Towards the end of the article the guy is quoted as saying that though a metal replacement was shipped, he wanted to keep the polycarbonate part in place to see how it held up. I trust that if the part fails it is not likely to do so catastrophically and fly across the shop at 50 m/s...
... a good point. The more citizens are under scrutiny, the more law enforcement should be too. I think cameras/mikes in all police cars & stations, covering not only in front of the car (good for police officer safety) but inside as well (good for arrestee safety). Cops usually can't get away with outrageous abuses any more, but only because the "blue wall of silence" is not 100% impermeable.
I just thought I'd tell you how funny I found your kitty litter// online music comparison. Great! As a cat owner I would be appalled if litter "locked up" if you added an extra cat. Hell, that's when you need it most! Oddly enough, the first CD I bought over the internet was Spit, by Kittie. So Kittie, yes, kitty litter, no.
I suspect you're being a bit of a troll here, or at least a contrarian. Nevertheless I apologize for the combative attitude in my original reply. Clearly, you would be much happier living in another country, and you are of course free to do so. Choose wisely. Come back home if, God forbid, you need an expensive medical procedure:-)
Don't be an idiot. Railing against Canadian Content ignores the fact that without it, VERY LITTLE Canadian music would get played on the radio. As giant media conglomerates buy up radio stations, local programming goes down the tubes, and eventually Canadian culture on the air would disappear beneath a deluge of American crap. (This is not to say that some Canadian music isn't crap, but the point is that there's a lot of GOOD Canadian music that wouldn't get played *at all* to make room for more Britney and Mariah).
The problem, if there is one, is the perception that "mediocre music" gets forced onto the air, excluding better American music. That's a load of sh*t. Popular Canadian tunes get a chance against the marketing muscle of their American counterparts. To try and get Can Con sunk would pretty much guarantee that you'd never hear another Canadian artist on the radio outside the college stations and the CBC (both excellent to listen to, BTW).
Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.
Um, they don't get a lot of airplay on the radio either. That marketing privelege is mostly reserved for younger, hipper acts like Moist, Natalie Imbruglia, or Gord Downie.
I think that's a brilliant (though devious) idea. Everyone has mp3 files, as opposed to PowerPoint files (10's of Mb) or whatever. But then, why send MP3's when you can send random.jpg's from their hard drive? True, the bandwidth would be less but the damage would be much greater. I bet at least a dozen rich and important people would have to retreat from public life because of what was revealed...
I understand that's sort of what the Scorsese film "The Last Temptation of Christ" is about. The idea that Jesus Christ could have wished for a "normal life", living out his days with Mary Magdalene instead of dying painfully on the cross, is of course, rank heresy to some so the film was poorly received by the fundie community. Protests etc. But apparently it's an excellent, moving film. I really should watch it some time.
Don't be ungrateful. How much time do you spend here? For *cough FREE cough*. So there was an outage. Go outside for a few hours, instead of insulting the people who run the site. Whatever you may think of their editorial discretion (which we can all complain about at one time or another), Slashdot works almost all the time, and you love it.
I'd think that a modem would be a good defense against the "multiple spawning windows of death" effect that some pr0n pages supposedly have (I wouldn't know, I only surf respectable smut sites). After all, if you have a slow connection, shouldn't you be able to close each window faster than it can download the script to open a new one? Heh. Of course, the dirt pics would also take longer to load, might "kill the mood"...
Your friend learned a valuable lesson...
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 2
... or two.
1. The person cracking/social-engineering into your e-mail account will more than likely be somebody who you already know. So don't use widely-known personal info as a password reminder!
2. If you cheat on your S.O., you WILL get caught. This is especially true if you're a man or a lesbian - women seem to be natural Sherlock Holmeses. And yes, "e-lovers" count as cheating.
Canada has about 10% of the population of the US. Still, you say, that means we should have 90 MRI machines, and 78 open-heart surgery centres to bring us up to US "standards". Guess what?
Canadians actually have ACCESS to these resources! If I live in the US, it doesn't matter if there are 100 MRI machines in my city, because unless I am quite wealthy or have medical insurance I most likely can't afford the procedure! And if I do have insurance, HMO's have a history of denying "non-essential" diagnostic procedures or demanding the procedure be done at a certain location anyway.
In Canada, MRI, or open-heart surgery, or a liver transplant, or arthroscopic knee surgery is FREE! Yes, folks, "free as in beer"! NO CHARGE TO YOU SIR, YOU'RE A CANADIAN! The question Americans should be asking is: if 50% of their healthcare is paid for by the government (ie. their taxes), WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE NOT HAVE ACCESS? Think about that one for a while.
