I know I've said this before, and I know a zillion others here are saying it, but I'll say it again as a way of showing how many people feel this way: This law is absurd. If someone brings me their computer to blow everything off the hard drive and reinstall Windoze from the rescue CD-ROMs, why should I need to be a private investigator? Computers go haywire all the time and need to be serviced by knowledgeable geeks. What's next? PI licenses required to service cars? To repair air conditioners? To install carpeting in homes? Oh I know! How 'bout a PI license to, oh, I don't know, be a private investigator for crying out loud?!!
Instead of merely hoping that Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth finds out about it, why not let them know? If dishonesty was involved in the Michigan proceedings, they SHOULD know about it. Us geeks from Slashdot should write to them and POLITELY let them know about the aforementioned contradiction and why it is of importance. Look through their contacts page (link located at center top of Department of Labor and Economic Growth page) to find the office or person you believe is the best one to notify. In your correspondence, please be clear, concise, and polite.
2. Buy a large island and form a new government on it, which cannot pass any laws without approval by 50% of the public (not 50% of voters but 50% of the island's population) in a vote, which takes place once per year.
In other news, a bill is coming before Congress to repeal the first ten amendments to the Constitution and replace them with an amendment making thoughtcrime illegal and punishable by immediate death and demonization without the need for a trial or any due process. Well, maybe it hasn't come before Congress yet, but mark my word -- it will. This is why freedom depends on YOU to monitor what the government is doing and to fight it when things become unfair. So many people around us say that they can't stand politics and so they simply concentrate on their day-to-day lives. This is a mistake, because it means that your life will eventually suck due to these things. Everyone must be involved, not "even if" they're not interested, but "especially if" they're not interested.
Though, from the context of the sentence in which you used "persecuted," it can appear as if you meant "prosecuted" and didn't know the difference. It is a common problem when writing that even carefully selected words can appear to be mistakes. This probably happens more often that it should only because so many people use the wrong words due to carelessness or simply lack of knowledge of the different (similar) words, and we therefore become accustomed to replacing words we see with what we believe the author intended (at least I do that, anyway). How many times have you seen "their" or "they're" where there should have been "there?" Or a "vise" (something commonly found on workbenches) in place of a "vice" (such as smoking). The ones that really drive me up the wall are accept/except, then/than, affect/effect. This can throw things off when you come across that rare circumstance that a chosen word is actually the correct one.
On second reading, your sentence makes perfect sense with "persecuted."
I'd say it's great that the Senate is scrutinizing what ISPs do to track people, but this shouldn't be limited solely to ISPs. There should be a lot of scrutiny about what the government does with your information, and I'm talking about all levels of government from the local level up to the federal level. Further, there are millions of businesses around the world, small and large, that gather all kinds of information. It is difficult to scrutinize so many companies, so I would say that the Senate should concentrate on the government first. Because the government collects the most.
Not to nitpick (well, actually I am nitpicking), but persecution is what happens when you go against an entire people. For example, pogroms carried out against the Jews are an example of persecution. The word you meant to use is prosecution. Small difference in spelling. Big difference in meaning.
Herr Zeller: Perhaps those who would warn you that the Anschluss is coming - and it is coming, Captain - perhaps they would get further with you by setting their words to music.
Captain von Trapp: If the Nazis take over Austria, I have no doubt, Herr Zeller, that you will be the entire trumpet section.
Herr Zeller: You flatter me, Captain.
Captain von Trapp: Oh, how clumsy of me - I meant to accuse you.
Somewhere among my older posts, there was a really long one about how air travel will be in ten years. I took the current state of air travel, which is getting worse with each passing day, and extrapolated. The gist of it is that plane tickets cost many, many times more than what they should, plus you have to pay additional huge fees for every "extra" that used to be included for free, so that nobody will fly because it will be cheaper to buy a car and then drive it over there. Then you get to the airport and security is so crazy that nobody even makes it to the door of the plane. You may as well line people up as they walk into the front door of the airport and march them directly into buses headed for big jails, because everyone is a terrorist until proven otherwise. I really thought I exaggerated in that long post. And you know the scary part? I now think that I was being much too conservative. The government has no idea what it's doing. That's the bottom line. They are completely inept.
