You got me there. I never understood why IE was the browser of choice in the Enterprise and Firefox was off limits. It was explained to me as "security reasons," and I told my IT guy that Firefox was widely known as a more secure browser. Then he told me that my company probably wants to blame Microsoft if anything goes wrong, and there's a ready-made cash cow if anything goes seriously south.
Let's see: an unlikely pay-out and damaged credibility if there's a serious data breach, vs. taking real steps to make your network more secure. Hmm...which to choose...
That's right. Kinda what I was thinking all along. Firefox started as Mozilla, with a lot of people writing user.js files and coding in javascript to make it work they way they wanted.
Now, with Firefox, you have a number of people writing extensions to make Firefox work...well...the way you want. It would make sense to have a Linux core, and then have a number of programs to download if you wanted to "flavor" your Linux experience. It would be easier for me, personally...Linux has a zillion distros, and I'm not sure which one I should even pick.
I always thought they should do more. I'm not particularly scared of it, but I always thought that since there's a massive amount of information available on you anyway, why not implement this in a useful way?
Go to a job interview, they could have a resume, letters of recommendation, supervisor comments, phone numbers, etc already on file. No more wasted paper or wasted time filling out the same info on different forms.
Go to a hospital, they could already have the meds you're on, anything you're allergic to, and any afflictions you currently suffer from along with symptoms, last blood pressure reading, x-rays, etc -- even if you've never been there.
Enlist in the military, they'd need things for that, including competencies, education, etc.
Insurance companies, well, unfortunately would have limited medical access.
The uses for a big pool of info, with limited access, would be massive. The best thing is that it wouldn't be available online -- it would be available on a data crystal or some other media capable of storing massive amounts of information. You could even have a retina scan or a galvanic skin sensor to make sure the right person has the medium, rather than a crook who ran off with your wallet or an identity thief. RFID doesn't scare me. I think it could be a step in the right direction. As a man who's tired of answering questions and filling out forms, I think this could be a boon, not a bane.
I had a friend who attempted to remove all traces of Internet Explorer from his Win95 box (he was an Opera browser fan). He deleted registry keys, shortcuts, folders,.dlls etc. What he ended up with was a machine that booted with about four error messages that he had to OK out of at startup, and he lost the ability to cut & paste. I don't like IE, but I recognize it's been made a necessary part of Windoze and I just opt not to use it. Firefox 3 and Chrome make my browsing experience more pleasant.
As I've said before, a wise man learns from his mistakes; a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.
Actually this is another symptom of the Zero Tolerance laws that have replaced common sense in the schools in this country. Draw a picture of an explosion and you're a terrorist. Take a cough drop to school and you're a drug dealer. Take a risque pic of yourself and you're a child pornographer.
The solution is simple: A) Throw out the ZT laws B) Throw out the administrators, and make them register as sex offenders for allowing such a thing to happen at the school. C) Make the admins follow a book on personal accountability. Make them read it, discuss it, do book reports on it, and bring it up at meetings.
A new set of ZT laws should be put into effect: Zero Tolerance for Studidity.
I dunno if it's so much "Kids are going to become violent" as "Kids might not understand the violence." I know people have points of contention with "The A-Team" and "Tom & Jerry" -- those are two shows where very dangerous things have been played with (dynamite, guns), very real things. And what happens? Does anyone die? No. They fly through the air, or get their fur blackened, but nothing shows the viewer what really happens when people get shot, or a grenade explodes underneath them. Did I enjoy watching those shows? Well, I like the A-Team. Do I go out in a black van and shoot up people and blow them up? Only in video games, and mostly I prefer the "carve them up with a sword" variety. I dunno. There is a case, too, where some kid beats his friend's brains out with a baseball bat, because the both of them wanted to know what it was like to be dead. And when they died, they'd come back to life and kill the other one, and each of 'em would know the experience of being dead.
