I would have quoted my orginal source for this earlier, but I was at work and had already used up my four hours of slacking off.
Larry Wall: "If you've ever been spammed (and who hasn't?), your e-mail address was almost certainly gleaned from the Net using a Perl script. The spam itself was likely sent via a Perl script. One could say that Perl is the language of choice for Net abuse. And one could almost be proud of it."
I wasn't trying to blame Perl for all the Spam in the world, but when I read that this site relied on Perl, the quote from Wall came to mind.
(And Bill Gates IS responsible for all Windows virii. He and Janet Reno write them in the basement of the loveshack on his back lawn, emailing the binaries to unsuspecting script kiddies around the world.) I'll take my medicine now.
I read somewhere (babelfish: Once upon a time) that Perl was responsible for a lot of Spam because it was used to extract information from newsgroups to find valid email addresses. Now this guy uses Perl to extract the same information on the Spammers
Whatever other comments are made in response to this, I think you're absolutely correct.
To add my thoughts: How can a person ever deserve money? Who makes that judgment and by what criteria?
As an example, say that an evil and stupid man purchases a plot of real estate at a very low price, then, months or years later, demand for that land increases and he sells it for a lot of money. Does he deserve that money?
As another example, let's say that an evil and stupid man writes a mediocre operating system and begins to sell it to computer manufacturers. He becomes the richest man on the planet. Does he deserve that money?
In both cases, my answer would be "no." Clearly, I deserve more money. I would spend it wisely and use my wealth to be with my wife and daughter more often. My wife would do endless hours of charity work, because she's into that.
The problem, what I think is irrelevant to their wealth.
You don't need to get anyone's permission to get rich.
BTW, for all his faults, I would not describe Bill Gates as either evil or stupid.
Quoting from my copy of "The Mac Bathroom Reader" (now renamed "Apple Confidential" by Owen Linzmayer:
"I was on a plane going to a user group club in Fort Lauderdale to promote the Mac, along with some other members of the Mac team," recalls Wozniak. "Andy Hertzfield had just read Zap, a book about Atari which said that Steve Jobs designed Breakout. I explained to him that we both worked on it and got paid $700. Andy corrected me, 'No, it says here it was $5,000.' When I read in the book how Nolan Bushnell actually paid Steve $5,000, I just cried."
I don't doubt this story for an instant, but still, it's apocryphal at best. The fact that it has been butchered so many times in so many ways says a lot. It's like all of those quotes that have been attributed to Bill Gates ( e.g. "No one will ever need more than 640k" ).
I don't buy into this statistic. Any evidence or support? I'm not disputing that AOL users are some of the most unsophisticated novices on the web or anywhere else, but I don't believe that 40% of their user base has never even installed Quake or Quicken or anything.
Post AC if you want, but let's see some support of this.
He's right, of course, about the mantra of Open Source being a powerful meme. Look at comment #1 in this thread. Linux is attracting a great many users because of the press it gets, but this user base will shrink when the honeymoon period goes away. As sorry as WinWhatever is, it is still easier to use than Linux, and it will continue to be this way for the next few years, IMO.
This does not diminish what Linux has to offer. People who love Linux will continue to love it, even after a lot of new users have returned to their original OS.
What the writer of this article neglects to mention is the vast amount of hardware that Linux will run under vs. BeOS, which runs on older Macs and a pretty good array of PCs. (Someone from the BSD camp should post a reply to this to point out that BSD is the most ported OS in the cosmos.)
Other reasons for Linux being more popular (right now): 1. Cheaper. You can try it out, then go buy a full distro later, or not at all. 2. More press. Microsoft hasn't started an anti-Be task force. No one has heard of Be in the mass media since Apple threatened to buy them.
Linux share will grow on both the server and desktop side, but until installation, maintenance, and UI are improved, most users will run after a few short days left alone in the Colloseum. Penguins bite.
If WB had decided that Buffy's ratings were too low to justify the air time, would it have been censorship? No. Are they required to air an episode simply because they bought it? No.
If the/. gods decide to remove this article from their server and ban Katz forever, is it censorship? No. Get your own server. Get your own broadcast network.
