It's been stated a few times already, but if you knew how secure a lot of these types of buildings are, you would understand.
It's not like they're going to be searching you for Furbies when you try to go to work. They don't let you bring ANYTHING in that could conceivably house or be modified (intentionally or unintentionally) to bring data or information out.
You walk in with your clothes (and MAYBE a briefcase if you have papers, but if this were allowed I wouldn't be surprised if they searched/X-rayed it before letting you in). Everything else is in the building (likely in a safe). I've even been told (treat this as 4th-hand) that even the PC's have removable hard drives, and everyone's hard drive is stored in its own little safe when you leave for the day.
They aren't making special policy for Furbies, they're just saying, "Yes, Furbies fall under the same 'banned items' rules to which everything else you're prohibited from bringing in applies."
It'll be the panicky nature of society. There will either be a mass of bank withdrawals shortly before Y2K or one or two relatively minor Y2K-related problems will cause widespread panic.
So long as the media is hyping the Y2K problem as the "end-of-the-world" bug, capable of detonating all nuclear arsenals of the world, capable of toppling buildings and governments, eliciting riots and mass hysteria, society as a whole will be very sensitive when the time comes.
For a more comprehensive look at my thoughts regarding at least the financial side of things (which aren't the only sociological threats I can forsee for the arrival of next year), read about it.
Oh, but I do. And Mp3 is just the start. Just like law enforcement, the music industry is behind the times as far as technology goes. Especially in America. 44.1Mhz for a CD? That's laughable with the type of technology we have now. All too often artists have to "dummy-down" a 48Mhz total digital recording to the good ole standard(You knew that, it was for the sake of other readers:-)) So we get a handful of all digital recordings, and with the tried and true method of artistic fullfillment in the industry, running your own label, you have a leg up on the "majors" even if you cant afford 7 color web-press and multi-plugin websites. Success can be achieved, if you think success is monetary gain. But if you dont, then just getting music release is very successful indeed.
I agree that this is the direction we need to try and go. But, existing groups locked into contracts with existing labels will have a hard time migrating. It's just a matter of finding people with enough flexibility, backing and will to make something like this work. I would love to see it happen.
But I don't think one band whining about their record label's greed and inflexibility is the way to make it happen.
If you've found yourself someplace during or immediately after high school that can teach and carry you into a career you're looking for, I would probably stick with that. If you're just the computer geek type who spends most of his/her time in the computer lab and works fast food on the weekends, I would suggest you plant yourself in college.
In my opinion, "real world" experience in the field you want to be in for four years is more valuable than a four-year computer degree ESPECIALLY if you have a tremendous amount of computer background and experience already.
BUT: For those script kiddies and IRC junkies that just have passing knowledge of the various aspects of computers, DO NOT delude yourself into thinking that that is a solid core of computer experience. You are a dime a dozen and will not make it in the real world with only those skills. If you still think that you are pretty smart, be an intern at some real places. Most people will quickly find out that there's a lot more they don't know.
By the time I had finished high school, I was working for an Internet provider (starting off doing tech support but quickly moved into other more intimate areas of networking/programming/writing, etc.). I learned more in the two years I worked there than I would have learned in two, three, or even four years at college.
I do not, however, think that field experience is a perfect replacement for college.
In college, you are taught a way of thinking, of problem solving. While real-world experience can be extremely valuable, most people with degrees have a stronger foundation of problem-solving skills than others. Besides teaching you how to program and how an operating system works, college teaches you how to think. For this reason, I believe a college background can be a valuable thing to have.
Additionally, many corporations (for whatever reasons) MANDATE that their employees have a college degree. You can have all the experience in the world, and could be absolutely perfect for a job, but without that degree, they simply can't hire you. College degrees also tend to be beneficial when it comes to "first impressions". Someone browsing over two resumes without any real knowledge of either applicant will tend to give the one with a college degree more thought. Unless you've accomplished a lot and have a good, strong amount of resume material (none of this "designed web pages for..." or "technical support for..." crap), you will tend to be passed over in favor of someone with likely less experience but with a college degree.
