Here's why: "Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to this web page. "Reason: "Internet Telephony is filtered." - So I'm glad slashdot linked to the blog so I'd be able to read what was going on. My workplace is so backwards they still use old-fashioned telephone lines rather than internet phones. Oh and hot water radiators with that classic "thunk thunk thunk" sound when they turn on. Feels like I'm living in the 1930s.;-)
Ahh so YOU'RE the one blocking my skype.;-) I don't understand why Net Admins (such as yourself) block useful tools like Skype. Or streaming radio. I don't see any harm in letting those things into the office space, and it provides a more pleasant working environment (to distract from the boredom of sitting at a desk all day).
"A bug in Skype for Windows version 5.0.0.152 made the application crash when receiving late messages..... previous versions for Windows and all the other versions for non-Windows machines were not affected by the bug."
The new versions are often *more* buggy than the last version. Just recently Microsoft auto-updated my work computer from IE7 to 8, and the browser worked perfectly but something in the update killed my network connection. I had to waste an hour going back to the previous version (as did most people in the office). And then there was that Antivirus Software update from three week ago that killed people's Windows PCs by making them unbootable.
Programmers really should be more careful with their updates, to make sure the new X.y release is better rather than worse. But since they aren't careful I turned off auto-updates. They are too dangerous.
"At its core, Skype relies on a third generation P2P network that has lots of peer nodes and a number of supernodes, one for several hundreds of nodes. Since Skype does not have a centralized directory to support finding routes between two or more nodes that want to communicate, the virtual network uses supernodes as directories. When a client enters Skype, it registers itself with a supernode, giving its IP address so it can be found by other clients who might want to establish a communication."
Skype is a peer-to-peer network? Like torrent? So the supernode is like a tracker website, to connect peers to one another? No supernode==no tracker==no calls going through. Hmmmm. Maybe they should try DHT.
By that reasoning companies don't need to cater to the masses, but instead can just build a few hundred $500,000 cars to market to the rich. A few companies have tried that but most went bankrupt in the 1920s and 30s. It is more profitable to cater to the masses (Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota), because the "poor" masses have more collective power (dollars) than the minority rich.
>>>It's bad when the government does it, but good when corporations do it, yadda yadda.
NOT what I said. You got an F in reading comprehension, I bet. It's bad when either of these organizations do it, but the difference is that corporations don't have the power to suck money from my wallet against my will, throw me in jail for years, send out goons to give me a Rodney King-style beating, or execute me on the electric chair. Only the government holds the monopoly to do that.
>>>The threat of censorship in liberal democracies isn't as much from governments as it is from corporations which have a monopoly on their market.
What cave have you been living in? Almost every day slashdot posts a new story about the Australian or French or British or US or EU trying to censor the internet. And they have the power to enforce that censorship by throwing your body into jail, or sucking money out of your wallet (fines). Neither amazon nor any other corporation has that kind of power.
Also to claim amazon or google or whoever has some kind of monopoly is ridiculous. There are tons of other bookstores where I can shop, and during this last month I gradually excised google from my browsers to use other search engines (like bing, yahoo, hotbot, lycos, etc). Even the mighty Microsoft which was sued for its monopolistic practices has seen its share of the webbrowser dwindle from ~90% downto ~50% as other competitors steal away market share.
Bottom Line: Corporations have power but it must be shared with other competitors. Consumers hold the power of choice to make a corporation succeed or go bankrupt (Circuit city, wards, GM). In contrast the government holds the monopoly on the power to jail, take, or kill. That is far, far, far more dangerous than pissant little amazon.
It was pretty common in Ancient cultures for relatives to not just have sex, but also marry. Even amongst the Romans who were advanced enough to know the negative consequences.
Those same books exist in the back of my local Barnes & Noble. Except they are american, not japanese, include both boys & girls, and they are not wearing any clothes at all. You see: Photography of nudes is protected by the First Amendment of the Supreme law of the land. (Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of expression)
Libraries censor books all the time. I'm not sure where you got the idea that libraries can't do that, because they can. Such as refusing to carry Huck Finn because of words like "nigger", or excising the breast-feeling and vagina-touching passages from Anne Frank's Diary.
"Grand Master" is a title that was conferred upon Heinlein (and Asimov and others) by the World Science Fiction Society (aka the hugo award people).