WB decides what they air. The word censorship is misused and the accusation is unfounded. If they want to pay Sarah and the gang for hundreds of episodes which are never seen, then that's their business. The fact that people stole their intellectual property and posted it to the web is not a sign of liberation.
How would you feel, Jon, if I stole a draft of a book that you wrote and then published that book to the web before you could have it published in print? It's theft.
Finally someone with some sense. Busting on Notes / Domino as a clunky POS misses the point. It's a great tool when used right.
If you want to serve up vanilla web pages, yeah, it can do that. If you want to give users access to basic email, yeah, it can do that. But what's the point?
Notes allows my company (less than 20 people) to do things that would be totally out of our reach with other apps and frameworks (semi-cross platform, too).
They committed to Linux last year. Good to see the commitment is still there.
Not to insult the open source community, but in comparison to fully closed OS's like MacOS and Windows, the user base for Linux, FreeBSD, etc..., is just as willing to accept inadequacies as other computer users. The difference being the nature of those inadequacies.
Example: Mac users would never accept an installation procedure that forced you to manually edit a text file for the program to work, but they will accept once a day crashes. The same thing is probably true for most Windows users.
The goal in desktop computing has been to move toward a feature rich, user friendly, environment with little emphasis on reliability or efficient use of system resources. The Linux market has been the opposite. Reliability and efficiency are key, but any complaints about ease of use will get an RTFM response.
It's a trade-off. The writer of this article complains that OS manufacturers abuse his trust and offer a second rate product, but this is a product of the market in which we live. Hardware design works the same way. Cheap is king. Big mHz, Big RAM, Big HD, even if everything is low quality.
The computer industry sells us what's just around the corner. We use what is viable today. As long as we buy into the marketing, they will keep selling us the future even as we go home and unwrap the past to use every day.
I don't think there's such a thing as a "self-respecting script kiddie."
In the CNN article, the claims by M1crochip ( or whatever... when will the stupid Internet aliases come to an end?) are a bit farfetched. So far thy've stuck to replacing.gov home pages with daring jargon, but next time EVERYTHING is going down. They mean it. Really. All.gov servers are going down.
If that happens, I hope they remember to leave up at least one server to host their M1crochip r00lz web page.
Isn't this what DejaNews is for? Next they'll be building really fast servers which constantly scan the internet for text, logging it into an ultra-secret database which can be searched.
I'm A Highly Testicular Poster...
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...or at least that what my friends tell me.
I don't know if Katz meant "highly testicular" when he wrote "highly testicular," but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say no. He was probably trying to use an fancy form of "testy" and not the adjective form of "teste."
If Jon really needs an editor, I'm volunteering, but I think a simple disctionary will do.
"i'm a bit confused by this post, partly because you seem to be agreeing with me for the most part."
Sorry if my post was unclear. I _am_ agreeing with you. I was expanding on your comment, not taking issue with it.
There is no rebuttal to your point. The only difference between your examples and Jon's example of Ultima Online property is one of expected (and I would argue, actual) value.
No one questions a decision to buy minutes from a phone company. No one questions that you bought those minutes with a piece of plastic with numbers on it, or through a "virtual" transaction of some other kind.
The only thing interesting about the eBay purchases of UO "virtual" property is the fact that people are buying what I would consider to be crap.
Jon's brain has confused him again. He looks for meaning and trends which don't exist. He scrathes and claws for cultural subtext never thinking that the trend is just one more step in a road our culture has been on for thousands of years.
I would like to see a rebuttal of this. How does your virtual property example of Ultima Online real estate differ from the services described by th0m?
I'll help you. They are intrinsically less valuable.
Ultima Online does not sanction or control the sale of these assets (AFAIK) so they could change the value of these assets with impunity. If real estate is scarce, they could "virtually" increase the total amount, which would have the same effect as a government printing more money. They could change any rule of the game and change the value of the property.
With the example of online minutes from a phone company, the phone company cannot redefine "minutes" or change the service without breach of contract. A "month" of HBO is a month. The worst HBO could do is decide to make the service free to everyone, in which case all you lose is a month's payment. A domain name is absolute. There can be only one resolution to the browser query of http://slashdot.org.
