Ah, but you miss the real point, which is the curious use of the word "heal." "Healing" implies a return to some sort of normal state, such as when a wound heals, and one's body regains its health. But the planet's environment has no such "normal" state. To what state will the environment "heal"? To the way it was in 1960? Or 1776? Or 1492? or 1066? Or 4004BC?
During the thousand milenninia or so that man has inhabited the planet, it has warmed and cooled, oceans have risen and fallen, mountain ranges have grown, continents have drifted apart and collided, ozone layers have thinned and thickened. The relatively minor changes that get everybody in a tizzy nowadays are nothing compared to what we have already survived. And we survived those changes with... well, with Stone Age technology.
Furthermore, as time passes and technoloigy advances, our ability to adapt to change grows exponentially. Man now lives in more different environments than virtually any other creature. We live in polar cold, in sweltering tropical heat, in deserts and in forests and on Himalayan mountains. And most of those places have running water and Internet connections. If we were not so able to adapt ourselves to the environment, then we would never have survived as long as we have.
There is no "healthy" state for the earth, it is and always has been in a state of change. Those who worship a particular state of ecological balance are very misguided. Change is the only constant. We will better insure our future if we accept the inevitablity of change and adapt to it rather than try to stop it.
You access the mailbox from only one PC, and the account that you use for the Net Folders is the default mail account. I've set them up in a small company, with decent results, and the VP's were happy. But I wasn't able to use them myself, since I use multiple accounts from multiple machines, and each machine used a different account as the default. No matter how I tried to set it up, corruption was ensured by design.
Also worth noting is that documentation of the feature is nearly non-existant (last time I looked).
That said, in a small company that can't afford an Exchange admin, they really do work pretty well, and they only require SMTP mail.
The one thing that I dread about Exchange is having to use that MAPI spooler for the client transport (if you want the full functionality). Yucko, awful, bad nasty stuff.
And if all you want is POP/SMTP/IMAP/LDAP, then there is absolutely no good reason to use Exchange.
Being part of the management team of a start-up is a truly unique experience and I would do it all over again for that reason alone.
Interesting observation. I went to work for a heavily-funded startup about a year ago. Management there was composed of former middle managers at some established companies. And they were very competent people, at least in a larger environment. Nice people, too. But over the course of the the last year, it became apparent that, while they may have been very competent working in an established company, none of them had ever run a small business. They thus lacked the perspective one gets from having all the weight on one's own shoulders; if one or more of them had ever run a neighborhood dry cleaner, some things would have been done differently. As a middle manager, one learns to cover one's tail, to do the proper analysis, make the safe decisions, and you're somewhat insulated from the effects. The process is more important than the results, as far as career advancement is concerned. In a startup, the results are all that matters.
That said, the compay's business plan was doomed, simply because investors had wildy overestimated the market. So that company wouldn't have been profitable even it had been run by Ellison and Gates.
... at the end of the roller-coaster ride, I can say that I have no regrets.
Likewise, I've talked to many other former employees, and few have expressed any regrets. The only ones who were really hurt were those who left good jobs at established companies seeking riches. But those of us who went in with realistic expectations (I always expected to be laid off, I just figured it would take a few months longer), enjoyed the experience, made some great friends, and the fact that I was able to come away with no bitterness really helped when I went job hunting.
More to the point, selecting the President by popular vote would require establishing a national election. Currently, the systems requires fifty state elections. There is no system in place for holding a national election, and we've never had one.
Among the issues that would arise would be oversight of the polling process. Currently, it is done by the states (or counties within the states), and they are free to conduct their elections as they see fit.
Having a national election would require either that the states remake their local ballots to conform to the national standard (clearly unconstitutional), or to separate the balloting for President from the balloting for local and copngressional elections.
The real problem with progressive taxation is that it's NOT a tax on wealth. It's a tax on the act of getting wealthy. A progressive tax actually helps keep the wealthy on top, and makes it difficult for young people to amass enough money to move up the ladder.
What the Dems need to do is move the electorate to the left.
