Correct me if I'm wrong here, but assuming that name resolution is handled so poorly, regardless of what institution is responsible for it, there is nothing stopping us from forking DNS. If Slash users don't like ICANN or the UN, why not start an alternative DNS? If I remember correctly, something to this effect was done when people wanted some TLD's early that hadn't been passed through. Why not split off from the whole thing?
Slash certainly has the usership and technical knowledge and resources to setup alternative Centeral DNS machines, this time with the name hierarchy done properly, and if a good amount of the tech sites go over, really what else would you need? If the businesses don't follow, good riddance, you can always go back to the polluted namespace with a simple config change, and if they do decide to migrate as popularity increases, they will have to play within the new rules.
Well, since I also have a couple of other spelling errors in there, which you failed to call out, perhaps you should consider the thought that I simply typed the post somewhat quickly, and care more about the idea than small details. The fact remains, you understood what was being said, and if you're suspicious of the content of my post, you can easily verify the details of what I've said, both in other posts made later and in outside sources.
If you have something to say about the actual thoughts that have been raised, That's one thing (and several other posters have, good for them). But if all you can do is point out minor errors, especialy when the correct meaning is easily determined by context, then you're really not adding to the discussion at all.
If one typo invalidates an entire point for you, then what are you doing on slashdot in the first place?
The first glaring problem with this is the use of a radio controled device in close proximity to ordinance. One of the first things they tell you, and continue to repeatedly tell you, about situations with IED's and UXO's (Unexploded Ordinance) is NOT to use any radios or electrical devices for an area around them. Presumably these "overly expensive" robots used by the experts are not just expensive for kicks, but, among other things, have sheilding and control systems to counter this danger.
A do it yourself aproach is admirable in a lot of situations, however, when dealing with military and terrorist style explosives, It seems doubtful that's the time to employ the pioneering spirit. The EOD guys are there for a reason, and this is one case where patience is a virtue.
You, Sir, Are on crack. I'm currently a member of the US Air Force. There's currently a program in place not only to let people out, but to let us out AHEAD of schedule. Aparently, for some odd reason, about 2-3 years ago, recruiting went through the roof, and now the Air Force is manned above what it's currently authorized by law. This Force Shaping program is the first stage in getting down to the target manning levels.
They are allowing personel out in almost all career fields, Including computer oriented ones. If this doesn't reduce down to the needed levels, they'll start refusing re-enlistments and forcing retirements. I don't know about the other branches, but round here, people are most definately able to leave.
If you read the original article and the articles published with it, you may notice something that jumped out at me. It was later made moot by the government giving up the ghost on the injunction, but before they did, they made a claim that "technical" information was different from other forms of speech and therefore not afforded First Amendment rights.
Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone from a more recent case? Perhaps I'll jog your memory. In the DeCSS case, it was argued that Code is not protected because it has functional value. In effect it is technical rather than political or other speech. In this case, it doesn't seem to be the government making the assertion, rather an organization. But that would be misleading. The DMCA represents a restraint on speech just as broad as the Energy Act used against this article. The identity of the party pushing for the censorship is irrelevant. It's the laws with over broad, sweeping generalizations on what we can, and cannot say, as well as the idea that there is protected and unprotected speech that are truly dangerous. Surely some forms of speech are distasteful in the extreme, and prompt a gut reaction that they should not be allowed. But once you establish a form of speech that is officially "not OK", The worst of your obstructions as a censor are over.
What part of of this is confusing?
"That Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and consult for their common good, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
It's straight forward, black and white. Our nations third grade students can easily understand it. But once you add even ONE exception, however well meaning it might be, the floodgates have opened, and the end result is the muddle we have today. Sufficiently muddled, the citizenry are too afraid to use the rights they might have, for fear of a costly lawsuit, and then they basically don't have those rights. Then we require people like The Progressive, 2600, Penthouse and Lary Flint, and anyone else willing to put their livelihoods and privacy on the line for our freedom.
The base point is this. As soon as something I can personally say out loud becomes Illegal, the whole of my freedom of speech is gone. As soon as something I could sit down and write with my own pen becomes illegal, my freedom of press is gone. Be it technical specifications, computer code, poetry, a political indictment, a story about rape, or a shopping list, If one of those things is illegal, eventually fear will make them all impossible. And once our freedom of speech is gone, Our ability to claim to live in a free society will be a farce.
The whole idea of using a market based system to get a poll sample is based on the idea that people will have more realistic responses if they have their money on the line, even if they don't necessarily agree with that particular outcome. The old "put your money where your mouth is" idea. Without actually putting down some green, it's all just hot air. There is a reason that the IEM was constructed by professors in Economics as well as Poli Sci and others. Because without the Economics part, it's just wanking.