Other than being a bad value, the examples of "virtual property" are no different than examples of real or meatspace property. Many things of monetary value cannot be held in your hand: 1000 shares of MSFT, car title, mortgage, bank statement.
My favorite line: "ooh! ooh! virtual property paid for with *virtual money*! another monumental technological discovery" [snip]
What's the difference between virtual money, which is a mere representation of money, and real money, which is a mere representation itself? There is no difference. The value is attributed and not inherent. American one hundred dollar bills only have as much value as we think other perople think they have. I know that the grocery store will let me walk out with a cart full of food if I let them take a shiny one hundred dollar bill, but I don't carry one around. Instead I pay for it with virtual money I store on a plastic card in my wallet.
Thanks for the summary. Don't you wish CNN writer's had the same kind of BS filters in their head? No offense to CmdrTaco, but anything with "hacker" in the article gets treated like gospel in the media./. links it, everyone reads it.
The words "hacker" and "Y2K" on the internet are the equivalent of "fire" in a crowded theater.
Who cares if the DOD website is brought down 4 times a day or cracked 250,000 times a year? (Where does that number come from? Is a port scan a crack?) It's non-classified, the admins are upgrading the routers and applying patches.
CNN filler. They ran out of Microsoft pr announcements to post as news.
Thanks for being the voice of reason. You're right that DejaNews is going out of their way to generate this log. It's not just a matter of standard mail server procedures.
My concern is how issues like this are handled. The best solution to this is don't use DejaNews. But the article hints that congressional bills may address the issue.
DejaNews has crossed the line! What do we do!?! Somebody call Strom Thurmond or Ted Kennedy! Maybe Al "Alpha Geek" Gore could help.
Everyone has a hard-on for the DOJ to slap Microsoft, but once government steps into the ring, they become the only true player. The internet (and the computer industry in general) has been blissfully free of congressional interference. Don't encourage the alterantive.
I agree with this. Here in Atlanta, one of our local radio idiots was talking about the influence of Marilyn Manson on these devil worshippers, and how we would hear a lot more about the music and how it was to blame before this was all over. Keep in mind, he was saying this at a time when the exact identity of the shooters was not known. The police had not even secured the building. When I got home that night, CNN was showing the cover art to Rammstein and playing up the fact that these two spoke German to each other.
Then came the video of Doom. I noticed the player in Doom had the shotgun (may favorite weopon in Doom) and had not yet got the chain gun.
Of the 1800 students at Calumbine (sp?) High School, how many do you think have played Doom? How many have listened to Rammstein?
Certainly any male old enough to hold a joystick has played Doom. No mention is made of the total prevalence of Doom on personal computers. It's an immensely popular game.
The media looks for some trait in the personality of these kids that will help mark them as members of a counter culture, but the traits they come up with are mainstream.
Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Doom. Not all teenagers listen to these bands or play first person shoot-em-up video games, but they are not counter culture.
The fascination with Hitler is disturbing, but not uncommon in confused teenagers. Most grow out of it. The strange posts to AOL (if true) are disturbing, but AOL is a very mainstream outlet for kids to express their uninhibited thoughts in anonymous chat rooms. There is nothing unusual about doing this.
These two were disturbed, they needed help, but the media looks at normal, everyday trappings of teenage culture and places them on a stage as oddities. They are not oddities.
Questions that should be asked: How did these guys manufacture pipe bombs in their garage without their parents noticing? What legitimate warning signs were missed? (e.g. did they threaten someone verbally, had they tortured animals in the past, was there a history of non-lethal violence leading up to this.) But the media plays clips from "Du Hast" and shows 640x400 screens of monsters getting blown away with a shotgun.
There's no easy answer to this one, but it's difficult for me to believe that these kids were instilled with any morality or belief system.
School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon and in a uniquely American way, pop culture will blame pop culture for the evils of our pop culture.
I'm into mysticism as much as the next guy, but I don't think cybersapce is a new place for mystical experiences. Quite the opposite.
Point one: there's no such thing as cyberspace. Get over it. The web is just HTML and USENET is something less than that. If I ping your IP address have we made a cosmic connection? If you email me are we brothers in the mystic order of Sendmail? If you answered yes to either of these questions, please stop reading now.