If you do decide to go the college route, you don't even necessarily have to finish. Sometimes employers will see that you've got a good core knowledge base from a few university courses, and they will be satisfied with that (assuming you held a good GPR and didn't flunk out). Don't, however, drop out after the first year simply because you don't think you're learning anything. In all likelyhood, you won't actually start learning anything useful until your 2nd or even 3rd year.
If you don't decide to go to college, and think you're making it fine now and can only advance your career, I would still consider taking some college courses. I find that good writing skills are hard to find among computer people that haven't been to college, so some english and/or technical writing courses could be helpful there. Some courses in secure programming or databases might be useful. Most "computer people" out of high school tend to have the same computer background. They might be able to program in C, might have some unix experience, but lack some other, very necessary, skill sets. Try to explore your weaknesses and patch them up. Push yourself out and beyond what your peers are all gravitating towards. And, most importantly, do NOT be arrogant and assume there isn't anything out there for you to learn. Quite a few slashdotters and annoying high school geeks have made that fatal mistake. You do NOT know everything, and in most all cases, everyone with a degree knows more than you, in most areas.
Whether or not you choose to get a degree, ALWAYS KEEP UP WITH THE TECHNOLOGY. I cannot stress this enough. A ten-year-old CS degree is usually worthless if you haven't kept up with the news, the trends, and the new technologies. If you can find a company that is technologically stale and has no desire to innovate or keep up, then you might be okay, but the real successful people are the ones that keep themselves on the edge of the latest technologies. This applies to both people pursuing and not pursuing college degrees. The instant you graduate from college, many of the things you've learned there are already out of date. Keep up!
So if you're leaning towards going to college, do it. If you're not sure, you'd might as well start off in college. You can always quit later. If you're leaning towards skipping college and going straight into a career, think carefully. Unless you've already got a decent amount of background and something besides generic "computer skills", you aren't likely to find anything but PC "grunt work" (tech support, repair, etc.).
Having a college degree (or at least some experience) doesn't hurt, but not having one can.
I'm not an Emacs user, so someone else might have the proper solution, but I would look and see if you can tell Emacs to use a different character besides a space for indentation (i.e. a hard tab), and set your indent level to 1? It would "auto-indent" 3 "spaces" (tabs) if you were 3 levels deep...
Not sure if this is even in the right ballpark, but it might be a usable hack. For all I know there's an Emacs option specifically designed to do what you're trying to do.
All this talk about how musician's should read contracts and how if you dont like it, dont sign shows me you people have not a FUCKING clue as to how the music industry works. Why do you think as a whole the music industry doesnt like MP3? Why did they pitch a bitch when stores started selling used CDs? It's because the industry is what sets the standards, not the artist.
Having worked in the music industry for several years (as a DJ, programming director) and having worked with several bands (in the family and friends, many of which are signed with relatively major and minor labels), I do not consider myself ignorant. I may not have had the experiences you or your friends have had, but I am rooting my arguments based upon what I have seen and know.
Everytime you buy a record for $17.99USD at your neighborhood chain store, you're saying, yes I like how the industry is ran and I dont mind that the artist is only getting $1.5USD for this CD.
No, I'm saying, "I want to buy this CD because I like the music or the artist and I'm willing to spend $17.99USD for it." To be honest, I (like most consumers) could care less where the money is going. If I found out that one label and/or artist was being significantly more evil than the rest, I might take that into consideration when contemplating purchase, but this is the way the record business is. So I bought the CD. So what? Does this make me an evil person for supporting the tyrrany of the record industry? No; I'm just a consumer. I've also bought CD's from most all of the friends and friends of friends that have released CD's. I support my friends.
Yes, being a band IS a job. There's a tremendous overhead involved and frequently, bands will be too sucked into the "we're gonna make it big!" bug that they're WILLING to sign over most of the money they make as well as the rights to everything they produce. Some bands are more cautious than others. Some don't *want* to try and "make it big" for this reason. For those that do, all the power to them, but they should expect the record company to do what record companies do and shouldn't start whining because they lacked the foresight to see that they'd get exploited.