It's always interesting to watch candidates be tugged betweent he undecided voters in the middle and their base on the left or right. Bush's 1992 loss was widely blamed on his abandoning the right with his tax increases. But Clinton's win was partly born of his own pitch to the center. The extreme left didn't mind it so much in '92, having endured twelve years out of the White House. Now, they're getting anxious, and ready to vote for Nader as a way to bring them back to their ideals.
Likewise, many Republicans were initially put off by some of Bush's wishy-washy positions, but once they sensed that he could win, they got behind him fairly strongly.
It's all about timing, I guess. Sometimes it pays to move tot he center, sometimes it pays to move to pitch the base.
And once you've got your own domain, you can set up an admin mailbox, or use postmaster@ to register your domain(s). Then use mail rules to file all mail for that account in its own folder. BTW, be careful if you're doing this with NSI's mail-from admin scheme. Mail-from is a poor choice to begin with, but it's a real pain if your admin account can't be used for some reason.
It's really amazing how little spam you get if you keep your everyday address private.
As an aside, my/. public address is the only one that still gets bombarded with porn spam.
Every been in the drive-through line behind a '70 'Cuda? Thos who are old enough will recall that ALL cars used to smell like that. Car emissions have been reduced so radically (albeit gradually) over the last 30 years that we don't notice just how much has changed. The air is vastly cleaner than it was 30 years ago, even though there are twice as many cars on the road. And that trend will continue. We're not headed for a pollution-filled hell, we're emerging from it.
Of course, some folks are so intent on keeping people from enjoying their cars that they continue to push the silly idea that cars produce so much carbon dioxide that the sky will fall. After hearing this nonsense for thirty years, you gotta start asking... when? According to the predictors of doom, we should have been through about three apocalypses by now.
The reality is that the only way to reduce CO output is to reduce the utility of cars in some way, by making them smaller or slower or more dangerous. And while that may seem fine for the Beautiful Person who commutes from one side of Palo Alto to the other, the potential impact on average working folks is somewhat more severe.
I expect that we'll continue to make incremental improvements in efficiency and emissions. And people will continue to insist that unless something drastic is done, civilization as we know it will end. But we needn't do anything drastic; incremental improvements over a period of years have made a very real difference, and they will continue to do so. And people will be able to go on with their lives without disruption.
Actually, it's not unlike some of the licenses that Microsoft provides with some of their beer-free add-ons. You're free to use the software, but only under Windows.
As certain as death and taxes: if it's built with federal money and it's named after Robert Byrd (or in the spirit of bipartisanship, Bud Schuster), then it's a waste of money.
I dunno. A quick estimate says that CPU speeds have increased 20x in the last decade. So that puts us at 20GHz at the top end, and maybe 8GHz for value PC's.
But the real limiting factor isn't so much technology as consumer demand. I seriously doubt that a broken-up Microsoft will be able to slow down the UI enough to make a 100GHz CPU necessary.
I've been involved in a bit of sports reporting, and this doesn't surprise me in the least.
First of all, no matter what the sport is, video is video, and the rights to transmit it are sold, period. Doesn't matter how it's distributed, if you're not a TV licensee, you're not allowed to do video. Some sports allow extraneous video to news outlets, like locker-room press conferences and pre-gmae stuff. But once the event starts, only the licensed video is shot. The NFL has been allowing local sports reporters to tape segments on the sidelines during the games, but that's the only exception that comes to mind.
Traditionally, the threshhold for getting media credentials was whether you had a publication or not. The cost of printing and distribution was enough of a barrier to separate the real reporters from the wannabes.
But since the 'net has come to prominence, it's lowered those barriers so much that event officials are swamped with requests. And the way they usually deal iwth it is to simply refuse credentials to all online organizations. Indeed, I've seen situations where we had been credentialled for years, but once the 'net became a buzzword, we were shut out, or at least had to remind the organizers that we had been there all along.
It also gets sticky when you realize that an online reporter can post reports before the event is over, something that print journalists couldn't do. Even a text report during the game blows their mind, since it treads on those valuable broadcast rights. One organizer offered us credentials with the provision that we would refrain from posting any reports until after midnight. When we said no thanks, they offered to sell us broadcast rights.