Point two: cyberspace will be ubiquitous soon and no one will know or care what you are talking about. The web is all exciting and new, but very soon this Love Boat of dropped packets and bad dial-up connections will dock. Evreyone will have web access, just like everyone has cars, and TVs, and no one will think of this as a mystic place.
Counterpoint: the argument could be made that not EVERYONE will have access to the internet. Impoverished people around the world and even in America (Say it ain't so!) don't have cars, TVs, or even telephones today. This is correct. My statement that the internet will become ubiquitous merely implies that it will become so common and mundane that people will no longer take notice of its newness.
Jon,/. and the rest of it may be a mystical experience to you, but for me it's just a more efficient means of communication. Not heaven, hell, or purgatory. Cyberspace is just packets, and, translated, there's still a high SNR.
From Katz: "This may be the only space in which geeks and gurus seem attracted in roughly equal numbers, doing radically different things side by side for utterly divergent reasons. "
Or you could just look at an Interstate highway, or cable TV, or intercept the varying phone calls which traverse our POTS. If you pigeon hole people enough, if you apply enough diverse labels and stereotypes, then the internet becomes an exciting melting pot. I am a geek. The guy three web sites over and to the left is a mystic. His neighbor is a pornographer. Rejoice in our diversity!
The internet is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
The world is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
If I invite enough people to my house then, my back yard is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
Two reasons for using personal content filters
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This is exactly right. Instead of looking for another geek related web site, but without all that crap about Microsoft (or Apple or Katz or whatever) we can choose.
The argument that this is censorship in any way simply fails. When I go into a bookstore (which I do every week) I never go into the Romance novel section or the Travel section. Could I be missing something? Probably not. Because I don't care.
If I filter Katz could I miss something? Not if I don't care what Katz has to say.
In a twisted version of self-censorship, I once avoided news programs and current events for almost a year. I did every thing I could not even to look at at paper, or see even a snip of local or national news on the TV. I changed the channel on the radio at the slightest hint of current events. I became one ignorant person. But I wasn't stupid. Denying this type of knowledge from myself didn't hurt me.
Web filtering software is different. The challenge there is you willingly give up some personal choice. You let someone else decide what is appropriate. Slashdot public comments are a lot like that. I hide all AC posts and all posts moderated below 1. One of my comments last week, which was not a flame or a rant, was moderated to a -2. It went back up to a 0, but I was censored to a degree. No need to begin a censorship chant. Somone didn't like it, but it was still there if anyone cared.
What if everyone filters Katz? Then he's totally silenced. This is censorship. Solution: Get your own damn web site, advertise on Yahoo, buy the top search position from AltaVista for keyword censorship. There, no more censorship.
Open letter to moderators: Please don't censor me. I need the attention. That -2 really hurt last week. What did I do to deserve it? God, help me! What did I do?
I agree with this post. When you use a search engine, you trust that the sites are listed in an order of relevance and not one of advertiser preference. You expect that a banner ad will be placed according to your query, but if the results are skewed, what's the point.
This isn't a case of commercialism vs. the web. It's a case of Alta Vista not understanding their customer base. If they change the product, they will change their customer. Alta Vista's best business practice is the one which will earn them the most money, not the one which will make the most/.ers happy. In the long run, though, they are one and the same. Alta Vista is number one because everyone recommends it. They have a reputation and they return good results. If they place those results for sale, they lose both the reputation, and, to a degree, the good results.
Many posters have recommended Google, both for its banner-free site and for the quality of hits. I try Google first, but Alta Vista was always my second choice. It's an excellent search engine. Google will have banner ads, or it will go away.
TANSTAAFL. But the lunch you pay for should be edible.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I didn't mean to cause a ruckus.
/. link to Linux Journal
I would have quoted my orginal source for this earlier, but I was at work and had already used up my four hours of slacking off.
Larry Wall: "If you've ever been spammed (and who hasn't?), your e-mail address was almost certainly gleaned from the Net using a Perl script. The spam itself was likely sent via a Perl script. One could say that Perl is the language of choice for Net abuse. And one could almost be proud of it."
From a previous
I wasn't trying to blame Perl for all the Spam in the world, but when I read that this site relied on Perl, the quote from Wall came to mind.