Also, The concept of an Idea market is also a bit of a miss. When you take something like an election, and simply ask "Who do you think will win" and "By what margin", your questions are without bias towards a particular outcome. With an idea, there is no clear, predictable, final event. Will stock X go up? Yes. How much? In what time period? What if No one is right? What if the market takes a powerdive no one expected? Or a terrorist event causes the market to be closed for a day? How do I buy THAT stock? And that's even an idea that's easy to track, and has a two dimensional plane of movement. In the end it's silly because we don't NEED a meta-market for the actual stock market. We already HAVE the stock market, which does that job nicely. How would you track more nebulous ideas, that have no prediction market, but more unpredictable outcomes? Not with a market of this type.
The current stock market works because it takes all the factors of the world, and asks a simple question. Will all these things help or hinder this company from making money, and therefore, make this stock valuable or worthless. In this case, our old friend Gordon Gecko was right. Greed is good. It causes this system to work, and without it, there simply IS no stock market, for ideas, companies, politicians or anything else under the sun.
Those courses have been updated (I'm about 3-4 months out of Keesler) and yes, they still suck. In fairness, some of the instructors are good at computing, and know their stuff. But yes, the standard set course with slides, or "death by Powerpoint" is still very much in effect. And ever single class and CDC is STILL signed off by Microsoft before we see it.
The CDC has also been recently updated, and I'm one of the first groups to be on it. The experience has been.... Unique. They've found an interesting way to avoid becoming obsolete. I'm about half way through and beside teaching how to convert from Decimal to Binary, Octal, and Hex (things I learned when I was eight), The text thus far has been devoid of technical info. That's right. The document that's supposed to be your main text for learning technical things has yet to have so much as a refrence to a hard drive in it.
On the flip side, There ARE opertunities to learn on the job, if you are cutthroat about it. Obvously anything more interesting than watching paint dry is going to be of interest to every airman who's just as bored as you are, so you have to be a bit ambitious going after those types of things. But once you get to do that, there are fun things out there to do. I have a different view from most people in the Airforce also, as I'm overseas, so the trend to contracting isn't as prevelant here (can't have TOO many forign nationals in your stuff).
So, in overview, Formal training, worthless. Learning oppertunities on the job, a tough nut to crack, but a tasty morsal inside if your persistant. And it beats the hell out of college.
While it's true that the upper management has been here for a while, The fact that some of them don't know their stuff pretty much puts us on par with every other buisness.
But as to people not being the best for their job, there are plenty of wash out positions to get rid of people who just don't get it, places like Help desk and the like. If you do well, you go places. In the end, the people in charge of things generaly know their stuff. Of course there is the occational "accident" and someone who dosn't know a clue ends up somewhere important, but that's different from the civilian world in one important way.
When it happens, it isn't because they buffaloed some HR person with an MCSE cert and some buzzwords. At the very least they have had to be in the military for several years, and even if they don't know squat about computers, they at least know what it's like to be at the bottom of the totem pole.
Most of them don't talk about it much because they generaly arn't allowed to. Much of what's done in a military shop has very fuzzy lines about what's classified and not, so generaly there isn't much talk at all, to be on the save side. Don't know how things are on the Civilian side.
From the article, it looks like Cox customers are up a tree, and Comcast customers are totaly screwed. How about the AT&T customers? It mentions that they are going to try to migrate them to existing network, but I'd be curious to see how many are already on said network, and how many are looking at outages.
Anyone here have a breakdown?
I'm slightly concerned as my parents are on AT&T@home, and if something goes wrong, I'll have to go and find something else for them, but also, I wonder just how many people will be turned off of broadband because of this. Cable was really being pushed as the way to go for broadband, and in this area, @home is the only circus in town...
I heard at one point that it was a voice vote. Now, I would hope that Congress wouldn't be so irresponsible to pass such huge legislation in a way that didn't leave us with any record of who voted for and against it, but if they were responsible, we wouldn't have this damn thing in the first place. And it does serve as an explination as to why it's so hard to find a voting record.
Due to this move, the Olympic committee will be ignored by those who want to report things, while the entire outdated concept will be ignored by everyone else.
Which is worse, Ignorance or Apathy? I don't know, and I don't care.
Just give us your Name, Address, CC#, Place of Birth, SSN, Mother's Maden name, what you want to be when you grow up, body measurements etc. to plug into our database.