They should do to Yahoo! what they did to Hotmail. Take a system that runs perfectly fine on FreeBSD, spend ten billion dollars to switch it over to Windows Server, and get no benefit out of it whatsoever, other than the ability to brag that it runs on Windows, which won't be much of a brag, given all the bugs and problems that will be introduced during the massive job of switching the systems.
If this is the case, then why am I saying that they should do this? For my entertainment and laughing pleasure.
Coupled with a simple hologram projector hidden in someone's house, you can make them believe that ghosts and demons haunt them all throughout the night!
A better game would go something like this. Two heavyweight chess players start a match. When one takes the other's pawn by en passant, he jumps up angrily, knocks the chess board, table and all, clear into the audience and then socks that guy right in the jaw. A crazy fight ensues, in which the one who took the pawn gets beaten to a pulp.
"I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains." Sorry Vizini, brains won't do you any good when you're having your face bashed in.
Now that it's mentioned, there really is something about Firefox's update feature that gets you to install and use the latest version. Maybe it's that it's so easy and doesn't mess up anything, e.g., by making drastic changes to the appearance of the browser, etc. I would say that most of the nearly 20% who are running outdated versions are probably the paranoid type who think that updating their software will mean introducing problems, you know, the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But this study is totally correct: Of all the browsers, Firefox makes updating the easiest.
This is wonderful news for someone who wants to sing, but I'm still waiting for those clever Israeli researchers to come up with a system capable of correctly predicting next week's winning lottery numbers. Such a system would cause many people to sing (though not very skillfully).
Please excuse my lack of comprehension, but as a matter of fact, I do fail to see any irony here. Is it ironic because Virgin and Paramount are competitors and therefore Virgin should avoid using names reminiscent of a Paramount product? Or is there something inherently sexual about the Star Trek series?
I know this has been said already, so please consider this an additional "vote" for this method, rather than a redundant post: Since your business is geographically dispersed, using names that match the geography is, IMO, a good choice. Your non-technical users don't know (or care) about the topology of your network, but I would venture to say that they probably know where your business has offices geographically. (The company I work for has offices in several U.S. cities and one European city, and everyone knows where they are.) Using names that match up the geography is as intuitive as calling those locations on the phone and dialing the correct area code. This method should make it easy to set up things in the future, such as OpenVPN tunnels between the various facilities, and any sysadmin or user in the future will have an easy time determining which system they're communicating with.
I like how Virgin are naming the first two ships Enterprise and Voyager. IIUC another is supposed to be named Columbia and another Discovery. Virgin ordered seven of these.
I've read the previous/. stories as linked from this one, plus lots of the comments, and what I'd really like to know is how this whole mess started in the first place -- if Ms. Lindor never used a computer, let alone downloaded any music, then what caused the RIAA to target her for one of these lawsuits?
Shows how in our legal system, even when you win, you still lose to some degree.
Read Bleak House by Charles Dickens (link to Wikipedia article about Bleak House). It's the story of a lawsuit that stretches on for two generations. When it comes to lawsuits, the only winners are the lawyers. They laugh all the way to the bank. Everyone else loses, regardless of how the case turns out.
This is the scary thing about the direction things are going in the world, with the Internet in particular. The Internet was supposed to be the vast equalizer, but instead, with all kinds of clueless governments and corporate overlords who dream up ways to take advantage of people, the Internet is turning into another tool for the powerful to control the masses. This example with Viacom and YouTube is one good example. It's obvious to me that they obtained the court order to get the information on every YouTube video watched for only one reason: To count how many videos they claim violate their copyrights, add up how many times each of these videos was watched, and show the court, "You see?! Our priceless valuable intellectual property, so valuable in fact that without it, the Universe would cease to exist, has been illegally watched 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 times on YouTube. This is irrefutable proof that because YouTube exists, we have lost 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 sales of our products at $19.95 each, so our damages due to Google's obviously ill intent come to $19,109,585,220,300,000,000,000,000.95 USD." Never mind that their sales over their entire existence as a company have never reached one percent of that. Now who knows how the privacy implications will affect users beyond that. Once they get all of Google's assets to cover their huge damages, they'll probably track down each and every user and sue them too, a la the RIAA and SCO. A bigger issue than privacy to look at is what happens when a company whose business model is outdated and falling apart turns to lawsuits instead of figuring out new and innovative ways to stay in business, much like how a bully in school beats up kids one tenth his size instead of making friends and getting a life.