Remember, the record companies are out to make money too. If you agree to sign your life over to them, be prepared to give it to them. If you don't like the terms, don't sign. Keep your day job.
Now I'm not saying protest and education isn't worthwhile. If you can provide artists and consumers with an alternative to the established record industry, I would be very interested to see if it succeeds. However, so long as there are artists that are aware of the risks of signing but are still willing to do it, and so long as there are record labels willing to continue doing what record labels do, I don't forsee much of a change in the near future.
Record labels will change when it becomes profitable for them to do so. So long as bands are lining up to get reamed and consumers are lining up to purchase what the labels offer, that won't happen.
Obviously, "stuff that matters" is opinion. That opinion will obviously not apply to every single reader to slashdot. Your only option is to pick and choose what articles you read (try reading just the summary before you read the whole thing).
If the subject doesn't interest you, why read it? In fact, WHY POST A COMMENT about it?
The last time this whole Public Enemy MP3 thing appeared on Slashdot, I said the same thing.
One important point to note was that, at the time they signed their contracts, MP3 was unheard of, and releasing your tracks via the Internet was something nobody had thought of. When these new technologies appeared, PE couldn't take advantage of them and couldn't convince their label to allow them to explore it. I think that's what their anger towards their label is about at this point.
Though I agree 100% with both the original comment and this one. They're making a relatively good living off of their music. The fact of the matter is, they want more. The label takes the bulk of their profits (which is something the band agreed to by signing the contract!), and the band is no longer comfortable with their relationship.
While most of my programming is done on Unix, occasionally I'll write some Java using VisualJ++. In addition to the GUI building portion of the IDE, the actual *coding* is considerably easier than most anything I've dealt with.
As you code, the IDE will note the types of classes and objects you declare, and as you use them, it will give you pop-up menus (in a passive, background sort of way so as not to interfere with your coding) with all of the possible methods and properties, so if you're not totally familiar with a class, or forgot how you declared it, you can see and choose from the list (or just keep typing). I find this feature extremely useful.
Though I'm no Emacs user, I'll agree that Emacs appears to do most of the tasks people desire in their graphical IDE's. Like vi, however, there's a lot you have to learn about Emacs before it can be usable, and a bit of configuration needed to make it useful as an IDE. Your average GIDE is typically ready to go out of the box. I can usually hop on any Windows IDE that I've never used before and crank out a simple GUI app in a few minutes.
Like most Windows vs Unix apps, the Windows versions tend to be easier for new people to learn, but in this case, I don't think anything Unix-based will be any more powerful than what's already available for Windows. With the exception of my "vi lapses" (hitting escape all the time, etc.), Microsoft's IDE is extremely powerful and, quite frankly, speeds my coding time considerably over my (non-Emacs-based) Unix equivalents. Like I said, though, I haven't tried Emacs, so that might be just as easy... I'd recommend you try programming in VisualC++ or J++ on Windows and see what I mean.
Not to start another tab-stop war or anything, I really have to disagree about your argument against hard tab stops. Most all programs have the ability of adjusting the amount of space used by hard tab stops. I routinely set my tab stops in vi to 4 spaces. If someone else prefers a different number of spaces for indentation, it's a simple matter to set the tab stops to the value of their choice. Using 3 or 4 spaces when you're coding forces everyone to look at your source using your preferred "tab stop", and their coding habits may differ, causing the code to be a mish-mash of different spacing styles. If everyone uses hard tab stops and adjusts their editor appropriately, everyone is happy.
Where I work, there are three other coders that I routinely work with. One uses hard tabs, like me, and adjusts his tab stops to 3. The other two use spaces (2 and 4). Code that the "space people" have collaborated on tends to get very messy (especially when cutting/pasting and re-indenting so that the pasted block matches up with the code that already exists). Quite frequently, someone will miss a space or add an extra space, and things never quite line up. When I collaborate with the other "tab guy", our code is always very neat, indented precisely and generally very easy to work with. It's very easy to make code changes in simple editors like 'vi' without auto-indentation.
