This is truly frightening. I've seen the other articles covering Bertelsmann's manifesto, but now that it's been converted to ASCII, I can actually read it. I couldn't get past the first page without feeling the need to respond to it.
It's worse than everyone said it was.
5. Governments: supporting and reinforcing self-regulation
Self-regulation cannot function without the support of pub- lic authorities, [...]
Huh? We can't regulate ourselves without outside help? That doesn't even parse.
8. Hotlines: communicating and evaluating content concerns
[...] Legislators should [...] shield them from crimi- inal or civil liability incurred in the proper conduct of their business ("safe harbor").
This is what really set me off. They're proposing to set up a government-endorsed censorship team which will operator above the law.
I can't read any more of this thing. I'm too disgusted already.
(Hmm, what's that screaming sound I hear from the north??)
Re:So the poor windows only geeks can decode binar
on
Nitrozac Answers
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· Score: 1
I think that "windows only geeks" (an oxymoron?) would benefit more from a Win32 port of perl than from some random VB application.
This will also help wean them from the GUI nipple.
Or, on the other hand, they could just use their Y2k-compliant PowerPads and render the binary into hexadecimal/octal and then into letters by looking up the ASCII values. Which is obviously the most geeky way to do it, and will earn them massive karma points.
Snow Crash is more approachable
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
While I liked Diamond Age, I thought it went a little bit too far into the "weird zone" at times.
Snow Crash, on the other hand, is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. If you liked Cryptonomicon but couldn't get into Diamond Age as easily, you may want to try Snow Crash instead. And unlike Diamond Age, the ending of Snow Crash didn't make me feel like hunting down Stephenson and beating him with the manuscript until he coughed up the real ending....;-)
Anyone using a root password on the web is a moron in the fisrt place. Not likely to happen is it.
Oh, no. Of course not. There are no morons on the web. No, everyone using the web is a long-time Unix hacker, with a background in practical security administration and cryptology. So this won't cause any problems at all.
To get people to vote on laws, you could offer a 10 percent tax break on their income tax, or give them some sort of sales tax waiver certificate.
There should not be an income tax. The government has no business knowing how much money I make, or even how much money I have.
I'm not terribly fond of property taxes, either, but I can bear to let them stand for now.
I'd support a national sales tax, if it meant the repeal of income tax.
But I'd prefer not to offer an incentive to vote. Those who really care enough to research the issues and vote on them, will do so. Those who don't care, won't vote. If you artificially inflate the number of people voting, you get a lot of people who vote without caring -- in other words, random noise. This drowns out the "signal" of those who actually took the time to think the matters through.
But on a practical note, I don't think the Internet is currently developed to the point where true Democracy is feasible. And voting on new laws couldn't be accomplished any other way -- Congress introduces literally hundreds of these monstrosities every year. Dragging people out to the polls every day would be a nightmare. (Didn't Heinlein include this in one of his novels? Yeah, I think it was him.)
If we simply start sending all of our emails signed (and encrypted, where possible), people can start to get used to the idea, and will ask questions. If we answer intelligently, we can get them willing to do the same thing.
This leads back to an issue that was raised recently on the main slashdot -- is there a good newbie explanation of cryptography somewhere on the web which can be used as the answer to the questions you're encouraging? Something that you could give to a completely non-technical person (your mother, or a WebTV user) which goes over the most basic concepts without going into enough detail to scare them off? (I guarantee you, as soon as you mention prime numbers or modular arithmetic, their brains will shut down. There must be no math at all.)
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
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· Score: 2
The following was written with implicit sarcasm tags:
All the social problems with Alcohol and cigarettes went away when they were made legal. It should work just the same with cannabis.
Cigarettes (nicotine) have never been illegal in this country (USA). Smoking is prohibited in certain situations, but not nicotine. So no fair conclusions can be drawn here.
The sale and consumption of alcohol (ethanol) were prohibited in the USA for a while, and caused many, many problems which I won't attempt to summarize here -- they are too numerous. But read some of these pages:
Prohibition of any drug is not only a violation of human rights and an Orwellian interference with privacy -- it's also deadly. We need to stop the drug warnow.
Many of my very computer literate friends were also in band in HS and college. We _can_ keep time, thank you.
That doesn't prove much, by itself. Autism-related disorders are so very broad a category that there's no single definition or set of behaviors/symptoms you can use to classify them.
I was in marching band, too, and I have what seems to be an above-average sense of rhythm. But I've got a few of the other symptoms, and my older son has a whole lot of the symptoms, which he probably inherited from me. Neither of us is "officially autistic", but he's going to have some real problems in the next few years. (He's 5 now.)
