I think he actually really is that clueless; I run into this kind of thing quite a bit. Lots of people, especially older people in Elton's age range (he just turned 60) didn't grow up with computers in their daily lives and so they don't use them as long as they don't really need them (and he doesn't. He's talented and doesn't need any assistance to write great music). If they are told by someone who they think does "get it", they accept what they are told, pretty much.
So I think that this is an example of "older guy who doesn't get it thinks the internet will be the death of us all" followed by "press goes crazy about anything with a celebrity involved in it" (I mean c'mon, even ABCNews is covering all the celebrity junk these days it's ridiculous) but you have to blame Slashdot, too -- why is this worthy of the front page? Probably because of the "famous person says something ridiculous and we want to point and laugh" angle...
Fortunately, not every older guy doesn't get it; my parents do more than Elton does (Dad really knows how to use computers) and both of them are older than Elton is. So I think it probably is a combination of age, upbringing, personality, and career (Dad's had to work with computers for years; he's a physicist).
Yep. Sorry about that; I should have credited him outright! You and I know all about him, fortunately.
Some of the songs are from Elton's perspective (Someone Saved My Life Tonight is an example) but yes, many are Bernie's, such as Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting, which is about Bernie's time in bars when he was younger.
While Elton is hardly "the latest plastic pop idol", I agree; see #20082281 above. The "anyone can be heard/seen/whatever" aspect of the Internet is one of the best things about it. Until the Net came along (and cdbaby, etc) it was often difficult to get heard if you were a smaller band. Now, indie bands can be on emusic, itunes, whatever they want to expand into.
I read the article (I know, I know) and Elton admits he doesn't have a cell phone, etc. etc. etc., and it's been my (personal) experience that people who don't find it easy to bring technology into their lives often don't really appreciate what that technology can offer to those who do appreciate it.
I've bought every one of Elton's albums on hardcopy CD (and he's the only artist I do that for, and otherwise I don't really buy new music, or download it either) but I have only taken each out of the case once -- to rip it. So I'm somewhere in the middle. But I've used iTunes before, and downloaded indie music from eMusic, and... I forgot where I was going with this, so that's all for now.
People who "try" to commit suicide and fail that badly (can't gas themselves, don't cut their wrist in the right place, whatever) are generally doing it to try to get attention and try to get help with some issue they can't just outright tell people about, not to actually kill themselves.
Sadly, I've known people who cut themselves up for attention-whore purposes... so I can't really jeer at it that easily.
I like a lot of his newer stuff, but then, musical tastes are very much an individual thing.
TLK is some of his best later work. While I don't care for his version of "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", Circle of Life and Can You Feel The Love Tonight are very good -- and the latter is very simple and easy to play but sounds fantastic, especially when he embellishes it in live performances.
Hey, Elton's actually made music that isn't the same canned love-song crap. The songs he writes are autobiographical, about people important to him, about things important to his lyricist, etc. And he's an amazing live performer. Yep, I'm a big fan of his and I'm continually amazed by his live work.
But "close down the internet"? That's just ridiculous. Not happening, and I don't agree. Sure, sometimes you get a lot of "me too" art of all sorts (drawings, music, whatever) but I think the fact that anyone can publish and create anything they want more than makes up for that.
If it weren't for the big name behind this silliness, I doubt anyone would pay it any mind. And I think it's silly and not worth the electrons it's "printed" with.
Did you try repairing the boxes? You can get new parts from places like weaknees.com. If it's repairable, you can sell it for a fair bit of money on ebay due to the lifetime sub.
Mine is on my wireless net with a UPS/surge protector between the box and the power supply, so if it gets fried it's covered. But even if the power supply blows, or the hard drive fails, I can fix it.
If you are using POP3 access to Gmail, you are already using SSL.
If I understand packet sniffing correctly (I'm no programmer), that just shows the source and destination but the contents are encrypted. Please let me know if I'm incorrect.
The Tivo wireless adapter has some components in it that offload some of the additional processing required for WPA onto the card. You can use other wireless adapters (there's a list on tivo.com) without trouble, but you will not be able to use WPA.
Whether there's the same restriction for g-based networking I don't know. But I bought the Tivo adapter so I could actually properly secure my network, and I've had absolutely no problems.
Actually, there is no such offer. The offer you linked to is expired.
And the fact that I've got lifetime on my Series 3 makes it all worth it. I love the remote (which you can buy separately via tivo.com, however) and the front display is nice, but what makes me still glad I have a Series 3 is the fact that I was able to transfer my lifetime subscription with no hassles.