As you might expect, when a "tab person" and a "space person" end up collaborating, the results tend to be disasterous. The only thing worse than using spaces inconsistently is using tabs *and* spaces.
With the Apache default distribution, apache_pb.gif is in Apache's/icons/ directory. I guess it's possible that they copied the contents of the Apache/icons/ directory into their IIS/icons/ directory, but odds are, the simpler explanation (they're running apache) is probably the correct one.
HTML does not provide for a mechanism to prevent cut/paste in documents. This is a browser bug and should be brought to the attention of the browser authors.
I have no problems cutting/pasting slashdot or any ZDnet article (even the URL given in the comment above).
The fact that mainstream media uses these terms and treats these groups as if they were real, honest-to-god organizations just rubs me the wrong way. The more these pathetic little IRC channels get recognized, the more these pathetic little IRC channels are going to do lame things.
With the web site hacks and announcements like this coming about in recent months, all that the media is doing is ENCOURAGING others to follow in these footsteps. So long as these gimps keep getting their names in lights, others are going to keep trying.
Every time I see the phrase "IRC press conference" I can't help but just laugh, both at the l33t little IRC channels hosting these things AND at the media source using these terms.
The US has never defaulted on a loan. I'd say that's a pretty good track record for anyone wanting to loan the US money. We're going into debt because we keep having to borrow money to pay off other debts. That, along with interest, is why we're spiraling deeper and faster into debt.
The US is in some 4.6 trillion US$ of debt, increasing some 230 million a day. People whine and whine about how things like the ISS cost and how much the whole Clinton scandal has cost us in legal fees, but people don't give the national debt a second thought.
The government and its budget are seriously broken. Most people have heard that line for years now but haven't given it much of a thought.
Well, think about it. In 50 years it's entirely possible the United States (and perhaps the entire global economy) in its current form will no longer exist. Remember, the US is *your* government and country. Stop thinking of it as "you vs the government". YOU are in debt 4.6 trillion$. I'm anxious to see that debt resolved, even if it means I have to cut back here and there or see a few public projects put on hold until it can be resolved.
Visit those web sites in the original comment. You might learn a thing or two.
Despite the paper surplus, we're still spiraling deeper into debt. We need a lot more than that to just keep us from going deeper in debt, to say nothing about getting us back out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been stated a few times already, but if you knew how secure a lot of these types of buildings are, you would understand.
It's not like they're going to be searching you for Furbies when you try to go to work. They don't let you bring ANYTHING in that could conceivably house or be modified (intentionally or unintentionally) to bring data or information out.
You walk in with your clothes (and MAYBE a briefcase if you have papers, but if this were allowed I wouldn't be surprised if they searched/X-rayed it before letting you in). Everything else is in the building (likely in a safe). I've even been told (treat this as 4th-hand) that even the PC's have removable hard drives, and everyone's hard drive is stored in its own little safe when you leave for the day.
They aren't making special policy for Furbies, they're just saying, "Yes, Furbies fall under the same 'banned items' rules to which everything else you're prohibited from bringing in applies."
It'll be the panicky nature of society. There will either be a mass of bank withdrawals shortly before Y2K or one or two relatively minor Y2K-related problems will cause widespread panic.
So long as the media is hyping the Y2K problem as the "end-of-the-world" bug, capable of detonating all nuclear arsenals of the world, capable of toppling buildings and governments, eliciting riots and mass hysteria, society as a whole will be very sensitive when the time comes.
For a more comprehensive look at my thoughts regarding at least the financial side of things (which aren't the only sociological threats I can forsee for the arrival of next year), read about it.
I agree that this is the direction we need to try and go. But, existing groups locked into contracts with existing labels will have a hard time migrating. It's just a matter of finding people with enough flexibility, backing and will to make something like this work. I would love to see it happen.
But I don't think one band whining about their record label's greed and inflexibility is the way to make it happen.
If you've found yourself someplace during or immediately after high school that can teach and carry you into a career you're looking for, I would probably stick with that. If you're just the computer geek type who spends most of his/her time in the computer lab and works fast food on the weekends, I would suggest you plant yourself in college.