Not to say that this is all wrong, either; no event organizer can afford to provide press facilities for every bozo with a web site, and the lines between broadcast and 'netcast are indeed quite blurry. It's just one of the curiosities of the way the 'net has changed things. By lowering the barriers to entry, it has increased the number of "journalists" to such an extent that nobody really knows which ones have a legitimate readership.
My first thought was "Duh, of course you can't sell a lot of software to the Free Software crowd."
But, I realized that if they're covering their costs, then they're basically getting free R&D. There must be some way to profit from it.
If they want to make it easier...
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 1
I can handle going to a local school once every couple of years. If government wants to make things easier for me, they should make it easier to register my car, or make it easier to fill out my taxes.
Re:Questioning the validity
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 1
More to the point, what's important is NOT the actual integrity of the voting, but the public's confidence in its integrity.
You could program any kind of checks and balances. But no matter how good the system is, if John Q. Public is suspicious of the process, then you've defeated the purpose of having elections.
Most folks can understand the ideas behind the physical voting process. You walk into a school building. You show an ID card. You get a ballot. You put it in a box. When the box is opened, a lot of people work together and keep an eye on each other.
To be sure, there is some occasional fraud, but the sheer number of living, breathing people who are involved helps insure that the fraud is kept to a minimum. And it's something that everybody can understand.
Online voting puts that whole process into a black box, and the people are told to trust it; yet few of them have any clue about what goes on inside the big machines. If people don't understand the process, they're far more likely to be suspicious of the results.
If "governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed," then it's important to maintain the public's trust of the voting system. And the best way to maintain that faith is to employ a system of checks and balances that is open and visible to all.
It's only censorship when it's government-imposed, and when there is no alternative way to access the information. The US government, for example, censors child pornography; it's illegal to posses it or make it. THAT is censorship, and even in the US, a certain amount of censorship is accepted.
But a private group that blocks porn sites from its employees is not practicing censorship. Likewise, a community group that decides what to allow certain things on their network is not practicing censorship. When it's done voluntarily by the citizens, it's called "having taste."
And the First Ammendment does not require private parties to lack taste. That would be a restiction on freedom, and a rather severe one at that. The First Ammendment does greatly restrict the government's power to impose its will, thankfully, but it does not restrict private citizens.
Most critics of free market economics miss the point. I'm not "libertarian" because I'm selfish and don't care about others. Rather, it's that I want them to have the same opportunities as I.
Give money to a poor person, and you ease they're pain some. And if they're down on their luck, that can be worthwhile. But you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that after you give them a buck, they'll still be on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Indeed, all forms of economic redistribution, while they might make poverty more bearable, serve to keep those who are wealthy on top. Income tax, for example, is not a tax on wealth, but a tax on getting wealthy. And a progressive income tax makes it very difficult for those on the bottom to accumulate wealth. A person who has one or two years of good income is taxed as if they were a billionaire (or higher, if any of that income is subject to payroll tax).
There are zillions of examples, but I find nothing so despicable as the person who has made their own fortune off of movie rights or record royalties or stock options, and thinks that those less fortunate should be happy with whatever crumbs they can spare. What they (we, actually) really want is the opportunity to accumulate some wealth of our own, and to keep most of it, and to pass it along to those we love when we pass. Is that selfish?
All these replies are about cookie handling. And those are good features, but...
The real problem with web bugs is that they don't really need cookies to learn something about you. Just the fact that you hit the page, and load an image that causes a hit on another server, can be a problem.
For example, an embedded image in an HTML e-mail message can act as a read receipt. A bunch of sequential hits from the same IP address can be associated, and if one of the sites provides your cookie info to the bug company, then it doesn't matter if the others send out cookies or not.
Again, the only real protection would be if your browser warned that the page you're loading consists of content from multiple domains.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you miss the real point, which is the curious use of the word "heal." "Healing" implies a return to some sort of normal state, such as when a wound heals, and one's body regains its health. But the planet's environment has no such "normal" state. To what state will the environment "heal"? To the way it was in 1960? Or 1776? Or 1492? or 1066? Or 4004BC?