I also went for a lifetime sub on my Sirius satellite radio in my car -- after doing the math for the TiVo and the satellite radio, it turned out that I'll break even in around three years. I plan to keep both devices for longer than that (until they die, basically, and even then I'm not afraid to repair them) so it's a good deal in the end, and one less monthly bill is one less worry.
I have no idea actually as I was just passing through. Sorry to not be of help.
I do know that there are places where active-duty ships can be seen from highways and public streets, though. Again I don't know precisely where as I live in the Midwest and I was just passing through (again) but I know I've seen submarines in Groton, CT.
I doubt it. It's been known for decades now that satellites pass overhead that have the resolution to take photos of anything on the ground with high enough resolution to make out details. If anyone screwed up, it would be whoever decided to leave the submarine tied up to a pier and not under cover. But really, how much can you tell from this photo? Not a lot, really. If there's no active war going on, it's not too useful to know that there is a submarine in a sub base... at least, not in the immediate "it's not out there shooting at our ships" sort of way that one worries about during a war.
When I was in Pennsylvania a week and a half ago, I drove past a naval base with a bunch of destroyers at the pier and was able to count how many there were and what type. Should someone be shot for allowing me to see that, too? I doubt it considering I was on a public highway at the time. It was OK for me to be there as much as it was OK for the satellite to orbit overhead.
If there's a shooting war then yes, I'd expect that sort of thing to be harder to see by the general public (ASAT weapons, ships not moored openly like that). But now? Naw.
Actually, you don't have to show anything. Just keep walking. If the guy harasses you, say that if you are touched you will call the police, don't turn to look, just keep walking out. The only places that CAN stop you are club stores that require memberships, and then only if you signed an agreement to let yourself be searched at exit.
With BitTorrent and other P2P apps you are deliberately sharing anything in your shared folder or whatever you are transferring/seeding. You are choosing what to share.
Stuff on your HD is not, on the other hand, being shared or offered to anyone for download. No one has the right to poke around in files that you did not offer for download.
It's like a garage sale. You can poke around in the items for sale and make offers or take items, as marked, but you cannot help yourself to anything elsewhere in the garage/yard or in the house itself. Doing so is theft/burglary.
I'm surprised you did not file a complaint against the officers involved. I know I would have. And I can't see what you did that was wrong. You were trying to stop someone from being assaulted. I guess in the Peoples' Republic of America, that's a felony now too.
And that's where you'd be wrong. I don't live in an apartment but when I did there wasn't an issue with dishes. My bf (GASP! Girls on Slashdot!) lives in a duplex next to nearly-identical duplexes, with a HOA, and you can put up dishes.
So you support the notion that companies are going to blame this guy for something someone else did?
Hell no.
I would have told them "Thank you for informing me that you do not want my business. I will now be spending $x with your competitor, who is willing to not treat me badly for something someone I don't even know has done." *click*
And yet, however, life at home doesn't stop while there's a war on. My hometown's baseball team won the World Series several times during WWII -- it was important that the public at home had something to enjoy instead of focusing on war news all the time. It's important to remember the important role played by social events such as baseball games.
Sure, it's important to bring wars to a conclusion, but your war machine stops cold if your morale takes a nosedive. The loss of German morale, for example, was a huge part in Germany's loss in 1945. (Not the whole cause, mind). There's a good reason why campaigns continue to be waged that are designed specifically to destroy enemy morale, including civilian morale.
The Second Amendment is there so that future threats to our liberties can be fought by citizens, whether individually or organized into militias, without the need for a federal army. We do have such an army, but what if that army were turned against the interests of the citizens? Remember that in the late 1700s, the colonies were in theory protected by the British army but that army was acting against the desires of the people -- and so the revolution began when citizens took up arms to defend their freedoms.
If the only purpose were to protect against the British, the Constitution would say so. However, it was written open-endedly so that it would still be relevant to future, unknown threats. And so it is.
Sure, there are other reasons to have a right to bear arms, but those who don't like that fact have a huge uphill fight to repeal the Second Amendment, and for good reason -- rights that are held that highly SHOULD be hard to repeal.
15,000+ complaints about this issue (that I know of personally) do a damn good job of hinting that, if that may have been true in the past, things may very well be changing. There's always a tipping point and it looks like this may possibly have been it. (no telling yet, though).
Slashdot Mirror
I think he actually really is that clueless; I run into this kind of thing quite a bit. Lots of people, especially older people in Elton's age range (he just turned 60) didn't grow up with computers in their daily lives and so they don't use them as long as they don't really need them (and he doesn't. He's talented and doesn't need any assistance to write great music). If they are told by someone who they think does "get it", they accept what they are told, pretty much.
