Re:Why pay money for anonymous information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 1
You are completely right about this.
While I oppose the forced use of blocking software, this issue is a total red herring, and a waste of time that could be better spent addressing the more serious issues.
What I found much more troubling was this phrase: "...requires all schools and libraries that want federal E-rate funds..."
Those funds are our tax dollars, which the federal government has removed from our states to be used for education. However, if you don't play ball their way, they think the kids in your state suddenly don't deserve to have their computer labs funded. Every American should be outraged by this kind of Congressional behavior, but the truth is that it goes on all the time.
Want your highway funding? It used to be that you had to accept the Federal speed limit to get it... not you need to accept the Federal blood-alchohol-level limits.
This is why local control is almost always better than state control. The Federal government should run the military, arbitrate interstate commerce, enforce constitutionally mandaded human rights, and little else. Until we, as a nation, insist on limited government, the federal government will remain a powerful and dangerous tool for those with the resources to wield it.
How to make breakfast using one egg, leftover chinese take-out, and a slice of cold pizza:
Method One - "Egg Foo Breakfast": - Fry the egg. - While the egg is frying, dump the take-out onto it, omlette style. - Scrape the cheese and toppings from the Pizza and lay it across the top. - Toast the Pizza crust in the oven.
Method Two (My preference): - Throw the egg and the chinese take-out into the trash. - Eat the cold pizza.
You're darn tootin'! Every time Despair does anything I'm sorry I didn't think of it first. They're selling thousands of posters, "desktoppers", calendars, etc. and the end is nowhere in sight! When I called it "beautiful" I was not being sarcastic.
They are doing their part to make the world a more miserable place, and my hat's off to them for it!
First, the form a company around the idea of making really depressing versions of those inspirational new-agey posters...
Then they advertize on Slashdot, the most popular geek website, and turn the Slash editors into shameless publicity whores for their company!
Next, I'm sure they will hire Jon Katz to write a book about Despair, hailing them as representative of a wave of "New Media" or "Open Poster-Making" or maybe even "Post-Columbine Virtual Community Chickclickers" or something.
Well said! A strong moral case can be made for keeping the option of abortion legal, for a wide array of compelling reasons, but that does not change the fact that each abortion is a regretful situation, and even if you do not accept the premise that the unborn are human beings, most reasonable people can agree that we are speaking of human life.
I'm not sure which is more tiresome, pro-lifers who want to pretend that women's rights are not impacted, or pro-choicers who want to pretend that a fetus is nothing more than a parasitic infection.
I continue to hope that the public will eventually engage in an honest discussion of these issues, but it seems to me that they never will as long as they keep lying to themselves.
Actually, with 3-year-old Macs, the OS is also free (7.5.3 was a popular choice at the time, and is a free download at Apple's website).
You are absolutely right that one of the many flavors of Linux or BSD would be a great choice for a setting up an old computer for a kid that really wants to learn. Always nice to be able to see the guts of a system when you are learning.
No, what he said was that a lack of computers in poor homes is the most urgent moral crisis we face. I was merely pointing out the absurdity of that position, because
I was not trying to assign blame, merely pointing out that the massive incarceration rates of black americans, whatever the reason, is probably a more pressing moral issue to discuss than the lack of shiny new Compaqs in poor households.
That said, your counterpoints were both lucid and insightful.
I might as well take this moment to correct my type... that sentence should have read "While one in four black men are going to prison..." I know, I know... I should have used the Preview, but when/. starts lagging it's just not worth the bother sometimes.:)
which is worse on the kid, the stigma of no computer or the stigma of a "worthless" (by
modern standards) computer. Keep in mind, kids can be very cruel.
I am more concerned about computers as tools... having a computer as a status symbol is not something I am willing to direct charitable efforts towards.
Speaking as one who has helped people who thought they could not afford a computer get on the net, I can tell you first-hand that they are usually thrilled to be able to exchange e-mail and browse the web, and are usually in awe of the kind of power you can rummage from the scrap heap these days. They don't care if it doesn't run the latest-and-greatest version of the blue screen of death... all they care about is that they can afford it and it works.
Also, getting old hardware to work can be a hell of a lot of fun. It takes me right back to my childhood, when I had to key a BASIC program in by hand to get a dial-out session to work on my VIC-20.
The best hackers are the ones who learned about computers using "junk". If you want a kid to learn about cars, you don't buy him a new Mercedes... you buy him a 1974 Chevy Nova, or maybe one of those '80's model Ford Escorts, and let him figure out how to get it working. His friends might laugh at his POS car, but only until the "good" car that Daddy bought them breaks down in the middle of nowhere and he's the only one who knows how to fix it.