Re:Want some cheese with that whine?
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2
Um, I'm gonna ignore the obnoxious and insulting title of your post for now. This discussion is a few days old now and I don't expect anybody except you to read this, so this is simply for your own information. While it's true that older laptops can be bought cheaply second hand or on sale, universities have a tendency to demand purchase of a particular model, or from a list of acceptable models. They do this for good reasons related to having to support the damn things (and bad reasons having to do with their own profit), and they don't usually pick the cheapest available ones. Hence, a financial burden.
mandatory laptops
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This recent trend towards mandatory laptop computers for students is a BAD idea! As a university student I couldn't afford a computer of *any* kind until about 4th year when I needed it to write up my honours thesis (and had saved up for years). If I'd been required to buy a laptop (typically, $1000's more than a desktop machine) upon arrival, that would have been an egregious financial burden on me. (I still have that desktop machine, in fact I'm typing this on it now... 5 years later).
Summary: mandatory laptops = kicking poor students in a vulnerable spot.
Re:Floppies
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ok, yeah, floppies do suck, but they're a commonly used medium. Anybody with a slow modem at home or no net connection at all probably uses them a lot. I use them to back up important data (2 copies, because floppies aren't 100% reliable, true) cheaply, and without having to buy a CD burner/tape drive/Zip drive for my old steam-powered Pentium 233. Remember, not everyone has a PIII with a brand new CD-RW. And let's be honest, the drives cost what... twenty bucks new? It doesn't kill you to put one in. You may need to exchange files with unfortunate wretches like myself on occasion.
If anything in the US, the cameras should not be trained on private citizens but on public officials. They are the real criminals. I would love to have the bright light of sunshine pound down on each and every politician -- focusing in on the actions they commit during their waking hours.
I'd take out the part about "not... on private citizens" and just say, cameras for one, cameras for all. Either everybody gets to be on camera, or nobody. Hmmm... wait a minute! Anybody who enters a public place, politician or hooker (often in the same public place, oddly enough) IS caught by any cameras present! Of course, they fail to catch any crimes which are committed behind closed doors, in the comfy chairs at the country club or in dimly-lit mahogany rooms at the State Department.
Maybe politicians and bureaucrats should have surveillance in their offices. If they do, so should you! You both have jobs to do, and honest responsibilities to uphold.
Bit of a quandary, eh? An obvious solution is to let everybody see what's on the cameras, of course. How about the "Orrin-Hatch's-office-cam" for website of the week?
(Disclaimer: the previous views are heavily influenced by "The Transparent Society" by David Brin. To quote Scripture, "There is nothing new under the sun"...)
S:AaB was, for me, one of the few SF shows it *never* felt painful to watch. Everything from Star Trek TNG to the X-files to (especially) the Outer Limits had at least a few episodes I was embarrassed to admit to have shared a planet with let alone watched. But S:AaB never slipped. There were a few points in some episodes which were shaky, or budget-constrained in terms of effects, but in general it was rock-solid. It had Babylon 5 (another great show) style semi-"realistic" space dogfighting, an enemy who was vicious but not completely dehumanized, and three-dimensional characters in all facets of the show. SPOILER: the final episode was wrenching - Wang's death and the probable deaths of Vansen and Damphousse were shocking and possibly the most honestly handled character deaths I've ever seen on TV.
I'd personally like to see someone show the number of protestors killed by cops vs. the number of cops killed by protestors.
I'm not going to look up the statistics but I'm guessing that protest-related deaths in First World countries are incredibly rare. Giuliani was certainly the first known fatality of the recent anti-capitalist/anti-globalization protests, though there have been a number of serious injuries.
What the hell are cops doing protecting the corporations against the point of view of protestors?
The police and government would counter that they are maintaining public order, not protecting corporations exclusively. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine when "public order" started justifying attacking peaceful protestors and passive resisters with pepper spray. Here in Canada we have had incredibly shameful incidents in which people locked to posts etc. have been sprayed right in the face despite being completely nonviolent.
Corporations should hire their own security.
They do. However, their rent-a-cops have no authority off their property - if they try to herd or grab you in the street you have every right to defend yourself by beating the stuffing out of them if neccessary. Companies would LIKE to be able to field troops against hostile demonstrators in public spaces, but thank Ford they don't have that ability yet.
Who's protecting the protestors?