(And Bill Gates IS responsible for all Windows virii. He and Janet Reno write them in the basement of the loveshack on his back lawn, emailing the binaries to unsuspecting script kiddies around the world.) I'll take my medicine now.
I read somewhere (babelfish: Once upon a time) that Perl was responsible for a lot of Spam because it was used to extract information from newsgroups to find valid email addresses. Now this guy uses Perl to extract the same information on the Spammers
;)
Truly a Postmodern situation.
Whatever other comments are made in response to this, I think you're absolutely correct.
To add my thoughts: How can a person ever deserve money? Who makes that judgment and by what criteria?
As an example, say that an evil and stupid man purchases a plot of real estate at a very low price, then, months or years later, demand for that land increases and he sells it for a lot of money. Does he deserve that money?
As another example, let's say that an evil and stupid man writes a mediocre operating system and begins to sell it to computer manufacturers. He becomes the richest man on the planet. Does he deserve that money?
In both cases, my answer would be "no." Clearly, I deserve more money. I would spend it wisely and use my wealth to be with my wife and daughter more often. My wife would do endless hours of charity work, because she's into that.
The problem, what I think is irrelevant to their wealth.
You don't need to get anyone's permission to get rich.
BTW, for all his faults, I would not describe Bill Gates as either evil or stupid.
I guess we'll all know who's a MacBigot now...
Quoting from my copy of "The Mac Bathroom Reader" (now renamed "Apple Confidential" by Owen Linzmayer:
"I was on a plane going to a user group club in Fort Lauderdale to promote the Mac, along with some other members of the Mac team," recalls Wozniak. "Andy Hertzfield had just read Zap, a book about Atari which said that Steve Jobs designed Breakout. I explained to him that we both worked on it and got paid $700. Andy corrected me, 'No, it says here it was $5,000.' When I read in the book how Nolan Bushnell actually paid Steve $5,000, I just cried."
I don't doubt this story for an instant, but still, it's apocryphal at best. The fact that it has been butchered so many times in so many ways says a lot. It's like all of those quotes that have been attributed to Bill Gates ( e.g. "No one will ever need more than 640k" ).
What kind of authority is Zap! anyway?
...the cost savings of not buying a hard disk for each unit is negligible...
Everything counts in large amounts. Plus, there's the administration problems and costs associated with all of those negligible units.
A bold announcement. Mac user comes out of the closet as an AC.
I'm typing this on a rev. A iMac. I feel cleansed.
I don't buy into this statistic. Any evidence or support? I'm not disputing that AOL users are some of the most unsophisticated novices on the web or anywhere else, but I don't believe that 40% of their user base has never even installed Quake or Quicken or anything.
Post AC if you want, but let's see some support of this.
He's right, of course, about the mantra of Open Source being a powerful meme. Look at comment #1 in this thread. Linux is attracting a great many users because of the press it gets, but this user base will shrink when the honeymoon period goes away. As sorry as WinWhatever is, it is still easier to use than Linux, and it will continue to be this way for the next few years, IMO.
This does not diminish what Linux has to offer. People who love Linux will continue to love it, even after a lot of new users have returned to their original OS.
What the writer of this article neglects to mention is the vast amount of hardware that Linux will run under vs. BeOS, which runs on older Macs and a pretty good array of PCs. (Someone from the BSD camp should post a reply to this to point out that BSD is the most ported OS in the cosmos.)
Other reasons for Linux being more popular (right now): 1. Cheaper. You can try it out, then go buy a full distro later, or not at all. 2. More press. Microsoft hasn't started an anti-Be task force. No one has heard of Be in the mass media since Apple threatened to buy them.
Linux share will grow on both the server and desktop side, but until installation, maintenance, and UI are improved, most users will run after a few short days left alone in the Colloseum. Penguins bite.
If WB had decided that Buffy's ratings were too low to justify the air time, would it have been censorship? No. Are they required to air an episode simply because they bought it? No.
/. gods decide to remove this article from their server and ban Katz forever, is it censorship? No. Get your own server. Get your own broadcast network.