What do they live with? What do they know? One person gets raised a pacifist, the other kid gets taught how to hunt animals for sport. Is either of them likely to be more or less violent? I know my 4 and a half year old is not allowed to play or watch some of the games I play (like GTA). He is not allowed to watch Robot Chicken, Family Guy, South Park, Appleseed, or any of the more mature content cartoons (certainly no violent movies like the Transporter or Bloodrayne). He watches Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles, but I sometimes have to ask myself is it any different from what I don't let him watch? Are the things I let him watch by their very nature sanitizing real violence? I guess that's my question...what determines whether someone turns out one way or another? Whether someone accepts punishment, or grabs a gun and says "close your eyes dad, I have a surprise?"
I can see where he would think of Reaganomics. But this theory, unlike Voodoo Economics, is sound, I believe.
Investing to reap a benefit in the long-term makes sense when it's mechanical, not when it's human beings who are happy in their greed.
I've seen it. There is a point at which Windows runs fine, once you reboot. Games will run well, and you can quit out the game, do something else, and everything's golden. After a couple weeks, massive slowdowns, lots of hard drive activity (trying to open a new tab in Firefox might prompt it), and at worst Doc Watson will appear. This is what I've noticed on XP. No other OS seems to do it the way XP does. You can leave various flavors of Linux running for years with no issue (RPG.net is a case in point).
The movie with the crow/evil guy was "The Stand." Based on a novel by Steven King. I was not a big fan of his stuff before, but the miniseries frightened me until it devolved into the forces of good v.s. evil. The first 3 parts were eerie, seeing a disease get out of control, and realizing we were the inventors of it.
The poster makes it sound a lot goofier than it actually is.
Anyone who has been keeping up with the news sites knows that Vista is fundamentally broken in different ways. There was no support for DirectSound last I heard. You had to use OpenAL. There are driver issues with Vista, just like with XP in the early days. The newest service pack for Vista slows it down. There are certain games that run just fine in XP that do not run in Vista. Worse, there are subscription based services (like GameTap) that simply aren't compatible with it.
And before you fling an accusation of Open Source junkie at me, you might want to consider that I've used M$ products since the MS-DOS days. I'd have been more impressed with Linux if it had recognized my Voodoo card back in the days when if you didn't have a Voodoo, you didn't have acceleration. I'd have been more impressed with ME if it hadn't crashed my virus scanner and hobbled some of my games -- that worked well in Win 98.
A simple Google search for my issues with Vista will doubtless reveal even more issues that I have not mentioned.
Yeah, I've hated Acrobat since about 5.0, and then I found Foxit.:)
Foxit even opens multiple PDFs in tabs, and does support some pretty advanced stuff (to my surprise).
Life's good.
If we do gather the knowledge we need to cure various forms of cancer so that those dear to us don't suffer, what are we going to do to balance things out and prevent the population from skyrocketing?
Well, problem is, we probably will have a skyrocketing population. What you'd have to do in order to counterbalance things is:
(A) Replace the free market economy system with something workable. Say, you get decent food, decent clothing, and decent shelter as a basic human right. You want more, you work for it, and upgrade. That's how I see the Star Trek universe working, which evolved beyond the need for money. (TNG: The Neutral Zone)
(B) Offworld colonies. You'd have to find a way to get people offworld, at least in space stations or something.
(C) Synthetic food. We'd have to find a way to make fake food with all the nutrients. What would be cool (though I have no idea how sound this is) is to reassemble the atoms and molecules in things like garbage into something consumable and nutritious.
Tech's come a long way, but it needs to go further before we start removing the population caps.
Did anyone go to the New Yorker's Cartoon Lounge and read the interview? The interviewer's questions read like he was on crack and was desperately trying to be funny.
He failed.
I guess it reminded me why I don't read the New Yorker.
Slashdot Mirror
*koff koff!* This must be the year of the...oh, never mind ;)
You got me there. I never understood why IE was the browser of choice in the Enterprise and Firefox was off limits. It was explained to me as "security reasons," and I told my IT guy that Firefox was widely known as a more secure browser. Then he told me that my company probably wants to blame Microsoft if anything goes wrong, and there's a ready-made cash cow if anything goes seriously south.