..." or "technical support for ..." crap), you will tend to be passed over in favor of someone with likely less experience but with a college degree.
In my opinion, "real world" experience in the field you want to be in for four years is more valuable than a four-year computer degree ESPECIALLY if you have a tremendous amount of computer background and experience already.
BUT: For those script kiddies and IRC junkies that just have passing knowledge of the various aspects of computers, DO NOT delude yourself into thinking that that is a solid core of computer experience. You are a dime a dozen and will not make it in the real world with only those skills. If you still think that you are pretty smart, be an intern at some real places. Most people will quickly find out that there's a lot more they don't know.
By the time I had finished high school, I was working for an Internet provider (starting off doing tech support but quickly moved into other more intimate areas of networking/programming/writing, etc.). I learned more in the two years I worked there than I would have learned in two, three, or even four years at college.
I do not, however, think that field experience is a perfect replacement for college.
In college, you are taught a way of thinking, of problem solving. While real-world experience can be extremely valuable, most people with degrees have a stronger foundation of problem-solving skills than others. Besides teaching you how to program and how an operating system works, college teaches you how to think. For this reason, I believe a college background can be a valuable thing to have.
Additionally, many corporations (for whatever reasons) MANDATE that their employees have a college degree. You can have all the experience in the world, and could be absolutely perfect for a job, but without that degree, they simply can't hire you. College degrees also tend to be beneficial when it comes to "first impressions". Someone browsing over two resumes without any real knowledge of either applicant will tend to give the one with a college degree more thought. Unless you've accomplished a lot and have a good, strong amount of resume material (none of this "designed web pages for
If you do decide to go the college route, you don't even necessarily have to finish. Sometimes employers will see that you've got a good core knowledge base from a few university courses, and they will be satisfied with that (assuming you held a good GPR and didn't flunk out). Don't, however, drop out after the first year simply because you don't think you're learning anything. In all likelyhood, you won't actually start learning anything useful until your 2nd or even 3rd year.
If you don't decide to go to college, and think you're making it fine now and can only advance your career, I would still consider taking some college courses. I find that good writing skills are hard to find among computer people that haven't been to college, so some english and/or technical writing courses could be helpful there. Some courses in secure programming or databases might be useful. Most "computer people" out of high school tend to have the same computer background. They might be able to program in C, might have some unix experience, but lack some other, very necessary, skill sets. Try to explore your weaknesses and patch them up. Push yourself out and beyond what your peers are all gravitating towards. And, most importantly, do NOT be arrogant and assume there isn't anything out there for you to learn. Quite a few slashdotters and annoying high school geeks have made that fatal mistake. You do NOT know everything, and in most all cases, everyone with a degree knows more than you, in most areas.
Whether or not you choose to get a degree, ALWAYS KEEP UP WITH THE TECHNOLOGY. I cannot stress this enough. A ten-year-old CS degree is usually worthless if you haven't kept up with the news, the trends, and the new technologies. If you can find a company that is technologically stale and has no desire to innovate or keep up, then you might be okay, but the real successful people are the ones that keep themselves on the edge of the latest technologies. This applies to both people pursuing and not pursuing college degrees. The instant you graduate from college, many of the things you've learned there are already out of date. Keep up!
So if you're leaning towards going to college, do it. If you're not sure, you'd might as well start off in college. You can always quit later. If you're leaning towards skipping college and going straight into a career, think carefully. Unless you've already got a decent amount of background and something besides generic "computer skills", you aren't likely to find anything but PC "grunt work" (tech support, repair, etc.).
Having a college degree (or at least some experience) doesn't hurt, but not having one can.
I'm not an Emacs user, so someone else might have the proper solution, but I would look and see if you can tell Emacs to use a different character besides a space for indentation (i.e. a hard tab), and set your indent level to 1? It would "auto-indent" 3 "spaces" (tabs) if you were 3 levels deep...
