To the uninitiated, it's like a garden hose about an inch and a quarter thick, and FIVE FEET LONG!!
Believe me, having been through that, I would say that having a little robot the size of a cockroach squirming around inside of me - while feeling really weird - would be infinitely more preferable to having *that* thing shoved quite ungently past every corner of my colon.
When I read the three words "Jack Thompson said". That guy is a complete looney toon. He's been disbarred how many times? He's headed how many cults? I'm shocked and awed by the sheer fact that he can still practice law *anywhere*.
The government seems to think it has a problem here. The phone company has had to track each call made, because of the nature of the system and the nature of their billing. The telegraph before it had the same kind of accounting. No other communications in the history of the world has had this kind of surveillance. Now that the government is used to the convenience of using phone records against criminals (and honest citizens too, lately), they see this brand new medium called the intarweb and wonder why they can't track it too.
Funny how they *don't* also wonder why they can't reliably track down snail mail to its sender, and aren't threatening the USPS and UPS with legislation to do so or else. And this is despite the fact that you can send bombs, funny white powders, and other biohazards through the mail to terrorize the population. That's really not something you can do with e-mail.
The problem with a "surveillance state" is that the collected information can be abused by the people that collect it.
Oh yes. Like blackmail, for instance. Blackmailers used to have to actually go out of their way to collect the naughty bits of people's lives to threaten people with. But now, they can get paid a regular paycheque on top of that.
Yeah. It's the ten worst of all time because they included the Vasa.
They also failed to include such obvious gaffes as the Titanic (although it failed only in part due to engineering), the Quebec Bridge, about 1/5 of the bridges built for various American railroads during the 1800s, the Soviet nuclear submarine "Kursk", and of course, Microsoft Windows.
There should be a law that you can't put a law on the books with no intention of enforcing it.
You see, there's a difference between *having* no intention of enforcing a law, and *saying* you have no intention of enforcing a law. The next thing you know, the electoral hopeful for Mayor of Seattle is doing time, thanks to some careful political manoeuvering. Along with any of the press that had anything bad to say about the powers that be in the past couple years.
You can always tell when a politician is lying - it's when his lips are moving.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?
When it comes to the law in China, there is no such thing as "a step too far". *Especially* when we're talking about crushing the rights of the little guy. I was actually quite surprised that I didn't see the words "prison term" anywhere in the article. Funny that, since if you get caught distributing software for free in the US, they *will* throw you in jail.
Geez, you had to write all this down to debunk the phrase "I did an informal poll recently of chief security officers on the CSO Council, and a lot of them said they really thought the industry should be regulated,"? (Emphasis mine)
Here's something to *really* throw a monkey wrench into his argument: a) the poll was informal, and he doesn't even have any numbers to back it up, and b) he just says "a lot of them." "A lot" can mean 25%. It by no means has anything to do with counting a majority. The real issue here isn't that the author is trying to lie through statistics, he's calling for legislation based on no statistics at all.
If the company in question is likely to sue or prosecute or persecute you for revealing the fact that the emperor has no clothes, then let them stew. I'm sure that someone with less honorable intentions will come along and find it just as easily, and then you can sit by and chuckle as their website/customer database/company is destroyed by a very small shell script.
Of course, this isn't the moral thing to do - to let a company die when you could have helped, but it's not what they want.
How about making a new virus that, immediately after the user does something stupid enough to install it, turns the volume up to the max in windows, and starts looping a wav file that says "MORON ALERT!! W00PWOOPWOOP! MORON ALERT!!" and starts flashing their monitor red and blue, refusing any user input until they type "I have learned today that I should be more careful about the things I click on".
Oh yeah, and it sends itself to everyone in his address book, so that the shame can be shared among others.
Quite honestly, I'm looking forward to the introduction of the "light flail", where you swing it around by power the cord and it makes wonderful whooshing and crashing sounds when it smacks into things. Lovely bits of hardware those flails are.
Four times the ethanol density of corn?(2/3 of sugar?) I find that hard to believe.
They may have meant that you get 4 times the energy out of hemp compared to corn, not based on the amount of energy per bushel, but when you offset how much energy goes into growing and harvesting corn, which is a hell of a lot. The advocate in question seems to indicate that hemp doesn't require things like fertilizer or pesticides and as such, is a very low cost crop. Of course, fertilizer and pesticides would likely increase the yeild greatly, but that's not the point.;)
Somehow I suspect that the real reason for advocating hemp is so that pot can be cheap, not gas.
The thing is, this is what consumers should demand. This isn't something the governments of states or the Federal government of the United States has ANY business in.
Sure thing, buddy. And while we're at it, consumers should demand UberMail, my magical new spam-preventing SMTP server which - if everyone were to switch to it overnight - would make spam and Exchange disappear forever. Until that day, perhaps the government could make spam illegal and actually enforce that law, no?