"It's tough to imagine a more urgent moral issue than the fate of children without access to computers or the Net, since their educational, economic, cultural and social lives will be directly affected." Let's see...
Many inner city schools are failing to even provide a basic level of literacy, let alone properly prepare students for advanced education.
While in four black men are going to prison, drug laws jail crack users longer than powdered cocaine users. (The only real difference between rocks and poweder: powder is the popular choice of white addicts, while the rocks are mostly used by blacks.)
Roughly one in five prgnancies in America are terminated, most of which are abortions of convenience, many of the women having these abortions are having more than one. Pro-choice or not, this should offend your sensibilies from a moral perspective.
Women in many Arabic and eastern nations are still treated like property.
That was just the first few things I could think of off the top of my head that are more "urgent moral issues" than kids that can't access Slashdot. Try to keep things in perspective, Jon.
The solution to this problem is easy.
Cost of a 3-year-old computer: damn near zero. Cost of using one of several ad-driven ISP's: absolutely zero.
Poor kids can't afford to play Everquest on a P4 with a 20" monitor and a broadband connection, but any kid that has power and a phone line can scrape together the cash to get on the net with a cheap Linux box and an old modem.
What's sad is that in this war between two monopolies
Were this an episode of "Yes, Minister", then this would be the point where Bernard would interruprt to say, "excuse me, Sir Humphrey, but you can't actually have two monopolies because 'monopoly' means there's only one. Two of them would be a stereopoly, which doesn't make a lot of sense and I think I'd better be quiet now..."
Texas has 1/3 of the population of Great Britain but produces 20% more pollution.
Population statistics are irrelevant. Texas produces oil. Oil drilling pollutes. When Great Britain's coal mines were in full production, the are was barely breathable in the mining towns, and black lung death was rampant.
Pollution is low in GB because they are not longer an industrial producer... merely a consumer, and a small one at that.
If we are going to do a per-capita study of pollution, look at it this way. Texas provides power to hundreds of millions of people, and produces only 20% more pollution than Great Britain, who mostly imports fuel.
Britain is polluting more than Texas, really, but they do their polluting away from home, in places like Saudi Arabia.
As long as you are playing "follow the money", it should be noted that the push for federally mandated "Ethanol" use in in highly poluted cities came mainly from politicians who owed favors to the chairman of ADM (Archer Dainiels Midland Corporation), who provides over 70% of the world supply of Ethanol-producing corn.
That's right, Ethanol was a pork project for ADM (proud corporate sponsors of "Meet the Press" and Public TV, and a huge campaign contributor to both parties). While burning Ethanol instead of regular gasoline does slightly reduce CO2 emmissions, it also produces higher levels of much more toxic chemicals, such as O3. Also, it really fucks up the engines of cars that were not made to handle it.
So next time you see a politician go after Exxon, instead of blindly going "yay! corporate power is reduced!" consider that there may be some other corporation bankrolling it. Don't be a rube.
I have to say I disagree, Jon. Our predictions are of little value to anybody, because nobody here (including you) has any clue what John Ashcroft's view of the Microsoft case will be. In fact, even John Ashcroft probably does not know what his opinion will be... he just got the job, and needs to view the facts of the case.
Everything you had to say in your column is the speculation of a journalist in the trenches, one with no more insight into the minds of the Bush team than any other journalist who might be reading this.
Rather than an informed prediction of what is soon to come, your column seems to be an attempt to drum up hysteria about the worst-case scenario. Perhaps you hope that by rousing up the activist spirits of the typical Slashdot reader, we will all be more prepared to throw our cabbages should Bush displease us. That is a reasonable goal, but at least be honest about it if that is what you are trying to do.
The production values of "chop socky" movies are notoriously bad, and Kung Fu films have a reputation for being unwatchable by all but serious fans.
You are right that the stunts can not possibly compare to those of "Project A", and the fighting is more of a homage to Wire Fu than a new development of it. What sets The Matrix apart from even the better Hong Kong flicks is the overall production values. It's a beautiful film to look at, and a fun story to follow (if you can get past all the holes). There was only one reason to ever watch a Bruce Lee movie... to see Bruce kick ass in his own unique and graceful way. The Matrix can be appreciated on more levels. For example, the scene where the glass windows of the skyscraper bow and shatter in a huge ripple was a cooler effect than anything Lucas ever dreamed of.
Come on, tell me you don't skip over the plot exposition scenes of "Enter The Dragon" when you are watching at home.
Actually, my favorite thing about the movie was that they actually created an excuse to explain away the "Wire Fu".
