Sites promoting gun use are available, including Colt,Browning and the National Rifle Association. But prominent gun safety organizations are blocked, including the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Safer Guns Now and the Million Mom March.
I'm glad to see that someone is looking after our children.. Just keep em away from information about sex, chess and PopeAliens..
These people just don't have a clue, do they? Trying to review enough content to make either a whitelist or blacklist worth anything would be sort of like trying to drink from the spillway of Hoover Dam, and this is the sort of thing where VI just doesn't help at all. Censorware will always suck, either because it doesn't work or because it works too well for the wrong people..
The free aspect of it means that anyone can send it to everyone. Think about it -- I get at least two or three ads in my snail mailbox a day that are for local stores. What prevents these local stores from telling the world about themselves via snail mail? Cost. There is no real cost for spam.
And there's no real cost (other than my own equipment and a $6-ish renewal fee every 10 years) for my ham radio license. Difference? My license FORBIDS me (or any other ham) from using the radio for commercial purposes. Therefore, about 99% of what I hear has some level of relevance to me.
Since email does NOT have a similar prohibition, anyone who collects my email address in a list (one of them is @arrl.net) can flood my inbox, and millions of others, with useless crap I have no desire to read, waste filesystem space on, or respond to. The more that happens, the less useful email becomes, until it degrades to a recipient-supported advertisement distribution system and personal emails are lost in the earsplitting din of competing high power commercial sites. It will go that way, believe me -- people want money and believe they'll get it if they can just make you see their name that 100,001st time.
Most spammers DON'T want to be found out, so they CRACK servers on the internet, they DENY service, and do other nasty things so they can anonymously mail things out, and let the brunt of the attack fall on someone else.
Hate to break it to you, but there are even spammer-friendly SMTP servers out there, specifically designed to work with high-speed bulk emailing software. This is a business, folks, and it will keep growing until someone throws a wrench in the works, or until nobody reads email anymore. Trace your spam. Complain to the hosting site, the hosting network, and/or the backbone if need be, but let these people know they're not welcome, NOW, before they get even more out of control..
I see a couple of really serious problems with the W.A.V.E. plan:
1. Anyone listed as potentially dangerous is apparently listed for life, not just for the time they are in the school. Since Pinkerton is not an official government agency (at least not anymore), these records are not completely private and can have devastating effects on a listed student's future job prospects as well as any dealings with the criminal justice system. What does Pinkerton plan to do with the data, and how can students be sure their records are purged when they leave school?
2. Anonymous referral is a system that encourages abuse by students wishing to harass their classmates, and since students have no way of determining whether they have been reported and by whom, they must live in fear that any action they take that is seen as 'different' can potentially ruin their standing in school or future higher education plans, as well as future employment and so on. This creates an extremely oppressive environment that enforces an artificial conformity and drives any students that *are* dangerous and/or violent even further underground. How does Pinkerton plan to address this problem, and would it be possible to require corroborating referrals and track students who abuse the reporting system?
I feel very strongly, as a person who would have almost certainly ended up on this list during my junior high and high school years, that students have rights that they do not simply check at the school door. We may be concerned about student safety and protecting the morals of our children, but students, especially unpopular ones, deserve to know that their rights will be protected against abuses by their classmates and deserve a chance to correct misperceptions by others who may not understand them or outright slander by others who are actively trying to do harm. I am not at all convinced that W.A.V.E. is the plan that satisfies these requirements.
Anybody remember what movies were like in the 50's? A few easily offended people decided they didn't want anybody to see anything naughty at the picture show, and so the movie industry had to put up with a couple of decades of official censorship by people whose self-appointed duty was protecting the morals of our innocent children.
Let's hope it takes them a little less than 20 years to realize they're making the same mistake..
Check at your local TV station. Remember, Video Toaster runs on Amigas, and it's one of the best low-budget titler/switcher programs you can get, at least from anyone other than Avid or Chyron..
Like I remind customers every other day or so, discontinued does not mean obsolete. Just because the company doesn't make them anymore doesn't mean they stop working.. as much as M$ would like that to happen..
