The most obvious solution is to have each machine that connects over wireless use a VPN. Everything coming in over anything other than the VPN is discarded.
Since this is Slashdot, I request a community service: Come up with a script/whatever where this is simple.
Yeah, art should never include any kind of political message no matter how vague or realistic. I like my movies like I like my women - bland and opinionless.
If you whiny fucking right wing lugnuts didn't love the torture so much in "24" I'm sure you'd crybaby about its political message this season, too.
You call me a "whiny, fucking right-wind lugnut?" I could just as easily make a movie about a man falsely convicted of rape due to a feminist lying, who gets out in 10 years after being finally cleared. Or a movie about a father falsely accused of sexual molestation by a woman in a divorce trying to retain custody. Or the fact that people like Rosie O'Donnell seem to worship jihadis without regard to the fact that they want to kill her precisely because of the filth that she puts out on her show and which gets beamed all over the planet.
There is more than enough blame to spread around. That isn't the point. The point is that when you try to make a movie to appeal to a wide range of people (e.g., "Children of Men" or "Lord of the Rings" as opposed to tripe like "The Passion of the Christ") you have to accept that if you try to make some political point in it, that many people are going to watch it and boggle. They're going to get bogged down in the political message that you're trying to send, instead of whatever artistic point you're trying to make. You can't blow stuff out of proportion under the guise of "political accuracy" and expect it to have the same effect.
With the point that the handlers of "Children of Men" were trying to make, there are plenty of ways that they could have done it, piss almost nobody off, and have those same people go out of the theatre thinking. That's far more effective. "The Matrix" did this, though I'll admit that the underlying points that The Matrix was trying to make were lost on most of the buffoons out there in the general populace. Unfortunately, in "Children of Men," the political points were superfluous and had little to do with the story ultimately; they were just something that some joker threw in to bitch about current political debate.
I saw this movie over the weekend. It wasn't even that good. It might be the best thing available on HDDVD, but I wouldn't rush out and buy it. Personally I think they did a really bad job on a story with really good potential.
That's because the writers and the directors were far too busy trying to make some kind of idiotic political point that they forgot to make the story something entertaining. I saw it in the theatre, and couldn't get over all the obvious political evangelicalism they were performing.
This really isn't that surprising to me - Kim Jong-Il is a noted movie buff, so it makes perfect sense that the Pirate Bay would relocate there. I just hope he doesn't get his hands on a translated copy of Team America: World Police.
One Gov office I know is at this moment throwing out 1yr old PC's so the can all get shiny new Vista boxes to run their spreadsheets on.
This is a pure waste of taxpayers money.
They only upgraded from NT to XP 12 months ago. I can't think how much they have added to Microsoft's coffers.
I know of two hospitals in my local area alone which are doing the same. One is a county (read: government) hospital. The other is private. While I appreciate the rights of private organizations to do whatever the hell they want with their business, I can't support this kind of waste while people are simultaneously complaining about underfunded public health care and rising healthcare costs. I'm tempted to say "blame Microsoft," but the reality is that these IT administrators are just a bunch of fucking morons.
The same hardware running the same OS is equally green. And, since one should not be logging in to a server directly, that means the system requirements for Windows is equally low.
The problem I've seen with Linux people is that they treat Windows servers like desktops: they always log right into them, use the Exchange bridgehead server to play their iTunes music and download their Quicktime film trailers, etc.
Linux people make quite possibly the worst Windows support people. The best ones are generally those who have either never worked with L/Unix, or else those who have completely abandoned that platform in order to become experts on Windows. The problem with L/Unix people is they are always whining about how Windows doesn't work the same way, then convince themselves that just because they have no idea what they are doing that Windows can't do what they want it to.
Windows is not Linux. Windows is not Unix. Get over it, learn what the f*ck you are doing, and get to work. Nobody pays you to whine (well, unless you work for Apple or Slashdot, that is).
While I agree with you in principal, the problem here is that Windows doesn't allow much at all in the way of remote administration. I have a site I remotely administer which has a Linux box sitting as the border router. I can administer it just fine. Whenever the Winblows machines need something changed, I find myself on the phone with someone trying to walk them through some GUI or, worse, having to go down there myself.
I am compelled to wonder whether Al Gore and any Democrats running Windows will feel compelled to buy "carbon credits" to offset their waste of energy by running Windows.