When Jet Li jumps 20 feet through the air, and kicks 3 people into unconsciousness before landing, the director actually expects us to believe that a person did it. Boring.
In The Matrix, when Trinity runs on walls, and Neo and Morphius pounce around like characters in a Mortal Kombat game, the director tells us "this is a virtual environment, where the rules of physics can be bent". Nice.
Of couse, we all know that getting root means you could simply delete any artifact of the artifice you don't like, saving all the trouble of fighting, but that would be a short movie.
While they failed to create a plausable background for all of this, they at least created an excuse that lets you suspend your disbelief and accept a fat old actor in a leather duster can jump from one skyscraper to another. For that, all I can say is, "whoa!"
But then why do a sci fi movie at all? If it really does not matter that the explanation of the Matrix is such a lame-assed contrivance, then why bother explaining it at all? Why not just say "you can jump high becasue it's magic", and have Agent Smith be some kind of Demonic force, rather than a computer-generated one?
Instead of wasting ten minutes telling us all about how humans are now batteries, how "your body cannot survive without your brain", and shit like that, they could have had Morpheous say a couple criptic things while playing with his pill-box, and then go straight to the ass-whooping.
Personally, I thought The Matrix was one of the best Kung-Fu action movies ever made, but it was not a good example of science fiction. What separates science fiction from outright fantasy is not the presense of computers or space-ships or robots... it is that the story follows its own rules, based on a theoretically possible speculation.
1. In The Matrix, we are told that man blotted out the sunlight, because the AI's got their energy from the sun. (Where the hell did they thing we got our energy from!?)
2. The AI's decided to imprison people to harvest their energy (People make horribly inefficient energy generators. You would need to consume more energy to collect it in those quantities than you would get out. Also, with no solar energy, life on earth dies unless you replicate it, which again costs more energy than you will get out of the people.
3. The dead are fed to the living. (One corpse has enough calories to feed one person for what, a month? You would run out of people very quickly with this system.)
4. The AI's have control over the Matrix and everything in it. (Ahem... ps -ef | grep neo. Then "kill -9" the little bastard and go back to torturing Morpheus. Movie over.)
5. The EMP is "the only weapon we have" in meatspace. (They can carry an EMP generator on their ship, and hack into the Matrix, but could not figure out how to mount a gun turret!?)
The bottom line here is: crappy story, cool fight scenes and stunts. The same is true for just about any Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee flick, and if you watch The Matrix with the same expectations, you will have a fun time.
People looking for a good version of this same story should watch Dark City, from two years earlier. No Kung Fu, but the plot works better.
Also, Cronenberg's eXistenZ was better a better sci fi VR story, but damn weird, and a little predictable in spots.
Iraq had no luck shooting down our planes during the Gulf War, in spite of the fact that we were bombing the hell out of them 24/7.
As long as you deploy something like this in a situation where you have established air superiority (as we did in Iraq), it could be very effective. If we had something like this at the time, it might have added an extra layer of defense to complement the Patriot missle program. Every little bit helps.
Not carrying a balance will keep you from getting a card from companies who are hoping to screw you. Getting a home or car loan, or a card from your bank or a credit union is another story.
You do not want to deal with the ones who expect you to keep a balance.
Slashdot Mirror
While I oppose the forced use of blocking software, this issue is a total red herring, and a waste of time that could be better spent addressing the more serious issues.
What I found much more troubling was this phrase: "...requires all schools and libraries that want federal E-rate funds..."
Those funds are our tax dollars, which the federal government has removed from our states to be used for education. However, if you don't play ball their way, they think the kids in your state suddenly don't deserve to have their computer labs funded. Every American should be outraged by this kind of Congressional behavior, but the truth is that it goes on all the time.
Want your highway funding? It used to be that you had to accept the Federal speed limit to get it... not you need to accept the Federal blood-alchohol-level limits.
This is why local control is almost always better than state control. The Federal government should run the military, arbitrate interstate commerce, enforce constitutionally mandaded human rights, and little else. Until we, as a nation, insist on limited government, the federal government will remain a powerful and dangerous tool for those with the resources to wield it.
Method One - "Egg Foo Breakfast":
- Fry the egg.
- While the egg is frying, dump the take-out onto it, omlette style.
- Scrape the cheese and toppings from the Pizza and lay it across the top.
- Toast the Pizza crust in the oven.
Method Two (My preference):
- Throw the egg and the chinese take-out into the trash.
- Eat the cold pizza.
Exclusively state-run TV might be fine for England, Canada and other communist nations, but I would like to defend network television thus:
The Simpsons
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
The first three Star Treks
Game, set, match.