So I think that this is an example of "older guy who doesn't get it thinks the internet will be the death of us all" followed by "press goes crazy about anything with a celebrity involved in it" (I mean c'mon, even ABCNews is covering all the celebrity junk these days it's ridiculous) but you have to blame Slashdot, too -- why is this worthy of the front page? Probably because of the "famous person says something ridiculous and we want to point and laugh" angle...
Fortunately, not every older guy doesn't get it; my parents do more than Elton does (Dad really knows how to use computers) and both of them are older than Elton is. So I think it probably is a combination of age, upbringing, personality, and career (Dad's had to work with computers for years; he's a physicist).
Yep. Sorry about that; I should have credited him outright! You and I know all about him, fortunately.
Some of the songs are from Elton's perspective (Someone Saved My Life Tonight is an example) but yes, many are Bernie's, such as Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting, which is about Bernie's time in bars when he was younger.
Thanks for following up.
While Elton is hardly "the latest plastic pop idol", I agree; see #20082281 above. The "anyone can be heard/seen/whatever" aspect of the Internet is one of the best things about it. Until the Net came along (and cdbaby, etc) it was often difficult to get heard if you were a smaller band. Now, indie bands can be on emusic, itunes, whatever they want to expand into.
... I forgot where I was going with this, so that's all for now.
I read the article (I know, I know) and Elton admits he doesn't have a cell phone, etc. etc. etc., and it's been my (personal) experience that people who don't find it easy to bring technology into their lives often don't really appreciate what that technology can offer to those who do appreciate it.
I've bought every one of Elton's albums on hardcopy CD (and he's the only artist I do that for, and otherwise I don't really buy new music, or download it either) but I have only taken each out of the case once -- to rip it. So I'm somewhere in the middle. But I've used iTunes before, and downloaded indie music from eMusic, and
People who "try" to commit suicide and fail that badly (can't gas themselves, don't cut their wrist in the right place, whatever) are generally doing it to try to get attention and try to get help with some issue they can't just outright tell people about, not to actually kill themselves.
... so I can't really jeer at it that easily.
Sadly, I've known people who cut themselves up for attention-whore purposes
I like a lot of his newer stuff, but then, musical tastes are very much an individual thing.
TLK is some of his best later work. While I don't care for his version of "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", Circle of Life and Can You Feel The Love Tonight are very good -- and the latter is very simple and easy to play but sounds fantastic, especially when he embellishes it in live performances.
Elton played the Pinball Wizard in Tommy -- all he asked in exchange for doing the role was getting to keep the shoes.
Hey, Elton's actually made music that isn't the same canned love-song crap. The songs he writes are autobiographical, about people important to him, about things important to his lyricist, etc. And he's an amazing live performer. Yep, I'm a big fan of his and I'm continually amazed by his live work.
But "close down the internet"? That's just ridiculous. Not happening, and I don't agree. Sure, sometimes you get a lot of "me too" art of all sorts (drawings, music, whatever) but I think the fact that anyone can publish and create anything they want more than makes up for that.
If it weren't for the big name behind this silliness, I doubt anyone would pay it any mind. And I think it's silly and not worth the electrons it's "printed" with.
Then would that not be covered under homeowner's insurance?
Did you try repairing the boxes? You can get new parts from places like weaknees.com. If it's repairable, you can sell it for a fair bit of money on ebay due to the lifetime sub.
Mine is on my wireless net with a UPS/surge protector between the box and the power supply, so if it gets fried it's covered. But even if the power supply blows, or the hard drive fails, I can fix it.
If you use Firefox and Gmail's web UI, use this extension to make sure your Gmail session is encrypted:
... and check the box labeled "Secure (switch to https)" in the Gmail section.
CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience -- Firefox Extension
If you are using POP3 access to Gmail, you are already using SSL.
If I understand packet sniffing correctly (I'm no programmer), that just shows the source and destination but the contents are encrypted. Please let me know if I'm incorrect.
The Tivo wireless adapter has some components in it that offload some of the additional processing required for WPA onto the card. You can use other wireless adapters (there's a list on tivo.com) without trouble, but you will not be able to use WPA.
Whether there's the same restriction for g-based networking I don't know. But I bought the Tivo adapter so I could actually properly secure my network, and I've had absolutely no problems.
Actually, there is no such offer. The offer you linked to is expired.
And the fact that I've got lifetime on my Series 3 makes it all worth it. I love the remote (which you can buy separately via tivo.com, however) and the front display is nice, but what makes me still glad I have a Series 3 is the fact that I was able to transfer my lifetime subscription with no hassles.
I also went for a lifetime sub on my Sirius satellite radio in my car -- after doing the math for the TiVo and the satellite radio, it turned out that I'll break even in around three years. I plan to keep both devices for longer than that (until they die, basically, and even then I'm not afraid to repair them) so it's a good deal in the end, and one less monthly bill is one less worry.
