Is it any surprise that the more technology becomes a part of these kids' educations, the more likely it is that the bad apples are going to find ways to exploit the system?
Whatever happened to actually studying and learning something? We've always had these "bad apples" who would rather cheat than learn, and the computers certainly do make things more interesting, but the real question is, why are these people more inclined to cheat their way through school, and what can be done to solve the underlying problem?
Whatever gets AOL off the net is fine with me.
on
AOL Kills Usenet Access
·
· Score: 4, Informative
From the article:
One dismayed user likened AOL members to drunk drivers on the Information Super Highway.
Hm, for the most part, they're still just exactly like that. Nothing's changed in 11 years. Unfortunately, this isn't going to kill AOL, as one other person suggested. Somehow, as badly as AOL sucks, they manage to continue to survive. Maybe it's all those CDs they keep distributing everywhere. Want an AOL CD? Go to Burger King! They make half-decent frisbees...
But I'll take anything that reduces AOL's Internet presence as a good thing for the Internet.
Oh, and the frivolous lawsuit was against AOL, not Usenet. You can't sue Usenet. It's too decentralized.
Okay, so where (ie. what country) can you go to host a web site without fear that the government will step in and take it down without warning or provocation?
As for the web site taken down here, I don't see the government taking down all the neo-Nazi web sites advocating killing all the Jews. What's the difference?
Iran was last week cited as a "outpost of tyranny" by Condoleezza Rice
How about the outpost of tyranny at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW in Washington, DC? Who's doing what about them?
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
For every listing backed by proof, post a large ad in the New York Times saying "THIS ISP SUPPORTS SPAMMERS" with the proof behind it. Enforce the PR leverage.
I'll kick money into this project. Is there a PayPal page up yet? Has anyone even made a project out of it yet?
It is simply good business sense to move into this largely untapped market, especially if you already have a platform for charging for and delivering digital content. Though they aren't the first; MovieLink and CinemaNow are already offering movies for legal download.
UPDATE 1/23/05, 2:44pm, by Ian: Professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy argues that this case is inconsistent with existing doctrine, and will likely be overturned on appeal.
It makes me sad when people feel superior for being older. Seriously. Have you ever used an abacus? Washed your clothes on a washboard?
I have both used an abacus and washed my clothes on a washboard. But I don't feel superior for being older. Instead, I feel... er, older. Look at all this gray hair! Well, the women like it, so it can't be all bad...
Anyhow, I've heard from actual/.ers who have related their confusion upon being confronted with a rotary telephone, so the post is entirely appropriate. You may have managed to go your entire life without running into any "obsolete" technology, but most of us don't work at Fry's.
As for progress, don't get me wrong, I love progress. I have my nice Pentium 4 and my nice ThinkPad and my nice GSM phone and my nice DSL and my nice non-lame MP3 player with as much space as a Nomad. And yes, Touch-Tone was a massive improvement over rotary. I was just sad to see it go.
What really makes me sad is the knowledge that many people today have never even seen a rotary phone, let alone used one.
If, however, on the off chance you find yourself stranded in South English, Iowa, where the only pay phone in town is still rotary, this is how it works.
Pick up the phone and wait for dialtone. Insert a dime. (Yes, this phone still costs a dime!) Now, see the holes arranged on the disc? Find the one corresponding to the digit you want to dial, insert your finger, and rotate the disc clockwise until you hit the stop. Remove your finger. Wait for the dial to rotate back to its original position. Repeat as needed.
While you were dialing, did you hear those clicks? The circuit is actually being interrupted at a rate of 10 times per second. (This will be 20 times in some other countries.) The switching equipment in the central office measures the number of clicks and the time in between them to determine the number you dialed.
For more information, I suggest reading old articles of Phrack.
IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sure, maybe by bandwidth, 99% of IRC traffic is illegal. Aside from the binary file transfers themselves, I'd say probably 99% of all remaining IRC traffic (i.e. in-channel) is perfectly legal.
Actually I read the article, and he says that "99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is 'illegal.'" Which doesn't surprise me; all 60 of them are warez channels. But overall, this is a drop in the IRC ocean.
There is far too much legal conversation going on that he completely ignored in this study, choosing to focus on the top 60 warez channels to the exclusion of all else. Is it any wonder he found what he found? If you go looking for warez, you're probably going to find warez.
In other words, this is a bunch of lies, damn lies and statistics. I didn't even have to think hard about this one to realize it's a bunch of bullshit.
Yeah, your upstairs neighbor deserved to get kicked out anyway, because playing music loud enough that you can't hear jet engines over it is a violation of the lease.
Evading the dreaded Distributed Mail Corporation, a group of freedom fighters led by Jay Stuler has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Ohio.
No. This is just needless complexity. XML is great for some things, but it is not the silver bullet for every problem in the known universe!
In this case, XML will probably make programming much more difficult and code far less readable -- to humans. The compiler might like it a little better, but the compiler is supposed to serve us, not the other way around. The tool serves us. At least in an ideal world.
In the real world we use tools to get work done. If the tools are inconvenient to use or not suitable to the problem at hand, they don't get used. For the sake of humanity, this needs to be killed now before he comes up with a prototype, and drives future generations of programmers to madness.
Now that Firefox and Thunderbird have taken on a life of their own, is "Netscape" still relevant? Why would I want to use Netscape (or even Mozilla) instead of Firefox/Thunderbird/all my favorite extensions?
Don't get me wrong, I like having more options to choose from. I just want to know why, at this point, I should choose Netscape? After all, that MozillaZine review basically said the interface was horrible...
So, we bitch when they cripple spam zombies, then we bitch when they raise the bandwidth cap.