During the thousand milenninia or so that man has inhabited the planet, it has warmed and cooled, oceans have risen and fallen, mountain ranges have grown, continents have drifted apart and collided, ozone layers have thinned and thickened. The relatively minor changes that get everybody in a tizzy nowadays are nothing compared to what we have already survived. And we survived those changes with... well, with Stone Age technology.
Furthermore, as time passes and technoloigy advances, our ability to adapt to change grows exponentially. Man now lives in more different environments than virtually any other creature. We live in polar cold, in sweltering tropical heat, in deserts and in forests and on Himalayan mountains. And most of those places have running water and Internet connections. If we were not so able to adapt ourselves to the environment, then we would never have survived as long as we have.
There is no "healthy" state for the earth, it is and always has been in a state of change. Those who worship a particular state of ecological balance are very misguided. Change is the only constant. We will better insure our future if we accept the inevitablity of change and adapt to it rather than try to stop it.
Net Folders work well IF:
You access the mailbox from only one PC, and the account that you use for the Net Folders is the default mail account. I've set them up in a small company, with decent results, and the VP's were happy. But I wasn't able to use them myself, since I use multiple accounts from multiple machines, and each machine used a different account as the default. No matter how I tried to set it up, corruption was ensured by design.
Also worth noting is that documentation of the feature is nearly non-existant (last time I looked).
That said, in a small company that can't afford an Exchange admin, they really do work pretty well, and they only require SMTP mail.
The one thing that I dread about Exchange is having to use that MAPI spooler for the client transport (if you want the full functionality). Yucko, awful, bad nasty stuff.
And if all you want is POP/SMTP/IMAP/LDAP, then there is absolutely no good reason to use Exchange.
Being part of the management team of a start-up is a truly unique experience and I would do it all over again for that reason alone.
Interesting observation. I went to work for a heavily-funded startup about a year ago. Management there was composed of former middle managers at some established companies. And they were very competent people, at least in a larger environment. Nice people, too. But over the course of the the last year, it became apparent that, while they may have been very competent working in an established company, none of them had ever run a small business. They thus lacked the perspective one gets from having all the weight on one's own shoulders; if one or more of them had ever run a neighborhood dry cleaner, some things would have been done differently. As a middle manager, one learns to cover one's tail, to do the proper analysis, make the safe decisions, and you're somewhat insulated from the effects. The process is more important than the results, as far as career advancement is concerned. In a startup, the results are all that matters.
That said, the compay's business plan was doomed, simply because investors had wildy overestimated the market. So that company wouldn't have been profitable even it had been run by Ellison and Gates.
Likewise, I've talked to many other former employees, and few have expressed any regrets. The only ones who were really hurt were those who left good jobs at established companies seeking riches. But those of us who went in with realistic expectations (I always expected to be laid off, I just figured it would take a few months longer), enjoyed the experience, made some great friends, and the fact that I was able to come away with no bitterness really helped when I went job hunting.
Well, if some company is gonna patent my DNA, then I oughta at least get some stock options.
More to the point, selecting the President by popular vote would require establishing a national election. Currently, the systems requires fifty state elections. There is no system in place for holding a national election, and we've never had one.
Among the issues that would arise would be oversight of the polling process. Currently, it is done by the states (or counties within the states), and they are free to conduct their elections as they see fit.
Having a national election would require either that the states remake their local ballots to conform to the national standard (clearly unconstitutional), or to separate the balloting for President from the balloting for local and copngressional elections.
The real problem with progressive taxation is that it's NOT a tax on wealth. It's a tax on the act of getting wealthy. A progressive tax actually helps keep the wealthy on top, and makes it difficult for young people to amass enough money to move up the ladder.
What the Dems need to do is move the electorate to the left.
It's always interesting to watch candidates be tugged betweent he undecided voters in the middle and their base on the left or right. Bush's 1992 loss was widely blamed on his abandoning the right with his tax increases. But Clinton's win was partly born of his own pitch to the center. The extreme left didn't mind it so much in '92, having endured twelve years out of the White House. Now, they're getting anxious, and ready to vote for Nader as a way to bring them back to their ideals.