My corporate black list continues to grow. Let's see: There's Toyota, GM, Sony, Microsoft, Dell, Apple iPad/store, Walmart, Ebay (great for buyers;bad for sellers), and now Amazon with their censorship. ----- Maybe it'd be easier to just list the good guys: Honda and Ford and...um, Nintendo maybe (although they were pretty bad from 1985-95).
>>>If you don't like it, don't shop there.
You are so right. The free market is the ultimate form of democracy where dollars are your votes, and you can cast those votes for any company you choose. Companies that don't receive enough votes go bankrupt (Circuit City, Wards, etc).
I still can't figure out why Sony stopped the Dreamcast. When it was discontinued at the end of 2001, the DC was still in the #1 spot for most units sold (although PS2 was catching up). I think Sega gave up too quickly, and if they had stayed with the DC it would have sold more units than the Nintendo Gamecube or Xbox. (i.e. ended in second place for the 2000-05 generation)
(1) No. (2) Anonymous Cowards should post under their UserIDs, instead of being... well... cowards. You don't see me hiding behind AC posts. You have an ID so use it, and the moderators can give you some +1 karma.
Even if the Ventura Internment camps is complete-and-utter BS (which I believe it is), doesn't it bother you that the White House has power to yank any TV show they don't like? Just by picking up the phone, calling the cable channel, and demanding it be removed or else the channel would be audited.
This is the kind of crap Nixon used to do when he was in power, except in his case, it was mostly blocking newspapers from printing unfavorable articles. Different target but still suppression of the free press.
[citation needed] Here: Governor Ventura stated in a radio interview why the episode was pulled: He talked to TRUtv, they revealed they had received a call and were told to yank the episode, or be audited. The last part may have been an empty threat nevertheless it had the desired result. TRUtv is afraid to air the episode a second time, and they pulled it off their website.
As for the episode's content, even if it's 100% whackjob fiction, it does not matter. (1) It's not as if this country has never used internment camps before. Just talk to an American from the 1940s who found themselves arrested & thrown into one. (2) This is a case of government doing what it is explicitly forbidden to do (not block free speech or press).
This conversation reminds me of [American] churches: - Thou shalt not lie. - Thou shalt not look at nude women. - Thou shalt not own a car if you work or live in Paris, you heathen.
I prefer Mark Twain's viewpoint: "Stop trying to take away all my vices. It's boring." It seems we've replaced the moral tyranny of the Catholic church (inquisition, suppression of Galileo, etc) with the Green church. They've even created videos where children get "blown up" if they use a plastic bag instead of paper (see youtube).
I can certainly understand banning cars that emit poisons which damage human lungs (carbon monoxide, soot, ozone), but not CO2 which doesn't harm human lungs, and is also a necessary ingredient for life (makes the food grow). And yeah I know about global warming, but even if every human disappeared tomorrow, it would only drop the CO2 in the atmosphere by 0.1%. That's it. So really we have no hope of fixing the problem, even if we all went extinct.
We must have watched different videos. What I saw was: - journalists walking around, misidentified as carrying guns (they were cameras), and then shot - the Iraqi version of an ambulance coming to rescue the journalists, and it too was killed
If the military had simply admitted they screwed-up, fine, but they classified the video and would have kept it quiet for the next 50 years. This is unacceptable. This is how the politicians hide their guilt & try to pretend to be flawless.
As for "government": Since various governments around the world are responsible for killing over 150 million of their OWN citizens (from 1910 to now), I think it very reasonable to fear the government (and its workers). Government was the #1 killer of the last hundred years. If it were a car or a cigarette, it would be banned as being too dangerous to exist. - "Government is a troublesome servant and a fearful master." - Geo. Washington
I'm also curious why you think the "Collateral Damage video" means nothing. The US Military had been telling family and friends of the missing journalists/children that they had no idea what happened to them. The military claimed no knowledge. The military was caught in a lie.
It makes you wonder how many of the POW-MIAs are not really missing, but instead the evidence of their death is locked up in the Pentagon because it's "secret". I can understand keeping secret info about future missions, but not past events. Not a white-washing to pretend "We don't know," when you actually do know but are ashamed to reveal the information.
Thomas Jefferson said unelected servants are akin to the unelected nobility that once ruled America. And just as dangerous because "they are not answerable to the People" and "have the same passions for power and prestige as any other man". i.e. Civil servants are liked a new noble class that steals the liberty & wealth from ordinary folks without fear of retribution.
He later said such as class represents an Oligarchy (rule by a few leaders), not a democracy or a republic (rule by law).