IMHO, buisness and sales are the arch-nemisis of privacy. Sure there are honest companies, but it seems to make any sort of transaction these days requires a disclosure of your entire personal history. My question would be, Any of these vendors accept cash and no questions of me? If not, privacy goes out the window.
The thing that scares me isn't the FBI, or their tactics. They have been the same and will likely remain the same. What bothers me is that we have a Judge stupid enough to grant a search warrant on the basis of a hit logged AFTER the story had hit the presses (I read that Reg. story, and was going to visit the site, but got busy. I'm glad I didn't).
We ABSOUTELY, without a doubt, NEED judges who are clued in to technological issues, and make SURE that these types of warrants go through them. No more asking Judge Joe Bob Technophobe for a warrant baised on server logs.
Let's look at a moment what the main political focus of Slashdot is. Corporate interests crowding personal freedom. Legislation against the internet and the online counterparts of our offline freedoms. Our ability to analize things, tinker with them, take them apart, given to us by the Fair Use doctorine is being taken away by the DMCA.
And which canidate is addressing these issues? Why, near as I can tell... None of them. They are focusing on Gay mariages, Military spending, Taxes.
Even Nader, ever touted here, is focusing on worker rights, and raising the minimum wage. The fact that those things go against corporations, and that that is needed to achive our ends is mere coincidence. I'm voting Nader, but only because his goals happen to dovetail better to mine. I have yet to see ANY canidate run on a platform with a SINGLE geek inspired or supported plank. If geeks don't care, that would seem to be a major reason why.
Just because it's in the EULA dosn't mean that that's how it is. A software company I used to work for had a EULA on the software disk that one or two of the more "creative" types changed to
"Surrender your first born child."
The EULA that installed was the normal one, and almost no one but folk in the company noticed. But if someone had tried to enforce it, they would have been laughed out of court.
The pranksters in question surrended their employment for this little caper.
One might argue quite a bit that Slashdot would count as a Public Sphere, if more folk would take the information obtainted here and DO something about it.
Little doubt that this is a source of information for many, but the question stands, is it a source of influence?
Slashdot Mirror
Mr Shatner, I didn't know you used slashdot!
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but assuming that name resolution is handled so poorly, regardless of what institution is responsible for it, there is nothing stopping us from forking DNS. If Slash users don't like ICANN or the UN, why not start an alternative DNS? If I remember correctly, something to this effect was done when people wanted some TLD's early that hadn't been passed through. Why not split off from the whole thing?
Slash certainly has the usership and technical knowledge and resources to setup alternative Centeral DNS machines, this time with the name hierarchy done properly, and if a good amount of the tech sites go over, really what else would you need? If the businesses don't follow, good riddance, you can always go back to the polluted namespace with a simple config change, and if they do decide to migrate as popularity increases, they will have to play within the new rules.
Am I missing something here? Why NOT do this?
Well, since I also have a couple of other spelling errors in there, which you failed to call out, perhaps you should consider the thought that I simply typed the post somewhat quickly, and care more about the idea than small details. The fact remains, you understood what was being said, and if you're suspicious of the content of my post, you can easily verify the details of what I've said, both in other posts made later and in outside sources.
If you have something to say about the actual thoughts that have been raised, That's one thing (and several other posters have, good for them). But if all you can do is point out minor errors, especialy when the correct meaning is easily determined by context, then you're really not adding to the discussion at all.
If one typo invalidates an entire point for you, then what are you doing on slashdot in the first place?
The first glaring problem with this is the use of a radio controled device in close proximity to ordinance. One of the first things they tell you, and continue to repeatedly tell you, about situations with IED's and UXO's (Unexploded Ordinance) is NOT to use any radios or electrical devices for an area around them. Presumably these "overly expensive" robots used by the experts are not just expensive for kicks, but, among other things, have sheilding and control systems to counter this danger.
A do it yourself aproach is admirable in a lot of situations, however, when dealing with military and terrorist style explosives, It seems doubtful that's the time to employ the pioneering spirit. The EOD guys are there for a reason, and this is one case where patience is a virtue.
You, Sir, Are on crack.
I'm currently a member of the US Air Force. There's currently a program in place not only to let people out, but to let us out AHEAD of schedule. Aparently, for some odd reason, about 2-3 years ago, recruiting went through the roof, and now the Air Force is manned above what it's currently authorized by law. This Force Shaping program is the first stage in getting down to the target manning levels.
They are allowing personel out in almost all career fields, Including computer oriented ones. If this doesn't reduce down to the needed levels, they'll start refusing re-enlistments and forcing retirements. I don't know about the other branches, but round here, people are most definately able to leave.