Bah! I want the game version so that I - as Han Solo, of course - can enter the tavern, walk up to the bar, and then calmly shoot the bartender in the face. Then I can quckly shoot some innocent civilians as they stare at me in shock and disbelief, until some of the other "scum and villany" decide they should do something. At which time I would start shooting wildly at them as I duck for cover behind the bar. With any luck, I could get a crossfire going, and they would all be shooting each other until imperial stormtroopers start blasting their way in through the throng of escaping civilians choking the only exit.
I could then ensure the deaths of Greedo, Obi Wan, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, that fucking band, as many stormtroopers as managed to force their way into the bar - and of course, myself - by cooking off a couple of thermal detonators and going sapper on the stormtroopers while screaming "may the force be with you, motherfuckers!"
If only they could now release episodes one through three with remastered versions that don't feature lousy acting, shallow characters and crappy plots.
Okay, but I'd settle for George Lucas' head on a silver platter, delivered to my door by singing telegram.
And *any* anti-theft system (short of exploding the car or something equally fatal) can be defeated by stealing a tow truck and hauling the difficult-to-steal car away.
I'm actually surprised that the method mentioned in the article doesn't take less time. Personally, I would just point a sensitive antenna at the owner as he turned on the security system and use the code that was broadcast to anyone willing to listen. SSL keys will be in the next implementation, I think.
it is stewart, for implying that any media source a responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want.
Oh sure. CNN could report whatever they wanted to. They could report on the tiddlywinks championship in Peru if they liked, but ultimately, it's their job to give the public what it wants, or it's going straight down the tubes.
And what does the public want from CNN? The news. Which implies the truth. But historically, you couldn't find the truth in the news if you chased it down an alley with a baseball bat, and these days it's no different. Today we say that this or that news outlet is balanced or impartial, but that's just a nice facade really. The exterior tells a story that looks like it might be truthful, but you can tell lies by omission just as well. So it *looks* like they're giving us what we want, but they're not really.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is very much what make Thief great too. Gameplay totally changed after you tried again on a different skill level.
Yeah, I was about to say.
To the uninitiated, it's like a garden hose about an inch and a quarter thick, and FIVE FEET LONG!!
Believe me, having been through that, I would say that having a little robot the size of a cockroach squirming around inside of me - while feeling really weird - would be infinitely more preferable to having *that* thing shoved quite ungently past every corner of my colon.
When I read the three words "Jack Thompson said". That guy is a complete looney toon. He's been disbarred how many times? He's headed how many cults? I'm shocked and awed by the sheer fact that he can still practice law *anywhere*.
Perhaps becuase the Kursk happened outside the US, and therefore qualifies for "non-US-centric-disaster?"
The government seems to think it has a problem here. The phone company has had to track each call made, because of the nature of the system and the nature of their billing. The telegraph before it had the same kind of accounting. No other communications in the history of the world has had this kind of surveillance. Now that the government is used to the convenience of using phone records against criminals (and honest citizens too, lately), they see this brand new medium called the intarweb and wonder why they can't track it too.
Funny how they *don't* also wonder why they can't reliably track down snail mail to its sender, and aren't threatening the USPS and UPS with legislation to do so or else. And this is despite the fact that you can send bombs, funny white powders, and other biohazards through the mail to terrorize the population. That's really not something you can do with e-mail.
The problem with a "surveillance state" is that the collected information can be abused by the people that collect it.
Oh yes. Like blackmail, for instance. Blackmailers used to have to actually go out of their way to collect the naughty bits of people's lives to threaten people with. But now, they can get paid a regular paycheque on top of that.
Yeah. It's the ten worst of all time because they included the Vasa.
They also failed to include such obvious gaffes as the Titanic (although it failed only in part due to engineering), the Quebec Bridge, about 1/5 of the bridges built for various American railroads during the 1800s, the Soviet nuclear submarine "Kursk", and of course, Microsoft Windows.
Consumers: Yeah, but we want it to run on hardware that isn't proprietary and doesn't cost 3x what the rest of the market charges.
Microsoft: Oh, and we included a penis. Enjoy.
You know, for *some* people, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
There should be a law that you can't put a law on the books with no intention of enforcing it.
You see, there's a difference between *having* no intention of enforcing a law, and *saying* you have no intention of enforcing a law. The next thing you know, the electoral hopeful for Mayor of Seattle is doing time, thanks to some careful political manoeuvering. Along with any of the press that had anything bad to say about the powers that be in the past couple years.
You can always tell when a politician is lying - it's when his lips are moving.
While everyone wants to see China improving its enforcement of IP rights, is this a step too far?
When it comes to the law in China, there is no such thing as "a step too far". *Especially* when we're talking about crushing the rights of the little guy. I was actually quite surprised that I didn't see the words "prison term" anywhere in the article. Funny that, since if you get caught distributing software for free in the US, they *will* throw you in jail.
