>in the past 20 years, we have been nowhere near the record of Americans turning 18
Thought that too. And besides, even if it were true, it means very little. The current crop of 18-yr-old voters are hardly the most poitically aware and active bunch in the last 20 years. I might go as far to say that they are probably the least likely bunch since the late 60's to actually be aware, much less participate in the presidential election. That's too bad, and I hope I'm wrong about that.
Katz's drift that alienating the young net-savvy voters by insulting their intelligence by painting the net as a chasm of evil seems somewhat moot. Is there really a chance that large numbers of the 18 20 23&1/2 doom/quake/napster crowd is going to vote for him anyway?
I doubt it. Are there hordes of registered voters in the 36-52 demographic with young kids that are scared to death their child might be the next Klebold and are waiting to hear which candidate "understands" how evil this internet thing is and is going to do something about keeping this bugaboo from corrupting their kid.
GW isn't going to be swept into office by swaying young voters and he knows this. If he were to stand up there and demonstrate a real understanding of the internet to the extent that Jon Katz would hail him as a true revolutionary political candidate, he would lose votes from that majoruty of registered voters that are afraid of the internet because they don't understand it and don't want to.
>[...]Sig11 [...], please god, let him show up for this. It would ruin Taco's night
Dunno, having read the log before, I think Taco really gets off tormenting sig11 and sig seems to get pretty peevish about it all.
I have to admin, sig's top-page article on k5 the other day was pretty interesting, although I can see where his constant whining and badgering about improving slash to eliminate this 'groupthink' pet peeve of his gets under taco's skin after a while.
I think everyone who is interested should read the log and decide for themselves. It is a facinating insight into sig and taco.
I think sig raises some valid issues but I tend to agree with taco that the system mostly works for the benefit of the of the majority. No one claims it's perfect, not sure it can be or even needs to be. Could it be better? Sure. Is it so broke right now that other things that need to be done everyday to run the site should be stopped. Doesn't seem like it to me.
Just a highlight to entice you to look at the log linked above:
[20:55] <CmdrTaco> You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up.
[20:56] <Signal_11> Just leave me alone, Rob... I've had enough for one week.
[20:57] <CmdrTaco> Sig:I've had to deal with your childish crap for 3 years. You can handle 10 sentances of IRC slapping;)
[20:58] <CmdrTaco> Signal 11 thinks he is the reason for moderation, for mete moderation, and for jesus.
[20:59] <CmdrTaco> I work all day, you just fucking troll websites. That definitely qualifies you as an expert.
[21:01] <CmdrTaco> Oh, shit! Dark Angel!
[21:01] * CmdrTaco is away: dark angel.
[21:02] <Signal_11> He comes in, slams me, then walks out to watch TV. what's WRONG with this picture...
Some of this may be out of context, read the whole thing. (I didn't try to intentionally slant it, but it probably looks that way.) Very interesting.
Well, I made a long story perhaps a bit too short. Obviously be wasn't imprisoned for being addicted to drugs (not even for trafficing or even posession).
No, he went to prison for armed robery. He would not have resorted to armed robery had he not owed over $10,000 to someone. He would not have been in such a desperate situation had he not lost his job, gotten thrown out of his apartment, etc because of his drug habbit.
You are correct, his condition was medically treatable. At any point before he walked into a liquor store at 3am with a sawed-off shotgun, he might have been able to go to rehab and find some way to cover his huge debt with his dealer.
The problem was, he himself refused to acknowledge he had a problem which of course is the first step to voluntary treatment. His friends and family didn't know exactly what was going on with him, but they probably suspected. Of course he closed himself off from everyone except his circle of fellow users, so noone who actually cared about what happened to him actually had a chance to help him.
I was headed down the same path as him and was just as deluded about how I could 'handle it' and tht it wasn't a problem. Could have been me instead of him.
No thank you. The trade-off between the immediacy of an online forum like/. vs the latency of traditional print media for the sake of a few typos and grammatical errors is too high.
I guess I'm not anal enough to be really bothered by then/than, they're/their, its/it's kind of mistakes. Kind of what gives/. that web-charm feel. What does kind of grate on me after a while is seeing posts complaining about spelling moderated to the top on stories like this that might otherwise threaten to spur interesting and intelligent discussion.:-)
>The reason I got started with the problem was that I started doing it every day. This was because I had a lot of work at the time, and the speed helped me get it done. But I still take the stuff now, just sensibly when I'm going out or something.
Congrats, you are probably in the majority of people who can use stimulants and/or mood altering chemicals and not become addicted.