While I don't agree that fireworks need to be done away with, it is true that dogs (and most animals for that matter) are frightened by fireworks, both the professional fireworks displays and the smaller variety that people set off in their neighbourhoods*. A few years ago on the Fourth of July, while driving down home from a fireworks display, a dog, frightened by other fireworks displays, jumped in front of a car in the next lane. The result was displeasing to all parties present (especially the dog). For this reason, there should be public service commercials about putting pets safely indoors before nightfall on Independence Day, similar to the ads discouraging the act of firing handguns into the air during New Years celebrations. ("Yes, those bullets do come back down!" exclaimed the news reporter in one such televised attempt to prevent accidental deaths from this stupid act.)
* Please excuse the Bri'ish spelling of neighborhood.
Right now it's Firefox 3.0 and soon we'll have Firefox 3.1. What's planned beyond that?
Firefox 3.11 for Workgroups Firefox 95, then 95b, then 95c. Firefox NT Firefox 98, then Firefox 98SE Firefox Me Firefox 2000 Firefox XP Firefox Vista Firefox 7
Then someone will come up with a new program, which will be a "browser-only" browser!!
Slashdot Mirror
I know I've said this before, and I know a zillion others here are saying it, but I'll say it again as a way of showing how many people feel this way: This law is absurd. If someone brings me their computer to blow everything off the hard drive and reinstall Windoze from the rescue CD-ROMs, why should I need to be a private investigator? Computers go haywire all the time and need to be serviced by knowledgeable geeks. What's next? PI licenses required to service cars? To repair air conditioners? To install carpeting in homes? Oh I know! How 'bout a PI license to, oh, I don't know, be a private investigator for crying out loud?!!
Instead of merely hoping that Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth finds out about it, why not let them know? If dishonesty was involved in the Michigan proceedings, they SHOULD know about it. Us geeks from Slashdot should write to them and POLITELY let them know about the aforementioned contradiction and why it is of importance. Look through their contacts page (link located at center top of Department of Labor and Economic Growth page) to find the office or person you believe is the best one to notify. In your correspondence, please be clear, concise, and polite.
My plan to fight this sort of thing:
1. Profit!!!
2. Buy a large island and form a new government on it, which cannot pass any laws without approval by 50% of the public (not 50% of voters but 50% of the island's population) in a vote, which takes place once per year.
3. ???
In other news, a bill is coming before Congress to repeal the first ten amendments to the Constitution and replace them with an amendment making thoughtcrime illegal and punishable by immediate death and demonization without the need for a trial or any due process. Well, maybe it hasn't come before Congress yet, but mark my word -- it will. This is why freedom depends on YOU to monitor what the government is doing and to fight it when things become unfair. So many people around us say that they can't stand politics and so they simply concentrate on their day-to-day lives. This is a mistake, because it means that your life will eventually suck due to these things. Everyone must be involved, not "even if" they're not interested, but "especially if" they're not interested.
Oh. I stand corrected.
Though, from the context of the sentence in which you used "persecuted," it can appear as if you meant "prosecuted" and didn't know the difference. It is a common problem when writing that even carefully selected words can appear to be mistakes. This probably happens more often that it should only because so many people use the wrong words due to carelessness or simply lack of knowledge of the different (similar) words, and we therefore become accustomed to replacing words we see with what we believe the author intended (at least I do that, anyway). How many times have you seen "their" or "they're" where there should have been "there?" Or a "vise" (something commonly found on workbenches) in place of a "vice" (such as smoking). The ones that really drive me up the wall are accept/except, then/than, affect/effect. This can throw things off when you come across that rare circumstance that a chosen word is actually the correct one.
