Let's see...I use my credit card to buy a two-week tour package to Europe. The package includes airline reservations, hotel and restaurant reservations, a seat on a tour bus, and tickets to a couple of London shows. How's an RFID chip going to affect my privacy?
BTW, it's an especially good idea to add the chip to diplomatic passports. Passports can be, and are, counterfeited, so the chip will help to ensure authenticity.
I don't disagree with your assertions. Bear in mid that I'm arguing, however, that the Internet hsa not caused new information to be exposed. The technology of the net has obviously made it much easier to aggregate, access, and search information. The information, however, existed prior to the Internet and was available for aggregation, access and search by the public. Searching file cabinets is more cumbersome than running a database query, but the information in both repositories is equally public.
We also need to remember that in many common cases we actually do give permission for someone to access and use personal information. E.g., when you complete and sign a credit application or an employment application, you've very likely also given permission for your records to be accessed. It's there, in the fine print that no one reads. Ditto for websites, with those voluminous terms of use statements that no one reads.
I suspect most people wold quickly become very annoyed with people contacting them to seek permission to access their information. (Of course, we'd have the follow-on problem of confirming the identity of the entity seeking that permission. E.g., you may give an auto dealer permission to run your credit record, but would you recognize the name of the third-party firms that actually produce the record or who access your driving record to determine auto insurance eligibility and rates?)
You sound like you'd be willing to trade a bit of privacy for the ability to obtain a mortgage or a job, or to keep pedophiles from driving your kids to and from school.
My point is this: Internet technology has not increased the amount of personal information that is available to the public. It has made access to that information much easier, but there's nothing there that wasn't placed there freely by someone or that couldn't be acquired 40 years ago by visiting a local courthouse or other facility.
An important fact that's seldom discussed is that any information about me that might be available via the Internet has already been made public. The act of digitizing that information and making it available in a database increases its potential access, but it does not impact my privacy. The data were already in the public domain.
If some piece of information about me is not legally available to the public, and still appears on the Internet, then someone has broken the law.
So, those who argue for new privacy legislation to curb what they see as violations of their privacy on the Internet are really asking to reclassify as private many types of personal information that have long been accessible to the public.
Suppose, then, that former employees could not verify or deny that we used to work for them. Suppose a bank was not allowed to access the credit history of the guy who wants to buy your house. Suppose your daycare center could not check the criminal record of the kid who wants to be their new driver.
Technology and the Internet certainly ease access to information -- that was the point, after all -- but it is almost always info that was already available to the public.
Legislation that broadens government access to private information is, of course, a different issue.
First, why would Volvo "not care" if someone else makes heater hoses for Volvos if Volvo believes there is still money to be made by retaining exclusive control of the right to sell Volvo heater hoses? Why would they want to give up that profit simply because they had "gone through their initial purchase of parts stock..."?
Second, We're not talking about IBM licensing other corporations to market this product. We're talking about IBM giving it away. That's a significant difference. Unless you believe that IBM has a moral obligation to give away software and that you have an obligation to impose that belief on IBM (I don't) then it makes no sense for IBM to give away a product until it believes all profit potential has been exhausted.
It's common for any retailer who controls a big chunk of a product's market to use that leverage to secure better deals. No one forced those retailers to wholesale all those CD's to Walmart.
Meanwhile, since when did selling 1 of every 5 instances of a product make you a monopoly? People must be getting those other 4 CD's by magic, eh?
If someone has a legitimate claim against some open source code used by Novell, and can prove it, Novell would likely agree to seek a license or would redesign the offending product. You don't sue, or fight a suit, when you know you'll lose.
I'm not especially in favor of universities going after websites and publications that criticize the school, but these folks are naive if they imagine that the school won't happily use the tool -- trademark violation -- that has been given to them.
That's especially true if the site uses any university facilities -- server space, network bandwidth, space on a dormitory floor, etc.
What free speech rights have been violated? If they, or you, think trademark registration is unConstitutional and violates the First Amendment, find some lawyers who agree and sue.
No one is telling the people who run that site what they can or cannot say. Some is telling them that they are violating a trademark. Whether this is true or not we will never learn from Slashdot, since Slashdot has no respect for journalistic ethics or the truth.
These stupid alleged 'rights" post are getting boring.
First, why the frequent reference to police? Can't Slashdot's crack uneditorial team tell the difference between civil and criminal law? More likely, they deliberately toss that in just to stir up more pageviews.