Not sure if this is even in the right ballpark, but it might be a usable hack. For all I know there's an Emacs option specifically designed to do what you're trying to do.
Good question.
Having worked in the music industry for several years (as a DJ, programming director) and having worked with several bands (in the family and friends, many of which are signed with relatively major and minor labels), I do not consider myself ignorant. I may not have had the experiences you or your friends have had, but I am rooting my arguments based upon what I have seen and know.
No, I'm saying, "I want to buy this CD because I like the music or the artist and I'm willing to spend $17.99USD for it." To be honest, I (like most consumers) could care less where the money is going. If I found out that one label and/or artist was being significantly more evil than the rest, I might take that into consideration when contemplating purchase, but this is the way the record business is. So I bought the CD. So what? Does this make me an evil person for supporting the tyrrany of the record industry? No; I'm just a consumer. I've also bought CD's from most all of the friends and friends of friends that have released CD's. I support my friends.
Yes, being a band IS a job. There's a tremendous overhead involved and frequently, bands will be too sucked into the "we're gonna make it big!" bug that they're WILLING to sign over most of the money they make as well as the rights to everything they produce. Some bands are more cautious than others. Some don't *want* to try and "make it big" for this reason. For those that do, all the power to them, but they should expect the record company to do what record companies do and shouldn't start whining because they lacked the foresight to see that they'd get exploited.
Remember, the record companies are out to make money too. If you agree to sign your life over to them, be prepared to give it to them. If you don't like the terms, don't sign. Keep your day job.
Now I'm not saying protest and education isn't worthwhile. If you can provide artists and consumers with an alternative to the established record industry, I would be very interested to see if it succeeds. However, so long as there are artists that are aware of the risks of signing but are still willing to do it, and so long as there are record labels willing to continue doing what record labels do, I don't forsee much of a change in the near future.
Record labels will change when it becomes profitable for them to do so. So long as bands are lining up to get reamed and consumers are lining up to purchase what the labels offer, that won't happen.
All generalizations are bad.
Sorry, I just love that quote. Heh.
I agree with the rest of your points.
Obviously, "stuff that matters" is opinion. That opinion will obviously not apply to every single reader to slashdot. Your only option is to pick and choose what articles you read (try reading just the summary before you read the whole thing).
If the subject doesn't interest you, why read it? In fact, WHY POST A COMMENT about it?
The last time this whole Public Enemy MP3 thing appeared on Slashdot, I said the same thing.
One important point to note was that, at the time they signed their contracts, MP3 was unheard of, and releasing your tracks via the Internet was something nobody had thought of. When these new technologies appeared, PE couldn't take advantage of them and couldn't convince their label to allow them to explore it. I think that's what their anger towards their label is about at this point.
Though I agree 100% with both the original comment and this one. They're making a relatively good living off of their music. The fact of the matter is, they want more. The label takes the bulk of their profits (which is something the band agreed to by signing the contract!), and the band is no longer comfortable with their relationship.
Sucks to be them... or does it?
I'm pretty curious myself to know if either winamp *or* x11amp will play it.
While most of my programming is done on Unix, occasionally I'll write some Java using VisualJ++. In addition to the GUI building portion of the IDE, the actual *coding* is considerably easier than most anything I've dealt with.
As you code, the IDE will note the types of classes and objects you declare, and as you use them, it will give you pop-up menus (in a passive, background sort of way so as not to interfere with your coding) with all of the possible methods and properties, so if you're not totally familiar with a class, or forgot how you declared it, you can see and choose from the list (or just keep typing). I find this feature extremely useful.
Though I'm no Emacs user, I'll agree that Emacs appears to do most of the tasks people desire in their graphical IDE's. Like vi, however, there's a lot you have to learn about Emacs before it can be usable, and a bit of configuration needed to make it useful as an IDE. Your average GIDE is typically ready to go out of the box. I can usually hop on any Windows IDE that I've never used before and crank out a simple GUI app in a few minutes.
