anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse
I think the RIAA's message is pretty clear: "All your art are belong to us. And all your money too."
Re:This is part of our destiny.
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 1
I guess what I'm really asking is what do you have against Western thought?
Good question, and I have another: What, pray tell, is this "west" you speak of? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What are its distinct and unique characteristics? How may we identify its citizens?
[irony]
"How like the east to broadly overgeneralize."
[/irony]
Heh. As we know, moderators will agree with just about anything, including goatse.cx and base ownership...
Is this your "genuinely held opinion" - that the student should be punished for off-campus behavior, rather than the school buying a clue and segregating its virtual space the same way it segregates its physical space?
If so, how do you figure? Or do you rather find my interpretation of your statements to be inaccurate, and my own opinion to be thoroughly wrong and trollesque?
Anti-advertising utilities are the worst thing to happen to the Internet. With ads generating the revenue for the majority of the content we know and love, we're shooting ourselves in the collective foot by blocking banners. This only forces good sites to die, and forces adevertisers to devise even more horrible ways than banners to capture our eyeballs.
This so-called "solution" to banner ads is really just the first step in an arms race that will only end when the advertisers figure out some way to nuke us with commercials.
Was the web site downloadable on school PCs? If so, this is no different than a student being suspended for distributing an obscene parody pamphlet, or running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle.
I think you misspelled "this is no different than a studend being suspended for distributing an obscene pamphlet off-campus, where other students could see it once they left the campus facilities".
Remember that the Internet != School Property. If you don't want your kids to carry on outside of school during school hours, then you close your campus. Many schools do this, to one extent or another. The only reason the kids could read the website during school hours is because they could leave the school property (i.e., the school's LAN) during school hours.
I know you're probably a troll, but the point's worth making anyway...
Re:Why the preoccupation with "intelligent" animal
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 1
Koko has been a. . . [v]ery quick learner, but they found that her (I think) intelligence was quite limited.
Well, I should think that someone thinks it's interesting that her learning curve is extremely steep but with a low upper limit.
Intuitively (i.e., out of my ass), I'd expect steep learning curves to be associated with high upper intelligence limits.
Assuming your statements are accurate, of course:)
Besides, who says dolphins don't make tools - or at least toys? Using their built-in anatomical structures to manipulate the raw materials avalable to them, they can do things like this.
I never looked at any of the specifics, but the overall "look and feel" of/utah/slc/ has turned me off from pursuing career options there, in spite of the lower cost of living &c.
Heh. In my previous life, I worked as a receptionist for [major software manufacturer], and they were predominantly Mac-oriented throughout all their offices... AppleTalk (at that time) defaulted to sharing the local filesystem across the network, without security, and without notifying the user.
Thousands of filesystems available to my receptionist's station... I leeched a lot of stuff.
Sure, I could do the same thing now on the Windoze networks I seem to be stuck with, but somehow the thrill is gone (plus, now I do real work, and don't have the time to go snooping around like that).
I think everybody's bothered because if CowboyNeal is just some boring guy with a boring job, then the same holds true for all the readers. If CowboyNeal isn't special - even though he's famous and l33t - then maybe the rest of us aren't hot shit either. Our idol has clay feet, and that's definitely worth whining about.
Well, it sounds like you're saying (chance to protect) != (guaranteed survival).
So how do you know that earlier species didn't have the same (or better) chances, but also failed to survive for some reason? The fact is, we really have no clear idea of the state of trilobite or dinosaur technology.
Not to mention Lovecraft's accounts of advanced civilzations preceeding the Trilobites!
Okay. So, to play the Devil's advocate: the Web is an open-access medium. If you put a website up, everybody else in the world is free to visit it, and react however they wish. You can't say "here's my site, but don't look at it", or "only look at it if you're not going to flame it", or "don't tell anybody about it, because I can't handle the traffic if it becomes popular".
What should/. do? Fail to report on things of interest to their readers, because the website owner/creator didn't prepare for the possibility that their public-access website might see a lot of public traffic? Or maybe you're one of those that propose/. get embroiled in the legal issues involved in mirroring other people's content?