I'm not clear on some crucial details. As described, the technology allows a site to block access to browsers outside its home country, but is there some sort of independent mechanism in the technology that prevents other access across international borders too?
In other words, if I own a site and choose to allow worldwide access to it, can I do it under this system or will some Internet border robocop block non-USA clients from seeing it? That would be hard to do without a national-level firewall of some sort.. and if they don't have that, what they've invented is a quick way to piss off a lot of customers and lose a lot of market share. For some reason I don't think that will catch on.
My only advice is, use encryption everywhere you can, and protect your keys with the most secure passphrase(s) you can remember.. previous poster is right, if it's not written down it's awful hard to get out of you.
The principle should be obvious: if I send 99 innocuous emails and one that's 1024-bit encrypted, anyone watching the datastream knows which one to try and crack, or bully me to get the key for. If all 100 are encrypted, and they guess, and crack or extort the key for the one that says 'let's do lunch sometime', then they look like the jerks they are.
The more of the data that's encrypted, the less practical it is to make us stop. Yeah, that was grammatically horrible, but you get the point, right?;-)
After seeing what the new Avids do with this capability, I would really like to have a camera that could take a 3D still. Talk about making it easier to get those impossible camera angles..
Putting aside the (flamebait) arguments that Perl is or is not a good first language, I've seen several people turn to other languages that were less appropriate for their needs (like sysadmins) because of the lack of a good beginner book for Perl.
I can see why it looks difficult to learn, having just taught myself the basics. However, it's worth learning! Having scalars that aren't strongly typed is a little weird for me, since I came to Perl by the BASIC->Pascal->C route, but after I got used to that and the enormously greater flexibility I have in Perl, I haven't looked back. Two days after I cracked the book, I was doing more with Perl than I've ever done with C.
IMHO, any entry point that makes it easier to get started in this language is fine by me. The camel book was a bit over my head too when I got started -- it's only started to be really useful to me. (Thanks Randal for Learning Perl, BTW!)
So the thing to do (as has been mentioned before under this subject) is to have a public repository of groovy and original-looking code in an easily understood and multiply-implemented form - in the pedantic style of patents.
This assumes that anyone at the USPTO understands us at all. Not necessarily warranted..;-)
I think the elegant solution goes a lot deeper than that. The USPTO runs on a mandate dating back to the 1800's, and their procedures are based on a patent process that worked great when it was first established back in the horse-and-buggy era. The trouble starts when you take a process that's really best for patenting farm implements and machinery designs and apply it to a technology that is evolving so fast a design is obsolete by the time the patent grant arrives.
If the PTO were to redesign their patent approval process, OR LET US USE DECLARATIVE PATENTS and follow an example that WORKS FOR COPYRIGHTS, things will improve a bit. If enough patent examiners learn enough about how the nuts and bolts of the Internet work to realize a lot of these applications are for stuff that's been prior art, used freely in the public domain, for years, and not just more 'computer magic' that sounds good on paper and ergo must be worth patenting, things might improve still more.
Get a couple of pieces of heavy (1/8" thick) aluminum 3/4" angle at the hardware store, as long as you want your rack to be tall, a 10-32 tap, the correct size drill bit for the tap (the store should be able to tell you), and a drill and tap wrench. Draw a marking line 1/4" from the edge of one side of one of the angle pieces. Starting 1/4" from the top (which end that is is up to you;-) drill holes in the spacing pattern 5/8" - 5/8" - 1/2" and repeat all the way to the bottom. Tap all the holes (C-9 is a good cutting fluid for aluminum, BTW). Make the other piece a mirror image (except for thread direction, of course -- duh!) of the one you've made.
Get a couple of 1U blank plates from the music store or the computer shop and attach the two rails together top and bottom (this will give you the right rail spacing -- use your rackmount case to make sure you leave enough space between!) and build a plywood case or metal frame around them.
Guess what? You have a homemade 19" rack.;-) Cheers.
One of my earliest recollections of how Microsoft felt about their intellectual property was my experience with the early Macintosh edition of Flight Simulator.
