No, it's terrorism.
Terrorism is the act of publicising your cause by making people afraid to go about their normal lives.
Okay, I'll accept your definition. You're right, it's terrorism.
But so what? Why should a murder committed in the name of scaring people be any different from a murder committed for any other reason? It's a murder. Yes, it's a particularly grisly one, with a ton of video evidence and a confession. So it should be easy to try the guy and lock him up... for murder.
I think we (society in general, not any particular country or government) do ourselves a great disservice when we label some crimes as "terrorism". Doing so sets these crimes apart from others, glorifies them, spreads the terror. I agree that the goal of terrorism is to spread fear. So fight back. Deny them that victory! Treat any and all terror attacks as ordinary crime. Report on it as a crime, try it as a crime. Take away terrorism's leverage by responding to the act instead of the motivation.
Terrorism loses its power when we refuse to be terrified.
Prosecution takes time and is costly. Worse, you might lose the case. It's much easier to put a site on the double-secret block list and not have to fool around with all that pesky "due process" stuff.
We only put bad guys on the block list. Therefore, if you're on the block list you must be a bad guy. Transparency and due process hurt the community by letting bad guys slip off the lists on technicalities.
I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this. If he confirms it, it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before. On the other hand, if he denies it it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before.
First, I'm entirely unclear about how Hitchhiker's Guide could be considered "science related". It's a great story, and it has all the trappings of science fiction, but it's almost (but not quite) exactly unlike science.
Second, though, I highly highly recommend Cory Doctorow's young adult novels, especially Little Brother. Good writing, good story, and the (computer) science is generally accurate. Plus it was actually written in the past decade so it doesn't seem like ancient history or retro "what we used to think the future would be like".
So to develop this further, we could create reusable OS-less (or minimal-OS VMs, if you prefer) instances to save the boot time.
Oh, wait, I guess we just reinvented the process...
Hey, I know! I bet we could speed things up even more if each one of these reusable minimal-OS VM "processes" could do several things at once. We could call it, I don't know, maybe "threads" of execution.
Well, yes and no. Mostly no, actually. In the early days the Internet wasn't anarchy. Remember, it was quite literally a network of networks. The organizations (mostly universities) running the individual networks had rules for those networks. The apparent lack of rules comes from the fact that all the involved organizations had very similar rules, not no rules. And, all the involved organizations had very similar goals. That's part of the reason we're where we are today. Basic protocols (DNS, SMTP, etc.) weren't designed with authentication in mind, because who would abuse them? It wasn't anarchy, it was community. Everyone's in this together, we all help each other, we're good neighbors. Hell, back in the day it was considered neighborly to run an open mail relay.
Then the net got bigger and harder for the community to self-police. People came in from outside the tiny group of technologists and academics. People saw money to be made at the expense of others. All the "good neighbor" policies became liabilities as scumbags moved in. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
To repeat: The early Internet was not an anarchy. The rules may have been implicit, but they were there.
If someone can come up with a disparaging name to call a female that is not sexist, please suggest one,
I find "asshole" a good all-gender term of disparagement. Everyone has one, so your target can't claim discrimination based on gender, race, orientation, or anything else. It's commonly understood to mean someone who's willfully loutish or stupid, which is usually the meaning you're going for when you use a disparaging term. It's a "naughty bit" in both the sexual and unclean senses, thus far more insulting than a less vulgar alternative.
The problem is that there's no way to get 100% of the userbase to either upgrade to 0.8 or downgrade to 0.7 instantly.
Wait, so Bitcoin is decentralized and distributed but requires all clients to remain in lockstep with each other? Nope, can't foresee any problems with that model...
"could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing"
Does anyone actually do that? I mean, other than in a couple of crappy TV ads? For that matter, has anyone ever used device-to-device file sharing more than once to see that it works? Outside of a couple novelty applications I never actually saw the Palm Pilot's beaming used for anything, or (god help us) Zune's squirting.
I guess if Bezos wants to patent an existing technology in a "novel" new application that nobody wants to use anyway, it's his money to throw away...