The fact is websites are public access. If/. happens to like yours, that's really what you get for putting it out there. Besides, a lot of people view/.'ing as a good thing - it's a sign their popularity far exceeds their wildest expectations!
Which is ironic, because I'm pretty sure that there are several things that are undoubtedly true about Christ's goals during his later years:
Actually, Christ is not on record as having any "later years" - he died in his (approximately) early 30s.
to reform the Jewish religion (not abolish it, and not to create a new religion)
The texts that quote Jesus strongly imply that he did in fact intend to "abolish the Jewish religion". He wanted to do away with the animal sacrifices, the legalism - pretty much everything except simple faith in him as the sole medium of communion with the Creator.
to get people to be nice to each other (not to punish each other with threats of damnation)
Who's punishing with threats of damnation? This is a popular misconception - so popular, in fact, that many "preachers" throughout the ages have adopted this viewpoint - but it's not necessarily true of the [Jews|Hebrews|Israelites] of Jesus' time. The operating principle of that society was that the natural state of humans was to have no communion with the Creator. They believed - and taught - that this communion could only be achieved through ritual sacrifice and purification, and strict adherence to a comprehensive set of rules. I find this more like warning your kid of the dangers of running willy-nilly out into the street - certainly it's not a punishment!
to get people to worship god (not to worship his own self)
Sure. I'd argue that the true goal was not "worship" per se, but "communion" - direct personal interaction. And not so much "instead of oneself" as achieving complete self-fulfilment through direct interaction with the Creator", but that's pretty much a question of interpretation...
Instead, what happened is that his reforms were hijacked by Paul, who founded a new religion based on the worship of the dead man, and got really self-righteous about being mean to people.
Okay, this is where you start to look like a troll. Paul was self-righteous about being mean to people before he began evangelizing Christianity - presumably because Jesus did intend to abolish the religion Paul had a vested interest in. Certainly Paul's later writings indicate that he shared this interpretations - he's even more clear than Jesus on this!
Paul's post-conversion writings also indicate a complete change from the self-righteous persecutor - have you even read any of this stuff? It's all right there. You might argue with his beliefs, but Paul's attitudes are pretty clear - and pretty clearly the opposite of what you state.
Not to mention that Paul was by no means the only figure active at the time. Peter, Philip (whose interaction with an Ethiopian ambassador was the seed for the still-extant Ethiopian Orthodox church), John, &c. I think any study of the existing texts will show that your theory of Paul "hijacking" the teachings of Christ is naive and incorrect. And without even debating the truth of the texts or the validity fo the teachings!
We all know that Mir will never actually be de-orbited. William Gibson has already explained that there will still be cosmonauts aboard it when the survivors of America's economic collapse launch rockets from balloons and board the damn thing.
Be that as it may, my prediction is: 2001-03-16 05:17:54
Of course they don't do it to monitor your reading - I was just observing that the machinery is already in place to do so. I figure it's probably not necessary to do so, however, since they already control the content.
I suppose a college could be so Machiavellian as to put "dangerous" books on the shelves, and then bust you for reading them, but that would be too... weird.
Oddly enough, these sorts of policies are in place even at schools that would never dream of snooping on students' postal mail or the books they read at the library.
Don't be an ass. AFAIK, USPS service is strictly controlled by the federal gov't. There are strong limitations on what local post offices can and cannot do with your mail, no matter where it is or who is handling it. I'm pretty sure that your college couldn't (legally) snoop your mail even if they wanted to - no matter if they have access to it or even handle it.
As far as controlling your library usage - duh! The library is a college asset, and presumably the books in it are already controlled by the library. If they don't want you reading something, they simply don't have to put it on the shelves. Furthermore, they already monitor what you do read - they know which books are late and who had them last, don't they?
In short, they don't snoop your snail mail because they can't. They could snoop your library usage, but probably don't need to, since they control the available content already.
You're missing the point. The point is that there are people in power out there who hate technology, who don't understand it and are afraid of it. Because of their positions of power, they're forced to accept the technology, but they will never trust it.
Leadbeater is talking to those people. Those of us who know better are completely irrelevant - we're overhearing a conversation we can't particpate in. Leadbeater is speaking the fears of those in power, and validating those fears. He's providing them with a "rationale" that will justify taking technology out of the hands of the skilled, and putting it under the control of the luddites.