More recently the US government was caught putting Americans in concentration camps (1940s) without due process, experimenting on blacks (1930s-50s), stealing an election (1970s-watergate), falsifying photos to create an excuse to go to war (2000s- Iraqi WMDs), and on and on. We the people have the right to know, and someone arguing we should NOT know these things is someone who never studied American history.
Disagree. The majority of Christians ARE control freaks. That's why a gay man or woman cannot get married - because Christians refuse to let them have the freedom to do so, or let the government pass same-sex marriage licenses, in order to suppress what they consider "filthy heathen sinners". And don't come-up with some bullshit about how marriage is religious. The word "marriage" was invented by the Latins circa 1000 BC and defined to include any kind of coupling, whether male-female or same-sex.
There's a reason the Founders did not want an official state religion. They didn't want to be suppressed by moral dictatorship. The history of the Catholic and Church of England are just as bloody and despotic as the history of Nazi Germany. Whither goes religious persons also goes DEATH and tyranny. Just look at modern-day Iran or Arabia.
A religious person deserves about as much respect as a member of the KKK... even if he himself has not done anything wrong, he is supporting an organization with a long history of Hate and suppression (sometimes even murder).
If I'm switching from Microsoft Office or Media Player or IE -to- Openoffice or VLC or Firefox, then that's exactly what I'm doing:
- Liberating both my software and myself. So I think "liberated software" makes sense versus "tyranny software" like MS operates to control/chain the user.
This conversation reminds me of church: - Thou shalt not lie. - Thou shalt not look at nude women. - Thou shalt not own a car if you work or live in Paris, you heathen.
I prefer Mark Twain's viewpoint: "Stop trying to take away all my vices. It's boring." It seems we've replaced the moral tyranny of the Catholic church with a new moral tyranny of the Green church. I can certainly understand banning cars that emit poisons (carbon monoxide, soot, ozone) which damage human lungs, but not CO2. First off CO2 is not a poison, and second it's a necessary ingredient in life (makes the food grow).
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure why you didn't link to the actual article on Skype http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/cio_update.html [skype.com] Instead of the blogspam site.
Here's why: "Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to this web page. ;-)
"Reason:
"Internet Telephony is filtered." - So I'm glad slashdot linked to the blog so I'd be able to read what was going on. My workplace is so backwards they still use old-fashioned telephone lines rather than internet phones. Oh and hot water radiators with that classic "thunk thunk thunk" sound when they turn on. Feels like I'm living in the 1930s.
Ahh so YOU'RE the one blocking my skype. ;-)
I don't understand why Net Admins (such as yourself) block useful tools like Skype. Or streaming radio. I don't see any harm in letting those things into the office space, and it provides a more pleasant working environment (to distract from the boredom of sitting at a desk all day).
"A bug in Skype for Windows version 5.0.0.152 made the application crash when receiving late messages..... previous versions for Windows and all the other versions for non-Windows machines were not affected by the bug."
The new versions are often *more* buggy than the last version. Just recently Microsoft auto-updated my work computer from IE7 to 8, and the browser worked perfectly but something in the update killed my network connection. I had to waste an hour going back to the previous version (as did most people in the office). And then there was that Antivirus Software update from three week ago that killed people's Windows PCs by making them unbootable.
Programmers really should be more careful with their updates, to make sure the new X.y release is better rather than worse. But since they aren't careful I turned off auto-updates. They are too dangerous.
"At its core, Skype relies on a third generation P2P network that has lots of peer nodes and a number of supernodes, one for several hundreds of nodes. Since Skype does not have a centralized directory to support finding routes between two or more nodes that want to communicate, the virtual network uses supernodes as directories. When a client enters Skype, it registers itself with a supernode, giving its IP address so it can be found by other clients who might want to establish a communication."
Skype is a peer-to-peer network? Like torrent? So the supernode is like a tracker website, to connect peers to one another? No supernode==no tracker==no calls going through. Hmmmm. Maybe they should try DHT.
By that reasoning companies don't need to cater to the masses, but instead can just build a few hundred $500,000 cars to market to the rich. A few companies have tried that but most went bankrupt in the 1920s and 30s. It is more profitable to cater to the masses (Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota), because the "poor" masses have more collective power (dollars) than the minority rich.
>>>It's bad when the government does it, but good when corporations do it, yadda yadda.
NOT what I said.