The "technical" term for mild autism is "Asperger's Syndrome".
That's just one of a whole family of diseases. The larger category is PDD, or "Pervasive Developmental Delay" -- a category of which autism is only one extreme. My older son has this, and I'm probably one of the people who show the "shadow syndromes" which are a much, much milder example of it.
There are many good sites on the WWW which discuss this, but unfortunately most of the good information is still in books. But you might start with autism resources.
Could someone please explain to me (with or without the benefit of muppet spokescreatures) exactly what I'm supposed to be protecting my children from?
Could someone please post the results of any sort of study demonstrating a correlation between the viewing of fictional sex or violence with mental or emotional disturbance?
I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that the viewing of this "explicit material" -- and in particular, sex -- is somehow "bad for children". (I can understand the desire to shield children from displays of violence; but not sex. Sex is a natural function, and is how those children got here in the first place.)
For the record, I'm a father of two children myself.
Why don't you do something like "After Year 2010" or "After Year 2020", Or even "after WW3" ?
Surely "After 2038" should be the next big one for all of us Linux people....
The only problem is we need a catchy name for the problem so that people who don't know Unix can understand the importance of this. "The 32-bit time_t problem" is accurate but just doesn't have that certain something....
What's the license for this product? Is it proprietary commercial software? All I could find at the linked sites was information about the beta test -- what will be the terms and conditions for the released product when the beta concludes?
download the MP3's for free off someone's site. Don't bother encoding them, someone has done it for you already.
One of my Linux boxes has a nice Samsung 32x CD-ROM drive that can rip audio files at 2-3 times playback speed. Encoding at 128 kbits with bladeenc takes longer, but all that means is that my RC5 keyrate drops. (I've got a K6-2 at 333 MHz and a Celeron at 400 MHz.)
On the other hand, my connection to the Internet at home is a 14.4 kbps modem. But that's not important, because the modem is not the bottleneck during downloads -- my ISP's network is.
You do the math.
Until broadband Internet access becomes the norm, ripping from audio CD is going to be much more feasible for me.
Personally I think the average registered slashdot is useless. [...] Spam is marketting directed to newbies.
Well, we geeks know that, but do the spammers know that? To the "average spammer", the "here's a collection of 500000 geek e-mail addresses" argument may actually look enticing.
click a parent link and then use the back button to come back to the same 10 questions, with Netscape Communicator 4.51 I'd get a new set every time
If you want to ensure that you won't lose the data you're looking at, open the parent link in a new window. On the Unix/X versions of Netscape, this is done with the middle mouse button (or emulation thereof, for those of us who have 2-button mice). On the Win32 versions of Netscape, this is one of the options on the right-mouse-button menu.
Then, when you're done looking at the parent link data, close the window (Alt-W in X, Ctrl-W in Win32). The original window will still be there untouched.
The behavior you're seeing is the browser-dependent handling of pages which have no Last-Modified or Expires header. Slashdot doesn't put either of these headers on its dynamnic pages, so the browser gets to decide whether they should be fetched every time, or whether going back to them can use an old copy.
For e-mail: use a mailer that supports PGP (I use mutt) if you can. If not, then you can save the message as a file and then encrypt it manually.
For general use: pgp -ea filname will create filename.asc which is a PGP-encrypted version of the file. You will be prompted for the recipient -- i.e., who will be able to read the file. Now, this is for PGP 2.6.3 -- I can't help with the other ones. You could try reading the manuals which came with the software....
how can I add a public key i got from someones webpage or something?
If the public key is in a file called key.asc then type pgp -ka key.asc. That's "key add".
everything is in PDF format and i HATE acrobat reader
PGP 2.6.3 predates PDF. The documentation that accompanies PGP 2.6.3 is in ASCII text format.
the network associates one
I recommend against using this. PGP 2.6.3 is the de facto standard -- the newer versions can read PGP 2.6.3 keys, but not vice versa (PGP 2.6.3 cannot read PGP 5 keys). If you don't want to use PGP 2.6.3, I recommend GnuPG.
Of course, you might want to create a PGP 2.6.3 key pair, but actually use the PGP 5 (or newer) software -- that way you can handle keys from both versions, and people who only have the older version can still handle your key. Last time I checked, PGP 5 could not create a PGP-2.6.3-compatible key pair -- you actually had to download and run the old software if you wanted to generate a PGP 2.6.3 key.
GnuPG can't create PGP-2.6.3-compatible key pairs, either, but that's because of patent restrictions on the RSA algorithm.