And you think you get pissed off now when someone walks off with one of your pens....
I'm reminded of the old Kids in the Hall sketch. "Hey, That's my pen!!!"
Hey now. Be fair to Microsoft. It's not a foreign terrorist organization. It's a DOMESTIC terrorist organization.
If you read the original article and the articles published with it, you may notice something that jumped out at me. It was later made moot by the government giving up the ghost on the injunction, but before they did, they made a claim that "technical" information was different from other forms of speech and therefore not afforded First Amendment rights.
Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone from a more recent case? Perhaps I'll jog your memory. In the DeCSS case, it was argued that Code is not protected because it has functional value. In effect it is technical rather than political or other speech. In this case, it doesn't seem to be the government making the assertion, rather an organization. But that would be misleading. The DMCA represents a restraint on speech just as broad as the Energy Act used against this article. The identity of the party pushing for the censorship is irrelevant. It's the laws with over broad, sweeping generalizations on what we can, and cannot say, as well as the idea that there is protected and unprotected speech that are truly dangerous. Surely some forms of speech are distasteful in the extreme, and prompt a gut reaction that they should not be allowed. But once you establish a form of speech that is officially "not OK", The worst of your obstructions as a censor are over.
What part of of this is confusing?
"That Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and consult for their common good, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
It's straight forward, black and white. Our nations third grade students can easily understand it. But once you add even ONE exception, however well meaning it might be, the floodgates have opened, and the end result is the muddle we have today. Sufficiently muddled, the citizenry are too afraid to use the rights they might have, for fear of a costly lawsuit, and then they basically don't have those rights. Then we require people like The Progressive, 2600, Penthouse and Lary Flint, and anyone else willing to put their livelihoods and privacy on the line for our freedom.
The base point is this. As soon as something I can personally say out loud becomes Illegal, the whole of my freedom of speech is gone. As soon as something I could sit down and write with my own pen becomes illegal, my freedom of press is gone. Be it technical specifications, computer code, poetry, a political indictment, a story about rape, or a shopping list, If one of those things is illegal, eventually fear will make them all impossible. And once our freedom of speech is gone, Our ability to claim to live in a free society will be a farce.
The whole idea of using a market based system to get a poll sample is based on the idea that people will have more realistic responses if they have their money on the line, even if they don't necessarily agree with that particular outcome. The old "put your money where your mouth is" idea. Without actually putting down some green, it's all just hot air. There is a reason that the IEM was constructed by professors in Economics as well as Poli Sci and others. Because without the Economics part, it's just wanking.
Also, The concept of an Idea market is also a bit of a miss. When you take something like an election, and simply ask "Who do you think will win" and "By what margin", your questions are without bias towards a particular outcome. With an idea, there is no clear, predictable, final event. Will stock X go up? Yes. How much? In what time period? What if No one is right? What if the market takes a powerdive no one expected? Or a terrorist event causes the market to be closed for a day? How do I buy THAT stock? And that's even an idea that's easy to track, and has a two dimensional plane of movement. In the end it's silly because we don't NEED a meta-market for the actual stock market. We already HAVE the stock market, which does that job nicely. How would you track more nebulous ideas, that have no prediction market, but more unpredictable outcomes? Not with a market of this type.
The current stock market works because it takes all the factors of the world, and asks a simple question. Will all these things help or hinder this company from making money, and therefore, make this stock valuable or worthless. In this case, our old friend Gordon Gecko was right. Greed is good. It causes this system to work, and without it, there simply IS no stock market, for ideas, companies, politicians or anything else under the sun.
Those courses have been updated (I'm about 3-4 months out of Keesler) and yes, they still suck. In fairness, some of the instructors are good at computing, and know their stuff. But yes, the standard set course with slides, or "death by Powerpoint" is still very much in effect. And ever single class and CDC is STILL signed off by Microsoft before we see it.
The CDC has also been recently updated, and I'm one of the first groups to be on it. The experience has been.... Unique. They've found an interesting way to avoid becoming obsolete. I'm about half way through and beside teaching how to convert from Decimal to Binary, Octal, and Hex (things I learned when I was eight), The text thus far has been devoid of technical info. That's right. The document that's supposed to be your main text for learning technical things has yet to have so much as a refrence to a hard drive in it.
On the flip side, There ARE opertunities to learn on the job, if you are cutthroat about it. Obvously anything more interesting than watching paint dry is going to be of interest to every airman who's just as bored as you are, so you have to be a bit ambitious going after those types of things. But once you get to do that, there are fun things out there to do. I have a different view from most people in the Airforce also, as I'm overseas, so the trend to contracting isn't as prevelant here (can't have TOO many forign nationals in your stuff).