You got an F in reading comprehension, I bet. It's bad when either of these organizations do it, but the difference is that corporations don't have the power to suck money from my wallet against my will, throw me in jail for years, send out goons to give me a Rodney King-style beating, or execute me on the electric chair. Only the government holds the monopoly to do that.
>>>The threat of censorship in liberal democracies isn't as much from governments as it is from corporations which have a monopoly on their market.
What cave have you been living in? Almost every day slashdot posts a new story about the Australian or French or British or US or EU trying to censor the internet. And they have the power to enforce that censorship by throwing your body into jail, or sucking money out of your wallet (fines). Neither amazon nor any other corporation has that kind of power.
Also to claim amazon or google or whoever has some kind of monopoly is ridiculous. There are tons of other bookstores where I can shop, and during this last month I gradually excised google from my browsers to use other search engines (like bing, yahoo, hotbot, lycos, etc). Even the mighty Microsoft which was sued for its monopolistic practices has seen its share of the webbrowser dwindle from ~90% downto ~50% as other competitors steal away market share.
Bottom Line: Corporations have power but it must be shared with other competitors. Consumers hold the power of choice to make a corporation succeed or go bankrupt (Circuit city, wards, GM). In contrast the government holds the monopoly on the power to jail, take, or kill. That is far, far, far more dangerous than pissant little amazon.
It was pretty common in Ancient cultures for relatives to not just have sex, but also marry. Even amongst the Romans who were advanced enough to know the negative consequences.
Those same books exist in the back of my local Barnes & Noble. Except they are american, not japanese, include both boys & girls, and they are not wearing any clothes at all. You see: Photography of nudes is protected by the First Amendment of the Supreme law of the land. (Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of expression)
Only images of under-18 sex is outlawed.
Libraries censor books all the time.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that libraries can't do that, because they can. Such as refusing to carry Huck Finn because of words like "nigger", or excising the breast-feeling and vagina-touching passages from Anne Frank's Diary.
"Grand Master" is a title that was conferred upon Heinlein (and Asimov and others) by the World Science Fiction Society (aka the hugo award people).
My corporate black list continues to grow. Let's see: There's Toyota, GM, Sony, Microsoft, Dell, Apple iPad/store, Walmart, Ebay (great for buyers;bad for sellers), and now Amazon with their censorship. ----- Maybe it'd be easier to just list the good guys: Honda and Ford and...um, Nintendo maybe (although they were pretty bad from 1985-95).
>>>If you don't like it, don't shop there.
You are so right. The free market is the ultimate form of democracy where dollars are your votes, and you can cast those votes for any company you choose. Companies that don't receive enough votes go bankrupt (Circuit City, Wards, etc).
I still can't figure out why Sony stopped the Dreamcast. When it was discontinued at the end of 2001, the DC was still in the #1 spot for most units sold (although PS2 was catching up). I think Sega gave up too quickly, and if they had stayed with the DC it would have sold more units than the Nintendo Gamecube or Xbox. (i.e. ended in second place for the 2000-05 generation)
(1) No.
(2) Anonymous Cowards should post under their UserIDs, instead of being... well... cowards. You don't see me hiding behind AC posts. You have an ID so use it, and the moderators can give you some +1 karma.
Even if the Ventura Internment camps is complete-and-utter BS (which I believe it is), doesn't it bother you that the White House has power to yank any TV show they don't like? Just by picking up the phone, calling the cable channel, and demanding it be removed or else the channel would be audited.
This is the kind of crap Nixon used to do when he was in power, except in his case, it was mostly blocking newspapers from printing unfavorable articles. Different target but still suppression of the free press.
[citation needed] Here: Governor Ventura stated in a radio interview why the episode was pulled: He talked to TRUtv, they revealed they had received a call and were told to yank the episode, or be audited. The last part may have been an empty threat nevertheless it had the desired result. TRUtv is afraid to air the episode a second time, and they pulled it off their website.
As for the episode's content, even if it's 100% whackjob fiction, it does not matter. (1) It's not as if this country has never used internment camps before. Just talk to an American from the 1940s who found themselves arrested & thrown into one. (2) This is a case of government doing what it is explicitly forbidden to do (not block free speech or press).
This conversation reminds me of [American] churches:
- Thou shalt not lie.
- Thou shalt not look at nude women.
- Thou shalt not own a car if you work or live in Paris, you heathen.
I prefer Mark Twain's viewpoint: "Stop trying to take away all my vices. It's boring." It seems we've replaced the moral tyranny of the Catholic church (inquisition, suppression of Galileo, etc) with the Green church. They've even created videos where children get "blown up" if they use a plastic bag instead of paper (see youtube).