MSFS was only offered in one version for the Mac, a floppy-based port for the early 128K and 512K Classics with fairly primitive graphics. I had noticed right away that it didn't like to run as anything but the boot disk, and decided to find out why -- intellectual exercise only, nobody sue me please.
Believe it or not, virtually all the code lives in the "unallocated" space Finder can't see on the disk! MS hacked the boot code and made FS a custom OS all its own.. the "Finder" window, icons, desktop, and everything else you see on the disk at startup are all fake, and the illusion is even more clever when you consider that the disk really does have a mountable Finder volume on it with an application called "Flight Simulator".. guess what it does!;-)
My point, before I get knocked down to -1 for the tangential discussion, is that it took a hell of a lot of work to do all that just for a game. What that tells me is that MS is VERY ****ING SERIOUS about controlling as much as they can about their code even after it goes out the door, and Bill's comments in the interview above are perfectly consistent with that attitude. I guess I don't blame them too much; Win2K's source, if printed out, would stack taller than the Statue of Liberty (not my data -- see SciAm) and they have to protect their investment, but still.. not to harp on a point, but technocracies are easy to start and VERY HARD to tear down.
If it's in the broadcast FM band, it can be voice or music, or both (if you have a subcarrier modulator), or you can put data on the subcarrier.
I'm sure you could probably chain them together as long as you coordinate your frequencies carefully -- just be sure you don't pirate a licensed station's broadcast for legal reasons that have nothing to do with the FCC, and remember you have to transmit on a different frequency from what you're receiving for purely technical reasons.
Need I mention that having an amateur radio license would give you a lot more information and opportunities to experiment? Remember, folks, it gets a hell of a lot easier in April..
Personally, I wish the government would spend less time trying to crack down on miscreants and more time educating the public. Prevention starts at the end-user, Janet!
Agreed.. but educating the end-user makes it harder to create a technocracy, which seems to be what *everyone* at the top levels of government wants to do. If technocracy is the goal, then cracking down on miscreants is a perfect strategy because it gets us fighting among ourselves and distracts everyone from the real issues.
Every school and library should be required to buy filters...to keep out materials that are not suitable for children the same way in which the library board filters printed materials for the library.
Only one problem with this.. libraries *do not* filter printed materials!! Ask the American Library Association. (If you're not familiar with the ALA, you should be -- they are our most powerful allies on this issue.)
Folks, censorware is propaganda just like any other form of media control. We went through it in the 50's during the Red Scare, and automated blacklisting is no better than the institutional form. If you need evidence, count how many sites *like Slashdot* are blocked by the censorware -- they don't want us getting the news out about what a bad precedent this is. Sites that are objectionable only by championing free speech are routinely blocked, often under false categories. (Try explaining *that* to your boss the next time you surf at work and all those FULL-NUDE URL's start popping up in his/her activity audit.)
The window of opportunity is very small here, and it's about to close. Speak up before it's too late.
I did click through to the legal citation and read it. After I recovered from the headache, the upshot seems to be that *any* sale of miniature radio transmitters could trigger a raid like this.
The emphasis in the wording of the law is on design, not intent -- if I design and sell small battery powered radio transmitters for ham use (yes, my nickname is my callsign) and the Feds decide it would be a good thing to use as a bug, they can legally come knock my door down and confiscate all my stock and whatever I used to make them, hold them until my business dries up, and publicly castigate me as a common criminal, all without due process. All perfectly kosher according to the law as cited above.
Scary, isn't it? Doesn't matter if you have any ethics or not -- that's the really nasty part.
I agree that the basic issue is that of outside control of our mobility. I was thinking a while back that a remote-stop device would be a good way to prevent high-speed pursuits, until I started thinking of possible ways to abuse it, and realized I don't *ever* want someone or something outside my car to override my control of it.
Agreed -- if we can be tracked, the tracking data can be analyzed for a LOT more than our current vehicle speed and location. Just imagine what conclusions could be drawn from a correlation with a "forbidden" location like the address of someone else the government doesn't like.
And don't forget this system, like anything else, can be hacked -- do you want criminals slowing you down so you're easier to carjack?