PS: Canadians, I was just kidding about calling you and the English a bunch of commies... I know that you prefer the term "pinko". No offense inteded.
Slap another layer of cruft on that bad boy and go snowboarding. It's not like you are going to be the one supporting that pile of spaghetti, right?
They are doing their part to make the world a more miserable place, and my hat's off to them for it!
First, the form a company around the idea of making really depressing versions of those inspirational new-agey posters...
Then they advertize on Slashdot, the most popular geek website, and turn the Slash editors into shameless publicity whores for their company!
Next, I'm sure they will hire Jon Katz to write a book about Despair, hailing them as representative of a wave of "New Media" or "Open Poster-Making" or maybe even "Post-Columbine Virtual Community Chickclickers" or something.
Way to go, Despair! Keep fighting the bad fight.
I'm not sure which is more tiresome, pro-lifers who want to pretend that women's rights are not impacted, or pro-choicers who want to pretend that a fetus is nothing more than a parasitic infection.
I continue to hope that the public will eventually engage in an honest discussion of these issues, but it seems to me that they never will as long as they keep lying to themselves.
You are absolutely right that one of the many flavors of Linux or BSD would be a great choice for a setting up an old computer for a kid that really wants to learn. Always nice to be able to see the guts of a system when you are learning.
1. There are far greater issues to worry about.
2. Lack of computers is not a moral crisis.
"Am I buggin' ya? I didn't mean to bug ya."
-Bono
That said, your counterpoints were both lucid and insightful.
I might as well take this moment to correct my type... that sentence should have read "While one in four black men are going to prison..." I know, I know... I should have used the Preview, but when /. starts lagging it's just not worth the bother sometimes. :)
I am more concerned about computers as tools... having a computer as a status symbol is not something I am willing to direct charitable efforts towards.
Speaking as one who has helped people who thought they could not afford a computer get on the net, I can tell you first-hand that they are usually thrilled to be able to exchange e-mail and browse the web, and are usually in awe of the kind of power you can rummage from the scrap heap these days. They don't care if it doesn't run the latest-and-greatest version of the blue screen of death... all they care about is that they can afford it and it works.
Also, getting old hardware to work can be a hell of a lot of fun. It takes me right back to my childhood, when I had to key a BASIC program in by hand to get a dial-out session to work on my VIC-20.
The best hackers are the ones who learned about computers using "junk". If you want a kid to learn about cars, you don't buy him a new Mercedes... you buy him a 1974 Chevy Nova, or maybe one of those '80's model Ford Escorts, and let him figure out how to get it working. His friends might laugh at his POS car, but only until the "good" car that Daddy bought them breaks down in the middle of nowhere and he's the only one who knows how to fix it.
Many inner city schools are failing to even provide a basic level of literacy, let alone properly prepare students for advanced education.
While in four black men are going to prison, drug laws jail crack users longer than powdered cocaine users. (The only real difference between rocks and poweder: powder is the popular choice of white addicts, while the rocks are mostly used by blacks.)
Roughly one in five prgnancies in America are terminated, most of which are abortions of convenience, many of the women having these abortions are having more than one. Pro-choice or not, this should offend your sensibilies from a moral perspective.
Women in many Arabic and eastern nations are still treated like property.
That was just the first few things I could think of off the top of my head that are more "urgent moral issues" than kids that can't access Slashdot. Try to keep things in perspective, Jon.
The solution to this problem is easy.
Cost of a 3-year-old computer: damn near zero.
Cost of using one of several ad-driven ISP's: absolutely zero.
Poor kids can't afford to play Everquest on a P4 with a 20" monitor and a broadband connection, but any kid that has power and a phone line can scrape together the cash to get on the net with a cheap Linux box and an old modem.
Were this an episode of "Yes, Minister", then this would be the point where Bernard would interruprt to say, "excuse me, Sir Humphrey, but you can't actually have two monopolies because 'monopoly' means there's only one. Two of them would be a stereopoly, which doesn't make a lot of sense and I think I'd better be quiet now..."
I hate to see people go through these kinds of problems, even if they are people I don't like very much.
Population statistics are irrelevant. Texas produces oil. Oil drilling pollutes. When Great Britain's coal mines were in full production, the are was barely breathable in the mining towns, and black lung death was rampant.
Pollution is low in GB because they are not longer an industrial producer... merely a consumer, and a small one at that.
If we are going to do a per-capita study of pollution, look at it this way. Texas provides power to hundreds of millions of people, and produces only 20% more pollution than Great Britain, who mostly imports fuel.