Let's see: an unlikely pay-out and damaged credibility if there's a serious data breach, vs. taking real steps to make your network more secure. Hmm...which to choose...
I've never seen a pop-up for NetFlix. Oh, right, I forgot...
I use Firefox. :P
That's right. Kinda what I was thinking all along. Firefox started as Mozilla, with a lot of people writing user.js files and coding in javascript to make it work they way they wanted.
Now, with Firefox, you have a number of people writing extensions to make Firefox work...well...the way you want. It would make sense to have a Linux core, and then have a number of programs to download if you wanted to "flavor" your Linux experience. It would be easier for me, personally...Linux has a zillion distros, and I'm not sure which one I should even pick.
Mod the parent up!
I always thought they should do more. I'm not particularly scared of it, but I always thought that since there's a massive amount of information available on you anyway, why not implement this in a useful way?
Go to a job interview, they could have a resume, letters of recommendation, supervisor comments, phone numbers, etc already on file. No more wasted paper or wasted time filling out the same info on different forms.
Go to a hospital, they could already have the meds you're on, anything you're allergic to, and any afflictions you currently suffer from along with symptoms, last blood pressure reading, x-rays, etc -- even if you've never been there.
Enlist in the military, they'd need things for that, including competencies, education, etc.
Insurance companies, well, unfortunately would have limited medical access.
The uses for a big pool of info, with limited access, would be massive. The best thing is that it wouldn't be available online -- it would be available on a data crystal or some other media capable of storing massive amounts of information. You could even have a retina scan or a galvanic skin sensor to make sure the right person has the medium, rather than a crook who ran off with your wallet or an identity thief. RFID doesn't scare me. I think it could be a step in the right direction. As a man who's tired of answering questions and filling out forms, I think this could be a boon, not a bane.
I had a friend who attempted to remove all traces of Internet Explorer from his Win95 box (he was an Opera browser fan). He deleted registry keys, shortcuts, folders, .dlls etc. What he ended up with was a machine that booted with about four error messages that he had to OK out of at startup, and he lost the ability to cut & paste. I don't like IE, but I recognize it's been made a necessary part of Windoze and I just opt not to use it. Firefox 3 and Chrome make my browsing experience more pleasant.
As I've said before, a wise man learns from his mistakes; a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.
Actually this is another symptom of the Zero Tolerance laws that have replaced common sense in the schools in this country. Draw a picture of an explosion and you're a terrorist. Take a cough drop to school and you're a drug dealer. Take a risque pic of yourself and you're a child pornographer.
The solution is simple:
A) Throw out the ZT laws
B) Throw out the administrators, and make them register as sex offenders for allowing such a thing to happen at the school.
C) Make the admins follow a book on personal accountability. Make them read it, discuss it, do book reports on it, and bring it up at meetings.
A new set of ZT laws should be put into effect: Zero Tolerance for Studidity.
I wonder how many "plusses" they can add to this Cloak of Invisibility?
I belong to the General Intemperance Task-force, also known as GIT. :)
I dunno if it's so much "Kids are going to become violent" as "Kids might not understand the violence." I know people have points of contention with "The A-Team" and "Tom & Jerry" -- those are two shows where very dangerous things have been played with (dynamite, guns), very real things. And what happens? Does anyone die? No. They fly through the air, or get their fur blackened, but nothing shows the viewer what really happens when people get shot, or a grenade explodes underneath them. Did I enjoy watching those shows? Well, I like the A-Team. Do I go out in a black van and shoot up people and blow them up? Only in video games, and mostly I prefer the "carve them up with a sword" variety. I dunno. There is a case, too, where some kid beats his friend's brains out with a baseball bat, because the both of them wanted to know what it was like to be dead. And when they died, they'd come back to life and kill the other one, and each of 'em would know the experience of being dead.