I am less forgiving - because people like you are responsible for the rise of Sirius Cybernetics, the robotics company behind some of the galaxy's most aggravating robots. "Share and enjoy!"
"Coffee with milk and no sugar"
"That will be three dollars"
"thanks"
"Coffee with milk and no sugar"
"You said you wanted 'coffee'. If that is correct, say yes."
"Yes."
"Would you like milk with that?"
"I just said, 'milk and no sugar'!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'yes' or 'no'."
"Yes."
"Would you like sugar with that?"
"What? No, dammit!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'yes' or 'no'."
"No!"
"What size would you like?"
"Large."
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Um, which is the big one?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Whichever is biggest."
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Tall! Give me a tall!"
"I'm sorry, we're sold out of the beverage you ordered, or one or more of the add-ins. Please make another selection and start again."
That red light (or stop sign) at the bottom of the hill is only for cars... I don't need to stop or even slow down
So what should a cyclist do facing a red light at the bottom of a hill that has stayed red for several minutes because the bicycle doesn't have enough metal surface to trip the induction sensor that it has remained stopped over?
The cyclist should go back and re-read the GP's complaint. See where it says, "don't need to stop or even slow down"? That part is key. So what should the cyclist do? STOP at the damned red light, make sure there's no cross-traffic, and then proceed. Through the red light if it really doesn't change for you. Just stop and look. That's all we automobilists ask of you in that situation.
Huh. I see it completely differently. During the time period there were three times as many Linux sales as OSX. Maybe it has less to do with market share of the operating systems or quality of their users, and more to do with the fact that all these games are old hat on OSX. OSX users who want to play those games have had plenty of time to get them at discount prices during other Steam sales. For Linux it's a new thing. This is the first time Linux users have been offered the games, (or at least, offered them in a nice convenient [and cheap!]) package. Well, no wonder sales on Linux are higher! It's just a fresh market versus a saturated one. Give it a year, then compare numbers.
Wow, I'm shocked. You mean the movie about how the world was saved by movie makers was the favorite among people who make movies for a living? How did that happen?
I agree with this... to a point. Online textbooks are indeed crap, and intentionally so. Publishers are terrified that the books will be copied, so they make them just as darned difficult to use as possible. And I'll even agree that most Sharepoint-style document servers are ridiculously bad. I pity anyone who's forced to use one.
On the other hand, there's no excuse at all to avoid putting the syllabus and course materials online. Anything that you'd print and hand out in class can be put online with no additional effort. Hell, I can imagine a virtual print driver that automagically publishes docs to a server while it sends them to the printer. Hit print once and bam, you've got hardcopy and a PDF ready to go. Or use something like Google Drive or Dropbox to save your files, and let the students pull them from there. If it's any more difficult than that then the process is broken.
Fact: Legit extensions installed with other software will now at the minimum need an annoying popup to allow them, or worse, digging through menus to figure out how to term them on instead of 'just working'.
"Legit extensions installed with other software"... Like that bullshit Ask Toolbar that got silently installed into Chrome when I loaded some crappy unrelated shareware the other day? Yeah, the world is sure going to lose out when that kind of anti-social behavior is made more difficult.
I can't think of any legitimate extensions that would be harmed by having Chrome open up with, "Hey, there's a new extension here, do you want to use it?" The only things that are going to suffer are the unwanted advertising / data mining extensions that survive only because people don't bother to uninstall them. Which they shouldn't have to do anyway, because the extension should never have been installed in the first place!
This is exactly what I came here to say. My son builds the model per the directions as soon as he gets it, but it ends up in the parts bin to be cannibalized for his own creations. Things get built, played with, and taken apart. Just like they did when I was a kid.
So, the intro goes on about how you need to take the time to learn the details, even the little things that you think you can skip for the time being. The example given is the output of ls -l. We are told that we will never understand Linux if we gloss over the confusing bits. We must dive in and know what each element of the output means.
And to do so, we're given a full in-browser emulator that boots Linux including pages and pages of boot-time console messages. Where's the explanation for these? Why is it okay to gloss over them when it's not okay to gloss over parts of a directory listing? Wouldn't "the hard way" be to start with the very first console message and work through the boot process?