Britain is polluting more than Texas, really, but they do their polluting away from home, in places like Saudi Arabia.
That's right, Ethanol was a pork project for ADM (proud corporate sponsors of "Meet the Press" and Public TV, and a huge campaign contributor to both parties). While burning Ethanol instead of regular gasoline does slightly reduce CO2 emmissions, it also produces higher levels of much more toxic chemicals, such as O3. Also, it really fucks up the engines of cars that were not made to handle it.
So next time you see a politician go after Exxon, instead of blindly going "yay! corporate power is reduced!" consider that there may be some other corporation bankrolling it. Don't be a rube.
Everything you had to say in your column is the speculation of a journalist in the trenches, one with no more insight into the minds of the Bush team than any other journalist who might be reading this.
Rather than an informed prediction of what is soon to come, your column seems to be an attempt to drum up hysteria about the worst-case scenario. Perhaps you hope that by rousing up the activist spirits of the typical Slashdot reader, we will all be more prepared to throw our cabbages should Bush displease us. That is a reasonable goal, but at least be honest about it if that is what you are trying to do.
LOL
My head hurts from cringing so hard when I read that comment. You could probably melt glass that way. :)
Talk Different.
You are right that the stunts can not possibly compare to those of "Project A", and the fighting is more of a homage to Wire Fu than a new development of it. What sets The Matrix apart from even the better Hong Kong flicks is the overall production values. It's a beautiful film to look at, and a fun story to follow (if you can get past all the holes). There was only one reason to ever watch a Bruce Lee movie... to see Bruce kick ass in his own unique and graceful way. The Matrix can be appreciated on more levels. For example, the scene where the glass windows of the skyscraper bow and shatter in a huge ripple was a cooler effect than anything Lucas ever dreamed of.
Come on, tell me you don't skip over the plot exposition scenes of "Enter The Dragon" when you are watching at home.
Now please don't ever speak of The Thirteeth Floor again.
Seriously.
When Jet Li jumps 20 feet through the air, and kicks 3 people into unconsciousness before landing, the director actually expects us to believe that a person did it. Boring.
In The Matrix, when Trinity runs on walls, and Neo and Morphius pounce around like characters in a Mortal Kombat game, the director tells us "this is a virtual environment, where the rules of physics can be bent". Nice.
Of couse, we all know that getting root means you could simply delete any artifact of the artifice you don't like, saving all the trouble of fighting, but that would be a short movie.
While they failed to create a plausable background for all of this, they at least created an excuse that lets you suspend your disbelief and accept a fat old actor in a leather duster can jump from one skyscraper to another. For that, all I can say is, "whoa!"
Instead of wasting ten minutes telling us all about how humans are now batteries, how "your body cannot survive without your brain", and shit like that, they could have had Morpheous say a couple criptic things while playing with his pill-box, and then go straight to the ass-whooping.
Personally, I thought The Matrix was one of the best Kung-Fu action movies ever made, but it was not a good example of science fiction. What separates science fiction from outright fantasy is not the presense of computers or space-ships or robots... it is that the story follows its own rules, based on a theoretically possible speculation.
1. In The Matrix, we are told that man blotted out the sunlight, because the AI's got their energy from the sun. (Where the hell did they thing we got our energy from!?)
2. The AI's decided to imprison people to harvest their energy (People make horribly inefficient energy generators. You would need to consume more energy to collect it in those quantities than you would get out. Also, with no solar energy, life on earth dies unless you replicate it, which again costs more energy than you will get out of the people.
3. The dead are fed to the living. (One corpse has enough calories to feed one person for what, a month? You would run out of people very quickly with this system.)
4. The AI's have control over the Matrix and everything in it. (Ahem... ps -ef | grep neo. Then "kill -9" the little bastard and go back to torturing Morpheus. Movie over.)
5. The EMP is "the only weapon we have" in meatspace. (They can carry an EMP generator on their ship, and hack into the Matrix, but could not figure out how to mount a gun turret!?)
The bottom line here is: crappy story, cool fight scenes and stunts. The same is true for just about any Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee flick, and if you watch The Matrix with the same expectations, you will have a fun time.
People looking for a good version of this same story should watch Dark City, from two years earlier. No Kung Fu, but the plot works better.
Also, Cronenberg's eXistenZ was better a better sci fi VR story, but damn weird, and a little predictable in spots.
As long as you deploy something like this in a situation where you have established air superiority (as we did in Iraq), it could be very effective. If we had something like this at the time, it might have added an extra layer of defense to complement the Patriot missle program. Every little bit helps.
You do not want to deal with the ones who expect you to keep a balance.