So, in overview, Formal training, worthless. Learning oppertunities on the job, a tough nut to crack, but a tasty morsal inside if your persistant. And it beats the hell out of college.
While it's true that the upper management has been here for a while, The fact that some of them don't know their stuff pretty much puts us on par with every other buisness.
But as to people not being the best for their job, there are plenty of wash out positions to get rid of people who just don't get it, places like Help desk and the like. If you do well, you go places. In the end, the people in charge of things generaly know their stuff. Of course there is the occational "accident" and someone who dosn't know a clue ends up somewhere important, but that's different from the civilian world in one important way.
When it happens, it isn't because they buffaloed some HR person with an MCSE cert and some buzzwords. At the very least they have had to be in the military for several years, and even if they don't know squat about computers, they at least know what it's like to be at the bottom of the totem pole.
Most of them don't talk about it much because they generaly arn't allowed to. Much of what's done in a military shop has very fuzzy lines about what's classified and not, so generaly there isn't much talk at all, to be on the save side. Don't know how things are on the Civilian side.
I'm a proud Bachelor who Mouse-Clicks, Does that count?
From the article, it looks like Cox customers are up a tree, and Comcast customers are totaly screwed. How about the AT&T customers? It mentions that they are going to try to migrate them to existing network, but I'd be curious to see how many are already on said network, and how many are looking at outages.
Anyone here have a breakdown?
I'm slightly concerned as my parents are on AT&T@home, and if something goes wrong, I'll have to go and find something else for them, but also, I wonder just how many people will be turned off of broadband because of this. Cable was really being pushed as the way to go for broadband, and in this area, @home is the only circus in town...
Wow, Slashdot opposes it, And now Microsoft does too?
The two Probably oppose it for entirely different reasons, but Politics sure do make for strange bedfellows....
I heard at one point that it was a voice vote. Now, I would hope that Congress wouldn't be so irresponsible to pass such huge legislation in a way that didn't leave us with any record of who voted for and against it, but if they were responsible, we wouldn't have this damn thing in the first place. And it does serve as an explination as to why it's so hard to find a voting record.
Due to this move, the Olympic committee will be ignored by those who want to report things, while the entire outdated concept will be ignored by everyone else.
Which is worse, Ignorance or Apathy? I don't know, and I don't care.
Sure, we'll sell you a privacy solution...
Just give us your Name, Address, CC#, Place of Birth, SSN, Mother's Maden name, what you want to be when you grow up, body measurements etc. to plug into our database.
IMHO, buisness and sales are the arch-nemisis of privacy. Sure there are honest companies, but it seems to make any sort of transaction these days requires a disclosure of your entire personal history. My question would be, Any of these vendors accept cash and no questions of me? If not, privacy goes out the window.
I'm sorry Dave, but this marketing ploy no longer serves any purpose. Goodbye.
Now, all we have to do is add a piece of Fairy Cake, a marker that says "You are Here", and ship the whole thing to Frogstar, and we're set....
The thing that scares me isn't the FBI, or their tactics. They have been the same and will likely remain the same. What bothers me is that we have a Judge stupid enough to grant a search warrant on the basis of a hit logged AFTER the story had hit the presses (I read that Reg. story, and was going to visit the site, but got busy. I'm glad I didn't).
We ABSOUTELY, without a doubt, NEED judges who are clued in to technological issues, and make SURE that these types of warrants go through them. No more asking Judge Joe Bob Technophobe for a warrant baised on server logs.
Let's look at a moment what the main political focus of Slashdot is. Corporate interests crowding personal freedom. Legislation against the internet and the online counterparts of our offline freedoms. Our ability to analize things, tinker with them, take them apart, given to us by the Fair Use doctorine is being taken away by the DMCA.
And which canidate is addressing these issues? Why, near as I can tell... None of them. They are focusing on Gay mariages, Military spending, Taxes.
Even Nader, ever touted here, is focusing on worker rights, and raising the minimum wage. The fact that those things go against corporations, and that that is needed to achive our ends is mere coincidence.
I'm voting Nader, but only because his goals happen to dovetail better to mine. I have yet to see ANY canidate run on a platform with a SINGLE geek inspired or supported plank. If geeks don't care, that would seem to be a major reason why.
Going... Going.... GONE!!!
Anyone got a mirror?
One might argue quite a bit that Slashdot would count as a Public Sphere, if more folk would take the information obtainted here and DO something about it.
Little doubt that this is a source of information for many, but the question stands, is it a source of influence?