Personaly, I'd like to see a one time bonus point for registering your public pgp key
It's impossible to confirm that the PGP key is valid. Someone who wants that point could fill in random text.
(The key validation issue is actually a deeply important one. If you download my PGP key from my home page, how far do you trust its accuracy? How do you know my web page/account hasn't been cracked? That my Slashdot account hasn't been cracked? These are deep issues.)
Does this mean that we should start clear-signing our posts?
I'd do it -- but only if I could hook external programs into my web browser's textareas. I wrote a "Mozilla wishlist" item in another slashdot post a few weeks back -- I want to be able to use an external text editor instead of the built-in text editor when writing in a textarea. If we extend this into a generic external program hook, then we could bind keystrokes to clear-sign textarea contents, or spell-check it with ispell, or invoke a real text editor (one that's more than 50x10..), etc.
Maybe I'll look into adding this into Bugzilla. They must have some sort of wishlist section. At least I think it would be an incredibly useful feature.
If you don't post for a while, can your karma dwindle (i.e. expire)?
I hope not. Personally, I think it should work like an uncursed luckstone in NetHack -- negative karma will expire (at a rate of, say, 1 point every two weeks), but positive karma will not expire.
Justification: once someone has negative karma, there are two possibilities -- (a) the person is a troll, or (b) the person is actively disliked by one or more moderators. Now, the M2 system will (at least theoretically) discourage bad moderation, but there are probably a few people out there who fall into category (b) due to moderator activity long ago. But in either case, people tend to mature over time -- and on the Internet, they tend to mature rather more quickly than in real life. (Or maybe I'm just naive or optimistic....) But anyway, I think that people who have misbehaved in the past shouldn't be punished forever -- by being stuck with bad karma for a while, they're "paying their dues", and when the "sentence" is over, they should be back to normal.
Oh well, I can forgive them for that. It's a German site, after all -- the article's English was still better than 90% of the stuff I see published here in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
This is truly frightening. I've seen the other articles covering Bertelsmann's manifesto, but now that it's been converted to ASCII, I can actually read it. I couldn't get past the first page without feeling the need to respond to it.
It's worse than everyone said it was.
Huh? We can't regulate ourselves without outside help? That doesn't even parse.
This is what really set me off. They're proposing to set up a government-endorsed censorship team which will operator above the law.
I can't read any more of this thing. I'm too disgusted already.
Besides, I doubt she lives in Canada (arg).
Actually, she does live in Canada.
(Hmm, what's that screaming sound I hear from the north??)
I think that "windows only geeks" (an oxymoron?) would benefit more from a Win32 port of perl than from some random VB application.
This will also help wean them from the GUI nipple.
Or, on the other hand, they could just use their Y2k-compliant PowerPads and render the binary into hexadecimal/octal and then into letters by looking up the ASCII values. Which is obviously the most geeky way to do it, and will earn them massive karma points.
While I liked Diamond Age, I thought it went a little bit too far into the "weird zone" at times.
Snow Crash, on the other hand, is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. If you liked Cryptonomicon but couldn't get into Diamond Age as easily, you may want to try Snow Crash instead. And unlike Diamond Age, the ending of Snow Crash didn't make me feel like hunting down Stephenson and beating him with the manuscript until he coughed up the real ending.... ;-)
o yjoml oy jsd dp,yomh yp fp eoyj no;; v;omypmd jrsf nromh dvts,n;rf
Hey! They're only giving Janet $80 million -- you've just wasted about $3 million of it, so she's only got $77 million left for other codes!
And you misspelled dp,ryjom -- but that'll probably make it harder for her to decipher. :-)
Anyone using a root password on the web is a moron in the fisrt place. Not likely to happen is it.
Oh, no. Of course not. There are no morons on the web. No, everyone using the web is a long-time Unix hacker, with a background in practical security administration and cryptology. So this won't cause any problems at all.
</sarcasm>
To get people to vote on laws, you could offer a 10 percent tax break on their income tax, or give them some sort of sales tax waiver certificate.
There should not be an income tax. The government has no business knowing how much money I make, or even how much money I have.
I'm not terribly fond of property taxes, either, but I can bear to let them stand for now.
I'd support a national sales tax, if it meant the repeal of income tax.
But I'd prefer not to offer an incentive to vote. Those who really care enough to research the issues and vote on them, will do so. Those who don't care, won't vote. If you artificially inflate the number of people voting, you get a lot of people who vote without caring -- in other words, random noise. This drowns out the "signal" of those who actually took the time to think the matters through.