Sadly, not everyone is exactly like you and it is kind of irrelevant cite your experience as evidence that these drugs aren't addictive. They are. Not to everyone who tries them, for sure, but for a large number of people it is a real problem.
Recreational use at parties is not really what the article deals with. When you start using coke as a work-enhancing stimulant, you are talking about a different situation.
It is easy enough to become dependent on even caffeine to get through your day under normal circumstances. Here we are talking about a situation where there is enormous pressure to produce, where people are working 14+ hours a day, 6-7 days a week. These conditions certainly strain the limits of human endurance, and so some are turning to coke, meth, etc to help them cope.
Man, it's one thing to get high to have a good time. It's something else when the only way to get through your long, stressful day is to load up on narcotic stimulants. Add to that the almost total lack of free time and you have a pretty bleak situation. How then do you spend that rare free time? Get _really_ stoned and convince yourself that you are really having fun and this is the reason you are working so hard.
>but there is no "take it once, you're doomed to be an addict" truth as you say.
Notice his use of words like 'leads' and 'eventually'.
You are right. I've never heard of anyone being 'instantly addicted' after a single use of any substance. But that didn't sound like what he was saying.
>Mild use without addiction can be acheived for all of these drugs.
How would define 'mild use'? Once a week, month? My experiences with addictive substances were that I started out with casual use and eventually, as my use became more frequent, found myself hooked. Hard.
What he said was true for me. Casual, recreational use of some of these drugs lead to abuse and addiction. It happened gradually, but I did reach a point where I _had_ to keep dosing myself because I had become addicted. Quitting was the hardest thing I ever did.
I'm sure that different people have different propensity to addiction. I knew a lot of guys that went to the same parties and didn't seem to reach the same level of abuse that I and some of my close friends did. I don't know what made us different.
One guy in particular really screwed up and landed in prison as a result of his spiraling down into addiction and crime. Maybe he had other problems, I don't know, but it was enough to make me stop and see my own condition. This is probably what motivated me to change my behavior.
Now I am not condemning anyone who uses drugs or saying that using something is going to get you hooked and ruin your life. But there is a real danger of physical addiction to a lot of people and discounting addiction as a 'myth' is kind of denying reality.
>...really prefer someone check to see if the door is open to turn them off for me rather than leaving a note on the window,
Well *you* may not mind, but *I'm* not going to be opening a stranger's car door to turn off the lights.
Seems like openening an unlocked car to turn off the lights exposes you to getting your butt shot off if the owner of the car gets the wrong idea as he sees you leaning into his car and happens to be the sort of person that carries a gun for just such an emergency (someone trying to boost his pickup).
Of course I was brought up with the kind of values that would make me want to help out a stranger by turning off his lights so he isn't stuck with a dead battery. Trouble is, you have to think twice before doing something like that because there are all types of people in the world, not all are like you and would appreciate seeing someone opening their car door and appearing to be getting in (for some unknown reason, perhaps to rob or vandalize).
If the car in question happens to be a neighbor's, I wouldn't hesitate to try the door and turn off the lights. If my neighbor sees me he's likely to wonder what I'm doing at first, but then thank me once he understands what I was doing. If I run across a stranger's car parked on the city streets, no way I'm touching it. Owner could be a loony. It is sad, but it's not worth the risk to be a 'good samaritan' these days.
I think this fits the analogy nicely. Obviously these guys knew enough about./ to feel reasonably comfortable in hacking in, fixing the hole and letting the admins know. Hacking into some random web server and doing the exact same thing carries the risk of being prosecuted or harassed because the owner of the hacked site could react to the appearance of an unwelcomed intrusion rather than the benign intent.
Plus the analogy falls apart when you compare leaving the headlights on (a visibly obvious problem with a certain near-term consequence) with probing for and exploiting a security hole.
My bottom line opinion? Sure, hack away if you have noble intentions and you know your target and you don't do any damage. I'm sure the/. admins who now have to rebuild the thing over the next couple days *just incase* something else was planted don't mind.
God, that's even worse than the one I saw. Some kind of 'heaven can wait' kind of theme. Some jr. angel trying to get his wings was the gist of what I caught. lame lame lame lame
Guess they did intensive demographic research and are going got the brainless wal-mart trailer-home set, eh?
I'm not sure which one Ameritech is or what the difference is, but I know they used to be referred to as a CLEC, I don't know what an ILEC is).
