I was so pissed off at the stupidity and ignorance of Mr. AC that I neglected to make the following important point. When the phone companies talk about "leasing their equipment at a loss" they're basically talking about the twisted pair that connects the customer's building with the central office. It's hard to see how they can possibly lease that out at a loss: it has to be there, and maintained in any case. Indeed, the phone company, the lease fee is pretty much gravy for the phone company — except that they lose the chance to be the sole DSL provider for their phone customers.
Besides at a price (newegg) of $115 each that is $34,500.00. That is insane.
Not insane. Just a minor variation of Hanlon's law: never attribute to insanity that which can be sufficiently explained by an inability to read — especially on Slashdot!
That would end all the ethical issues with raising an animal for food, potential issues from mad cow disease, bird flu and whatever the next media induced panic is."
Yeah, right. Steaks made from clones. No potential for "media induced panic" there!
Oh please. The entry you're quoting is taken from FOLDOC. Despite it's name, this is not really a dictionary. It doesn't an attempt to research and describe common usage. It's just the opinion of whoever wrote the entry, combined with that of the FOLDOC editor, Denis Howe (probably one and the same in this case).
People, get real. Just because something comes from a web site with a pretentious name like Dictionary.com doesn't mean it's authoritative. That should be particularly obvious when an entry is as opinionated as this one.
And if that weren't lame enough: you're quoting an entry that describes sending the same message to multiple recipients! Which isn't the same as mailbombing a single mailbox.
Something to note: He didn't actually tell us the terms of his settlement with PayPal...
And in fact, I find his whole story pretty hard to understand. He seems to feel screwed over, even though nobody was trying to collect money from him. Sure, his Paypal account had a negative balance, but he just wanted to close it, so what's the diff?
Most complaints against PayPal seem to assume that they have an obligation to protect you from fraud. They're just a financial middleman. When people refuse to pay for credit card transactions, it's the merchant that gets stuck, not the bank. Why should it be any different for an individual who sells something using Paypal instead of the bank?
But who does one-off jobs? If you have the expertise to program this kind of massive computing project, you're going to employ that expertise continually.
This is the umpteenth grid service where anybody can buy huge gobs of computer time. The question is, is there really anybody out there who needs to do this and doesn't have their own hardware? Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?
Hey, it's not a big stretch to assume that a headline that says "Spammer" is about somebody who sends spam. Mail bombing is a completely different realm of assholedom. CNET should be less sloppy. And the Slashdot editors should pass though stupid headlines unchecked.
You're right, it's hypocritical to get uptight about nuclear power and ignore the health risks of coal-fired plants. But you yourself are guilty of the same evidential cherry picking. The fact that coal power plants disperse radioactive materials is meaningless — just about anything you do does this, because radioactive materials are everywhere. They don't become dangerous until you refine them and concentrate them in order to build power plants or bombs.
The invitation rule is just a symptom of the fact that GMail is still in beta (after more than two years!). The invitation network has long since become meaningless: many GMail users will send an invite to any stranger that asks. Also, invite servers sent out hundreds of thousands of invites to anybody who asked before Google forced them to shut down.
If you look in the settings for your email client, you'll see separate settings for secure authentication and secure send/receive. You're right, not using secure authentication exposes the password to sniffers. But I wasn't talking about authentication.
They same reason people buy car alarms that will be ignored when they go off, or guns that they don't have the training to use. People want some technological solution to their security problems. They don't want to go through the hassle of doing a real security strategy. The real purpose of most security technology is not to provide security, but to provide the feeling of security.
Reading email is still mostly via unencrypted channels.
If by "reading email", you mean downloading messages from a POP or IMAP server, you're quite right. But that's only a tiny part of the problem. Most email messages can be easily intercepted, not just when the read or sent, but at several points in between.
People seem to be pretty ignorant of this fact. When I worked the help desk for an ISP, I got complaints from folks because we didn't support SSL connections to our email servers. That would be like using an armed courier to send a package to someone, then having the courier leave the package on the doorstep!
If you need to send sensitive info via email, encrypt it.