Or is this just the author's way of saying, "You need to learn all the details up to the level that I know them. But the stuff I don't know about, like all that console garbage, isn't important anyway."?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'll accept your definition. You're right, it's terrorism.
But so what? Why should a murder committed in the name of scaring people be any different from a murder committed for any other reason? It's a murder. Yes, it's a particularly grisly one, with a ton of video evidence and a confession. So it should be easy to try the guy and lock him up... for murder.
I think we (society in general, not any particular country or government) do ourselves a great disservice when we label some crimes as "terrorism". Doing so sets these crimes apart from others, glorifies them, spreads the terror. I agree that the goal of terrorism is to spread fear. So fight back. Deny them that victory! Treat any and all terror attacks as ordinary crime. Report on it as a crime, try it as a crime. Take away terrorism's leverage by responding to the act instead of the motivation.
Terrorism loses its power when we refuse to be terrified.
In other news, a majority of those polled responded that the barn door should be closed, despite the horses running free in the pasture.
Prosecution takes time and is costly. Worse, you might lose the case. It's much easier to put a site on the double-secret block list and not have to fool around with all that pesky "due process" stuff.
We only put bad guys on the block list. Therefore, if you're on the block list you must be a bad guy. Transparency and due process hurt the community by letting bad guys slip off the lists on technicalities.
I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this. If he confirms it, it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before. On the other hand, if he denies it it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before.
Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.
That's why most modern Linux distributions have deprecated it. A murder here, a murder there, and suddenly Linux doesn't look so good anymore.
First, I'm entirely unclear about how Hitchhiker's Guide could be considered "science related". It's a great story, and it has all the trappings of science fiction, but it's almost (but not quite) exactly unlike science.
Second, though, I highly highly recommend Cory Doctorow's young adult novels, especially Little Brother. Good writing, good story, and the (computer) science is generally accurate. Plus it was actually written in the past decade so it doesn't seem like ancient history or retro "what we used to think the future would be like".
Hey, I know! I bet we could speed things up even more if each one of these reusable minimal-OS VM "processes" could do several things at once. We could call it, I don't know, maybe "threads" of execution.
Ethel! Call the patent office!
Well, yes and no. Mostly no, actually. In the early days the Internet wasn't anarchy. Remember, it was quite literally a network of networks. The organizations (mostly universities) running the individual networks had rules for those networks. The apparent lack of rules comes from the fact that all the involved organizations had very similar rules, not no rules. And, all the involved organizations had very similar goals. That's part of the reason we're where we are today. Basic protocols (DNS, SMTP, etc.) weren't designed with authentication in mind, because who would abuse them? It wasn't anarchy, it was community. Everyone's in this together, we all help each other, we're good neighbors. Hell, back in the day it was considered neighborly to run an open mail relay.
Then the net got bigger and harder for the community to self-police. People came in from outside the tiny group of technologists and academics. People saw money to be made at the expense of others. All the "good neighbor" policies became liabilities as scumbags moved in. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
To repeat: The early Internet was not an anarchy. The rules may have been implicit, but they were there.
I find "asshole" a good all-gender term of disparagement. Everyone has one, so your target can't claim discrimination based on gender, race, orientation, or anything else. It's commonly understood to mean someone who's willfully loutish or stupid, which is usually the meaning you're going for when you use a disparaging term. It's a "naughty bit" in both the sexual and unclean senses, thus far more insulting than a less vulgar alternative.
Asshole! Get yours today!
Wait, so Bitcoin is decentralized and distributed but requires all clients to remain in lockstep with each other? Nope, can't foresee any problems with that model...
"could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing"
Does anyone actually do that? I mean, other than in a couple of crappy TV ads? For that matter, has anyone ever used device-to-device file sharing more than once to see that it works? Outside of a couple novelty applications I never actually saw the Palm Pilot's beaming used for anything, or (god help us) Zune's squirting.
I guess if Bezos wants to patent an existing technology in a "novel" new application that nobody wants to use anyway, it's his money to throw away...