LEC means Local Exchange Carrier and the I is for incumbent, which Ameritech is. C is for Competitive, which Ameritech is not.;-)
All stems from the 1996 Telecom act where local telephone monopoly was supposed to be opened up to all comers (esp, ld companies like AT&T and Sprint). All this about unbundling the local loop (the copper between your house and the central telephone office). Since it isn't practical for the CLECs to lay new copper to everyone's location, they have facilities in the ILEC's physical plant.
In the case of the so-called "Data CLECs", the xDSL equipment sits at the Baby Bell's central office and taps into the copper loop coming from your house there in what I think they call the DSLAM.
If you go with Ameritech or another extablished local carrier for DSL, you potentially eliminate some of the back-and forth described in the top post of this thread.
Microsoft isn't the one who would complain if this is true. This decision is what they wanted. Microsoft wants the appeal to go to the friendly federal appeals court, the DoJ wanted it to go directly to the Supreme Court.
If the Chief Justice's son worked for the DOJ prosecuting MS and the decision was to skip federal appeals and go straight to Supreme Court, _then_ MS would undoubtably cry foul.
As it is, it is the government who would be in a position to complain if Rhenquist had tainted his decision to deny the direct appeal because his son would be in a less favorable position as a result. But who does the DoJ complain to, the pres? Is there any constitutional recourse against the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?
But really, what would Rhenquist's motivation be? If his son is defending MS in a 'private antitrust action', what would he even gain/lose based on the appeal to the SC? If the case gets accepted to the SC and is pretty much upheld, the case the son is working on is probably settled. If the case gets accepted and is overturned, the case the son is working on might get thrown out.
Since the case was handed back to federal appeals, the private case will likely drag on for an extra year and then the son's case drags on an extra year also. Regardless of the outcome of appeals, MS or the DoJ will take it to the SC. The Supreme Court could refuse to hear an appeal, though I wouldn't think that was likely.
The son is working for the defense so he's likely working on retainer, right? Not like he works for the prosecution and stands to make a huge score from a settlement.
I geuss I don't see where Rhenquist has that much incentive to influence the court on his son's behalf. If he what that whacked out and wanted to help his son's career as much as possible, wouldn't he have voted to accept the appeal and then overturned Jackson's ruling?
If he was trying to help his son out financially, bouncing the case back to appeals for a year probably makes some difference. If he is trying to help him win his case, accepting the appeal and then overturning Jackson's ruling would make the most difference.
>but for personal use I don't know what they're fussing about: as has been pointed out, they give these things away.
Yes they mail them out for free. You can go to RS and get one for free. You can go to their website (as seen on the Discovery channel) and get one for free+S&H. They obviously know that not every single one of these that leaves the warehouse will result in revenue from someone using it with their service.
But they probably counted on some % when they charted their business plan and pitched it to investors. What this represents is a threat to reduce that %, potentially below their point of profitability (as if they really had a chance anyway).
So yeah, if someone were to try to offer a commercial service based on the cat and some software that was built on the foocat barcode code, they would probably have a strong legal case. But, another potential is for someone to make some windows shareware based on foocat that uses the cuecat to build a personal database of books using Amazon ISBN lookups or something.
Then you have (lots more) people going to RS to get one of these free with no intention of ever using the DC service. I think that is probably what they are trying to fend off. They screwed up.
They must fear that people (large numbers) who get these things will never sign up for their service but instead use it with non-DC software. They almost certainly will keep after websites that post the scanner code (IMO).
Now, granted - a few linux geeks getting their hands on one of these and using fooCat_barCode instead of the cuecat software shouldn't make any difference. These guys probably wouldn't subscriber to their service in any case and finding an alternate use for the thing simply spares it from the landfill.
But if someone were to take the fooCat_barCode stuff and use it to implement a windows shareware program that gets wildly popular as a replacement for DC's service, that is a different story.
So, I think they might fight with whatever they have left to keep this source off the net for as long as possible. This, of course, is a losing battle. That doesn't mean they will/should give up. Someone's dink is in the fire right now for not properly preparing for this challenge to their business model. They will have to answer to whoever put up the cash for this little venture. There is no way they give up now.
Well, guess in this case she was sending e-mail to her local paper which was then printed in the local edition and probably posted on their web page.
Think the issue is not allowing any exceptions. You are right, the athletes probably agree not to publish journals or accounts or anything as a condition for participation in the games.
I'm sure also that the last thing the IOC want's to see is some athlete slamming the Judges, the hosting city, the IOC or the games themselves during the actual Olympics. They can't very well control what you say after the games are over and you go home, but they obviously have an interest in controlling the distribution of what is said during the games (not that I think it's right).