Bacteriophage has been known about for a long time — long before it was identified as viruses. There's a novel written in 1925 that has a doctor using bacteriophage to fight bubonic plague. So I have to wonder why it's taken this long to develop such an obvious application.
Yeah, that's really clever. Instead of creating a computer that lets people erase records with a keystroke, let's spend a gazillion dollars on a robot that lets people shred records with a keystroke!
Of all the stupid ideas, using old technology to preserve information is the stupidist. By that logic, we should make the FBI carve their records in stone tablets! Except that wouldn't work either, since stone tablets be destroyed or misplaced, just as paper can be shredded, have coffee spilled on it, or just misfiled. It is, in fact, much easier to hide an incriminating record in a warehouse full of cardboard boxes than it is to hide an electronic record in a database.
If you want to preserve records, you need to put some sort of system in place that makes it hard to destroy or lose them. That's true no matter how primitive your record system is. In fact, technology is your friend. You might, for example, simply require that ever record have a copy filed with an outside authority. Which is absurdly expensive for paper records, but trivial for electronic ones.
Everybody has too much faith in paper. Right now, California is going through a big hassle because of a law that requires a paper copy of every ballot. As if nobody ever fixed an election based on paper ballots!
Where do you get your information? The official line is that the laptops cost about $130 to make, and that's without any subsidy. That's the official line from the project. If you have any information to the contrary (beyond your own ignorant opinion as to how much it costs to build a laptop) let's see a pointer to it, or at least a reference I can find at the library.
Your notions about the economics of printing books is pure fantasy. Paper is not that cheap, and your statements about the cost of transportation is pure nonsense. I mean, how do you transport big truckloads of books where there are no roads?
What's this bullshit about "training"? Have you ever seen a small kid with a computer? They teach themselves, being too naive to know how hard it is.
There's more in your amorphous blob of rant I should respond to, but I'm bored now.
Indeed, the folks tending livestock will want weather reports and commodity prices. They'll access chat rooms where they can discuss cattle diseases and breeding strategies.
And yes, many such folk are illiterate. So they'll be after their kids to learn to read, so the whole family can go online.
The article's not about Tibet, it's about Tibetan exiles in India. This is made clear in the very first paragraph. This is a sad commentary on how few Slashdoters RTFA. In this case, neither the submitter nor the editor did, or else they wouldn't have put "Tibet" in the title. And not a single poster has commented on this mistake so far. Very sad.
Slashdot Mirror
I was so pissed off at the stupidity and ignorance of Mr. AC that I neglected to make the following important point. When the phone companies talk about "leasing their equipment at a loss" they're basically talking about the twisted pair that connects the customer's building with the central office. It's hard to see how they can possibly lease that out at a loss: it has to be there, and maintained in any case. Indeed, the phone company, the lease fee is pretty much gravy for the phone company — except that they lose the chance to be the sole DSL provider for their phone customers.
Has the UK changed its currency again?
Amazing how clueless online news sites are about character set issues.
Yeah, right. Steaks made from clones. No potential for "media induced panic" there!
People, get real. Just because something comes from a web site with a pretentious name like Dictionary.com doesn't mean it's authoritative. That should be particularly obvious when an entry is as opinionated as this one.
And if that weren't lame enough: you're quoting an entry that describes sending the same message to multiple recipients! Which isn't the same as mailbombing a single mailbox.
And in fact, I find his whole story pretty hard to understand. He seems to feel screwed over, even though nobody was trying to collect money from him. Sure, his Paypal account had a negative balance, but he just wanted to close it, so what's the diff?
Most complaints against PayPal seem to assume that they have an obligation to protect you from fraud. They're just a financial middleman. When people refuse to pay for credit card transactions, it's the merchant that gets stuck, not the bank. Why should it be any different for an individual who sells something using Paypal instead of the bank?
But who does one-off jobs? If you have the expertise to program this kind of massive computing project, you're going to employ that expertise continually.
This is the umpteenth grid service where anybody can buy huge gobs of computer time. The question is, is there really anybody out there who needs to do this and doesn't have their own hardware? Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?