Nothing you say, here or anywhere else, has any value - unless you are in a position of power.
I never was allowed to use a calculator in school, but my ability with mental arithmetic never really gelled. To this day I find I'm still much more comfortable working [addition|subtraction|multiplication|division] problems out on paper. Yet I'm generally considered quite intelligent by my friends and by external testing.
Also, I've always relied on reference materials to remember information so that I don't have to. It frees up my mental cycles to contemplate my navel. The net just makes this policy even easier.
Finally, in spite of my bad habits, I have an uncanny knack for remembering all kinds of random trivia. I rule at Trivial Pursuit! Also, remembering rules of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary has never been a problem for me - in any of the languages I'm fluent in.
Heh. That's only because today's standards are lame.
Personally, I always found the FX from the "pre-SGI/Dreamworks era" to be much more aesthetically pleasing. They often did an excellent job of conveying the idea, without presenting you with visually jarring CGI &c.
Sure, you could often tell that the scene contained non-real elements, but let's face facts: you can still tell that. At least movies like Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, The Black Hole, and even Barbarella don't leave you with the same sour taste in your mouth that you got from the FX in the new Godzilla or The Phantom Menace.
On another note, all we need to do now is combine the SAUREC technology with the sugar- or slug-eating technology referenced earlier. Remember: "it's not fun and games until somebody loses an eye (to a cluster of carinvorous microbots)."
Re:Why pay money for anonymous information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 1
Targeted advertizing is not good for the recipient, it's just more effective at getting the recipient to do what the advertizers want...
I think you meant to say that targeted advertising is both better and worse for the recipient. On the one hand, it does indeed make the task of brainwashing consumers easier for the advertisers.
On the other hand, it also means that you are much more likely to get timely information about products that you actually desire. I'd love to see less ads in general, but in the mean time I sure could use more information that's interesting and relevant to me.
Slashdot Mirror
anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse
I think the RIAA's message is pretty clear: "All your art are belong to us. And all your money too."
I guess what I'm really asking is what do you have against Western thought?
Good question, and I have another: What, pray tell, is this "west" you speak of? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What are its distinct and unique characteristics? How may we identify its citizens?
[irony]
"How like the east to broadly overgeneralize."
[/irony]
Heh. As we know, moderators will agree with just about anything, including goatse.cx and base ownership...
Is this your "genuinely held opinion" - that the student should be punished for off-campus behavior, rather than the school buying a clue and segregating its virtual space the same way it segregates its physical space?
If so, how do you figure? Or do you rather find my interpretation of your statements to be inaccurate, and my own opinion to be thoroughly wrong and trollesque?
Anti-advertising utilities are the worst thing to happen to the Internet. With ads generating the revenue for the majority of the content we know and love, we're shooting ourselves in the collective foot by blocking banners. This only forces good sites to die, and forces adevertisers to devise even more horrible ways than banners to capture our eyeballs.
This so-called "solution" to banner ads is really just the first step in an arms race that will only end when the advertisers figure out some way to nuke us with commercials.
Was the web site downloadable on school PCs? If so, this is no different than a student being suspended for distributing an obscene parody pamphlet, or running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle.
I think you misspelled "this is no different than a studend being suspended for distributing an obscene pamphlet off-campus, where other students could see it once they left the campus facilities".
Remember that the Internet != School Property. If you don't want your kids to carry on outside of school during school hours, then you close your campus. Many schools do this, to one extent or another. The only reason the kids could read the website during school hours is because they could leave the school property (i.e., the school's LAN) during school hours.
I know you're probably a troll, but the point's worth making anyway...
Koko has been a. . . [v]ery quick learner, but they found that her (I think) intelligence was quite limited.
Well, I should think that someone thinks it's interesting that her learning curve is extremely steep but with a low upper limit.
Intuitively (i.e., out of my ass), I'd expect steep learning curves to be associated with high upper intelligence limits.
Assuming your statements are accurate, of course :)
Clearly, these Dolphins are being trained to initialize Hayes-compatible modems...
Besides, who says dolphins don't make tools - or at least toys? Using their built-in anatomical structures to manipulate the raw materials avalable to them, they can do things like this.