If the
WB decides what they air. The word censorship is misused and the accusation is unfounded. If they want to pay Sarah and the gang for hundreds of episodes which are never seen, then that's their business. The fact that people stole their intellectual property and posted it to the web is not a sign of liberation.
How would you feel, Jon, if I stole a draft of a book that you wrote and then published that book to the web before you could have it published in print? It's theft.
/.'s Preview button should include a spell-check routine. Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the internet who cares about speling and grammer.
BTW, this is a legitimate feature request. How hard could it be to implement?
Somewhat off topic, but Linus is set to give the keynote address at Lotus DevCon in June.
The Lotus page for the conferecne
Finally someone with some sense. Busting on Notes / Domino as a clunky POS misses the point. It's a great tool when used right.
If you want to serve up vanilla web pages, yeah, it can do that. If you want to give users access to basic email, yeah, it can do that. But what's the point?
Notes allows my company (less than 20 people) to do things that would be totally out of our reach with other apps and frameworks (semi-cross platform, too).
They committed to Linux last year. Good to see the commitment is still there.
Not to insult the open source community, but in comparison to fully closed OS's like MacOS and Windows, the user base for Linux, FreeBSD, etc..., is just as willing to accept inadequacies as other computer users. The difference being the nature of those inadequacies.
Example: Mac users would never accept an installation procedure that forced you to manually edit a text file for the program to work, but they will accept once a day crashes. The same thing is probably true for most Windows users.
The goal in desktop computing has been to move toward a feature rich, user friendly, environment with little emphasis on reliability or efficient use of system resources. The Linux market has been the opposite. Reliability and efficiency are key, but any complaints about ease of use will get an RTFM response.
It's a trade-off. The writer of this article complains that OS manufacturers abuse his trust and offer a second rate product, but this is a product of the market in which we live. Hardware design works the same way. Cheap is king. Big mHz, Big RAM, Big HD, even if everything is low quality.
The computer industry sells us what's just around the corner. We use what is viable today. As long as we buy into the marketing, they will keep selling us the future even as we go home and unwrap the past to use every day.
I don't think there's such a thing as a "self-respecting script kiddie."
.gov home pages with daring jargon, but next time EVERYTHING is going down. They mean it. Really. All .gov servers are going down.
In the CNN article, the claims by M1crochip ( or whatever... when will the stupid Internet aliases come to an end?) are a bit farfetched. So far thy've stuck to replacing
If that happens, I hope they remember to leave up at least one server to host their M1crochip r00lz web page.
Isn't this what DejaNews is for? Next they'll be building really fast servers which constantly scan the internet for text, logging it into an ultra-secret database which can be searched.
...or at least that what my friends tell me.
I don't know if Katz meant "highly testicular" when he wrote "highly testicular," but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say no. He was probably trying to use an fancy form of "testy" and not the adjective form of "teste."
If Jon really needs an editor, I'm volunteering, but I think a simple disctionary will do.
"i'm a bit confused by this post, partly because you seem to be agreeing with me for the most part."
Sorry if my post was unclear. I _am_ agreeing with you. I was expanding on your comment, not taking issue with it.
There is no rebuttal to your point. The only difference between your examples and Jon's example of Ultima Online property is one of expected (and I would argue, actual) value.
No one questions a decision to buy minutes from a phone company. No one questions that you bought those minutes with a piece of plastic with numbers on it, or through a "virtual" transaction of some other kind.
The only thing interesting about the eBay purchases of UO "virtual" property is the fact that people are buying what I would consider to be crap.
Jon's brain has confused him again. He looks for meaning and trends which don't exist. He scrathes and claws for cultural subtext never thinking that the trend is just one more step in a road our culture has been on for thousands of years.
Jon,
I would like to see a rebuttal of this. How does your virtual property example of Ultima Online real estate differ from the services described by th0m?
I'll help you. They are intrinsically less valuable.
Ultima Online does not sanction or control the sale of these assets (AFAIK) so they could change the value of these assets with impunity. If real estate is scarce, they could "virtually" increase the total amount, which would have the same effect as a government printing more money. They could change any rule of the game and change the value of the property.