On second reading, your sentence makes perfect sense with "persecuted."
I'd say it's great that the Senate is scrutinizing what ISPs do to track people, but this shouldn't be limited solely to ISPs. There should be a lot of scrutiny about what the government does with your information, and I'm talking about all levels of government from the local level up to the federal level. Further, there are millions of businesses around the world, small and large, that gather all kinds of information. It is difficult to scrutinize so many companies, so I would say that the Senate should concentrate on the government first. Because the government collects the most.
Not to nitpick (well, actually I am nitpicking), but persecution is what happens when you go against an entire people. For example, pogroms carried out against the Jews are an example of persecution. The word you meant to use is prosecution. Small difference in spelling. Big difference in meaning.
There's a technical term for this: Selective Photographic Memory Loss. Bill Cliton suffers from this condition.
Herr Zeller: Perhaps those who would warn you that the Anschluss is coming - and it is coming, Captain - perhaps they would get further with you by setting their words to music.
Captain von Trapp: If the Nazis take over Austria, I have no doubt, Herr Zeller, that you will be the entire trumpet section.
Herr Zeller: You flatter me, Captain.
Captain von Trapp: Oh, how clumsy of me - I meant to accuse you.
Somewhere among my older posts, there was a really long one about how air travel will be in ten years. I took the current state of air travel, which is getting worse with each passing day, and extrapolated. The gist of it is that plane tickets cost many, many times more than what they should, plus you have to pay additional huge fees for every "extra" that used to be included for free, so that nobody will fly because it will be cheaper to buy a car and then drive it over there. Then you get to the airport and security is so crazy that nobody even makes it to the door of the plane. You may as well line people up as they walk into the front door of the airport and march them directly into buses headed for big jails, because everyone is a terrorist until proven otherwise. I really thought I exaggerated in that long post. And you know the scary part? I now think that I was being much too conservative. The government has no idea what it's doing. That's the bottom line. They are completely inept.
Oh good, a 400 GB read only disc. That means you get 400 GB of zeros for your reading pleasure! What will you do with 400 GB of zeros?
They should do to Yahoo! what they did to Hotmail. Take a system that runs perfectly fine on FreeBSD, spend ten billion dollars to switch it over to Windows Server, and get no benefit out of it whatsoever, other than the ability to brag that it runs on Windows, which won't be much of a brag, given all the bugs and problems that will be introduced during the massive job of switching the systems.
If this is the case, then why am I saying that they should do this? For my entertainment and laughing pleasure.
Coupled with a simple hologram projector hidden in someone's house, you can make them believe that ghosts and demons haunt them all throughout the night!
A better game would go something like this. Two heavyweight chess players start a match. When one takes the other's pawn by en passant, he jumps up angrily, knocks the chess board, table and all, clear into the audience and then socks that guy right in the jaw. A crazy fight ensues, in which the one who took the pawn gets beaten to a pulp.
"I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains." Sorry Vizini, brains won't do you any good when you're having your face bashed in.
Now that it's mentioned, there really is something about Firefox's update feature that gets you to install and use the latest version. Maybe it's that it's so easy and doesn't mess up anything, e.g., by making drastic changes to the appearance of the browser, etc. I would say that most of the nearly 20% who are running outdated versions are probably the paranoid type who think that updating their software will mean introducing problems, you know, the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But this study is totally correct: Of all the browsers, Firefox makes updating the easiest.
This is wonderful news for someone who wants to sing, but I'm still waiting for those clever Israeli researchers to come up with a system capable of correctly predicting next week's winning lottery numbers. Such a system would cause many people to sing (though not very skillfully).
Please excuse my lack of comprehension, but as a matter of fact, I do fail to see any irony here. Is it ironic because Virgin and Paramount are competitors and therefore Virgin should avoid using names reminiscent of a Paramount product? Or is there something inherently sexual about the Star Trek series?