The advantage, however, is that since this technology can be used to upgrade the backbones, it wlll make the ISP networks eight times faster. If the ISPs translated that to the customers at even a ratio of 6:1, then everybody would be happy: The users get 6 times the bandwidth, the ISPs have an additional 2 times the bandwidth to buffer this mess they've created by myopia.
What a waste. For a million dollars, I'd at least want the thing to have a big freakin' laser on its freakin' lid.
More seriously, I'd rather have a bad-ass server controlled by a laptop, and which uses the laptop as its terminal interface, perhaps with a OpenMOSIX-like distributed system.
If a someone wants to make money from porn, their site should be.xxx. So, to use an example from later in this post, if a website called "grape" is a site that depicts naked women doing odd things with grapes, it should be grape.xxx. If "grape" is about the Napa valley it should be grape.com.
Of course, ICANN, InterNIC, and their ilk completely shot to hell the entire notion of separate TLDs for different kinds of sites when they started giving out random.com,.net, and.org addresses. As far as I'm concerned, these morons couldn't even figure out how to handle those three TLDs. What makes you think that they could handle an.xxx TLD?
how exactly does it help "freedom to acquire useful knowledge" to stop people from being able to acquire and use against her in court useful knowledge of what a scumbag she is?
And there we have it. Linefeed, very good way to put it. Thanks.
If you are having problems viewing this web site - it may be because we were forced to disable the copy, save and print functions on these web site pages. We had to do this because our adversaries (like CPS and hostile GALs) would copy and/or print these pages to submit to the courts for use against parents in their dependency cases. This is a blatant violation of state and Federal constitutionally protected rights (freedom of association, freedom to acquire useful knowledge, freedom of the press, right to petition the government for redress of grievances, etc.) of the parents and the children as well as copyright infringement against the owner of the web site. This conduct only reinforces our assertion that the child savers will lie, cheat and steal in their effort to protect children who don't need protecting.
Not only is that utterly stupid in and of itself, because there is no way that she can keep someone from copying, saving, or printing the web page, I just printed the page with this notice out for the hell of it.
When the hospital I worked at last pulled this kind of crap on us doctors, I just set up an SSL proxy on one of my off-site machines and started pumping traffic through that (for myself, not anyone else). They never even noticed. Nor is it specifically forbidden by their Internet access policy, so about all they could have done was tell me, "uh, don't do that anymore." The reality is that they have little idea (short of desktop-spyware) what that proxy URL actually corresponds to, and considering that one of the things I do is used a web-based calendar and appointment software that runs on my machines off-site...
Unfortunately, this is far too little, too late. What has been happening in the scientific community for literally years now is that the individuals who are performing research and are not financially strapped to some journal are getting their research peer-reviewed themselves, then publishing it. In reality, what this means is that they publish their research along two paths: one, to satisfy some journal, and two, to get reviewed by other means. If you sit around and do a Medline search on it, you'll get the former. But if you really try, you'll get the latter.
So what's the difference, you ask? People who are involved in rather esoteric research areas, which includes things like stem cell research for example, release this stuff among themselves. Peer review is all well and good, but this material is released far before it achieves journal publication. This is both good and bad. It's good because it gets distributed. It's bad because the peer-review simply isn't there _except_ for the investigator's colleagues critisizing it.
In other words, the research community has become somewhat self-contained itself. We're all too aware of the ridiculous biases that exist in the "public" sector (in other words, those people who tow some party line because it gets them more funding).
No it isn't. It was, however, a movie that made a lot of money, was widely seen in theatres, and which took away several Oscars last Sunday, thus any assertion that a movie has to end well to be popular with the public is false.
The problem is that the various hardware vendors seem to have no interest in producing hardware (e.g., wireless cards) that have any support for anything outside of Mickey$hit Windoze. If Dell or someone could punch them in their pocket book and only buy hardware that has multiplatform drivers, it would be a good thing for the community as a whole.
This bears some elaboration. Even if you knocked out an entire region's infrastructure, so long as they have ANY -- and I mean ANY -- communication to a system on their (bot)network, they can still launch attacks all over the place. For instance, you knock out my entire country's network, and I make a modem call to some wanker in another country and send a 256 byte command out there. It authenticates it, then goes and blows your system to hell.
The necessary thing is to secure your damned systems. Period.