So in this case it was some small-hometown athelete publishing her story to those most interested, those in her home town. Pretty harmless, but if they were to allow it, seems like a precedent is set that opens up headaches when athletes start selling their during-games accounts to national and inter-national media outlets. Don't want those uppity athletes to get too much power, afterall. Just run and jump and swim and let everyone think everything is peace and love and pure athletic competition.
Coke is an
official sponsor of the Syndey 2000 games. If people are walking into the stadium with Pepsi products (or anything else) they will likely get it taken away. Lots of places don't let you bring food and beverage inside. If they sell coke, so what?
That's a good point. Yeah, they exclusively control who can participate, and who can distribute telecasts of the events, but that doesn't extend to stopping others from publishing their accounts (except the athletes, it seems).
So what does this really do for the IOC? What would really happen if these diaries went up on the front pages of every major paper in the world? God, these athletes are the reason for the games' existance, aren't they. I understand that the IOC wants to squeeze every penny out of the thing, but this doesn't make sense. Seems like publishing diary entries wouldn't take anything away from the coverage and would only add to the public's interest and so increase viewership.
But then, the IOC has already been paid, hasn't it. NBC is the one who will live or die by the ratings. This is about trying to maintain status-quo in the coming decades.
"Concerned that the power of the Internet could eventually undermine the economic foundation of the modern Olympic movement, the Olympic committee is going to great lengths to control how and where the images and accounts of the Sydney extravaganza reach the public"
So here it is again, an attempt to control information in the interest of economics. The "modern Olympic movement" must be spared from the ravages of unchecked exchange of information and ideas. I'm sorry, but I have a hell of a lot more interest in these athletes as human beings than as sound bites from 'up close, and personal'.
This reminds me of someone frantically putting up a wall of sandbags around their house when the levee has already started to burst and 20' flood waters will inevitably innundate your house.
Man, I thought the IOC had lost touch with reality before, this dials it up to '11'.
One of the actually useful features I like in IE (what I'm stuck using at work) is the address history. I usually type 'sla' and hit the down arrow once and hit enter. Stuff I visit everyday I just don't bother to bookmark.
This actually happened at my office. Someone typoed a domain and was sent into javascript pop-up porno land. They were really worried about losing their job because someone had been recently fired for visiting porno sites from work. They went to their boss and let 'em know right away what happened. Turns out that the monitoring software on the firewall did flag this and an e-mail went to the boss and HR. Of course nothing serious happened because the policy is to notify management and let them investigate, and in this case it was clearly unintentional.
The ass that got fired was warned multiple times about his browsing and chose to continue. He had a pretty sizeable collection on his harddrive, looked like the majority came from e-mail attachments he was exchanging with his buddies. I couldn't understand that one. Guess he was pretty compulsive about it.
Right after this clown was fired, a memo went out reminding everyone of the policy and that everything was logged and sniffed. Guess a bunch of people were warned and cleaned up their act since. I'm no prude, like to see some skin myself once in a while but it completely escapes me why someone would need to do this while at work.
True, however the code needed for the recomplie is not yet available:
Mods for Quake 3 Arena will require a recompile for use with 1.25 and above as we have added in a lot of mod requested features which added trap calls and changed the event system a bit. I'll get the source posted asap so all the teams can get their new cuts up. Look for it in a day or two.
So mod authors are telling players to hold off upgrading until after a new version of the mod with 1.25 changes is available.
A couple of days doesn't sound too bad. Probably a little longer than that for most of the mod authors to release updated binaries and then a little longer again for all the servers to upgrade. This could piss you off if your 'clan' had a trash-talk-induced match to defend the groups honor and they had to wait a week because their best player upped to 1.25 and couldn't play.;-) (that's sarcasm)
Thanks, that makes sense. I hadn't realized people were getting these in the mail without asking for them first. My only experience with this was looking at their website where they send you one 'free' for a S&H charge or you could drop into RadioShack and pick one up. Hey! I'm subscriberd to Wired, have to check the mailbox today to see if I have one yet.
Slashdot Mirror
>in the past 20 years, we have been nowhere near the record of Americans turning 18
Thought that too. And besides, even if it were true, it means very little. The current crop of 18-yr-old voters are hardly the most poitically aware and active bunch in the last 20 years. I might go as far to say that they are probably the least likely bunch since the late 60's to actually be aware, much less participate in the presidential election. That's too bad, and I hope I'm wrong about that.