I never looked at any of the specifics, but the overall "look and feel" of /utah/slc/ has turned me off from pursuing career options there, in spite of the lower cost of living &c.
Heh. In my previous life, I worked as a receptionist for [major software manufacturer], and they were predominantly Mac-oriented throughout all their offices... AppleTalk (at that time) defaulted to sharing the local filesystem across the network, without security, and without notifying the user.
Thousands of filesystems available to my receptionist's station... I leeched a lot of stuff.
Sure, I could do the same thing now on the Windoze networks I seem to be stuck with, but somehow the thrill is gone (plus, now I do real work, and don't have the time to go snooping around like that).
I think everybody's bothered because if CowboyNeal is just some boring guy with a boring job, then the same holds true for all the readers. If CowboyNeal isn't special - even though he's famous and l33t - then maybe the rest of us aren't hot shit either. Our idol has clay feet, and that's definitely worth whining about.
Well, it sounds like you're saying (chance to protect) != (guaranteed survival).
So how do you know that earlier species didn't have the same (or better) chances, but also failed to survive for some reason? The fact is, we really have no clear idea of the state of trilobite or dinosaur technology.
Not to mention Lovecraft's accounts of advanced civilzations preceeding the Trilobites!
Okay. So, to play the Devil's advocate: the Web is an open-access medium. If you put a website up, everybody else in the world is free to visit it, and react however they wish. You can't say "here's my site, but don't look at it", or "only look at it if you're not going to flame it", or "don't tell anybody about it, because I can't handle the traffic if it becomes popular".
What should /. do? Fail to report on things of interest to their readers, because the website owner/creator didn't prepare for the possibility that their public-access website might see a lot of public traffic? Or maybe you're one of those that propose /. get embroiled in the legal issues involved in mirroring other people's content?
The fact is websites are public access. If /. happens to like yours, that's really what you get for putting it out there. Besides, a lot of people view /.'ing as a good thing - it's a sign their popularity far exceeds their wildest expectations!
Which is ironic, because I'm pretty sure that there are several things that are undoubtedly true about Christ's goals during his later years:
Actually, Christ is not on record as having any "later years" - he died in his (approximately) early 30s.
to reform the Jewish religion (not abolish it, and not to create a new religion)
The texts that quote Jesus strongly imply that he did in fact intend to "abolish the Jewish religion". He wanted to do away with the animal sacrifices, the legalism - pretty much everything except simple faith in him as the sole medium of communion with the Creator.
to get people to be nice to each other (not to punish each other with threats of damnation)
Who's punishing with threats of damnation? This is a popular misconception - so popular, in fact, that many "preachers" throughout the ages have adopted this viewpoint - but it's not necessarily true of the [Jews|Hebrews|Israelites] of Jesus' time. The operating principle of that society was that the natural state of humans was to have no communion with the Creator. They believed - and taught - that this communion could only be achieved through ritual sacrifice and purification, and strict adherence to a comprehensive set of rules. I find this more like warning your kid of the dangers of running willy-nilly out into the street - certainly it's not a punishment!
to get people to worship god (not to worship his own self)
Sure. I'd argue that the true goal was not "worship" per se, but "communion" - direct personal interaction. And not so much "instead of oneself" as achieving complete self-fulfilment through direct interaction with the Creator", but that's pretty much a question of interpretation...
Instead, what happened is that his reforms were hijacked by Paul, who founded a new religion based on the worship of the dead man, and got really self-righteous about being mean to people.
Okay, this is where you start to look like a troll. Paul was self-righteous about being mean to people before he began evangelizing Christianity - presumably because Jesus did intend to abolish the religion Paul had a vested interest in. Certainly Paul's later writings indicate that he shared this interpretations - he's even more clear than Jesus on this!
Paul's post-conversion writings also indicate a complete change from the self-righteous persecutor - have you even read any of this stuff? It's all right there. You might argue with his beliefs, but Paul's attitudes are pretty clear - and pretty clearly the opposite of what you state.