I have to put in my vote for the slide rule as perhaps the cleverest gadget. Simple and elegant, and leads to a surprisingly intuitive way to solve more math problems than you'd think. I know, calculators are more precise, but precision isn't everything..;-)
How much computer do most people need? I don't do that much real-time animation at home, so I have as much computer power as I need with my 68040 Mac and the max upgrade of 36MB.
How well do you think the computer industry in general (this applies to Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, and everyone else) serves lower-end users like me? I don't see much on the market today that I really need, or even want -- all I really need for now is an upgrade to 7.6.1 and a bigger hard disk. Is the technology mature yet?
Slashdot Mirror
These people just don't have a clue, do they? Trying to review enough content to make either a whitelist or blacklist worth anything would be sort of like trying to drink from the spillway of Hoover Dam, and this is the sort of thing where VI just doesn't help at all. Censorware will always suck, either because it doesn't work or because it works too well for the wrong people
And there's no real cost (other than my own equipment and a $6-ish renewal fee every 10 years) for my ham radio license. Difference? My license FORBIDS me (or any other ham) from using the radio for commercial purposes. Therefore, about 99% of what I hear has some level of relevance to me.
Since email does NOT have a similar prohibition, anyone who collects my email address in a list (one of them is @arrl.net) can flood my inbox, and millions of others, with useless crap I have no desire to read, waste filesystem space on, or respond to. The more that happens, the less useful email becomes, until it degrades to a recipient-supported advertisement distribution system and personal emails are lost in the earsplitting din of competing high power commercial sites. It will go that way, believe me -- people want money and believe they'll get it if they can just make you see their name that 100,001st time.
Hate to break it to you, but there are even spammer-friendly SMTP servers out there, specifically designed to work with high-speed bulk emailing software. This is a business, folks, and it will keep growing until someone throws a wrench in the works, or until nobody reads email anymore. Trace your spam. Complain to the hosting site, the hosting network, and/or the backbone if need be, but let these people know they're not welcome, NOW, before they get even more out of control
I see a couple of really serious problems with the W.A.V.E. plan:
1. Anyone listed as potentially dangerous is apparently listed for life, not just for the time they are in the school. Since Pinkerton is not an official government agency (at least not anymore), these records are not completely private and can have devastating effects on a listed student's future job prospects as well as any dealings with the criminal justice system. What does Pinkerton plan to do with the data, and how can students be sure their records are purged when they leave school?
2. Anonymous referral is a system that encourages abuse by students wishing to harass their classmates, and since students have no way of determining whether they have been reported and by whom, they must live in fear that any action they take that is seen as 'different' can potentially ruin their standing in school or future higher education plans, as well as future employment and so on. This creates an extremely oppressive environment that enforces an artificial conformity and drives any students that *are* dangerous and/or violent even further underground. How does Pinkerton plan to address this problem, and would it be possible to require corroborating referrals and track students who abuse the reporting system?
I feel very strongly, as a person who would have almost certainly ended up on this list during my junior high and high school years, that students have rights that they do not simply check at the school door. We may be concerned about student safety and protecting the morals of our children, but students, especially unpopular ones, deserve to know that their rights will be protected against abuses by their classmates and deserve a chance to correct misperceptions by others who may not understand them or outright slander by others who are actively trying to do harm. I am not at all convinced that W.A.V.E. is the plan that satisfies these requirements.
Anybody remember what movies were like in the 50's? A few easily offended people decided they didn't want anybody to see anything naughty at the picture show, and so the movie industry had to put up with a couple of decades of official censorship by people whose self-appointed duty was protecting the morals of our innocent children.
..
Let's hope it takes them a little less than 20 years to realize they're making the same mistake
Check at your local TV station. Remember, Video Toaster runs on Amigas, and it's one of the best low-budget titler/switcher programs you can get, at least from anyone other than Avid or Chyron ..
.. as much as M$ would like that to happen ..
Like I remind customers every other day or so, discontinued does not mean obsolete. Just because the company doesn't make them anymore doesn't mean they stop working
I'm not clear on some crucial details. As described, the technology allows a site to block access to browsers outside its home country, but is there some sort of independent mechanism in the technology that prevents other access across international borders too?