There's no reason to say that USCD is a trademark the school "claims" to own. It's a matter of public record. Look it up. (Of course, Slashdot is too damned lazy and incompetent to do that.) By using the word "claims", Slashdot is deliberately and falsely creating the impression the USCD is lieing about the trademark.
Trademake stories are a favorite here, trumpeted as being about "rights". That's bogus, of course. If USCD is trademarked, then no one else has nay right to use it. The only way Slashdot can argue that this is about rights is to argue that the concept of trademark itself is invalid. OSTG's corporate lawers, however, might have something to say about that.
I think the arrest of a third-party candidate who is essentially completely unknown has very little newsworthiness. I don't think CNN, or any other news source, can have its "legitimacy" -- whatever that means -- judged by whether or not it runs one insignificant news story. All news stories are created, written and published based on the resources available at the time, the other stories competing for those resources, and the judgment of the editor making the decisions. A story that gets reported one day might be ignored the next, and vice versa.
Even at Slashdot, which has blatantly abandoned any pretense of adhering to journalisitc ethics and standards, people with the nerve to call themselves "editors" decide which submissions are published and which are not.
I don't read or watch CNN, but I consider them a much more reputable and reliable news source than I consider Slashdot, which did point to the candidate's website. (Note, though, that Slashdot did not engage in any actual news creation or reporting. It simply took the submitters word for the veracity of the post and published it.)
If you expect a single news source to provide all the news you need to know in a complete, consisent fashion and in a way that consider "objective" (which usually means it accords with the listeners biases and bigotries), then you will never find a single source you're willing to call "legitimate".
As I said, I don't like any of the default icons offered by KDE. And, I must be using indecent distributions, because they don't seem to offer anything better.
And, of course people change from double-click to single-click, and adjust the fonts, and play with window focus. Those options are available in KDE, Gnome, and just about any other similar tool I can think of. KDE has many options, and many people like that. But, in truth, Gnome also has many options, expecially if you can figure out the impenetrable gconf. But, speaking for only myself, most of those options pertain to things I don't care about.
This "story" highlights the failure of so-called journalism taking place on sites like Slashdot.
There's been no verification that the remarks attributed to Slackware's Pat. V. are true. We simply have a single pseudonymous post to one online forum.
Where's the attempt to check with Pat V. to see if he actually made those remarks? Nowhere that I can see.
Slashdot, among others, lathered itself in sanctimonious glee when CBS was duped by a bogus memo. How is this any different?
If KDE is so bleepin' configurable, how do I replace the default icons with something I like without trolling all over the net looking for new icons?
I suspect a great deal of Gnome's appeal is simply aesthetic -- people like the way it looks out of the box. And, they don't like the way KDE looks. To my eye, KDE's default appearance reminds me of a Denny's restaurant. (For non-Yanks, Denny's is a restaurant chain given to garish color schemes.)
Configuration options are nice, but only if you have a reason to use them. If, like most people, your interaction with the desktop is confined to clicking on icons to launch programs, you'll never touch those options.
I think the default KDE icons are ugly, and nonoe of the icon sets available after an install are much better. Ditto the rest of the window controls, color schemes, etc.
I've been to the usual KDE "art" sites, but haven't found anything that's better.
I'm not trolling, really. Is there a site that helps you tone down KDE? I've seen some nice screenshots, so it must be possible.
Well, if the tool was open source, the e-week headline seems accurate to me. The fact that it was open source merited inclusion in the headline precisely because that has been a rare event. That's the newsworthy part of this story, not the fact that yet another Windows exploit is out there.
e-week has no reason to sugar-coat and bias their reporting in order to hype open source. If you want that, there's Slashdot and its corporate brethern or The Register, etc.
You forgot to use the adjective "effective". This just proves that no one cares if these guys get arrested. As for the person who says he was there and who says he didn't know they were arrested, why should he know? Did he expect Charles Gibson to make an announcement before the debate began? Did he expect the police to make a public announcement as people entered?
I'm sure a number of other people in St Louis were also arrested that evening. We haven't heard about them, either. Not because the mainstream press is conspiring to keep important news from us. No, that only happens in the brains of the tinfoil brigade. It's because the people who write the news decided, correctly, that their time was better spent working on other stories.
Well, Slashdot has no news staff, no reporters, snears at the value of editors and, even, proofreading, and makes no attempt to verify the veracity of the stories sent to it. So, yes, I do not believe Slashdot linked to the candidate's site out of any other motivation than simple-minded laziness and callousness. The headline will attract readers, which is all Slashdot wants. They don't care if the headline is the truth or a lie.