Not to mention that Paul was by no means the only figure active at the time. Peter, Philip (whose interaction with an Ethiopian ambassador was the seed for the still-extant Ethiopian Orthodox church), John, &c. I think any study of the existing texts will show that your theory of Paul "hijacking" the teachings of Christ is naive and incorrect. And without even debating the truth of the texts or the validity fo the teachings!
Heh. The Roman Catholic church is somewhat less than 2k years old - maybe people haven't had enough time to figure things out?
Or maybe there's been a large number of viable, ongoing Christian sects that have "seen through" Roman Catholicism... Martin Luther springs to mind.
And the Anglican Church.
Troll.
You're new here, aren't you?
We all know that Mir will never actually be de-orbited. William Gibson has already explained that there will still be cosmonauts aboard it when the survivors of America's economic collapse launch rockets from balloons and board the damn thing.
Be that as it may, my prediction is: 2001-03-16 05:17:54
Of course they don't do it to monitor your reading - I was just observing that the machinery is already in place to do so. I figure it's probably not necessary to do so, however, since they already control the content.
I suppose a college could be so Machiavellian as to put "dangerous" books on the shelves, and then bust you for reading them, but that would be too... weird.
Oddly enough, these sorts of policies are in place even at schools that would never dream of snooping on students' postal mail or the books they read at the library.
Don't be an ass. AFAIK, USPS service is strictly controlled by the federal gov't. There are strong limitations on what local post offices can and cannot do with your mail, no matter where it is or who is handling it. I'm pretty sure that your college couldn't (legally) snoop your mail even if they wanted to - no matter if they have access to it or even handle it.
As far as controlling your library usage - duh! The library is a college asset, and presumably the books in it are already controlled by the library. If they don't want you reading something, they simply don't have to put it on the shelves. Furthermore, they already monitor what you do read - they know which books are late and who had them last, don't they?
In short, they don't snoop your snail mail because they can't. They could snoop your library usage, but probably don't need to, since they control the available content already.
You're missing the point. The point is that there are people in power out there who hate technology, who don't understand it and are afraid of it. Because of their positions of power, they're forced to accept the technology, but they will never trust it.
Leadbeater is talking to those people. Those of us who know better are completely irrelevant - we're overhearing a conversation we can't particpate in. Leadbeater is speaking the fears of those in power, and validating those fears. He's providing them with a "rationale" that will justify taking technology out of the hands of the skilled, and putting it under the control of the luddites.
Nothing you say, here or anywhere else, has any value - unless you are in a position of power.
I never was allowed to use a calculator in school, but my ability with mental arithmetic never really gelled. To this day I find I'm still much more comfortable working [addition|subtraction|multiplication|division] problems out on paper. Yet I'm generally considered quite intelligent by my friends and by external testing.
Also, I've always relied on reference materials to remember information so that I don't have to. It frees up my mental cycles to contemplate my navel. The net just makes this policy even easier.
Finally, in spite of my bad habits, I have an uncanny knack for remembering all kinds of random trivia. I rule at Trivial Pursuit! Also, remembering rules of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary has never been a problem for me - in any of the languages I'm fluent in.
Heh. That's only because today's standards are lame.
Personally, I always found the FX from the "pre-SGI/Dreamworks era" to be much more aesthetically pleasing. They often did an excellent job of conveying the idea, without presenting you with visually jarring CGI &c.
Sure, you could often tell that the scene contained non-real elements, but let's face facts: you can still tell that. At least movies like Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, The Black Hole, and even Barbarella don't leave you with the same sour taste in your mouth that you got from the FX in the new Godzilla or The Phantom Menace.
On another note, all we need to do now is combine the SAUREC technology with the sugar- or slug-eating technology referenced earlier. Remember: "it's not fun and games until somebody loses an eye (to a cluster of carinvorous microbots)."
You're new here, aren't you?
Targeted advertizing is not good for the recipient, it's just more effective at getting the recipient to do what the advertizers want...
I think you meant to say that targeted advertising is both better and worse for the recipient. On the one hand, it does indeed make the task of brainwashing consumers easier for the advertisers.
On the other hand, it also means that you are much more likely to get timely information about products that you actually desire. I'd love to see less ads in general, but in the mean time I sure could use more information that's interesting and relevant to me.
But it's not a "ridiculous lawsuit" - it's envelope-pushing performance art!