With the example of online minutes from a phone company, the phone company cannot redefine "minutes" or change the service without breach of contract. A "month" of HBO is a month. The worst HBO could do is decide to make the service free to everyone, in which case all you lose is a month's payment. A domain name is absolute. There can be only one resolution to the browser query of http://slashdot.org.
Other than being a bad value, the examples of "virtual property" are no different than examples of real or meatspace property. Many things of monetary value cannot be held in your hand: 1000 shares of MSFT, car title, mortgage, bank statement.
My favorite line:
"ooh! ooh! virtual property paid for with *virtual money*! another monumental technological discovery"
[snip]
What's the difference between virtual money, which is a mere representation of money, and real money, which is a mere representation itself? There is no difference. The value is attributed and not inherent. American one hundred dollar bills only have as much value as we think other perople think they have. I know that the grocery store will let me walk out with a cart full of food if I let them take a shiny one hundred dollar bill, but I don't carry one around. Instead I pay for it with virtual money I store on a plastic card in my wallet.
Thanks for the summary. Don't you wish CNN writer's had the same kind of BS filters in their head? No offense to CmdrTaco, but anything with "hacker" in the article gets treated like gospel in the media. /. links it, everyone reads it.
The words "hacker" and "Y2K" on the internet are the equivalent of "fire" in a crowded theater.
Who cares if the DOD website is brought down 4 times a day or cracked 250,000 times a year? (Where does that number come from? Is a port scan a crack?) It's non-classified, the admins are upgrading the routers and applying patches.
CNN filler. They ran out of Microsoft pr announcements to post as news.
Thanks for being the voice of reason. You're right that DejaNews is going out of their way to generate this log. It's not just a matter of standard mail server procedures.
My concern is how issues like this are handled. The best solution to this is don't use DejaNews. But the article hints that congressional bills may address the issue.
DejaNews has crossed the line! What do we do!?! Somebody call Strom Thurmond or Ted Kennedy! Maybe Al "Alpha Geek" Gore could help.
Everyone has a hard-on for the DOJ to slap Microsoft, but once government steps into the ring, they become the only true player. The internet (and the computer industry in general) has been blissfully free of congressional interference. Don't encourage the alterantive.
"We didn't have tracer implants that the police track 24 hours a day 7 days a week to 'make sure we're safe'"
I like my tracer implant, but sometimes it kind of aches in wet weather, and sometimes it tells me to do things I don't want to do.
Is there a bug fix I can download for this?
I agree with this. Here in Atlanta, one of our local radio idiots was talking about the influence of Marilyn Manson on these devil worshippers, and how we would hear a lot more about the music and how it was to blame before this was all over. Keep in mind, he was saying this at a time when the exact identity of the shooters was not known. The police had not even secured the building. When I got home that night, CNN was showing the cover art to Rammstein and playing up the fact that these two spoke German to each other.
Then came the video of Doom. I noticed the player in Doom had the shotgun (may favorite weopon in Doom) and had not yet got the chain gun.
Of the 1800 students at Calumbine (sp?) High School, how many do you think have played Doom? How many have listened to Rammstein?
Certainly any male old enough to hold a joystick has played Doom. No mention is made of the total prevalence of Doom on personal computers. It's an immensely popular game.
The media looks for some trait in the personality of these kids that will help mark them as members of a counter culture, but the traits they come up with are mainstream.
Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Doom. Not all teenagers listen to these bands or play first person shoot-em-up video games, but they are not counter culture.
The fascination with Hitler is disturbing, but not uncommon in confused teenagers. Most grow out of it. The strange posts to AOL (if true) are disturbing, but AOL is a very mainstream outlet for kids to express their uninhibited thoughts in anonymous chat rooms. There is nothing unusual about doing this.
These two were disturbed, they needed help, but the media looks at normal, everyday trappings of teenage culture and places them on a stage as oddities. They are not oddities.
Questions that should be asked: How did these guys manufacture pipe bombs in their garage without their parents noticing? What legitimate warning signs were missed? (e.g. did they threaten someone verbally, had they tortured animals in the past, was there a history of non-lethal violence leading up to this.) But the media plays clips from "Du Hast" and shows 640x400 screens of monsters getting blown away with a shotgun.
There's no easy answer to this one, but it's difficult for me to believe that these kids were instilled with any morality or belief system.
