter. Nielsen/NetRatings did a marketing survey of Mac users and found two things: they have more money and they're better educated (not necessarily smarter).
The Nielsen spokesperson admits that there are other factors which contribute to this effect: "Kelly said the greater affluence and education level of those who surf using a Mac is attributable in part to the company's comparatively pricier machines, as well as to their perception as a status symbol and their greater market share among those in the publishing and design industries."
Now, that doesn't look to me like they're lying through statistics, and in fact they have a pretty solid analysis. However, their goal is a market analysis, not a statistical one. They're not interested in the cause, just the demographic, which appeals to advertisers because high-income, higher educated people tend to buy pricier products (Macs!).
If you want to debate whether or not CNet is justified with its wording on the headline ("Are Mac Users Smarter?"), but honestly, magazines and newspapers use such sensational headlines all the time. For that matter, Slashdot has made it worse, already jumping to a conclusion with "Mac Users May Be Smarter", a statement that is no way supported by the article.
"... and real files that are subtly but annoyingly processed. add in some shitty harmonics, and try to get people to associate those sounds with mp3 encoding, thus making them want cds."
This plan would be much more effective than anything Overpeer's doing. Screw up the file just enough to piss the real fans off, but not enough that everyone will just delete it immediately. Enough people think the file's "good enough" and keep it, propogating the bad files across the P2P network.
Something similar is going on already, with people using crappy ripping software to produce low quality rips or high quality rips with just a few annoying errors. The only way to be assured of a quality rip is to do it yourself--and to buy the CD.
I'm using TCP/UDP ports 4660-4669 and it works fine. Note that eDonkey by itself does not update it server list. So, you might have just had an old list with a bunch of dead servers; and a lot of the servers are full most of the time anyway. Get eDonkeyBot (automatic server list updater) and see if that helps.
eDonkey actually has a fair amount of improperly labelled files. A lot of stuff like "Star Wars 3 Extra Early Leaked Cut" is obviously bogus and turns out to be a German dub of Shrek -- if you ever manage to download the whole thing. The way eDonkey works, all incomplete downloads are shared. So, it frequently happens that no one has the whole thing. You can usually spot when it happens though, as it tends to be that everyone is missing the same parts.
Also, I wouldn't attribute eDonkey's problems to leeches so much. Even leeches have to share what they're downloading while they're downloading it, and there's generally enough demand to fill the upload slots. eDonkey even encourages leeching in my opinion, because all shared files have to be hashed every time the program loads. If you're sharing 5gb, this takes a long time and rather penalizes you for sharing so much.
Myself, I'd blame eDonkey's tendency to download 1k/s from 20 people instead of 20k/s from one person. This leads to a lot of overhead and long queues.
Your analogy is flawed. What the university is supplying, what students find so valuable, is a guarantee to potential employers that you have a certain skill set. Sure, you could go to each and every class, learn all the same material as everyone else, but if all an interviewer had was your word that you know all that, you wouldn't likely get the job, or perhaps not be paid as much.
To bring this back to your analogy, a pirated CD is usually an exact copy of the original. For a pirate, there's little chance that it's faulty and little to lose if it is. However, if an employer is going to pay you a hefty salary for things you only claim to know, he's at tremendous risk of loss if you're incompetent. Thus, the employer pays more to individuals who have a degree to back up their resume, and this extra bonus is incentive for students to pay the university.
It's more like a large company deploying software across a thousand machines. They need to know it's going to work, so they need a support relationship with the manufacturer. Here, they're selling what the university is selling: a guarantee of performance, rather than just pure IP.
If aliens want to study us, they don't need to actually come to earth. We broadcast plenty enough material into space using those same electromagnetic wave. Perhaps they're even fans of Gilligan's Island.
I don't know if it's true and I can't really remember where I heard it, but I remember hearing that there isn't a transmitter on Earth powerful enough to be detected by SETI if it were as far away as we think these aliens might be. Not to mention that the few solar systems that we think might be capable of supporting life are so far away that they wouldn't even be receiving our first few weak radio transmissions just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you mean CPSLO, 'cause all the Pomona dweebs have to say Cal Poly Pomona since no one knows they exist.