I also suggest Slashdot made no effort to find a second or third source reporting this story. I strongly doubt anyone at Slashdot phoned the candidate. the local police, or the debate's management for confirmation. I do believe some Slashdot weenie ran the story after about 5 seconds thought.
You may like the mindset of Slashdot stories, and you may not like what you here on legitimate news outlets, and you may not have the intellectual maturity to tell the difference between news and the blathering of talking heads, but you really ought not to put so much trust in the little rag called Slashdot.
Smart cars are one thing, but how about smart drivers?
Drivers seem to be getting dumber, and ruder, by the day.
So, I'd like smart cars that pull over to the curb and turn themselves off when the driver does something stupid, like turning right across three lanes of traffic from the far left lane, or speeding along the right shoulder on an Interstate to pass, or speeding up to go through a yellow light, or....
No question that lighter payloads allow lighter launchers. But, I do believe there is a limit on the size of a vehicle that can be droppped from an aircraft. Beyond that limit, are Rutan's technique's applicable to larger payloads launched by large, conventional boosters?
And, to be accurate. SS1 is not a spacecraft. It is an airplane. It reaches bureaucratically defined "space" for a few seconds. One wonders what would happen if someone slapped some auxilliary solid-rocket packs on an F-15, pointed it straight up, and let it coast as high as it could go. My guess is that it, too, might just get to the 100K line.
Finally, remembers that "aerostructures" are out of place in space. If Rutan's ideas can be successfully applied to larger vehicles capable of ferrying, say, 5-20 tons to LEO, then they may have a future as supply vehicles to LEO, where the real action will take place.
Slashdot Mirror
>> "I've also read that BASIC is really just a derivative of Pascal and VB even more so."
Elves live in your closet
There, you just read that. It isn't true, either.
Let's see...I use my credit card to buy a two-week tour package to Europe. The package includes airline reservations, hotel and restaurant reservations, a seat on a tour bus, and tickets to a couple of London shows. How's an RFID chip going to affect my privacy?
BTW, it's an especially good idea to add the chip to diplomatic passports. Passports can be, and are, counterfeited, so the chip will help to ensure authenticity.
I don't disagree with your assertions. Bear in mid that I'm arguing, however, that the Internet hsa not caused new information to be exposed. The technology of the net has obviously made it much easier to aggregate, access, and search information. The information, however, existed prior to the Internet and was available for aggregation, access and search by the public. Searching file cabinets is more cumbersome than running a database query, but the information in both repositories is equally public.
We also need to remember that in many common cases we actually do give permission for someone to access and use personal information. E.g., when you complete and sign a credit application or an employment application, you've very likely also given permission for your records to be accessed. It's there, in the fine print that no one reads. Ditto for websites, with those voluminous terms of use statements that no one reads.
I suspect most people wold quickly become very annoyed with people contacting them to seek permission to access their information. (Of course, we'd have the follow-on problem of confirming the identity of the entity seeking that permission. E.g., you may give an auto dealer permission to run your credit record, but would you recognize the name of the third-party firms that actually produce the record or who access your driving record to determine auto insurance eligibility and rates?)
You sound like you'd be willing to trade a bit of privacy for the ability to obtain a mortgage or a job, or to keep pedophiles from driving your kids to and from school.
My point is this: Internet technology has not increased the amount of personal information that is available to the public. It has made access to that information much easier, but there's nothing there that wasn't placed there freely by someone or that couldn't be acquired 40 years ago by visiting a local courthouse or other facility.
An important fact that's seldom discussed is that any information about me that might be available via the Internet has already been made public. The act of digitizing that information and making it available in a database increases its potential access, but it does not impact my privacy. The data were already in the public domain.
If some piece of information about me is not legally available to the public, and still appears on the Internet, then someone has broken the law.
So, those who argue for new privacy legislation to curb what they see as violations of their privacy on the Internet are really asking to reclassify as private many types of personal information that have long been accessible to the public.
Suppose, then, that former employees could not verify or deny that we used to work for them. Suppose a bank was not allowed to access the credit history of the guy who wants to buy your house. Suppose your daycare center could not check the criminal record of the kid who wants to be their new driver.
Technology and the Internet certainly ease access to information -- that was the point, after all -- but it is almost always info that was already available to the public.
Legislation that broadens government access to private information is, of course, a different issue.
>>"...I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public."
Of course, not. No more than the "general public" will decide it wants to watch programming about accounting, horticulture, or dairy farming.