Katz's drift that alienating the young net-savvy voters by insulting their intelligence by painting the net as a chasm of evil seems somewhat moot. Is there really a chance that large numbers of the 18 20 23&1/2 doom/quake/napster crowd is going to vote for him anyway?
I doubt it. Are there hordes of registered voters in the 36-52 demographic with young kids that are scared to death their child might be the next Klebold and are waiting to hear which candidate "understands" how evil this internet thing is and is going to do something about keeping this bugaboo from corrupting their kid.
GW isn't going to be swept into office by swaying young voters and he knows this. If he were to stand up there and demonstrate a real understanding of the internet to the extent that Jon Katz would hail him as a true revolutionary political candidate, he would lose votes from that majoruty of registered voters that are afraid of the internet because they don't understand it and don't want to.
I don't have any proof at all. It seems to be real, though.
/. yesterday.
;-)
Rusty and Hemos et all seemed to take him as real. They set up the IRC chat for last night at that time which was announced on
Someone tracerouted the IP and saw that it was a Michigan ISP.
I don't discount the possibility that this could have been bogus, but it looks pretty real and K5 posted it so it *must* be real, right?
oops, I previewed and still the html got munched, the link is here.
Dunno, having read the log before, I think Taco really gets off tormenting sig11 and sig seems to get pretty peevish about it all.
I have to admin, sig's top-page article on k5 the other day was pretty interesting, although I can see where his constant whining and badgering about improving slash to eliminate this 'groupthink' pet peeve of his gets under taco's skin after a while.
I think everyone who is interested should read the log and decide for themselves. It is a facinating insight into sig and taco.
I think sig raises some valid issues but I tend to agree with taco that the system mostly works for the benefit of the of the majority. No one claims it's perfect, not sure it can be or even needs to be. Could it be better? Sure. Is it so broke right now that other things that need to be done everyday to run the site should be stopped. Doesn't seem like it to me.
Just a highlight to entice you to look at the log linked above:
[20:55] <CmdrTaco> You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. ;)
[20:56] <Signal_11> Just leave me alone, Rob... I've had enough for one week.
[20:57] <CmdrTaco> Sig:I've had to deal with your childish crap for 3 years. You can handle 10 sentances of IRC slapping
[20:58] <CmdrTaco> Signal 11 thinks he is the reason for moderation, for mete moderation, and for jesus.
[20:59] <CmdrTaco> I work all day, you just fucking troll websites. That definitely qualifies you as an expert.
[21:01] <CmdrTaco> Oh, shit! Dark Angel!
[21:01] * CmdrTaco is away: dark angel.
[21:02] <Signal_11> He comes in, slams me, then walks out to watch TV. what's WRONG with this picture...
Some of this may be out of context, read the whole thing. (I didn't try to intentionally slant it, but it probably looks that way.) Very interesting.
>oxymoron
that was a typo, "narcotics and stimulants" is what I meant.
Well, I made a long story perhaps a bit too short. Obviously be wasn't imprisoned for being addicted to drugs (not even for trafficing or even posession).
No, he went to prison for armed robery. He would not have resorted to armed robery had he not owed over $10,000 to someone. He would not have been in such a desperate situation had he not lost his job, gotten thrown out of his apartment, etc because of his drug habbit.
You are correct, his condition was medically treatable. At any point before he walked into a liquor store at 3am with a sawed-off shotgun, he might have been able to go to rehab and find some way to cover his huge debt with his dealer.
The problem was, he himself refused to acknowledge he had a problem which of course is the first step to voluntary treatment. His friends and family didn't know exactly what was going on with him, but they probably suspected. Of course he closed himself off from everyone except his circle of fellow users, so noone who actually cared about what happened to him actually had a chance to help him.
I was headed down the same path as him and was just as deluded about how I could 'handle it' and tht it wasn't a problem. Could have been me instead of him.
No thank you. The trade-off between the immediacy of an online forum like /. vs the latency of traditional print media for the sake of a few typos and grammatical errors is too high.
/. that web-charm feel. What does kind of grate on me after a while is seeing posts complaining about spelling moderated to the top on stories like this that might otherwise threaten to spur interesting and intelligent discussion. :-)
I guess I'm not anal enough to be really bothered by then/than, they're/their, its/it's kind of mistakes. Kind of what gives
>The reason I got started with the problem was that I started doing it every day. This was because I had a lot of work at the time, and the speed helped me get it done. But I still take the stuff now, just sensibly when I'm going out or something.