Normally, something along the lines of "Go Mustangs!" would be appropriate, but then our athletic teams kinda suck.
No, state governments are not in the habit of posting your home address, but other people occaisionally find the need to include information about you on a site you don't control. Schools are notorious for this, IME. Lists of students with phone numbers and email addresses are not uncommon to find online. If you've ever done anything noteworthy enough to find a place in the local paper, chances are you will never get that information off of the internet, as it gets copied over and over and archived.
No one said they could guess a URL.
But good luck trying to hide one from them.
Why is Googlebot downloading information from our "secret" web server?
It is almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another web server, it is likely that your "secret" URL is in the referer tag, and it can be stored and possibly published by the other web server in its referer log. So, if there is a link to your "secret" web server or page on the web anywhere, it is likely that Googlebot and other "web crawlers" will find it.
If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.
It wasn't always so black and white, public or not. Back in the day I could have a personal website known only to me and a few friends. Maybe certain industrious investigators could discover it, but not many would. Now, I have to assume that any information I would put there is public knowledge, easily accessible by anyone who knows my name.
As a kind of parlor trick, I amuse myself and give my friends the willies just using Google and telling them about themselves. With only a nickname or an email address, I can find phone numbers, addresses, and past histories. Frequently, much this information was not placed on the net by the person themselves or is no longer under their control.
I completely agree that Google has had a net positive effect on how we use the net, but you can't ignore the impact it's had on privacy. There's no correct answer here; the easier it is for you to find information, the easier it is to find information about you.
One small exception: Oregon has no state sales tax. In Washington, at least, if you show a valid ID that proves you live in Oregon (or a few other places), you don't have to pay the sales tax. Link
Alright guy, I'm wrong and I admit it. I guess I've been doing bad, bad things when I report the sales tax on my new mobo. I'm sure the cops will be here any moment.
Not as such (yet). If the two parties are in different states, no sales tax applies. If you're in different counties in the same state, only the common state tax applies. The state taxes applies as long as the company maintains a presence in your state. So a company may have stores in several states and charge the appropriate tax for customers in those states.
The states are in quite an uproar about this, as it's quite common for people to buy stuff from out of state for the specific purpose of avoiding sales tax. I do it all the time when it comes to buying expensive computer parts where the tax would be more than the extra shipping.
In this day and age, yes, a unified installshield kind of app is badly needed.
What is it about Linux that makes this so hard? Nullsoft, the people who made Winamp and then were bought by AOL, made their own open source installation/packaging program for Windows. They're just 15 or so people and they did it in their spare time from coding Winamp.
Now, I'm no coder, but why is it any harder to do the same on Linux? Of course it is harder, which is obvious from the amount of work that's put into the problem; but why does it need to be?
If I pirate Microsoft software, do you think Microsoft will stand by and let the big name OEMs sell computers which (according to them) facilitate piracy? I don't have a say, but Microsoft does.
End result: You do not get your $850 computer to run Linux on, because I could get the same $850 computer and run pirated Windows on it. Microsoft is more than willing to sacrifice the former to prevent the latter. It's a win-win situation that they have no incentive to change.
Yeah, people will buy the $850 machine, but -- get this -- they're still not going to run Linux. Linux desktop users are in the vast minority. 90% of the people who pick up the cheaper machine are still going to want to run Windows. Microsoft will claim that the 90% are just going to install a pirated version of Windows. And you know what? They're not really wrong. I know plenty of people who would buy the Linux machine and install a pirated copy of Windows.
Does this mean they're justified in charging those 10% Linux users the "Microsoft Tax"? I can't really say, but I know what RMS will say and I know what Microsoft will say. But then, who gets to decide? Microsoft. Because RMS sure as hell isn't going to pay the OEMs the difference to license full price versions of Windows.