But on a practical note, I don't think the Internet is currently developed to the point where true Democracy is feasible. And voting on new laws couldn't be accomplished any other way -- Congress introduces literally hundreds of these monstrosities every year. Dragging people out to the polls every day would be a nightmare. (Didn't Heinlein include this in one of his novels? Yeah, I think it was him.)
The real problem is that Congress is evil. :-(
If we simply start sending all of our emails signed (and encrypted, where possible), people can start to get used to the idea, and will ask questions. If we answer intelligently, we can get them willing to do the same thing.
This leads back to an issue that was raised recently on the main slashdot -- is there a good newbie explanation of cryptography somewhere on the web which can be used as the answer to the questions you're encouraging? Something that you could give to a completely non-technical person (your mother, or a WebTV user) which goes over the most basic concepts without going into enough detail to scare them off? (I guarantee you, as soon as you mention prime numbers or modular arithmetic, their brains will shut down. There must be no math at all.)
The following was written with implicit sarcasm tags:
All the social problems with Alcohol and cigarettes went away when they were made legal. It should work just the same with cannabis.
Cigarettes (nicotine) have never been illegal in this country (USA). Smoking is prohibited in certain situations, but not nicotine. So no fair conclusions can be drawn here.
The sale and consumption of alcohol (ethanol) were prohibited in the USA for a while, and caused many, many problems which I won't attempt to summarize here -- they are too numerous. But read some of these pages:
Prohibition of any drug is not only a violation of human rights and an Orwellian interference with privacy -- it's also deadly. We need to stop the drug war now.
Many of my very computer literate friends were also in band in HS and college. We _can_ keep time, thank you.
That doesn't prove much, by itself. Autism-related disorders are so very broad a category that there's no single definition or set of behaviors/symptoms you can use to classify them.
I was in marching band, too, and I have what seems to be an above-average sense of rhythm. But I've got a few of the other symptoms, and my older son has a whole lot of the symptoms, which he probably inherited from me. Neither of us is "officially autistic", but he's going to have some real problems in the next few years. (He's 5 now.)
The "technical" term for mild autism is "Asperger's Syndrome".
That's just one of a whole family of diseases. The larger category is PDD, or "Pervasive Developmental Delay" -- a category of which autism is only one extreme. My older son has this, and I'm probably one of the people who show the "shadow syndromes" which are a much, much milder example of it.
There are many good sites on the WWW which discuss this, but unfortunately most of the good information is still in books. But you might start with autism resources.
Um, at least Bambi and Dawn are both of African descent (see today's strip).
The ancestry of the TTB's isn't mentioned in any of the strips. However, Nitrozac did mention a couple of them on the message board.
It's certainly not mentioned in today's strip, which involves Dawn and the geek looking at a fly.
Could someone please explain to me (with or without the benefit of muppet spokescreatures) exactly what I'm supposed to be protecting my children from?
Could someone please post the results of any sort of study demonstrating a correlation between the viewing of fictional sex or violence with mental or emotional disturbance?
I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that the viewing of this "explicit material" -- and in particular, sex -- is somehow "bad for children". (I can understand the desire to shield children from displays of violence; but not sex. Sex is a natural function, and is how those children got here in the first place.)
For the record, I'm a father of two children myself.
Why don't you do something like "After Year 2010" or "After Year 2020", Or even "after WW3" ?
Surely "After 2038" should be the next big one for all of us Linux people....
The only problem is we need a catchy name for the problem so that people who don't know Unix can understand the importance of this. "The 32-bit time_t problem" is accurate but just doesn't have that certain something....
What's the license for this product? Is it proprietary commercial software? All I could find at the linked sites was information about the beta test -- what will be the terms and conditions for the released product when the beta concludes?
No, this is clearly inspired by the "bit" from Tron. Does it change shape when it answers "YES" or "NO"?
download the MP3's for free off someone's site. Don't bother encoding them, someone has done it for you already.
One of my Linux boxes has a nice Samsung 32x CD-ROM drive that can rip audio files at 2-3 times playback speed. Encoding at 128 kbits with bladeenc takes longer, but all that means is that my RC5 keyrate drops. (I've got a K6-2 at 333 MHz and a Celeron at 400 MHz.)
On the other hand, my connection to the Internet at home is a 14.4 kbps modem. But that's not important, because the modem is not the bottleneck during downloads -- my ISP's network is.
You do the math.
Until broadband Internet access becomes the norm, ripping from audio CD is going to be much more feasible for me.
Personally I think the average registered slashdot is useless. [...] Spam is marketting directed to newbies.