Congrats, you are probably in the majority of people who can use stimulants and/or mood altering chemicals and not become addicted.
Sadly, not everyone is exactly like you and it is kind of irrelevant cite your experience as evidence that these drugs aren't addictive. They are. Not to everyone who tries them, for sure, but for a large number of people it is a real problem.
Recreational use at parties is not really what the article deals with. When you start using coke as a work-enhancing stimulant, you are talking about a different situation.
It is easy enough to become dependent on even caffeine to get through your day under normal circumstances. Here we are talking about a situation where there is enormous pressure to produce, where people are working 14+ hours a day, 6-7 days a week. These conditions certainly strain the limits of human endurance, and so some are turning to coke, meth, etc to help them cope.
Man, it's one thing to get high to have a good time. It's something else when the only way to get through your long, stressful day is to load up on narcotic stimulants. Add to that the almost total lack of free time and you have a pretty bleak situation. How then do you spend that rare free time? Get _really_ stoned and convince yourself that you are really having fun and this is the reason you are working so hard.
Been there, done that. Nearly killed me.
>but there is no "take it once, you're doomed to be an addict" truth as you say.
Notice his use of words like 'leads' and 'eventually'.
You are right. I've never heard of anyone being 'instantly addicted' after a single use of any substance. But that didn't sound like what he was saying.
>Mild use without addiction can be acheived for all of these drugs.
How would define 'mild use'? Once a week, month? My experiences with addictive substances were that I started out with casual use and eventually, as my use became more frequent, found myself hooked. Hard.
What he said was true for me. Casual, recreational use of some of these drugs lead to abuse and addiction. It happened gradually, but I did reach a point where I _had_ to keep dosing myself because I had become addicted. Quitting was the hardest thing I ever did.
I'm sure that different people have different propensity to addiction. I knew a lot of guys that went to the same parties and didn't seem to reach the same level of abuse that I and some of my close friends did. I don't know what made us different.
One guy in particular really screwed up and landed in prison as a result of his spiraling down into addiction and crime. Maybe he had other problems, I don't know, but it was enough to make me stop and see my own condition. This is probably what motivated me to change my behavior.
Now I am not condemning anyone who uses drugs or saying that using something is going to get you hooked and ruin your life. But there is a real danger of physical addiction to a lot of people and discounting addiction as a 'myth' is kind of denying reality.
>...really prefer someone check to see if the door is open to turn them off for me rather than leaving a note on the window,
./ to feel reasonably comfortable in hacking in, fixing the hole and letting the admins know. Hacking into some random web server and doing the exact same thing carries the risk of being prosecuted or harassed because the owner of the hacked site could react to the appearance of an unwelcomed intrusion rather than the benign intent.
/. admins who now have to rebuild the thing over the next couple days *just incase* something else was planted don't mind.
Well *you* may not mind, but *I'm* not going to be opening a stranger's car door to turn off the lights.
Seems like openening an unlocked car to turn off the lights exposes you to getting your butt shot off if the owner of the car gets the wrong idea as he sees you leaning into his car and happens to be the sort of person that carries a gun for just such an emergency (someone trying to boost his pickup).
Of course I was brought up with the kind of values that would make me want to help out a stranger by turning off his lights so he isn't stuck with a dead battery. Trouble is, you have to think twice before doing something like that because there are all types of people in the world, not all are like you and would appreciate seeing someone opening their car door and appearing to be getting in (for some unknown reason, perhaps to rob or vandalize).
If the car in question happens to be a neighbor's, I wouldn't hesitate to try the door and turn off the lights. If my neighbor sees me he's likely to wonder what I'm doing at first, but then thank me once he understands what I was doing. If I run across a stranger's car parked on the city streets, no way I'm touching it. Owner could be a loony. It is sad, but it's not worth the risk to be a 'good samaritan' these days.
I think this fits the analogy nicely. Obviously these guys knew enough about
Plus the analogy falls apart when you compare leaving the headlights on (a visibly obvious problem with a certain near-term consequence) with probing for and exploiting a security hole.
My bottom line opinion? Sure, hack away if you have noble intentions and you know your target and you don't do any damage. I'm sure the
Ah, that explains Signal 11's posts today. No, wait... nevermind.
God, that's even worse than the one I saw. Some kind of 'heaven can wait' kind of theme. Some jr. angel trying to get his wings was the gist of what I caught. lame lame lame lame
Guess they did intensive demographic research and are going got the brainless wal-mart trailer-home set, eh?