The "general public" is everyone. People have different interests. No single interest has any more or less value than another.
You're mixing apples and oranges.
First, why would Volvo "not care" if someone else makes heater hoses for Volvos if Volvo believes there is still money to be made by retaining exclusive control of the right to sell Volvo heater hoses? Why would they want to give up that profit simply because they had "gone through their initial purchase of parts stock..."?
Second, We're not talking about IBM licensing other corporations to market this product. We're talking about IBM giving it away. That's a significant difference. Unless you believe that IBM has a moral obligation to give away software and that you have an obligation to impose that belief on IBM (I don't) then it makes no sense for IBM to give away a product until it believes all profit potential has been exhausted.
And, what planet do you live on?
why would a IBM even consider giving away a product that they can sell for a profit? That's what they do: Sell software, hardware and support.
Do you expect Volvo to give away free cars or the Disney corporation to offer free weeks at Disneyland?
Contrary to Stallman's dogma, most people think selling software is just as ethical as giving it away.
It's common for any retailer who controls a big chunk of a product's market to use that leverage to secure better deals. No one forced those retailers to wholesale all those CD's to Walmart.
Meanwhile, since when did selling 1 of every 5 instances of a product make you a monopoly? People must be getting those other 4 CD's by magic, eh?
Just confirms Slashdot's economic illiteracy.
Huh? 19th century technology?
What 19th century dirigible reached an altitude of 70,000 feet?
Someone must have "learned" history watching bad movies.
Typical.
But, think of all that choice! That's what it is all about, right?
If someone has a legitimate claim against some open source code used by Novell, and can prove it, Novell would likely agree to seek a license or would redesign the offending product. You don't sue, or fight a suit, when you know you'll lose.
I'm not especially in favor of universities going after websites and publications that criticize the school, but these folks are naive if they imagine that the school won't happily use the tool -- trademark violation -- that has been given to them.
That's especially true if the site uses any university facilities -- server space, network bandwidth, space on a dormitory floor, etc.
What free speech rights have been violated? If they, or you, think trademark registration is unConstitutional and violates the First Amendment, find some lawyers who agree and sue.
No one is telling the people who run that site what they can or cannot say. Some is telling them that they are violating a trademark. Whether this is true or not we will never learn from Slashdot, since Slashdot has no respect for journalistic ethics or the truth.
These stupid alleged 'rights" post are getting boring.
First, why the frequent reference to police? Can't Slashdot's crack uneditorial team tell the difference between civil and criminal law? More likely, they deliberately toss that in just to stir up more pageviews.
There's no reason to say that USCD is a trademark the school "claims" to own. It's a matter of public record. Look it up. (Of course, Slashdot is too damned lazy and incompetent to do that.) By using the word "claims", Slashdot is deliberately and falsely creating the impression the USCD is lieing about the trademark.
Trademake stories are a favorite here, trumpeted as being about "rights". That's bogus, of course. If USCD is trademarked, then no one else has nay right to use it. The only way Slashdot can argue that this is about rights is to argue that the concept of trademark itself is invalid. OSTG's corporate lawers, however, might have something to say about that.
I think the arrest of a third-party candidate who is essentially completely unknown has very little newsworthiness. I don't think CNN, or any other news source, can have its "legitimacy" -- whatever that means -- judged by whether or not it runs one insignificant news story. All news stories are created, written and published based on the resources available at the time, the other stories competing for those resources, and the judgment of the editor making the decisions. A story that gets reported one day might be ignored the next, and vice versa.
Even at Slashdot, which has blatantly abandoned any pretense of adhering to journalisitc ethics and standards, people with the nerve to call themselves "editors" decide which submissions are published and which are not.
I don't read or watch CNN, but I consider them a much more reputable and reliable news source than I consider Slashdot, which did point to the candidate's website. (Note, though, that Slashdot did not engage in any actual news creation or reporting. It simply took the submitters word for the veracity of the post and published it.)
If you expect a single news source to provide all the news you need to know in a complete, consisent fashion and in a way that consider "objective" (which usually means it accords with the listeners biases and bigotries), then you will never find a single source you're willing to call "legitimate".
>>"Control Panel | Appearance & Themes | Icons.."
As I said, I don't like any of the default icons offered by KDE. And, I must be using indecent distributions, because they don't seem to offer anything better.
And, of course people change from double-click to single-click, and adjust the fonts, and play with window focus. Those options are available in KDE, Gnome, and just about any other similar tool I can think of. KDE has many options, and many people like that. But, in truth, Gnome also has many options, expecially if you can figure out the impenetrable gconf. But, speaking for only myself, most of those options pertain to things I don't care about.