This is the crux of the issue. Police are supposed to defend nonviolent, law-abiding citizens from violent criminal thugs. However, the issue is getting turned around so that anybody assembling to criticize the government is defined as a criminal by the police, and law enforcement then acts accordingly. A lot of people are arrested at protests, but few end up with criminal records. Why? Because they were doing nothing illegal! Their arrests are simply a scare tactic to try and reduce the number of people who protest the next time.
I saw an interesting brown-purple box sitting in the hallway at Comp Services here at U. of Guelph today. Wanted to take it. Long story short, it was a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris, weighing in at about 50 lb, and unable to run any software or OS I would have any idea how to use (I'm a Windoze luser). I liked the case though, I had visions of gutting it and sticking my old P233 in it:-)
"Red Star, Winter Orbit" features spacecraft launched from solar-power balloons that people had colonized. They make their way up to an abandoned Russian space station just in time to move in...
"We're from the balloons. Squatters, I guess you could say. Heard the place was empty. You know the orbit is decaying on this thing?" The man executed a clumsy midair somersault, the tools clattering on his belt. "This free fall's outrageous."
"God," said the woman, "I just can't get used to it! It's wonderful. It's like skydiving, but there's no wind."
Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth. "But you don't even have a launchpad," he said.
"Launchpad?" the man said, laughing. "What we do, we haul these surplus booster engines up the cables to the balloons, drop 'em, and fire 'em in midair."
It was a reference to Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, if I'm not mistaken. In the book, "Pinoygrams" were the short video-greeting-cards that Filipinos overseas could send home to family, to be viewable for a small fee at convenience stores with terminals. It was set up to finance the construction of a data haven IIRC.
Well, I just can't afford NEW CD's, copy-protected or not. Especially now that I can't "preview" them on Napster. I spend $10 and buy second-hand at the used music store or even pawn shop. It's not like there isn't a vast back-catalogue of music to pick from, and with enough patience, you can find almost anything semi-mainstream... And I don't mind paying $17 to Righteous Babe or some other smaller label for truly innovative, fresh music - once in a while as a treat.
Yeah, I too would happily use PGP or a similar technology if anybody I knew used it. That's the problem: nobody feels that e-mails containing "fwd:fwd:fwd:Funny joke" and pictures of their cats warrant spending time and money on encryption. Most people, if they don't feel secure sending sensitive info (credit card #'s, financial records, naked pictures of their spouse) by e-mail, will make a phone call or send a registered letter instead. So how does widespread encryption usage get off the ground? I suppose this is one case where all the paranoia about "hackers" could serve a useful purpose and not just as FUD. People already dislike the idea of government-held key escrow so that idea is not likely to fly again any time soon either. So all we need is one encryption standard that the general public feels comfortable using. Could it be PGP? I dunno.
As I recall, he wasn't wearing his bright orange jacket, just some brown fabrics and leather. He was probably mistaken for a deer or sheep by another hunter, and shot accidentally. This is yet another example of what happens when people don't prepare properly before going hunting. Bows don't kill people, people kill people.
Slashdot Mirror
Towards the end of the article the guy is quoted as saying that though a metal replacement was shipped, he wanted to keep the polycarbonate part in place to see how it held up. I trust that if the part fails it is not likely to do so catastrophically and fly across the shop at 50 m/s...
... a good point. The more citizens are under scrutiny, the more law enforcement should be too. I think cameras/mikes in all police cars & stations, covering not only in front of the car (good for police officer safety) but inside as well (good for arrestee safety). Cops usually can't get away with outrageous abuses any more, but only because the "blue wall of silence" is not 100% impermeable.
I just thought I'd tell you how funny I found your kitty litter // online music comparison. Great! As a cat owner I would be appalled if litter "locked up" if you added an extra cat. Hell, that's when you need it most! Oddly enough, the first CD I bought over the internet was Spit, by Kittie. So Kittie, yes, kitty litter, no.
Like it? Send thanks and donations to above address. Have a good one.
I suspect you're being a bit of a troll here, or at least a contrarian. Nevertheless I apologize for the combative attitude in my original reply. Clearly, you would be much happier living in another country, and you are of course free to do so. Choose wisely. Come back home if, God forbid, you need an expensive medical procedure :-)
Oops, I meant Nelly Furtado... Natalie Imbruglia is Australian, heh.
Don't be an idiot. Railing against Canadian Content ignores the fact that without it, VERY LITTLE Canadian music would get played on the radio. As giant media conglomerates buy up radio stations, local programming goes down the tubes, and eventually Canadian culture on the air would disappear beneath a deluge of American crap. (This is not to say that some Canadian music isn't crap, but the point is that there's a lot of GOOD Canadian music that wouldn't get played *at all* to make room for more Britney and Mariah).