Likewise, many Republicans were initially put off by some of Bush's wishy-washy positions, but once they sensed that he could win, they got behind him fairly strongly.
It's all about timing, I guess. Sometimes it pays to move tot he center, sometimes it pays to move to pitch the base.
And once you've got your own domain, you can set up an admin mailbox, or use postmaster@ to register your domain(s). Then use mail rules to file all mail for that account in its own folder. BTW, be careful if you're doing this with NSI's mail-from admin scheme. Mail-from is a poor choice to begin with, but it's a real pain if your admin account can't be used for some reason.
/. public address is the only one that still gets bombarded with porn spam.
It's really amazing how little spam you get if you keep your everyday address private.
As an aside, my
I don't know about the early 90's, but I knew John Linnell in the early 80's, and he OWNED Asteroids.
Every been in the drive-through line behind a '70 'Cuda? Thos who are old enough will recall that ALL cars used to smell like that. Car emissions have been reduced so radically (albeit gradually) over the last 30 years that we don't notice just how much has changed. The air is vastly cleaner than it was 30 years ago, even though there are twice as many cars on the road. And that trend will continue. We're not headed for a pollution-filled hell, we're emerging from it.
Of course, some folks are so intent on keeping people from enjoying their cars that they continue to push the silly idea that cars produce so much carbon dioxide that the sky will fall. After hearing this nonsense for thirty years, you gotta start asking... when? According to the predictors of doom, we should have been through about three apocalypses by now.
The reality is that the only way to reduce CO output is to reduce the utility of cars in some way, by making them smaller or slower or more dangerous. And while that may seem fine for the Beautiful Person who commutes from one side of Palo Alto to the other, the potential impact on average working folks is somewhat more severe.
I expect that we'll continue to make incremental improvements in efficiency and emissions. And people will continue to insist that unless something drastic is done, civilization as we know it will end. But we needn't do anything drastic; incremental improvements over a period of years have made a very real difference, and they will continue to do so. And people will be able to go on with their lives without disruption.
Actually, it's not unlike some of the licenses that Microsoft provides with some of their beer-free add-ons. You're free to use the software, but only under Windows.
I can see why ESR and RMS don't like it.
As certain as death and taxes: if it's built with federal money and it's named after Robert Byrd (or in the spirit of bipartisanship, Bud Schuster), then it's a waste of money.
I dunno. A quick estimate says that CPU speeds have increased 20x in the last decade. So that puts us at 20GHz at the top end, and maybe 8GHz for value PC's.
But the real limiting factor isn't so much technology as consumer demand. I seriously doubt that a broken-up Microsoft will be able to slow down the UI enough to make a 100GHz CPU necessary.
But you never know.
SCSI is better in every way imaginable, and if I could afford it, I'd use it. But I can't afford it.
When I'm spending somebody else's money, though, I always use SCSI.
I've been involved in a bit of sports reporting, and this doesn't surprise me in the least.
First of all, no matter what the sport is, video is video, and the rights to transmit it are sold, period. Doesn't matter how it's distributed, if you're not a TV licensee, you're not allowed to do video. Some sports allow extraneous video to news outlets, like locker-room press conferences and pre-gmae stuff. But once the event starts, only the licensed video is shot. The NFL has been allowing local sports reporters to tape segments on the sidelines during the games, but that's the only exception that comes to mind.
Traditionally, the threshhold for getting media credentials was whether you had a publication or not. The cost of printing and distribution was enough of a barrier to separate the real reporters from the wannabes.
But since the 'net has come to prominence, it's lowered those barriers so much that event officials are swamped with requests. And the way they usually deal iwth it is to simply refuse credentials to all online organizations. Indeed, I've seen situations where we had been credentialled for years, but once the 'net became a buzzword, we were shut out, or at least had to remind the organizers that we had been there all along.
It also gets sticky when you realize that an online reporter can post reports before the event is over, something that print journalists couldn't do. Even a text report during the game blows their mind, since it treads on those valuable broadcast rights. One organizer offered us credentials with the provision that we would refrain from posting any reports until after midnight. When we said no thanks, they offered to sell us broadcast rights.