I'll prefix this by saying that I KNOW that it is not a new idea. Hell, C++, ObjC, and Java, among other OOP, were built on this idea. But it still has yet to be truly done.
You make a widget. The widget has a defined interface (ala any OOP methodology). You have defaults, but you let the programmer override the widget's defaults if he wants. This, in turn, means that the programmer can do something like this (and I know I didn't do allocation here. I'm simplifying):
[code]
main()
{
int a,b,c;
input_widget.load_definition(whatever);// Load a definition from some structure.
input_widget.run();// Let the user do whatever until he hits "OK"
a = input_widget.get_a();
b = input_widget.get_b();
c = input_widget.get_c();
output_graph_widget.graph(a,b,c);// Or whatever format.
}
[/code]
The end result is something that's simple to write, gives a standardized (relatively) UI, and is not particularly work intensive. C++, ObjectiveC, etc., have various ancillary widget sets that perform this functionality, but I haven't seen a decent widget set that will let me write quick and dirty applications that simply. Granted, I haven't looked in well over a year.
It is a problem, and it's a very big problem. But I can draw a parallel to the Internet too: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
A few years ago, I took care of a 15 year old with a neurological disorder. The mother, rightly so, is curious and wants to learn about this (self-limited) disorder and goes and plugs the diagnosis into a search engine. (This is back in about 2001.) She gets little to no real information about the disease, and gets dozens of pages talking about how terrible it is, advertising support groups for people with long term sequelae (which are rare), and so on. It scared the crap out of her, understandably so. So she's making medical decisions based on bad data. As doctors, it's our job to tell her it's bad data and correct it. Unfortunately, many times they don't let us know that they got their information from Aunt Susie the Vet, and just ignore what we're telling them.
More on topic, drug ads. I think that they should be REQUIRED to state the mechanism of action of the drug in the ad. "But the consumer won't have any idea what that is!" you scream. You're right. But when two analgesics advertised on TV for arthritis both say that they're a "COX2 inhibitor" or a "Proton-pump inhibitor," or an "H2 blocker," most people are going to draw the parallel. That means that when they come into my office, I can tell them quickly, briefly, and simplified what that means without them thinking I'm trying to make them feel stupid (because the TV already used the term), and at the same time can explain that drug X has the same mechanism of action, works just as well, has the same side effects, and is $2 instead of $60.
Then there is, of course, the typical bullshit you get in advertising, and drugs are no exception. Hint: Nexium doesn't heal your esophagus. It stops the acid reflux which is causing the damned damage in the first place, by reducing acid production capacity, and lets your esophagus heal itself. Minor, I know, but that kind of thing annoys the hell out of me. Instead of, "And drug X healed the damage to my esophagus and stopped my acid reflux," they could just as easily say, "And drug X stopped my acid reflux and the damage that caused to my esophagus, and let my body heal it." So people erroneously think that esophageal damage == indication for a PPI, which isn't always the case, and then actually try and argue.
The previous poster was right. If you want medical advice from your TV, then go visit it. You aren't buying dishwashing liquid here.
Four years ago when I started at a certain large academic institution, I was given an academic email account. Almost immediately, I was hit with spam from "legitimate" organizations that I had no interest in, didn't care about, and in several cases had never heard of. One of them was The American Journal of Nursing. Another was American Blinds and Wallpaper. I repeatidly emailed both these organizations telling them to remove me from their damned list.
It's four years later. I'm still getting the crap. And it's categorized as spam.
Stolen? As in, somebody got onto the studio lot, entered the writer's office/cubicle and physically removed a sheet of paper/diskette/stone tablet with the only copy of the ideas (which the writers had already forgotten, having cast their one script spell per day)?
Perhaps I take that word "stolen" too literally, but doesn't stealing typically involve depriving someone of their property? AFAIK, the studios haven't physically lost anything - perhaps TFA's orientation/bias shows through? To me, this article looks like the *AA trying to reaffirm their argument that downloading media content is theft.
As an interesting aside, the entire ambiguity over whether piracy is really stealing as in the sense of stealing a car or something different leads some redence to the Sapir-Worph(sp) hypothesis. Basically, the idea is that the sematics and vocabulary of a language constrain thought within that language. See also symantic dilution.