This "story" highlights the failure of so-called journalism taking place on sites like Slashdot.
There's been no verification that the remarks attributed to Slackware's Pat. V. are true. We simply have a single pseudonymous post to one online forum.
Where's the attempt to check with Pat V. to see if he actually made those remarks? Nowhere that I can see.
Slashdot, among others, lathered itself in sanctimonious glee when CBS was duped by a bogus memo. How is this any different?
If KDE is so bleepin' configurable, how do I replace the default icons with something I like without trolling all over the net looking for new icons?
I suspect a great deal of Gnome's appeal is simply aesthetic -- people like the way it looks out of the box. And, they don't like the way KDE looks. To my eye, KDE's default appearance reminds me of a Denny's restaurant. (For non-Yanks, Denny's is a restaurant chain given to garish color schemes.)
Configuration options are nice, but only if you have a reason to use them. If, like most people, your interaction with the desktop is confined to clicking on icons to launch programs, you'll never touch those options.
I think the default KDE icons are ugly, and nonoe of the icon sets available after an install are much better. Ditto the rest of the window controls, color schemes, etc.
I've been to the usual KDE "art" sites, but haven't found anything that's better.
I'm not trolling, really. Is there a site that helps you tone down KDE? I've seen some nice screenshots, so it must be possible.
Well, if the tool was open source, the e-week headline seems accurate to me. The fact that it was open source merited inclusion in the headline precisely because that has been a rare event. That's the newsworthy part of this story, not the fact that yet another Windows exploit is out there.
e-week has no reason to sugar-coat and bias their reporting in order to hype open source. If you want that, there's Slashdot and its corporate brethern or The Register, etc.
You forgot to use the adjective "effective". This just proves that no one cares if these guys get arrested. As for the person who says he was there and who says he didn't know they were arrested, why should he know? Did he expect Charles Gibson to make an announcement before the debate began? Did he expect the police to make a public announcement as people entered?
I'm sure a number of other people in St Louis were also arrested that evening. We haven't heard about them, either. Not because the mainstream press is conspiring to keep important news from us. No, that only happens in the brains of the tinfoil brigade. It's because the people who write the news decided, correctly, that their time was better spent working on other stories.
Well, Slashdot has no news staff, no reporters, snears at the value of editors and, even, proofreading, and makes no attempt to verify the veracity of the stories sent to it. So, yes, I do not believe Slashdot linked to the candidate's site out of any other motivation than simple-minded laziness and callousness. The headline will attract readers, which is all Slashdot wants. They don't care if the headline is the truth or a lie.
I also suggest Slashdot made no effort to find a second or third source reporting this story. I strongly doubt anyone at Slashdot phoned the candidate. the local police, or the debate's management for confirmation. I do believe some Slashdot weenie ran the story after about 5 seconds thought.
You may like the mindset of Slashdot stories, and you may not like what you here on legitimate news outlets, and you may not have the intellectual maturity to tell the difference between news and the blathering of talking heads, but you really ought not to put so much trust in the little rag called Slashdot.
If they hadn't been arrested, no one would have known they were there.
/. care about legitimate news?
These turkeys got exactly what they wanted.
And, since when is a candidate's partisan website a legitimate news source?
But, then, since when does
Smart cars are one thing, but how about smart drivers?
Drivers seem to be getting dumber, and ruder, by the day.
So, I'd like smart cars that pull over to the curb and turn themselves off when the driver does something stupid, like turning right across three lanes of traffic from the far left lane, or speeding along the right shoulder on an Interstate to pass, or speeding up to go through a yellow light, or....
No question that lighter payloads allow lighter launchers. But, I do believe there is a limit on the size of a vehicle that can be droppped from an aircraft. Beyond that limit, are Rutan's technique's applicable to larger payloads launched by large, conventional boosters?
And, to be accurate. SS1 is not a spacecraft. It is an airplane. It reaches bureaucratically defined "space" for a few seconds. One wonders what would happen if someone slapped some auxilliary solid-rocket packs on an F-15, pointed it straight up, and let it coast as high as it could go. My guess is that it, too, might just get to the 100K line.
Finally, remembers that "aerostructures" are out of place in space. If Rutan's ideas can be successfully applied to larger vehicles capable of ferrying, say, 5-20 tons to LEO, then they may have a future as supply vehicles to LEO, where the real action will take place.