I don't think his point was "all anyone needs is a $30 case" but "if all you need is a $30 case, don't spend $150 on a fancy looking case". Of course there are good reasons to buy an high-end case, but most cases designed for looks aren't much better than the El Cheapo case you can get from your local computer store.
you could, you know, leave the network cable unplugged until it's all secure...
/. within a few hours, but it'll take me a bit longer.
Which only leaves me with less of an incentive to switch, when I already have free reign on the net in reasonably secure environment with Windows 2000. General security issues aside, a Windows box in the hands of an experienced user is more secure than a Linux box in the hands of an inexperienced one. And the time to become experienced is more likely measured in weeks or months. Sure, you can make a new Red Hat install secure enough to host
What, desktop users don't get the much-touted benefits of open source software? We're just stuck with Microsoft because the people in charge of the OSS movement don't want to change any more than Microsoft does? Linux isn't for me, but neither is Windows. I use Windows now because it's a lot closer to what is for me than Linux, but that doesn't mean I'm statisfied.
For myself, I was really happy with BeOS. I found it to be the happy medium between a hardcore roll-your-own OS like Linux and the don't-touch-that attitude of Windows. When Be died, I moved back to Windows because Linux has little to offer me. I've messed around with it in the past, but I've found I spend more time learning to use the system rather than using it.
With Be gone, I'm not left with many options. I could take the plunge into Linux, hope my box doesn't get rooted in the time it takes me to figure out how to secure it, or I could stick with Windows and be pushed around by Microsoft. I have hope for distros like Mandrake, but I find they're often incomplete. If I want do Linux right, I have to get down in there and screw around with stuff I don't know how to use.
The deciding issue is whether my reluctance to trudge through Linux is matched by Microsoft's attempts to control what I can do with my computer. Does my ignorance prevent me from doing what I want in Linux more so than Microsoft does in Windows? I have a feeling things will swing the other way about the time Windows 2000 ceases to be a viable option or when distros like Mandrake become mature enough that I can trust it to handle the small stuff.
I forgot to mention that just covers the MPAA or the RIAA. If you're talking about the police or the FBI, your little notice doesn't mean anything. If you try to sue Officer Joe because he caught you with kiddie porn when the server says cops have to disconnect from the server, the court will laugh in your face and promptly throw you in jail.
Think about it: If cops were held responsible for agreements they made in the process of an undercover investigation, imagine how many drug buys would be proceeded by a contract that says, "I am not a cop. Signed: ___________"
Doesn't this fall under the "you have to tell me if you're a cop" myth propogated among prostitutes? The MPAA could argue that despite your MOTD legalese, the IRC server is a public environment and that information on the network is publicly accessible. So, it doesn't matter how they got it, even if they broke your TOS to get it, because it's public knowledge anyway.
Of course, IANAL and what I just said bears no relation to the actual law.
Does the MPAA really think they can get away with this?!
Yes. And so far, it looks like they have. Remember, they're not threatening to sue anyone who's sharing infringing material. They're threatening to sue ISPs for not disconnecting said people, which is worse in my view. The ISP hasn't done anything wrong, can't verify that you've done anything wrong, but they'll do whatever the MPAA tells them to do to avoid a costly lawsuit.
You know, I hate to break out the trusty Slashdot insult, but did anyone read the article? Beyond the headline, which is indeed a troll, the article does not claim that Mac users are smarter. Nielsen/NetRatings did a marketing survey of Mac users and found two things: they have more money and they're better educated (not necessarily smarter).
The Nielsen spokesperson admits that there are other factors which contribute to this effect: "Kelly said the greater affluence and education level of those who surf using a Mac is attributable in part to the company's comparatively pricier machines, as well as to their perception as a status symbol and their greater market share among those in the publishing and design industries."
Now, that doesn't look to me like they're lying through statistics, and in fact they have a pretty solid analysis. However, their goal is a market analysis, not a statistical one. They're not interested in the cause, just the demographic, which appeals to advertisers because high-income, higher educated people tend to buy pricier products (Macs!).