Like most Windows vs Unix apps, the Windows versions tend to be easier for new people to learn, but in this case, I don't think anything Unix-based will be any more powerful than what's already available for Windows. With the exception of my "vi lapses" (hitting escape all the time, etc.), Microsoft's IDE is extremely powerful and, quite frankly, speeds my coding time considerably over my (non-Emacs-based) Unix equivalents. Like I said, though, I haven't tried Emacs, so that might be just as easy... I'd recommend you try programming in VisualC++ or J++ on Windows and see what I mean.
Not to start another tab-stop war or anything, I really have to disagree about your argument against hard tab stops. Most all programs have the ability of adjusting the amount of space used by hard tab stops. I routinely set my tab stops in vi to 4 spaces. If someone else prefers a different number of spaces for indentation, it's a simple matter to set the tab stops to the value of their choice. Using 3 or 4 spaces when you're coding forces everyone to look at your source using your preferred "tab stop", and their coding habits may differ, causing the code to be a mish-mash of different spacing styles. If everyone uses hard tab stops and adjusts their editor appropriately, everyone is happy.
Where I work, there are three other coders that I routinely work with. One uses hard tabs, like me, and adjusts his tab stops to 3. The other two use spaces (2 and 4). Code that the "space people" have collaborated on tends to get very messy (especially when cutting/pasting and re-indenting so that the pasted block matches up with the code that already exists). Quite frequently, someone will miss a space or add an extra space, and things never quite line up. When I collaborate with the other "tab guy", our code is always very neat, indented precisely and generally very easy to work with. It's very easy to make code changes in simple editors like 'vi' without auto-indentation.
As you might expect, when a "tab person" and a "space person" end up collaborating, the results tend to be disasterous. The only thing worse than using spaces inconsistently is using tabs *and* spaces.
With the Apache default distribution, apache_pb.gif is in Apache's /icons/ directory. I guess it's possible that they copied the contents of the Apache /icons/ directory into their IIS /icons/ directory, but odds are, the simpler explanation (they're running apache) is probably the correct one.
HTML does not provide for a mechanism to prevent cut/paste in documents. This is a browser bug and should be brought to the attention of the browser authors.
I have no problems cutting/pasting slashdot or any ZDnet article (even the URL given in the comment above).
The fact that mainstream media uses these terms and treats these groups as if they were real, honest-to-god organizations just rubs me the wrong way. The more these pathetic little IRC channels get recognized, the more these pathetic little IRC channels are going to do lame things.
With the web site hacks and announcements like this coming about in recent months, all that the media is doing is ENCOURAGING others to follow in these footsteps. So long as these gimps keep getting their names in lights, others are going to keep trying.
Every time I see the phrase "IRC press conference" I can't help but just laugh, both at the l33t little IRC channels hosting these things AND at the media source using these terms.
(sorry forgot that nasty passwd again. sigh)
So, a) USE A COOKIE; or b) CHANGE THE PASSWORD TO SOMETHING YOU CAN REMEMBER.
Either of those two options should take you less time than it took for you to type the apology above.
I guess that's why you posted as an AC...
The US has never defaulted on a loan. I'd say that's a pretty good track record for anyone wanting to loan the US money. We're going into debt because we keep having to borrow money to pay off other debts. That, along with interest, is why we're spiraling deeper and faster into debt.
The US is in some 4.6 trillion US$ of debt, increasing some 230 million a day. People whine and whine about how things like the ISS cost and how much the whole Clinton scandal has cost us in legal fees, but people don't give the national debt a second thought.
The government and its budget are seriously broken. Most people have heard that line for years now but haven't given it much of a thought.
Well, think about it. In 50 years it's entirely possible the United States (and perhaps the entire global economy) in its current form will no longer exist. Remember, the US is *your* government and country. Stop thinking of it as "you vs the government". YOU are in debt 4.6 trillion$. I'm anxious to see that debt resolved, even if it means I have to cut back here and there or see a few public projects put on hold until it can be resolved.
Visit those web sites in the original comment. You might learn a thing or two.
Despite the paper surplus, we're still spiraling deeper into debt. We need a lot more than that to just keep us from going deeper in debt, to say nothing about getting us back out.