.. and if they don't have that, what they've invented is a quick way to piss off a lot of customers and lose a lot of market share. For some reason I don't think that will catch on.
In other words, if I own a site and choose to allow worldwide access to it, can I do it under this system or will some Internet border robocop block non-USA clients from seeing it? That would be hard to do without a national-level firewall of some sort
My only advice is, use encryption everywhere you can, and protect your keys with the most secure passphrase(s) you can remember .. previous poster is right, if it's not written down it's awful hard to get out of you.
;-)
The principle should be obvious: if I send 99 innocuous emails and one that's 1024-bit encrypted, anyone watching the datastream knows which one to try and crack, or bully me to get the key for. If all 100 are encrypted, and they guess, and crack or extort the key for the one that says 'let's do lunch sometime', then they look like the jerks they are.
The more of the data that's encrypted, the less practical it is to make us stop. Yeah, that was grammatically horrible, but you get the point, right?
After seeing what the new Avids do with this capability, I would really like to have a camera that could take a 3D still. Talk about making it easier to get those impossible camera angles ..
I can see why it looks difficult to learn, having just taught myself the basics. However, it's worth learning! Having scalars that aren't strongly typed is a little weird for me, since I came to Perl by the BASIC->Pascal->C route, but after I got used to that and the enormously greater flexibility I have in Perl, I haven't looked back. Two days after I cracked the book, I was doing more with Perl than I've ever done with C.
IMHO, any entry point that makes it easier to get started in this language is fine by me. The camel book was a bit over my head too when I got started -- it's only started to be really useful to me. (Thanks Randal for Learning Perl, BTW!)
So you rewrite your CD-ROM backups onto fresh media every 15 years. Not hard.
Besides, how useful are the contents of those disks going to be 20 years from now? Gimme a break.
This assumes that anyone at the USPTO understands us at all. Not necessarily warranted
I think the elegant solution goes a lot deeper than that. The USPTO runs on a mandate dating back to the 1800's, and their procedures are based on a patent process that worked great when it was first established back in the horse-and-buggy era. The trouble starts when you take a process that's really best for patenting farm implements and machinery designs and apply it to a technology that is evolving so fast a design is obsolete by the time the patent grant arrives.
If the PTO were to redesign their patent approval process, OR LET US USE DECLARATIVE PATENTS and follow an example that WORKS FOR COPYRIGHTS, things will improve a bit. If enough patent examiners learn enough about how the nuts and bolts of the Internet work to realize a lot of these applications are for stuff that's been prior art, used freely in the public domain, for years, and not just more 'computer magic' that sounds good on paper and ergo must be worth patenting, things might improve still more.
Get a couple of pieces of heavy (1/8" thick) aluminum 3/4" angle at the hardware store, as long as you want your rack to be tall, a 10-32 tap, the correct size drill bit for the tap (the store should be able to tell you), and a drill and tap wrench. Draw a marking line 1/4" from the edge of one side of one of the angle pieces. Starting 1/4" from the top (which end that is is up to you ;-) drill holes in the spacing pattern 5/8" - 5/8" - 1/2" and repeat all the way to the bottom. Tap all the holes (C-9 is a good cutting fluid for aluminum, BTW). Make the other piece a mirror image (except for thread direction, of course -- duh!) of the one you've made.
;-) Cheers.
Get a couple of 1U blank plates from the music store or the computer shop and attach the two rails together top and bottom (this will give you the right rail spacing -- use your rackmount case to make sure you leave enough space between!) and build a plywood case or metal frame around them.
Guess what? You have a homemade 19" rack.
One of my earliest recollections of how Microsoft felt about their intellectual property was my experience with the early Macintosh edition of Flight Simulator.
.. the "Finder" window, icons, desktop, and everything else you see on the disk at startup are all fake, and the illusion is even more clever when you consider that the disk really does have a mountable Finder volume on it with an application called "Flight Simulator" .. guess what it does! ;-)
.. not to harp on a point, but technocracies are easy to start and VERY HARD to tear down.