If you want to debate whether or not CNet is justified with its wording on the headline ("Are Mac Users Smarter?"), but honestly, magazines and newspapers use such sensational headlines all the time. For that matter, Slashdot has made it worse, already jumping to a conclusion with "Mac Users May Be Smarter", a statement that is no way supported by the article.
American Graffiti was really good though. Not good enough to make up for episodes one and two, but it was a darned good movie.
Yeah, this is totally off-topic and schtuff.
"... and real files that are subtly but annoyingly processed. add in some shitty harmonics, and try to get people to associate those sounds with mp3 encoding, thus making them want cds."
This plan would be much more effective than anything Overpeer's doing. Screw up the file just enough to piss the real fans off, but not enough that everyone will just delete it immediately. Enough people think the file's "good enough" and keep it, propogating the bad files across the P2P network.
Something similar is going on already, with people using crappy ripping software to produce low quality rips or high quality rips with just a few annoying errors. The only way to be assured of a quality rip is to do it yourself--and to buy the CD.
I'm using TCP/UDP ports 4660-4669 and it works fine. Note that eDonkey by itself does not update it server list. So, you might have just had an old list with a bunch of dead servers; and a lot of the servers are full most of the time anyway. Get eDonkeyBot (automatic server list updater) and see if that helps.
eDonkey actually has a fair amount of improperly labelled files. A lot of stuff like "Star Wars 3 Extra Early Leaked Cut" is obviously bogus and turns out to be a German dub of Shrek -- if you ever manage to download the whole thing. The way eDonkey works, all incomplete downloads are shared. So, it frequently happens that no one has the whole thing. You can usually spot when it happens though, as it tends to be that everyone is missing the same parts.
Also, I wouldn't attribute eDonkey's problems to leeches so much. Even leeches have to share what they're downloading while they're downloading it, and there's generally enough demand to fill the upload slots. eDonkey even encourages leeching in my opinion, because all shared files have to be hashed every time the program loads. If you're sharing 5gb, this takes a long time and rather penalizes you for sharing so much.
Myself, I'd blame eDonkey's tendency to download 1k/s from 20 people instead of 20k/s from one person. This leads to a lot of overhead and long queues.
Your analogy is flawed. What the university is supplying, what students find so valuable, is a guarantee to potential employers that you have a certain skill set. Sure, you could go to each and every class, learn all the same material as everyone else, but if all an interviewer had was your word that you know all that, you wouldn't likely get the job, or perhaps not be paid as much.
To bring this back to your analogy, a pirated CD is usually an exact copy of the original. For a pirate, there's little chance that it's faulty and little to lose if it is. However, if an employer is going to pay you a hefty salary for things you only claim to know, he's at tremendous risk of loss if you're incompetent. Thus, the employer pays more to individuals who have a degree to back up their resume, and this extra bonus is incentive for students to pay the university.
It's more like a large company deploying software across a thousand machines. They need to know it's going to work, so they need a support relationship with the manufacturer. Here, they're selling what the university is selling: a guarantee of performance, rather than just pure IP.
If aliens want to study us, they don't need to actually come to earth. We broadcast plenty enough material into space using those same electromagnetic wave. Perhaps they're even fans of Gilligan's Island.
I don't know if it's true and I can't really remember where I heard it, but I remember hearing that there isn't a transmitter on Earth powerful enough to be detected by SETI if it were as far away as we think these aliens might be. Not to mention that the few solar systems that we think might be capable of supporting life are so far away that they wouldn't even be receiving our first few weak radio transmissions just yet.
I've seen these incredible beasts. I've even flown in a few! Yep! They're called airplanes. The government has a whole slew of them too.
The problem is, its expensive, and requires ALOT of energy.
Seems to fit the description of a 747 quite nicely.
A little bit of Googling showed that York is a city in a North Yorkshire, whereas Hampshire is a county.
Another useless bit of information brought to you by a few seconds of boredom and Google.