The problem, if there is one, is the perception that "mediocre music" gets forced onto the air, excluding better American music. That's a load of sh*t. Popular Canadian tunes get a chance against the marketing muscle of their American counterparts. To try and get Can Con sunk would pretty much guarantee that you'd never hear another Canadian artist on the radio outside the college stations and the CBC (both excellent to listen to, BTW).
Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.
Um, they don't get a lot of airplay on the radio either. That marketing privelege is mostly reserved for younger, hipper acts like Moist, Natalie Imbruglia, or Gord Downie.
I think that's a brilliant (though devious) idea. Everyone has mp3 files, as opposed to PowerPoint files (10's of Mb) or whatever. But then, why send MP3's when you can send random .jpg's from their hard drive? True, the bandwidth would be less but the damage would be much greater. I bet at least a dozen rich and important people would have to retreat from public life because of what was revealed...
I understand that's sort of what the Scorsese film "The Last Temptation of Christ" is about. The idea that Jesus Christ could have wished for a "normal life", living out his days with Mary Magdalene instead of dying painfully on the cross, is of course, rank heresy to some so the film was poorly received by the fundie community. Protests etc. But apparently it's an excellent, moving film. I really should watch it some time.
Don't be ungrateful. How much time do you spend here? For *cough FREE cough*. So there was an outage. Go outside for a few hours, instead of insulting the people who run the site. Whatever you may think of their editorial discretion (which we can all complain about at one time or another), Slashdot works almost all the time, and you love it.
I'd think that a modem would be a good defense against the "multiple spawning windows of death" effect that some pr0n pages supposedly have (I wouldn't know, I only surf respectable smut sites). After all, if you have a slow connection, shouldn't you be able to close each window faster than it can download the script to open a new one? Heh. Of course, the dirt pics would also take longer to load, might "kill the mood"...
... or two.
1. The person cracking/social-engineering into your e-mail account will more than likely be somebody who you already know. So don't use widely-known personal info as a password reminder!
2. If you cheat on your S.O., you WILL get caught. This is especially true if you're a man or a lesbian - women seem to be natural Sherlock Holmeses. And yes, "e-lovers" count as cheating.
Canada has about 10% of the population of the US. Still, you say, that means we should have 90 MRI machines, and 78 open-heart surgery centres to bring us up to US "standards". Guess what?
Canadians actually have ACCESS to these resources! If I live in the US, it doesn't matter if there are 100 MRI machines in my city, because unless I am quite wealthy or have medical insurance I most likely can't afford the procedure! And if I do have insurance, HMO's have a history of denying "non-essential" diagnostic procedures or demanding the procedure be done at a certain location anyway.
In Canada, MRI, or open-heart surgery, or a liver transplant, or arthroscopic knee surgery is FREE! Yes, folks, "free as in beer"! NO CHARGE TO YOU SIR, YOU'RE A CANADIAN! The question Americans should be asking is: if 50% of their healthcare is paid for by the government (ie. their taxes), WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE NOT HAVE ACCESS? Think about that one for a while.
Um, I'm gonna ignore the obnoxious and insulting title of your post for now. This discussion is a few days old now and I don't expect anybody except you to read this, so this is simply for your own information. While it's true that older laptops can be bought cheaply second hand or on sale, universities have a tendency to demand purchase of a particular model, or from a list of acceptable models. They do this for good reasons related to having to support the damn things (and bad reasons having to do with their own profit), and they don't usually pick the cheapest available ones. Hence, a financial burden.
Summary: mandatory laptops = kicking poor students in a vulnerable spot.
Ok, yeah, floppies do suck, but they're a commonly used medium. Anybody with a slow modem at home or no net connection at all probably uses them a lot. I use them to back up important data (2 copies, because floppies aren't 100% reliable, true) cheaply, and without having to buy a CD burner/tape drive/Zip drive for my old steam-powered Pentium 233. Remember, not everyone has a PIII with a brand new CD-RW. And let's be honest, the drives cost what... twenty bucks new? It doesn't kill you to put one in. You may need to exchange files with unfortunate wretches like myself on occasion.
I'd take out the part about "not... on private citizens" and just say, cameras for one, cameras for all. Either everybody gets to be on camera, or nobody. Hmmm... wait a minute! Anybody who enters a public place, politician or hooker (often in the same public place, oddly enough) IS caught by any cameras present! Of course, they fail to catch any crimes which are committed behind closed doors, in the comfy chairs at the country club or in dimly-lit mahogany rooms at the State Department.