School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon and in a uniquely American way, pop culture will blame pop culture for the evils of our pop culture.
I'm into mysticism as much as the next guy, but I don't think cybersapce is a new place for mystical experiences. Quite the opposite.
/. and the rest of it may be a mystical experience to you, but for me it's just a more efficient means of communication. Not heaven, hell, or purgatory. Cyberspace is just packets, and, translated, there's still a high SNR.
Point one: there's no such thing as cyberspace. Get over it. The web is just HTML and USENET is something less than that. If I ping your IP address have we made a cosmic connection? If you email me are we brothers in the mystic order of Sendmail? If you answered yes to either of these questions, please stop reading now.
Point two: cyberspace will be ubiquitous soon and no one will know or care what you are talking about. The web is all exciting and new, but very soon this Love Boat of dropped packets and bad dial-up connections will dock. Evreyone will have web access, just like everyone has cars, and TVs, and no one will think of this as a mystic place.
Counterpoint: the argument could be made that not EVERYONE will have access to the internet. Impoverished people around the world and even in America (Say it ain't so!) don't have cars, TVs, or even telephones today. This is correct. My statement that the internet will become ubiquitous merely implies that it will become so common and mundane that people will no longer take notice of its newness.
Jon,
From Katz: "This may be the only space in which geeks and gurus seem attracted in roughly equal numbers, doing radically different things side by side for utterly divergent reasons. "
Or you could just look at an Interstate highway, or cable TV, or intercept the varying phone calls which traverse our POTS. If you pigeon hole people enough, if you apply enough diverse labels and stereotypes, then the internet becomes an exciting melting pot. I am a geek. The guy three web sites over and to the left is a mystic. His neighbor is a pornographer. Rejoice in our diversity!
The internet is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
The world is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
If I invite enough people to my house then, my back yard is an incredibly diverse place "filled with countless ethereal connections between people."
This is exactly right. Instead of looking for another geek related web site, but without all that crap about Microsoft (or Apple or Katz or whatever) we can choose.
The argument that this is censorship in any way simply fails. When I go into a bookstore (which I do every week) I never go into the Romance novel section or the Travel section. Could I be missing something? Probably not. Because I don't care.
If I filter Katz could I miss something? Not if I don't care what Katz has to say.
In a twisted version of self-censorship, I once avoided news programs and current events for almost a year. I did every thing I could not even to look at at paper, or see even a snip of local or national news on the TV. I changed the channel on the radio at the slightest hint of current events. I became one ignorant person. But I wasn't stupid. Denying this type of knowledge from myself didn't hurt me.
Web filtering software is different. The challenge there is you willingly give up some personal choice. You let someone else decide what is appropriate. Slashdot public comments are a lot like that. I hide all AC posts and all posts moderated below 1. One of my comments last week, which was not a flame or a rant, was moderated to a -2. It went back up to a 0, but I was censored to a degree. No need to begin a censorship chant. Somone didn't like it, but it was still there if anyone cared.
What if everyone filters Katz? Then he's totally silenced. This is censorship. Solution: Get your own damn web site, advertise on Yahoo, buy the top search position from AltaVista for keyword censorship. There, no more censorship.
Open letter to moderators: Please don't censor me. I need the attention. That -2 really hurt last week. What did I do to deserve it? God, help me! What did I do?
I agree with this post. When you use a search engine, you trust that the sites are listed in an order of relevance and not one of advertiser preference. You expect that a banner ad will be placed according to your query, but if the results are skewed, what's the point.
/.ers happy. In the long run, though, they are one and the same. Alta Vista is number one because everyone recommends it. They have a reputation and they return good results. If they place those results for sale, they lose both the reputation, and, to a degree, the good results.
This isn't a case of commercialism vs. the web. It's a case of Alta Vista not understanding their customer base. If they change the product, they will change their customer. Alta Vista's best business practice is the one which will earn them the most money, not the one which will make the most
Many posters have recommended Google, both for its banner-free site and for the quality of hits. I try Google first, but Alta Vista was always my second choice. It's an excellent search engine. Google will have banner ads, or it will go away.
TANSTAAFL. But the lunch you pay for should be edible.