Not to say that this is all wrong, either; no event organizer can afford to provide press facilities for every bozo with a web site, and the lines between broadcast and 'netcast are indeed quite blurry. It's just one of the curiosities of the way the 'net has changed things. By lowering the barriers to entry, it has increased the number of "journalists" to such an extent that nobody really knows which ones have a legitimate readership.
"Debian and AOL, two great pieces of software that go great together?"
If you posted that in a comment, it would get moderated as flamebait.
My first thought was "Duh, of course you can't sell a lot of software to the Free Software crowd."
But, I realized that if they're covering their costs, then they're basically getting free R&D. There must be some way to profit from it.
I can handle going to a local school once every couple of years. If government wants to make things easier for me, they should make it easier to register my car, or make it easier to fill out my taxes.
More to the point, what's important is NOT the actual integrity of the voting, but the public's confidence in its integrity.
You could program any kind of checks and balances. But no matter how good the system is, if John Q. Public is suspicious of the process, then you've defeated the purpose of having elections.
Most folks can understand the ideas behind the physical voting process. You walk into a school building. You show an ID card. You get a ballot. You put it in a box. When the box is opened, a lot of people work together and keep an eye on each other.
To be sure, there is some occasional fraud, but the sheer number of living, breathing people who are involved helps insure that the fraud is kept to a minimum. And it's something that everybody can understand.
Online voting puts that whole process into a black box, and the people are told to trust it; yet few of them have any clue about what goes on inside the big machines. If people don't understand the process, they're far more likely to be suspicious of the results.
If "governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed," then it's important to maintain the public's trust of the voting system. And the best way to maintain that faith is to employ a system of checks and balances that is open and visible to all.
It's only censorship when it's government-imposed, and when there is no alternative way to access the information. The US government, for example, censors child pornography; it's illegal to posses it or make it. THAT is censorship, and even in the US, a certain amount of censorship is accepted.
But a private group that blocks porn sites from its employees is not practicing censorship. Likewise, a community group that decides what to allow certain things on their network is not practicing censorship. When it's done voluntarily by the citizens, it's called "having taste."
And the First Ammendment does not require private parties to lack taste. That would be a restiction on freedom, and a rather severe one at that. The First Ammendment does greatly restrict the government's power to impose its will, thankfully, but it does not restrict private citizens.
Um... this is Slashdot's first Presidential election year, isn't it?
Yikes. It's gonna be a wild ride.
Most critics of free market economics miss the point. I'm not "libertarian" because I'm selfish and don't care about others. Rather, it's that I want them to have the same opportunities as I.
Give money to a poor person, and you ease they're pain some. And if they're down on their luck, that can be worthwhile. But you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that after you give them a buck, they'll still be on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Indeed, all forms of economic redistribution, while they might make poverty more bearable, serve to keep those who are wealthy on top. Income tax, for example, is not a tax on wealth, but a tax on getting wealthy. And a progressive income tax makes it very difficult for those on the bottom to accumulate wealth. A person who has one or two years of good income is taxed as if they were a billionaire (or higher, if any of that income is subject to payroll tax).
There are zillions of examples, but I find nothing so despicable as the person who has made their own fortune off of movie rights or record royalties or stock options, and thinks that those less fortunate should be happy with whatever crumbs they can spare. What they (we, actually) really want is the opportunity to accumulate some wealth of our own, and to keep most of it, and to pass it along to those we love when we pass. Is that selfish?
Well, it was meant to be funny, and it initially went up to a five. Once it was a five, it became flamebait and a troll and overrated.
Maybe I oughta start using them cute emoticons like the folks on AOL.
Naw... the guy with the bird already does that.
Write once, crack anywhere.
All these replies are about cookie handling. And those are good features, but...
The real problem with web bugs is that they don't really need cookies to learn something about you. Just the fact that you hit the page, and load an image that causes a hit on another server, can be a problem.
For example, an embedded image in an HTML e-mail message can act as a read receipt. A bunch of sequential hits from the same IP address can be associated, and if one of the sites provides your cookie info to the bug company, then it doesn't matter if the others send out cookies or not.
Again, the only real protection would be if your browser warned that the page you're loading consists of content from multiple domains.