>Think of all the Supreme Court nominees who were rejected because they didn't understand the tax witholding laws for their nannies.
:-)
Thought that was the first two Attorney Generals that Clinton tried to appoint.
I'm not sure which one Ameritech is or what the difference is, but I know they used to be referred to as a CLEC, I don't know what an ILEC is).
;-)
LEC means Local Exchange Carrier and the I is for incumbent, which Ameritech is. C is for Competitive, which Ameritech is not.
All stems from the 1996 Telecom act where local telephone monopoly was supposed to be opened up to all comers (esp, ld companies like AT&T and Sprint). All this about unbundling the local loop (the copper between your house and the central telephone office). Since it isn't practical for the CLECs to lay new copper to everyone's location, they have facilities in the ILEC's physical plant.
In the case of the so-called "Data CLECs", the xDSL equipment sits at the Baby Bell's central office and taps into the copper loop coming from your house there in what I think they call the DSLAM.
If you go with Ameritech or another extablished local carrier for DSL, you potentially eliminate some of the back-and forth described in the top post of this thread.
Microsoft isn't the one who would complain if this is true. This decision is what they wanted. Microsoft wants the appeal to go to the friendly federal appeals court, the DoJ wanted it to go directly to the Supreme Court.
If the Chief Justice's son worked for the DOJ prosecuting MS and the decision was to skip federal appeals and go straight to Supreme Court, _then_ MS would undoubtably cry foul.
As it is, it is the government who would be in a position to complain if Rhenquist had tainted his decision to deny the direct appeal because his son would be in a less favorable position as a result. But who does the DoJ complain to, the pres? Is there any constitutional recourse against the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?
But really, what would Rhenquist's motivation be? If his son is defending MS in a 'private antitrust action', what would he even gain/lose based on the appeal to the SC? If the case gets accepted to the SC and is pretty much upheld, the case the son is working on is probably settled. If the case gets accepted and is overturned, the case the son is working on might get thrown out.
Since the case was handed back to federal appeals, the private case will likely drag on for an extra year and then the son's case drags on an extra year also. Regardless of the outcome of appeals, MS or the DoJ will take it to the SC. The Supreme Court could refuse to hear an appeal, though I wouldn't think that was likely.
The son is working for the defense so he's likely working on retainer, right? Not like he works for the prosecution and stands to make a huge score from a settlement.
I geuss I don't see where Rhenquist has that much incentive to influence the court on his son's behalf. If he what that whacked out and wanted to help his son's career as much as possible, wouldn't he have voted to accept the appeal and then overturned Jackson's ruling?
If he was trying to help his son out financially, bouncing the case back to appeals for a year probably makes some difference. If he is trying to help him win his case, accepting the appeal and then overturning Jackson's ruling would make the most difference.
>but for personal use I don't know what they're fussing about: as has been pointed out, they give these things away.
Yes they mail them out for free. You can go to RS and get one for free. You can go to their website (as seen on the Discovery channel) and get one for free+S&H. They obviously know that not every single one of these that leaves the warehouse will result in revenue from someone using it with their service.
But they probably counted on some % when they charted their business plan and pitched it to investors. What this represents is a threat to reduce that %, potentially below their point of profitability (as if they really had a chance anyway).
So yeah, if someone were to try to offer a commercial service based on the cat and some software that was built on the foocat barcode code, they would probably have a strong legal case. But, another potential is for someone to make some windows shareware based on foocat that uses the cuecat to build a personal database of books using Amazon ISBN lookups or something.
Then you have (lots more) people going to RS to get one of these free with no intention of ever using the DC service. I think that is probably what they are trying to fend off. They screwed up.
They must fear that people (large numbers) who get these things will never sign up for their service but instead use it with non-DC software. They almost certainly will keep after websites that post the scanner code (IMO).
Now, granted - a few linux geeks getting their hands on one of these and using fooCat_barCode instead of the cuecat software shouldn't make any difference. These guys probably wouldn't subscriber to their service in any case and finding an alternate use for the thing simply spares it from the landfill.
But if someone were to take the fooCat_barCode stuff and use it to implement a windows shareware program that gets wildly popular as a replacement for DC's service, that is a different story.
So, I think they might fight with whatever they have left to keep this source off the net for as long as possible. This, of course, is a losing battle. That doesn't mean they will/should give up. Someone's dink is in the fire right now for not properly preparing for this challenge to their business model. They will have to answer to whoever put up the cash for this little venture. There is no way they give up now.