Right on. Someone's just going to send up a quad-copter with a wifi camera and claim the prize.
Go stick your head in a pig!
"Coffee with milk and no sugar"
"You said you wanted 'coffee'. If that is correct, say yes."
"Yes."
"Would you like milk with that?"
"I just said, 'milk and no sugar'!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'yes' or 'no'."
"Yes."
"Would you like sugar with that?"
"What? No, dammit!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'yes' or 'no'."
"No!"
"What size would you like?"
"Large."
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Um, which is the big one?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Whichever is biggest."
"I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response. Please answer 'grande', 'venti', or 'tall'.
"Tall! Give me a tall!"
"I'm sorry, we're sold out of the beverage you ordered, or one or more of the add-ins. Please make another selection and start again."
The cyclist should go back and re-read the GP's complaint. See where it says, "don't need to stop or even slow down"? That part is key. So what should the cyclist do? STOP at the damned red light, make sure there's no cross-traffic, and then proceed. Through the red light if it really doesn't change for you. Just stop and look. That's all we automobilists ask of you in that situation.
Huh. I see it completely differently. During the time period there were three times as many Linux sales as OSX. Maybe it has less to do with market share of the operating systems or quality of their users, and more to do with the fact that all these games are old hat on OSX. OSX users who want to play those games have had plenty of time to get them at discount prices during other Steam sales. For Linux it's a new thing. This is the first time Linux users have been offered the games, (or at least, offered them in a nice convenient [and cheap!]) package. Well, no wonder sales on Linux are higher! It's just a fresh market versus a saturated one. Give it a year, then compare numbers.
Wow, I'm shocked. You mean the movie about how the world was saved by movie makers was the favorite among people who make movies for a living? How did that happen?
Dude! Know where I can get a bootleg of this concert? It sounds AWESOME!
I agree with this... to a point. Online textbooks are indeed crap, and intentionally so. Publishers are terrified that the books will be copied, so they make them just as darned difficult to use as possible. And I'll even agree that most Sharepoint-style document servers are ridiculously bad. I pity anyone who's forced to use one.
On the other hand, there's no excuse at all to avoid putting the syllabus and course materials online. Anything that you'd print and hand out in class can be put online with no additional effort. Hell, I can imagine a virtual print driver that automagically publishes docs to a server while it sends them to the printer. Hit print once and bam, you've got hardcopy and a PDF ready to go. Or use something like Google Drive or Dropbox to save your files, and let the students pull them from there. If it's any more difficult than that then the process is broken.
"Whoo! Dead guy smoke. Don't breathe that!"
Bah. An unknown like Coulton should be paying Fox for the nationwide distribution on a hit TV show.
"Legit extensions installed with other software"... Like that bullshit Ask Toolbar that got silently installed into Chrome when I loaded some crappy unrelated shareware the other day? Yeah, the world is sure going to lose out when that kind of anti-social behavior is made more difficult.
I can't think of any legitimate extensions that would be harmed by having Chrome open up with, "Hey, there's a new extension here, do you want to use it?" The only things that are going to suffer are the unwanted advertising / data mining extensions that survive only because people don't bother to uninstall them. Which they shouldn't have to do anyway, because the extension should never have been installed in the first place!
This is exactly what I came here to say. My son builds the model per the directions as soon as he gets it, but it ends up in the parts bin to be cannibalized for his own creations. Things get built, played with, and taken apart. Just like they did when I was a kid.
So, the intro goes on about how you need to take the time to learn the details, even the little things that you think you can skip for the time being. The example given is the output of ls -l. We are told that we will never understand Linux if we gloss over the confusing bits. We must dive in and know what each element of the output means.
And to do so, we're given a full in-browser emulator that boots Linux including pages and pages of boot-time console messages. Where's the explanation for these? Why is it okay to gloss over them when it's not okay to gloss over parts of a directory listing? Wouldn't "the hard way" be to start with the very first console message and work through the boot process?
Or is this just the author's way of saying, "You need to learn all the details up to the level that I know them. But the stuff I don't know about, like all that console garbage, isn't important anyway."?