I know this has been said already, so please consider this an additional "vote" for this method, rather than a redundant post: Since your business is geographically dispersed, using names that match the geography is, IMO, a good choice. Your non-technical users don't know (or care) about the topology of your network, but I would venture to say that they probably know where your business has offices geographically. (The company I work for has offices in several U.S. cities and one European city, and everyone knows where they are.) Using names that match up the geography is as intuitive as calling those locations on the phone and dialing the correct area code. This method should make it easy to set up things in the future, such as OpenVPN tunnels between the various facilities, and any sysadmin or user in the future will have an easy time determining which system they're communicating with.
I like how Virgin are naming the first two ships Enterprise and Voyager. IIUC another is supposed to be named Columbia and another Discovery. Virgin ordered seven of these.
I've read the previous /. stories as linked from this one, plus lots of the comments, and what I'd really like to know is how this whole mess started in the first place -- if Ms. Lindor never used a computer, let alone downloaded any music, then what caused the RIAA to target her for one of these lawsuits?
Shows how in our legal system, even when you win, you still lose to some degree.
Read Bleak House by Charles Dickens (link to Wikipedia article about Bleak House). It's the story of a lawsuit that stretches on for two generations. When it comes to lawsuits, the only winners are the lawyers. They laugh all the way to the bank. Everyone else loses, regardless of how the case turns out.
This is the scary thing about the direction things are going in the world, with the Internet in particular. The Internet was supposed to be the vast equalizer, but instead, with all kinds of clueless governments and corporate overlords who dream up ways to take advantage of people, the Internet is turning into another tool for the powerful to control the masses. This example with Viacom and YouTube is one good example. It's obvious to me that they obtained the court order to get the information on every YouTube video watched for only one reason: To count how many videos they claim violate their copyrights, add up how many times each of these videos was watched, and show the court, "You see?! Our priceless valuable intellectual property, so valuable in fact that without it, the Universe would cease to exist, has been illegally watched 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 times on YouTube. This is irrefutable proof that because YouTube exists, we have lost 9,578,739,458,797,245,858,274 sales of our products at $19.95 each, so our damages due to Google's obviously ill intent come to $19,109,585,220,300,000,000,000,000.95 USD." Never mind that their sales over their entire existence as a company have never reached one percent of that. Now who knows how the privacy implications will affect users beyond that. Once they get all of Google's assets to cover their huge damages, they'll probably track down each and every user and sue them too, a la the RIAA and SCO. A bigger issue than privacy to look at is what happens when a company whose business model is outdated and falling apart turns to lawsuits instead of figuring out new and innovative ways to stay in business, much like how a bully in school beats up kids one tenth his size instead of making friends and getting a life.
While I don't agree that fireworks need to be done away with, it is true that dogs (and most animals for that matter) are frightened by fireworks, both the professional fireworks displays and the smaller variety that people set off in their neighbourhoods*. A few years ago on the Fourth of July, while driving down home from a fireworks display, a dog, frightened by other fireworks displays, jumped in front of a car in the next lane. The result was displeasing to all parties present (especially the dog). For this reason, there should be public service commercials about putting pets safely indoors before nightfall on Independence Day, similar to the ads discouraging the act of firing handguns into the air during New Years celebrations. ("Yes, those bullets do come back down!" exclaimed the news reporter in one such televised attempt to prevent accidental deaths from this stupid act.)
* Please excuse the Bri'ish spelling of neighborhood.
Dude, does this mean that GCC will produced output based on the spirit of my code, rather than its letter? Because that would prevent a lot of bugs.
Right now it's Firefox 3.0 and soon we'll have Firefox 3.1. What's planned beyond that?
Firefox 3.11 for Workgroups
Firefox 95, then 95b, then 95c.
Firefox NT
Firefox 98, then Firefox 98SE
Firefox Me
Firefox 2000
Firefox XP
Firefox Vista
Firefox 7
Then someone will come up with a new program, which will be a "browser-only" browser!!
Nah, just kidding. Don't take it seriously. :-)