Maybe politicians and bureaucrats should have surveillance in their offices. If they do, so should you! You both have jobs to do, and honest responsibilities to uphold.
Bit of a quandary, eh? An obvious solution is to let everybody see what's on the cameras, of course. How about the "Orrin-Hatch's-office-cam" for website of the week?
(Disclaimer: the previous views are heavily influenced by "The Transparent Society" by David Brin. To quote Scripture, "There is nothing new under the sun"...)
S:AaB was, for me, one of the few SF shows it *never* felt painful to watch. Everything from Star Trek TNG to the X-files to (especially) the Outer Limits had at least a few episodes I was embarrassed to admit to have shared a planet with let alone watched. But S:AaB never slipped. There were a few points in some episodes which were shaky, or budget-constrained in terms of effects, but in general it was rock-solid. It had Babylon 5 (another great show) style semi-"realistic" space dogfighting, an enemy who was vicious but not completely dehumanized, and three-dimensional characters in all facets of the show. SPOILER: the final episode was wrenching - Wang's death and the probable deaths of Vansen and Damphousse were shocking and possibly the most honestly handled character deaths I've ever seen on TV.
I'm not going to look up the statistics but I'm guessing that protest-related deaths in First World countries are incredibly rare. Giuliani was certainly the first known fatality of the recent anti-capitalist/anti-globalization protests, though there have been a number of serious injuries.
What the hell are cops doing protecting the corporations against the point of view of protestors?
The police and government would counter that they are maintaining public order, not protecting corporations exclusively. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine when "public order" started justifying attacking peaceful protestors and passive resisters with pepper spray. Here in Canada we have had incredibly shameful incidents in which people locked to posts etc. have been sprayed right in the face despite being completely nonviolent.
Corporations should hire their own security.
They do. However, their rent-a-cops have no authority off their property - if they try to herd or grab you in the street you have every right to defend yourself by beating the stuffing out of them if neccessary. Companies would LIKE to be able to field troops against hostile demonstrators in public spaces, but thank Ford they don't have that ability yet.
Who's protecting the protestors?
This is the crux of the issue. Police are supposed to defend nonviolent, law-abiding citizens from violent criminal thugs. However, the issue is getting turned around so that anybody assembling to criticize the government is defined as a criminal by the police, and law enforcement then acts accordingly. A lot of people are arrested at protests, but few end up with criminal records. Why? Because they were doing nothing illegal! Their arrests are simply a scare tactic to try and reduce the number of people who protest the next time.
I saw an interesting brown-purple box sitting in the hallway at Comp Services here at U. of Guelph today. Wanted to take it. Long story short, it was a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris, weighing in at about 50 lb, and unable to run any software or OS I would have any idea how to use (I'm a Windoze luser). I liked the case though, I had visions of gutting it and sticking my old P233 in it :-)
It was a reference to Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, if I'm not mistaken. In the book, "Pinoygrams" were the short video-greeting-cards that Filipinos overseas could send home to family, to be viewable for a small fee at convenience stores with terminals. It was set up to finance the construction of a data haven IIRC.
Well, I just can't afford NEW CD's, copy-protected or not. Especially now that I can't "preview" them on Napster. I spend $10 and buy second-hand at the used music store or even pawn shop. It's not like there isn't a vast back-catalogue of music to pick from, and with enough patience, you can find almost anything semi-mainstream... And I don't mind paying $17 to Righteous Babe or some other smaller label for truly innovative, fresh music - once in a while as a treat.
Yeah, I too would happily use PGP or a similar technology if anybody I knew used it. That's the problem: nobody feels that e-mails containing "fwd:fwd:fwd:Funny joke" and pictures of their cats warrant spending time and money on encryption. Most people, if they don't feel secure sending sensitive info (credit card #'s, financial records, naked pictures of their spouse) by e-mail, will make a phone call or send a registered letter instead. So how does widespread encryption usage get off the ground? I suppose this is one case where all the paranoia about "hackers" could serve a useful purpose and not just as FUD. People already dislike the idea of government-held key escrow so that idea is not likely to fly again any time soon either. So all we need is one encryption standard that the general public feels comfortable using. Could it be PGP? I dunno.
As I recall, he wasn't wearing his bright orange jacket, just some brown fabrics and leather. He was probably mistaken for a deer or sheep by another hunter, and shot accidentally. This is yet another example of what happens when people don't prepare properly before going hunting. Bows don't kill people, people kill people.