I have no idea actually as I was just passing through. Sorry to not be of help.
I do know that there are places where active-duty ships can be seen from highways and public streets, though. Again I don't know precisely where as I live in the Midwest and I was just passing through (again) but I know I've seen submarines in Groton, CT.
I doubt it. It's been known for decades now that satellites pass overhead that have the resolution to take photos of anything on the ground with high enough resolution to make out details. If anyone screwed up, it would be whoever decided to leave the submarine tied up to a pier and not under cover. But really, how much can you tell from this photo? Not a lot, really. If there's no active war going on, it's not too useful to know that there is a submarine in a sub base... at least, not in the immediate "it's not out there shooting at our ships" sort of way that one worries about during a war.
When I was in Pennsylvania a week and a half ago, I drove past a naval base with a bunch of destroyers at the pier and was able to count how many there were and what type. Should someone be shot for allowing me to see that, too? I doubt it considering I was on a public highway at the time. It was OK for me to be there as much as it was OK for the satellite to orbit overhead.
If there's a shooting war then yes, I'd expect that sort of thing to be harder to see by the general public (ASAT weapons, ships not moored openly like that). But now? Naw.
Actually, you don't have to show anything. Just keep walking. If the guy harasses you, say that if you are touched you will call the police, don't turn to look, just keep walking out. The only places that CAN stop you are club stores that require memberships, and then only if you signed an agreement to let yourself be searched at exit.
With BitTorrent and other P2P apps you are deliberately sharing anything in your shared folder or whatever you are transferring/seeding. You are choosing what to share.
Stuff on your HD is not, on the other hand, being shared or offered to anyone for download. No one has the right to poke around in files that you did not offer for download.
It's like a garage sale. You can poke around in the items for sale and make offers or take items, as marked, but you cannot help yourself to anything elsewhere in the garage/yard or in the house itself. Doing so is theft/burglary.
I'm surprised you did not file a complaint against the officers involved. I know I would have. And I can't see what you did that was wrong. You were trying to stop someone from being assaulted. I guess in the Peoples' Republic of America, that's a felony now too.
And that's where you'd be wrong. I don't live in an apartment but when I did there wasn't an issue with dishes. My bf (GASP! Girls on Slashdot!) lives in a duplex next to nearly-identical duplexes, with a HOA, and you can put up dishes.
... NOBODY.
Yes, there's competition, and yes I am in the US.
Or I could just use
So you support the notion that companies are going to blame this guy for something someone else did?
Hell no.
I would have told them "Thank you for informing me that you do not want my business. I will now be spending $x with your competitor, who is willing to not treat me badly for something someone I don't even know has done." *click*
Because other people have different needs than you and don't want to run games necessarily and don't want to deal with having to be afraid of malware?
Frankly I don't know why people keep posting smug crap like your post.
Oh, wait. Because this is the internet where everyone knows better than everyone else what's best for EVERYONE.
And yet, however, life at home doesn't stop while there's a war on. My hometown's baseball team won the World Series several times during WWII -- it was important that the public at home had something to enjoy instead of focusing on war news all the time. It's important to remember the important role played by social events such as baseball games.
Sure, it's important to bring wars to a conclusion, but your war machine stops cold if your morale takes a nosedive. The loss of German morale, for example, was a huge part in Germany's loss in 1945. (Not the whole cause, mind). There's a good reason why campaigns continue to be waged that are designed specifically to destroy enemy morale, including civilian morale.
Um... in a word: no.
The Second Amendment is there so that future threats to our liberties can be fought by citizens, whether individually or organized into militias, without the need for a federal army. We do have such an army, but what if that army were turned against the interests of the citizens? Remember that in the late 1700s, the colonies were in theory protected by the British army but that army was acting against the desires of the people -- and so the revolution began when citizens took up arms to defend their freedoms.
If the only purpose were to protect against the British, the Constitution would say so. However, it was written open-endedly so that it would still be relevant to future, unknown threats. And so it is.
Sure, there are other reasons to have a right to bear arms, but those who don't like that fact have a huge uphill fight to repeal the Second Amendment, and for good reason -- rights that are held that highly SHOULD be hard to repeal.
It worked well for Babylon 5. Instead of griping about show X being cancelled, let it wind down on the story's terms. It'll be better in the end.
I miss B5 but there's always the DVDs, and it just shows that doing a show right in the first place leads to more enjoyment in the long run.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
That's not for us to judge.
And certainly not to sneer at and call a "fucking hobby".
15,000+ complaints about this issue (that I know of personally) do a damn good job of hinting that, if that may have been true in the past, things may very well be changing. There's always a tipping point and it looks like this may possibly have been it. (no telling yet, though).