If the word "steal" means "to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice" (www.m-w.com), then one has to define "intellectual property" and so on. But prior to all the piracy hysteria, nobody really thought of photocopying a newspaper article as "stealing" it because someone might not buy the entire paper for that article, or even photocopying a chapter out of a textbook as "stealing" for the same reason. Perhaps morall ambiguous? Okay. But if I steal your car, you are deprived of that car because now I have it, and you can't drive it. As a result, the word "steal" doesn't mean quite what it meant before, and becomes more ambiguous, diluting its meaning. The same concept applies for the terms "murder" and "abortion:" If you keep saying "abortion is murder," you dilute the meaning of the word "murder."
Perhaps I "steal" an episode of a TV show by downloading it. I watch it. Argurably, the studio lost money from ad revenue. But what if the movie was on Showtime and I subscribe to Showtime? Showtime therefore hasn't lost ANYTHING. And in the case of ad-based television, if I return next week to actually watch the show on their channel, they have a net gain. But I guess if I fast-forward through all the ads, then I've also "stolen" the TV show.
Slashdot Mirror
First post! Waaaah! :)
Since this is Slashdot, I request a community service: Come up with a script/whatever where this is simple.
There is more than enough blame to spread around. That isn't the point. The point is that when you try to make a movie to appeal to a wide range of people (e.g., "Children of Men" or "Lord of the Rings" as opposed to tripe like "The Passion of the Christ") you have to accept that if you try to make some political point in it, that many people are going to watch it and boggle. They're going to get bogged down in the political message that you're trying to send, instead of whatever artistic point you're trying to make. You can't blow stuff out of proportion under the guise of "political accuracy" and expect it to have the same effect.
With the point that the handlers of "Children of Men" were trying to make, there are plenty of ways that they could have done it, piss almost nobody off, and have those same people go out of the theatre thinking. That's far more effective. "The Matrix" did this, though I'll admit that the underlying points that The Matrix was trying to make were lost on most of the buffoons out there in the general populace. Unfortunately, in "Children of Men," the political points were superfluous and had little to do with the story ultimately; they were just something that some joker threw in to bitch about current political debate.
That's because the writers and the directors were far too busy trying to make some kind of idiotic political point that they forgot to make the story something entertaining. I saw it in the theatre, and couldn't get over all the obvious political evangelicalism they were performing.
Why the frak don't they just use PGP/GnuPG? Cripes.
I am compelled to wonder whether Al Gore and any Democrats running Windows will feel compelled to buy "carbon credits" to offset their waste of energy by running Windows.
The advantage, however, is that since this technology can be used to upgrade the backbones, it wlll make the ISP networks eight times faster. If the ISPs translated that to the customers at even a ratio of 6:1, then everybody would be happy: The users get 6 times the bandwidth, the ISPs have an additional 2 times the bandwidth to buffer this mess they've created by myopia.
More seriously, I'd rather have a bad-ass server controlled by a laptop, and which uses the laptop as its terminal interface, perhaps with a OpenMOSIX-like distributed system.
...Which is great because I don't have any. In fifteen years, I haven't needed it.
So sue me.
Oops. (double barrel finger)
When the hospital I worked at last pulled this kind of crap on us doctors, I just set up an SSL proxy on one of my off-site machines and started pumping traffic through that (for myself, not anyone else). They never even noticed. Nor is it specifically forbidden by their Internet access policy, so about all they could have done was tell me, "uh, don't do that anymore." The reality is that they have little idea (short of desktop-spyware) what that proxy URL actually corresponds to, and considering that one of the things I do is used a web-based calendar and appointment software that runs on my machines off-site...
So what's the difference, you ask? People who are involved in rather esoteric research areas, which includes things like stem cell research for example, release this stuff among themselves. Peer review is all well and good, but this material is released far before it achieves journal publication. This is both good and bad. It's good because it gets distributed. It's bad because the peer-review simply isn't there _except_ for the investigator's colleagues critisizing it.
In other words, the research community has become somewhat self-contained itself. We're all too aware of the ridiculous biases that exist in the "public" sector (in other words, those people who tow some party line because it gets them more funding).
Then how do you explain "The Departed?"
The problem is that the various hardware vendors seem to have no interest in producing hardware (e.g., wireless cards) that have any support for anything outside of Mickey$hit Windoze. If Dell or someone could punch them in their pocket book and only buy hardware that has multiplatform drivers, it would be a good thing for the community as a whole.