Geez, you had to write all this down to debunk the phrase "I did an informal poll recently of chief security officers on the CSO Council, and a lot of them said they really thought the industry should be regulated,"? (Emphasis mine)
Here's something to *really* throw a monkey wrench into his argument: a) the poll was informal, and he doesn't even have any numbers to back it up, and b) he just says "a lot of them." "A lot" can mean 25%. It by no means has anything to do with counting a majority. The real issue here isn't that the author is trying to lie through statistics, he's calling for legislation based on no statistics at all.
He said that before the days of computer science degrees, there were two disciplines that were sought after when it came to finding programmers.
#2 was mathematicians.
#1 was philosophers.
Enough said.
If the company in question is likely to sue or prosecute or persecute you for revealing the fact that the emperor has no clothes, then let them stew. I'm sure that someone with less honorable intentions will come along and find it just as easily, and then you can sit by and chuckle as their website/customer database/company is destroyed by a very small shell script.
Of course, this isn't the moral thing to do - to let a company die when you could have helped, but it's not what they want.
How about making a new virus that, immediately after the user does something stupid enough to install it, turns the volume up to the max in windows, and starts looping a wav file that says "MORON ALERT!! W00PWOOPWOOP! MORON ALERT!!" and starts flashing their monitor red and blue, refusing any user input until they type "I have learned today that I should be more careful about the things I click on".
Oh yeah, and it sends itself to everyone in his address book, so that the shame can be shared among others.
Quite honestly, I'm looking forward to the introduction of the "light flail", where you swing it around by power the cord and it makes wonderful whooshing and crashing sounds when it smacks into things. Lovely bits of hardware those flails are.
Four times the ethanol density of corn?(2/3 of sugar?) I find that hard to believe.
;)
They may have meant that you get 4 times the energy out of hemp compared to corn, not based on the amount of energy per bushel, but when you offset how much energy goes into growing and harvesting corn, which is a hell of a lot. The advocate in question seems to indicate that hemp doesn't require things like fertilizer or pesticides and as such, is a very low cost crop. Of course, fertilizer and pesticides would likely increase the yeild greatly, but that's not the point.
Somehow I suspect that the real reason for advocating hemp is so that pot can be cheap, not gas.
The thing is, this is what consumers should demand. This isn't something the governments of states or the Federal government of the United States has ANY business in.
Sure thing, buddy. And while we're at it, consumers should demand UberMail, my magical new spam-preventing SMTP server which - if everyone were to switch to it overnight - would make spam and Exchange disappear forever. Until that day, perhaps the government could make spam illegal and actually enforce that law, no?
I learned from personal experience a long, long time ago that big, weird-looking glasses make you look like a total dork.
Bah! I want the game version so that I - as Han Solo, of course - can enter the tavern, walk up to the bar, and then calmly shoot the bartender in the face. Then I can quckly shoot some innocent civilians as they stare at me in shock and disbelief, until some of the other "scum and villany" decide they should do something. At which time I would start shooting wildly at them as I duck for cover behind the bar. With any luck, I could get a crossfire going, and they would all be shooting each other until imperial stormtroopers start blasting their way in through the throng of escaping civilians choking the only exit.
I could then ensure the deaths of Greedo, Obi Wan, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, that fucking band, as many stormtroopers as managed to force their way into the bar - and of course, myself - by cooking off a couple of thermal detonators and going sapper on the stormtroopers while screaming "may the force be with you, motherfuckers!"
If only they could now release episodes one through three with remastered versions that don't feature lousy acting, shallow characters and crappy plots.
Okay, but I'd settle for George Lucas' head on a silver platter, delivered to my door by singing telegram.
While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know
Because, you know, there will *never* be any evil locksmiths or auto maker employees. Oh no.
And *any* anti-theft system (short of exploding the car or something equally fatal) can be defeated by stealing a tow truck and hauling the difficult-to-steal car away.
I'm actually surprised that the method mentioned in the article doesn't take less time. Personally, I would just point a sensitive antenna at the owner as he turned on the security system and use the code that was broadcast to anyone willing to listen. SSL keys will be in the next implementation, I think.
"Are you having that dream again where you make all the white people riot? I told you to stop that."
it is stewart, for implying that any media source a responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want.
Oh sure. CNN could report whatever they wanted to. They could report on the tiddlywinks championship in Peru if they liked, but ultimately, it's their job to give the public what it wants, or it's going straight down the tubes.
And what does the public want from CNN? The news. Which implies the truth. But historically, you couldn't find the truth in the news if you chased it down an alley with a baseball bat, and these days it's no different. Today we say that this or that news outlet is balanced or impartial, but that's just a nice facade really. The exterior tells a story that looks like it might be truthful, but you can tell lies by omission just as well. So it *looks* like they're giving us what we want, but they're not really.