What do they live with? What do they know? One person gets raised a pacifist, the other kid gets taught how to hunt animals for sport. Is either of them likely to be more or less violent? I know my 4 and a half year old is not allowed to play or watch some of the games I play (like GTA). He is not allowed to watch Robot Chicken, Family Guy, South Park, Appleseed, or any of the more mature content cartoons (certainly no violent movies like the Transporter or Bloodrayne). He watches Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles, but I sometimes have to ask myself is it any different from what I don't let him watch? Are the things I let him watch by their very nature sanitizing real violence? I guess that's my question...what determines whether someone turns out one way or another? Whether someone accepts punishment, or grabs a gun and says "close your eyes dad, I have a surprise?"
I can see where he would think of Reaganomics. But this theory, unlike Voodoo Economics, is sound, I believe. Investing to reap a benefit in the long-term makes sense when it's mechanical, not when it's human beings who are happy in their greed.
Was there a worm involved? That can sometimes do it. Tastes bitter when you bite into it, but the effects can be amusing.
I've seen it. There is a point at which Windows runs fine, once you reboot. Games will run well, and you can quit out the game, do something else, and everything's golden. After a couple weeks, massive slowdowns, lots of hard drive activity (trying to open a new tab in Firefox might prompt it), and at worst Doc Watson will appear. This is what I've noticed on XP. No other OS seems to do it the way XP does. You can leave various flavors of Linux running for years with no issue (RPG.net is a case in point).
The movie with the crow/evil guy was "The Stand." Based on a novel by Steven King. I was not a big fan of his stuff before, but the miniseries frightened me until it devolved into the forces of good v.s. evil. The first 3 parts were eerie, seeing a disease get out of control, and realizing we were the inventors of it.
The poster makes it sound a lot goofier than it actually is.
Y'know, they never really specified whether the donated brains were from the living or the dead...
Anyone remember the Live Organ Donor skit from Monty Python?
Anyone who has been keeping up with the news sites knows that Vista is fundamentally broken in different ways. There was no support for DirectSound last I heard. You had to use OpenAL. There are driver issues with Vista, just like with XP in the early days. The newest service pack for Vista slows it down. There are certain games that run just fine in XP that do not run in Vista. Worse, there are subscription based services (like GameTap) that simply aren't compatible with it. And before you fling an accusation of Open Source junkie at me, you might want to consider that I've used M$ products since the MS-DOS days. I'd have been more impressed with Linux if it had recognized my Voodoo card back in the days when if you didn't have a Voodoo, you didn't have acceleration. I'd have been more impressed with ME if it hadn't crashed my virus scanner and hobbled some of my games -- that worked well in Win 98. A simple Google search for my issues with Vista will doubtless reveal even more issues that I have not mentioned.
Yeah, I've hated Acrobat since about 5.0, and then I found Foxit. :)
Foxit even opens multiple PDFs in tabs, and does support some pretty advanced stuff (to my surprise).
Life's good.
If we do gather the knowledge we need to cure various forms of cancer so that those dear to us don't suffer, what are we going to do to balance things out and prevent the population from skyrocketing?
Well, problem is, we probably will have a skyrocketing population. What you'd have to do in order to counterbalance things is:
(A) Replace the free market economy system with something workable. Say, you get decent food, decent clothing, and decent shelter as a basic human right. You want more, you work for it, and upgrade. That's how I see the Star Trek universe working, which evolved beyond the need for money. (TNG: The Neutral Zone)
(B) Offworld colonies. You'd have to find a way to get people offworld, at least in space stations or something.
(C) Synthetic food. We'd have to find a way to make fake food with all the nutrients. What would be cool (though I have no idea how sound this is) is to reassemble the atoms and molecules in things like garbage into something consumable and nutritious.
Tech's come a long way, but it needs to go further before we start removing the population caps.
Did anyone go to the New Yorker's Cartoon Lounge and read the interview? The interviewer's questions read like he was on crack and was desperately trying to be funny. He failed. I guess it reminded me why I don't read the New Yorker.