I can certainly understand banning cars that emit poisons which damage human lungs (carbon monoxide, soot, ozone), but not CO2 which doesn't harm human lungs, and is also a necessary ingredient for life (makes the food grow). And yeah I know about global warming, but even if every human disappeared tomorrow, it would only drop the CO2 in the atmosphere by 0.1%. That's it. So really we have no hope of fixing the problem, even if we all went extinct.
>>>The Citroën "2CV" originally did mean "2 Horsepower".
Doubtful. 2 horsepower isn't enough to move a car down the highway. Heck even my lawnmower has more HP than 2.
We must have watched different videos. What I saw was:
- journalists walking around, misidentified as carrying guns (they were cameras), and then shot
- the Iraqi version of an ambulance coming to rescue the journalists, and it too was killed
If the military had simply admitted they screwed-up, fine, but they classified the video and would have kept it quiet for the next 50 years. This is unacceptable. This is how the politicians hide their guilt & try to pretend to be flawless.
As for "government": Since various governments around the world are responsible for killing over 150 million of their OWN citizens (from 1910 to now), I think it very reasonable to fear the government (and its workers). Government was the #1 killer of the last hundred years. If it were a car or a cigarette, it would be banned as being too dangerous to exist. - "Government is a troublesome servant and a fearful master." - Geo. Washington
I'm also curious why you think the "Collateral Damage video" means nothing. The US Military had been telling family and friends of the missing journalists/children that they had no idea what happened to them. The military claimed no knowledge. The military was caught in a lie.
It makes you wonder how many of the POW-MIAs are not really missing, but instead the evidence of their death is locked up in the Pentagon because it's "secret". I can understand keeping secret info about future missions, but not past events. Not a white-washing to pretend "We don't know," when you actually do know but are ashamed to reveal the information.
Thomas Jefferson said unelected servants are akin to the unelected nobility that once ruled America. And just as dangerous because "they are not answerable to the People" and "have the same passions for power and prestige as any other man". i.e. Civil servants are liked a new noble class that steals the liberty & wealth from ordinary folks without fear of retribution.
He later said such as class represents an Oligarchy (rule by a few leaders), not a democracy or a republic (rule by law).
You don't have to go THAT extreme. Jeez.
More recently the US government was caught putting Americans in concentration camps (1940s) without due process, experimenting on blacks (1930s-50s), stealing an election (1970s-watergate), falsifying photos to create an excuse to go to war (2000s- Iraqi WMDs), and on and on. We the people have the right to know, and someone arguing we should NOT know these things is someone who never studied American history.
Disagree.
The majority of Christians ARE control freaks. That's why a gay man or woman cannot get married - because Christians refuse to let them have the freedom to do so, or let the government pass same-sex marriage licenses, in order to suppress what they consider "filthy heathen sinners". And don't come-up with some bullshit about how marriage is religious. The word "marriage" was invented by the Latins circa 1000 BC and defined to include any kind of coupling, whether male-female or same-sex.
There's a reason the Founders did not want an official state religion. They didn't want to be suppressed by moral dictatorship. The history of the Catholic and Church of England are just as bloody and despotic as the history of Nazi Germany. Whither goes religious persons also goes DEATH and tyranny. Just look at modern-day Iran or Arabia.
A religious person deserves about as much respect as a member of the KKK... even if he himself has not done anything wrong, he is supporting an organization with a long history of Hate and suppression (sometimes even murder).
If I'm switching from Microsoft Office or Media Player or IE -to- Openoffice or VLC or Firefox, then that's exactly what I'm doing:
- Liberating both my software and myself. So I think "liberated software" makes sense versus "tyranny software" like MS operates to control/chain the user.
Doubtful. 2 horsepower isn't enough to move a car down the highway. Heck even my lawnmower has more HP than 2.
This conversation reminds me of church:
- Thou shalt not lie.
- Thou shalt not look at nude women.
- Thou shalt not own a car if you work or live in Paris, you heathen.
I prefer Mark Twain's viewpoint: "Stop trying to take away all my vices. It's boring." It seems we've replaced the moral tyranny of the Catholic church with a new moral tyranny of the Green church. I can certainly understand banning cars that emit poisons (carbon monoxide, soot, ozone) which damage human lungs, but not CO2. First off CO2 is not a poison, and second it's a necessary ingredient in life (makes the food grow).