Hey, it's not a big stretch to assume that a headline that says "Spammer" is about somebody who sends spam. Mail bombing is a completely different realm of assholedom. CNET should be less sloppy. And the Slashdot editors should pass though stupid headlines unchecked.
You're right, it's hypocritical to get uptight about nuclear power and ignore the health risks of coal-fired plants. But you yourself are guilty of the same evidential cherry picking. The fact that coal power plants disperse radioactive materials is meaningless — just about anything you do does this, because radioactive materials are everywhere. They don't become dangerous until you refine them and concentrate them in order to build power plants or bombs.
The invitation rule is just a symptom of the fact that GMail is still in beta (after more than two years!). The invitation network has long since become meaningless: many GMail users will send an invite to any stranger that asks. Also, invite servers sent out hundreds of thousands of invites to anybody who asked before Google forced them to shut down.
If you look in the settings for your email client, you'll see separate settings for secure authentication and secure send/receive. You're right, not using secure authentication exposes the password to sniffers. But I wasn't talking about authentication.
They same reason people buy car alarms that will be ignored when they go off, or guns that they don't have the training to use. People want some technological solution to their security problems. They don't want to go through the hassle of doing a real security strategy. The real purpose of most security technology is not to provide security, but to provide the feeling of security.
If by "reading email", you mean downloading messages from a POP or IMAP server, you're quite right. But that's only a tiny part of the problem. Most email messages can be easily intercepted, not just when the read or sent, but at several points in between.
People seem to be pretty ignorant of this fact. When I worked the help desk for an ISP, I got complaints from folks because we didn't support SSL connections to our email servers. That would be like using an armed courier to send a package to someone, then having the courier leave the package on the doorstep!
If you need to send sensitive info via email, encrypt it.
In other words, you just don't want to talk about it. Fine. Nobody's forcing your to participate in this discussion.
... another word processor!
Google needs to get a life!
Bacteriophage has been known about for a long time — long before it was identified as viruses. There's a novel written in 1925 that has a doctor using bacteriophage to fight bubonic plague. So I have to wonder why it's taken this long to develop such an obvious application.
Yeah, that's really clever. Instead of creating a computer that lets people erase records with a keystroke, let's spend a gazillion dollars on a robot that lets people shred records with a keystroke!
Of all the stupid ideas, using old technology to preserve information is the stupidist. By that logic, we should make the FBI carve their records in stone tablets! Except that wouldn't work either, since stone tablets be destroyed or misplaced, just as paper can be shredded, have coffee spilled on it, or just misfiled. It is, in fact, much easier to hide an incriminating record in a warehouse full of cardboard boxes than it is to hide an electronic record in a database.
If you want to preserve records, you need to put some sort of system in place that makes it hard to destroy or lose them. That's true no matter how primitive your record system is. In fact, technology is your friend. You might, for example, simply require that ever record have a copy filed with an outside authority. Which is absurdly expensive for paper records, but trivial for electronic ones.
Everybody has too much faith in paper. Right now, California is going through a big hassle because of a law that requires a paper copy of every ballot. As if nobody ever fixed an election based on paper ballots!
Where do you get your information? The official line is that the laptops cost about $130 to make, and that's without any subsidy. That's the official line from the project. If you have any information to the contrary (beyond your own ignorant opinion as to how much it costs to build a laptop) let's see a pointer to it, or at least a reference I can find at the library.
Your notions about the economics of printing books is pure fantasy. Paper is not that cheap, and your statements about the cost of transportation is pure nonsense. I mean, how do you transport big truckloads of books where there are no roads?
What's this bullshit about "training"? Have you ever seen a small kid with a computer? They teach themselves, being too naive to know how hard it is.
There's more in your amorphous blob of rant I should respond to, but I'm bored now.
And yes, many such folk are illiterate. So they'll be after their kids to learn to read, so the whole family can go online.
The article's not about Tibet, it's about Tibetan exiles in India. This is made clear in the very first paragraph. This is a sad commentary on how few Slashdoters RTFA. In this case, neither the submitter nor the editor did, or else they wouldn't have put "Tibet" in the title. And not a single poster has commented on this mistake so far. Very sad.