This bears some elaboration. Even if you knocked out an entire region's infrastructure, so long as they have ANY -- and I mean ANY -- communication to a system on their (bot)network, they can still launch attacks all over the place. For instance, you knock out my entire country's network, and I make a modem call to some wanker in another country and send a 256 byte command out there. It authenticates it, then goes and blows your system to hell. The necessary thing is to secure your damned systems. Period.
You make a widget. The widget has a defined interface (ala any OOP methodology). You have defaults, but you let the programmer override the widget's defaults if he wants. This, in turn, means that the programmer can do something like this (and I know I didn't do allocation here. I'm simplifying): [code] main() { int a,b,c; input_widget.load_definition(whatever); // Load a definition from some structure.
input_widget.run(); // Let the user do whatever until he hits "OK"
a = input_widget.get_a();
b = input_widget.get_b();
c = input_widget.get_c();
output_graph_widget.graph(a,b,c); // Or whatever format.
}
[/code]
The end result is something that's simple to write, gives a standardized (relatively) UI, and is not particularly work intensive. C++, ObjectiveC, etc., have various ancillary widget sets that perform this functionality, but I haven't seen a decent widget set that will let me write quick and dirty applications that simply. Granted, I haven't looked in well over a year.
A few years ago, I took care of a 15 year old with a neurological disorder. The mother, rightly so, is curious and wants to learn about this (self-limited) disorder and goes and plugs the diagnosis into a search engine. (This is back in about 2001.) She gets little to no real information about the disease, and gets dozens of pages talking about how terrible it is, advertising support groups for people with long term sequelae (which are rare), and so on. It scared the crap out of her, understandably so. So she's making medical decisions based on bad data. As doctors, it's our job to tell her it's bad data and correct it. Unfortunately, many times they don't let us know that they got their information from Aunt Susie the Vet, and just ignore what we're telling them.
More on topic, drug ads. I think that they should be REQUIRED to state the mechanism of action of the drug in the ad. "But the consumer won't have any idea what that is!" you scream. You're right. But when two analgesics advertised on TV for arthritis both say that they're a "COX2 inhibitor" or a "Proton-pump inhibitor," or an "H2 blocker," most people are going to draw the parallel. That means that when they come into my office, I can tell them quickly, briefly, and simplified what that means without them thinking I'm trying to make them feel stupid (because the TV already used the term), and at the same time can explain that drug X has the same mechanism of action, works just as well, has the same side effects, and is $2 instead of $60.
Then there is, of course, the typical bullshit you get in advertising, and drugs are no exception. Hint: Nexium doesn't heal your esophagus. It stops the acid reflux which is causing the damned damage in the first place, by reducing acid production capacity, and lets your esophagus heal itself. Minor, I know, but that kind of thing annoys the hell out of me. Instead of, "And drug X healed the damage to my esophagus and stopped my acid reflux," they could just as easily say, "And drug X stopped my acid reflux and the damage that caused to my esophagus, and let my body heal it." So people erroneously think that esophageal damage == indication for a PPI, which isn't always the case, and then actually try and argue.
The previous poster was right. If you want medical advice from your TV, then go visit it. You aren't buying dishwashing liquid here.
It's four years later. I'm still getting the crap. And it's categorized as spam.
If the word "steal" means "to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice" (www.m-w.com), then one has to define "intellectual property" and so on. But prior to all the piracy hysteria, nobody really thought of photocopying a newspaper article as "stealing" it because someone might not buy the entire paper for that article, or even photocopying a chapter out of a textbook as "stealing" for the same reason. Perhaps morall ambiguous? Okay. But if I steal your car, you are deprived of that car because now I have it, and you can't drive it. As a result, the word "steal" doesn't mean quite what it meant before, and becomes more ambiguous, diluting its meaning. The same concept applies for the terms "murder" and "abortion:" If you keep saying "abortion is murder," you dilute the meaning of the word "murder."
Perhaps I "steal" an episode of a TV show by downloading it. I watch it. Argurably, the studio lost money from ad revenue. But what if the movie was on Showtime and I subscribe to Showtime? Showtime therefore hasn't lost ANYTHING. And in the case of ad-based television, if I return next week to actually watch the show on their channel, they have a net gain. But I guess if I fast-forward through all the ads, then I've also "stolen" the TV show.