Well, we geeks know that, but do the spammers know that? To the "average spammer", the "here's a collection of 500000 geek e-mail addresses" argument may actually look enticing.
click a parent link and then use the back button to come back to the same 10 questions, with Netscape Communicator 4.51 I'd get a new set every time
If you want to ensure that you won't lose the data you're looking at, open the parent link in a new window. On the Unix/X versions of Netscape, this is done with the middle mouse button (or emulation thereof, for those of us who have 2-button mice). On the Win32 versions of Netscape, this is one of the options on the right-mouse-button menu.
Then, when you're done looking at the parent link data, close the window (Alt-W in X, Ctrl-W in Win32). The original window will still be there untouched.
The behavior you're seeing is the browser-dependent handling of pages which have no Last-Modified or Expires header. Slashdot doesn't put either of these headers on its dynamnic pages, so the browser gets to decide whether they should be fetched every time, or whether going back to them can use an old copy.
How do I enecrypt emails and stuff
For e-mail: use a mailer that supports PGP (I use mutt) if you can. If not, then you can save the message as a file and then encrypt it manually.
For general use: pgp -ea filname will create filename.asc which is a PGP-encrypted version of the file. You will be prompted for the recipient -- i.e., who will be able to read the file. Now, this is for PGP 2.6.3 -- I can't help with the other ones. You could try reading the manuals which came with the software....
how can I add a public key i got from someones webpage or something?
If the public key is in a file called key.asc then type pgp -ka key.asc . That's "key add".
everything is in PDF format and i HATE acrobat reader
PGP 2.6.3 predates PDF. The documentation that accompanies PGP 2.6.3 is in ASCII text format.
the network associates one
I recommend against using this. PGP 2.6.3 is the de facto standard -- the newer versions can read PGP 2.6.3 keys, but not vice versa (PGP 2.6.3 cannot read PGP 5 keys). If you don't want to use PGP 2.6.3, I recommend GnuPG.
Of course, you might want to create a PGP 2.6.3 key pair, but actually use the PGP 5 (or newer) software -- that way you can handle keys from both versions, and people who only have the older version can still handle your key. Last time I checked, PGP 5 could not create a PGP-2.6.3-compatible key pair -- you actually had to download and run the old software if you wanted to generate a PGP 2.6.3 key.
GnuPG can't create PGP-2.6.3-compatible key pairs, either, but that's because of patent restrictions on the RSA algorithm.
Personaly, I'd like to see a one time bonus point for registering your public pgp key
It's impossible to confirm that the PGP key is valid. Someone who wants that point could fill in random text.
(The key validation issue is actually a deeply important one. If you download my PGP key from my home page, how far do you trust its accuracy? How do you know my web page/account hasn't been cracked? That my Slashdot account hasn't been cracked? These are deep issues.)
Does this mean that we should start clear-signing our posts?
I'd do it -- but only if I could hook external programs into my web browser's textareas. I wrote a "Mozilla wishlist" item in another slashdot post a few weeks back -- I want to be able to use an external text editor instead of the built-in text editor when writing in a textarea. If we extend this into a generic external program hook, then we could bind keystrokes to clear-sign textarea contents, or spell-check it with ispell, or invoke a real text editor (one that's more than 50x10..), etc.
Maybe I'll look into adding this into Bugzilla. They must have some sort of wishlist section. At least I think it would be an incredibly useful feature.
If you don't post for a while, can your karma dwindle (i.e. expire)?
I hope not. Personally, I think it should work like an uncursed luckstone in NetHack -- negative karma will expire (at a rate of, say, 1 point every two weeks), but positive karma will not expire.
Justification: once someone has negative karma, there are two possibilities -- (a) the person is a troll, or (b) the person is actively disliked by one or more moderators. Now, the M2 system will (at least theoretically) discourage bad moderation, but there are probably a few people out there who fall into category (b) due to moderator activity long ago. But in either case, people tend to mature over time -- and on the Internet, they tend to mature rather more quickly than in real life. (Or maybe I'm just naive or optimistic....) But anyway, I think that people who have misbehaved in the past shouldn't be punished forever -- by being stuck with bad karma for a while, they're "paying their dues", and when the "sentence" is over, they should be back to normal.
... they misspelled Neal's name.
Oh well, I can forgive them for that. It's a German site, after all -- the article's English was still better than 90% of the stuff I see published here in the USA.
what we need is an open source windows/*nix util that just allows cookies from certain sites. Then destroy them on close.
This is precisely how lynx works. Too bad it doesn't handle tables or frames very well -- apart from that, and the lack of images, it's excellent.