Well, guess in this case she was sending e-mail to her local paper which was then printed in the local edition and probably posted on their web page.
Think the issue is not allowing any exceptions. You are right, the athletes probably agree not to publish journals or accounts or anything as a condition for participation in the games.
I'm sure also that the last thing the IOC want's to see is some athlete slamming the Judges, the hosting city, the IOC or the games themselves during the actual Olympics. They can't very well control what you say after the games are over and you go home, but they obviously have an interest in controlling the distribution of what is said during the games (not that I think it's right).
So in this case it was some small-hometown athelete publishing her story to those most interested, those in her home town. Pretty harmless, but if they were to allow it, seems like a precedent is set that opens up headaches when athletes start selling their during-games accounts to national and inter-national media outlets. Don't want those uppity athletes to get too much power, afterall. Just run and jump and swim and let everyone think everything is peace and love and pure athletic competition.
Coke is an official sponsor of the Syndey 2000 games. If people are walking into the stadium with Pepsi products (or anything else) they will likely get it taken away. Lots of places don't let you bring food and beverage inside. If they sell coke, so what?
That's a good point. Yeah, they exclusively control who can participate, and who can distribute telecasts of the events, but that doesn't extend to stopping others from publishing their accounts (except the athletes, it seems).
So what does this really do for the IOC? What would really happen if these diaries went up on the front pages of every major paper in the world? God, these athletes are the reason for the games' existance, aren't they. I understand that the IOC wants to squeeze every penny out of the thing, but this doesn't make sense. Seems like publishing diary entries wouldn't take anything away from the coverage and would only add to the public's interest and so increase viewership.
But then, the IOC has already been paid, hasn't it. NBC is the one who will live or die by the ratings. This is about trying to maintain status-quo in the coming decades.
"Concerned that the power of the Internet could eventually undermine the economic foundation of the modern Olympic movement, the Olympic committee is going to great lengths to control how and where the images and accounts of the Sydney extravaganza reach the public"
So here it is again, an attempt to control information in the interest of economics. The "modern Olympic movement" must be spared from the ravages of unchecked exchange of information and ideas. I'm sorry, but I have a hell of a lot more interest in these athletes as human beings than as sound bites from 'up close, and personal'.
This reminds me of someone frantically putting up a wall of sandbags around their house when the levee has already started to burst and 20' flood waters will inevitably innundate your house.
Man, I thought the IOC had lost touch with reality before, this dials it up to '11'.
I did the first time.
Right-o
One of the actually useful features I like in IE (what I'm stuck using at work) is the address history. I usually type 'sla' and hit the down arrow once and hit enter. Stuff I visit everyday I just don't bother to bookmark.
This actually happened at my office. Someone typoed a domain and was sent into javascript pop-up porno land. They were really worried about losing their job because someone had been recently fired for visiting porno sites from work. They went to their boss and let 'em know right away what happened. Turns out that the monitoring software on the firewall did flag this and an e-mail went to the boss and HR. Of course nothing serious happened because the policy is to notify management and let them investigate, and in this case it was clearly unintentional.
The ass that got fired was warned multiple times about his browsing and chose to continue. He had a pretty sizeable collection on his harddrive, looked like the majority came from e-mail attachments he was exchanging with his buddies. I couldn't understand that one. Guess he was pretty compulsive about it.
Right after this clown was fired, a memo went out reminding everyone of the policy and that everything was logged and sniffed. Guess a bunch of people were warned and cleaned up their act since. I'm no prude, like to see some skin myself once in a while but it completely escapes me why someone would need to do this while at work.
Mods for Quake 3 Arena will require a recompile for use with 1.25 and above as we have added in a lot of mod requested features which added trap calls and changed the event system a bit. I'll get the source posted asap so all the teams can get their new cuts up. Look for it in a day or two.
So mod authors are telling players to hold off upgrading until after a new version of the mod with 1.25 changes is available.
A couple of days doesn't sound too bad. Probably a little longer than that for most of the mod authors to release updated binaries and then a little longer again for all the servers to upgrade. This could piss you off if your 'clan' had a trash-talk-induced match to defend the groups honor and they had to wait a week because their best player upped to 1.25 and couldn't play. ;-) (that's sarcasm)
Thanks, that makes sense. I hadn't realized people were getting these in the mail without asking for them first. My only experience with this was looking at their website where they send you one 'free' for a S&H charge or you could drop into RadioShack and pick one up. Hey! I'm subscriberd to Wired, have to check the mailbox today to see if I have one yet.