If they had crippled any zombies, I wouldn't be bitching. As it is, all the best botnets are on Comcast. Wake me up when they make their subscribers clean out their Windows boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to actually studying and learning something? We've always had these "bad apples" who would rather cheat than learn, and the computers certainly do make things more interesting, but the real question is, why are these people more inclined to cheat their way through school, and what can be done to solve the underlying problem?
Hm, for the most part, they're still just exactly like that. Nothing's changed in 11 years. Unfortunately, this isn't going to kill AOL, as one other person suggested. Somehow, as badly as AOL sucks, they manage to continue to survive. Maybe it's all those CDs they keep distributing everywhere. Want an AOL CD? Go to Burger King! They make half-decent frisbees...
But I'll take anything that reduces AOL's Internet presence as a good thing for the Internet.
Oh, and the frivolous lawsuit was against AOL, not Usenet. You can't sue Usenet. It's too decentralized.
As for the web site taken down here, I don't see the government taking down all the neo-Nazi web sites advocating killing all the Jews. What's the difference?
How about the outpost of tyranny at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW in Washington, DC? Who's doing what about them?
Yes, but have you placed a password on the hard drive?
And here is some nice debunking of other myths about Dvorak, including that GSA study you cited.
It takes about a month to retrain, and employers can easily recoup this cost in fewer workers compensation and health insurance claims.
Original press release
Engadget reivew
From the CES show
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
I'll kick money into this project. Is there a PayPal page up yet? Has anyone even made a project out of it yet?
It is simply good business sense to move into this largely untapped market, especially if you already have a platform for charging for and delivering digital content. Though they aren't the first; MovieLink and CinemaNow are already offering movies for legal download.
Google already IS the default search engine on Firefox!
Am I the only one who can't hear the audio on this file? I've tried totem, xine and vlc, and nothing wants to play the audio...
It's a confession that Elvis isn't dead; that he's been working for the CIA all this time, in the disguise of an Elvis impersonator.
UPDATE 1/23/05, 2:44pm, by Ian: Professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy argues that this case is inconsistent with existing doctrine, and will likely be overturned on appeal.
Unfortunately, what this didn't tell me is which moving company isn't going to rip you off.
/. editors actually reading the articles? You must be new here.
I have both used an abacus and washed my clothes on a washboard. But I don't feel superior for being older. Instead, I feel ... er, older. Look at all this gray hair! Well, the women like it, so it can't be all bad...
Anyhow, I've heard from actual /.ers who have related their confusion upon being confronted with a rotary telephone, so the post is entirely appropriate. You may have managed to go your entire life without running into any "obsolete" technology, but most of us don't work at Fry's.
As for progress, don't get me wrong, I love progress. I have my nice Pentium 4 and my nice ThinkPad and my nice GSM phone and my nice DSL and my nice non-lame MP3 player with as much space as a Nomad. And yes, Touch-Tone was a massive improvement over rotary. I was just sad to see it go.
If, however, on the off chance you find yourself stranded in South English, Iowa, where the only pay phone in town is still rotary, this is how it works.
Pick up the phone and wait for dialtone. Insert a dime. (Yes, this phone still costs a dime!) Now, see the holes arranged on the disc? Find the one corresponding to the digit you want to dial, insert your finger, and rotate the disc clockwise until you hit the stop. Remove your finger. Wait for the dial to rotate back to its original position. Repeat as needed.
While you were dialing, did you hear those clicks? The circuit is actually being interrupted at a rate of 10 times per second. (This will be 20 times in some other countries.) The switching equipment in the central office measures the number of clicks and the time in between them to determine the number you dialed.
For more information, I suggest reading old articles of Phrack.
Actually I read the article, and he says that "99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is 'illegal.'" Which doesn't surprise me; all 60 of them are warez channels. But overall, this is a drop in the IRC ocean.
There is far too much legal conversation going on that he completely ignored in this study, choosing to focus on the top 60 warez channels to the exclusion of all else. Is it any wonder he found what he found? If you go looking for warez, you're probably going to find warez.
In other words, this is a bunch of lies, damn lies and statistics. I didn't even have to think hard about this one to realize it's a bunch of bullshit.
Yeah, your upstairs neighbor deserved to get kicked out anyway, because playing music loud enough that you can't hear jet engines over it is a violation of the lease.
WARS
Episode V
The Spammer Strikes Back
It is a dark time for the Internet. Although Spamford Wallace has been shut down, Atriks spammers have driven the irate users from their inboxes and pursued them into court.
Evading the dreaded Distributed Mail Corporation, a group of freedom fighters led by Jay Stuler has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Ohio.
The evil lord Darth Haberstroh, obsessed with harassing young Stuler, has dispatched thousands of spambots into the far reaches of the Internet...
In this case, XML will probably make programming much more difficult and code far less readable -- to humans. The compiler might like it a little better, but the compiler is supposed to serve us, not the other way around. The tool serves us. At least in an ideal world.
In the real world we use tools to get work done. If the tools are inconvenient to use or not suitable to the problem at hand, they don't get used. For the sake of humanity, this needs to be killed now before he comes up with a prototype, and drives future generations of programmers to madness.
Don't get me wrong, I like having more options to choose from. I just want to know why, at this point, I should choose Netscape? After all, that MozillaZine review basically said the interface was horrible...
If they had crippled any zombies, I wouldn't be bitching. As it is, all the best botnets are on Comcast. Wake me up when they make their subscribers clean out their Windows boxes.
Try the WordPress SpamAssassin plugin, which has also been ported to Movable Type, to kill all that comment spam.
Dilbert-inspired: The Buzzword Generator
Yet Another Buzzword Generator
And there are many, many more buzzword generators out there, implemented using open-architected dynamic algorithms by organic radical policies...