MSFS was only offered in one version for the Mac, a floppy-based port for the early 128K and 512K Classics with fairly primitive graphics. I had noticed right away that it didn't like to run as anything but the boot disk, and decided to find out why -- intellectual exercise only, nobody sue me please.
Believe it or not, virtually all the code lives in the "unallocated" space Finder can't see on the disk! MS hacked the boot code and made FS a custom OS all its own
My point, before I get knocked down to -1 for the tangential discussion, is that it took a hell of a lot of work to do all that just for a game. What that tells me is that MS is VERY ****ING SERIOUS about controlling as much as they can about their code even after it goes out the door, and Bill's comments in the interview above are perfectly consistent with that attitude. I guess I don't blame them too much; Win2K's source, if printed out, would stack taller than the Statue of Liberty (not my data -- see SciAm) and they have to protect their investment, but still
Just my $.02. YMMV.
Ethics. It's all we have.
Looked to me like individuals are included, and I'm not sure they're talking about licensing
then again, I've been wrong before
If it's in the broadcast FM band, it can be voice or music, or both (if you have a subcarrier modulator), or you can put data on the subcarrier.
I'm sure you could probably chain them together as long as you coordinate your frequencies carefully -- just be sure you don't pirate a licensed station's broadcast for legal reasons that have nothing to do with the FCC, and remember you have to transmit on a different frequency from what you're receiving for purely technical reasons.
Need I mention that having an amateur radio license would give you a lot more information and opportunities to experiment? Remember, folks, it gets a hell of a lot easier in April..
so we now have a TRUE hacker goddess ..
.. ;-)
'bout time if you ask me
Agreed
Folks, censorware is propaganda just like any other form of media control. We went through it in the 50's during the Red Scare, and automated blacklisting is no better than the institutional form. If you need evidence, count how many sites *like Slashdot* are blocked by the censorware -- they don't want us getting the news out about what a bad precedent this is. Sites that are objectionable only by championing free speech are routinely blocked, often under false categories. (Try explaining *that* to your boss the next time you surf at work and all those FULL-NUDE URL's start popping up in his/her activity audit.)
The window of opportunity is very small here, and it's about to close. Speak up before it's too late.
I did click through to the legal citation and read it. After I recovered from the headache, the upshot seems to be that *any* sale of miniature radio transmitters could trigger a raid like this.
The emphasis in the wording of the law is on design, not intent -- if I design and sell small battery powered radio transmitters for ham use (yes, my nickname is my callsign) and the Feds decide it would be a good thing to use as a bug, they can legally come knock my door down and confiscate all my stock and whatever I used to make them, hold them until my business dries up, and publicly castigate me as a common criminal, all without due process. All perfectly kosher according to the law as cited above.
Scary, isn't it? Doesn't matter if you have any ethics or not -- that's the really nasty part.
I agree that the basic issue is that of outside control of our mobility. I was thinking a while back that a remote-stop device would be a good way to prevent high-speed pursuits, until I started thinking of possible ways to abuse it, and realized I don't *ever* want someone or something outside my car to override my control of it.
Then again, that, too, can be hacked..
Agreed -- if we can be tracked, the tracking data can be analyzed for a LOT more than our current vehicle speed and location. Just imagine what conclusions could be drawn from a correlation with a "forbidden" location like the address of someone else the government doesn't like.
And don't forget this system, like anything else, can be hacked -- do you want criminals slowing you down so you're easier to carjack?
No. Bad idea all around.
I have to put in my vote for the slide rule as perhaps the cleverest gadget. Simple and elegant, and leads to a surprisingly intuitive way to solve more math problems than you'd think. I know, calculators are more precise, but precision isn't everything .. ;-)
My primary question:
How much computer do most people need? I don't do that much real-time animation at home, so I have as much computer power as I need with my 68040 Mac and the max upgrade of 36MB.
How well do you think the computer industry in general (this applies to Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, and everyone else) serves lower-end users like me? I don't see much on the market today that I really need, or even want -- all I really need for now is an upgrade to 7.6.1 and a bigger hard disk. Is the technology mature yet?