Look, don't get angry that they are using your posts.
You can't sue them. Fair use allows quoting. Admittedly they should attribute the quote to you, but there's nothing that requires them to do so in a specific manner. "Howdy," said one guy on Slashdot is attribution enough for the law. The fact is that when you say something in a public forum, it is then public. Deal with it.
I don't see why anyone would be angry (as many commenters seem to be) in the first place. Guess what people, that means they're listening! Certainly took 'em long enough.
Instead of focusing on this new power for itself, perhaps we should focus on making all our comments a little more well-reasoned and thought out. After all, the world (via the media) may be paying attention to what you say.
Stop shooting from the hip so much. THINK about what you say, and make sure that it's your honest opinion. Opinions are good, disagreeing opinions are even better. But when what you say really gets the point across, more people will read it.
(You realize I'm just angling for a major news organization to quote me, don't you?:-)
BFD. Ham radio people have been making stuff like this for years. Maybe not so nice a version, but hey...
Of course, it is a difference when it's a mass-market item, and more people have the ability to hack away at the software.
Anyway, basically the card is a variable tuner to go through the spectrum and see what's out there. Pipe any signals you may find into the system and decode to your hearts content...
It's pretty entertaining what's out there on the airwaves.. Fun with HAM radios.
A long time ago I was writing a simple CD player program for myself, mainly to do Auto-DJing with. I never finished it, but one of the things I did look at very hard was the CDDB protocol.
When you send an update to the database, you are sending an e-mail with a special format.
However, when you QUERY for info, all you send is data about the CD so it can return the cd data. NO EMAIL ADDRESS IS SENT in the query.
Now, they have a new protocol, called cddb2 (cddb-squared, actually), and I haven't looked at it. So I don't know about it. But the standard CDDB protocol does NOT gather personal info in this way.
They do gather info on number of queries as a whole done to their database, of course. This is a handy way to determine popular playing choices. But they have no way to determine an individual's popular playing choices.
Stupid people like the prinicpal who caused all this crap in the first place should not be in charge. Toss him out, put someone else in his place.
Revenge is a bad thing. Taking stupid idiots out of power is not.
A student at MIT dies from binge drinking that was involved with a frat. The dead student's parents decide they're going to stick it to the school, since its their fault.
I agree that your example is not a case where sticking it to the school (and the frat) is an option. The student did this dumb thing himself.
But that's entirely different from one person doing nothing wrong, and having wrong come to him because of some idiot in power.
I've noticed that under Solaris that I've got core files after a crash.
As I understand it, the core files (which are not just Solaris, BTW) are a memory dump when an application crashes. I believe that it wasn't possible to do this with a kernel, because the kernel is the guy who is actually writing the core file. I'm probably wrong in specific bits here.
Anyway, core files can be extremely handy for debugging and such. They're just not very easy to examine.:-)
I was not overjoyed to notice comments on/. of the form "whoo, so the Royal Web site has moved to Linux. I've got a rootkit with your name on it" (you know who you are). Consider. I have just moved some high profile web sites to the OS of choice to you readers. You want to see that OS taken seriously.
Hey, script kiddies read/. too. You don't think all these "First Post!" morons actually have a clue do you?
I just wanted to exonerate the Linux-lovin'/. crowd and point out that not everyone who is a/. fan is a open-source/linux fan.
I will be enraged if the parents of this kid attempt to sue the school. And I am sure they are getting plenty of offers from lawyers this minute. Yes, it was stupid of the school and they over-reacted... but to sue them, and waste education funds because of it!?
I don't think the school should be sued either. I think that the principal and the teacher should be fired and banned from working for the state (at a minimum) ever again.
You just really can't understand how much this angers me.
Yes, society is to blame.. Yes, sueing people has gotten entirely out of control..
However, beating the crap out of 'em doesn't seem like a feasible option.:-)
Honestly, I feel that there should be punishment against the people who caused this outrage to occur. Yes, it is an outrage. No, nothing will probably happen from it. That's the real tragedy, because this teacher and principal are still in charge of myriads of students, and one just can't help but feel sorry for those poor kids.
Well, the story is total crap that deserves an F, in any case. I'll give them that.
Here's the story: (it's on the Dallas Morning News Website)
--- My flashlight went out and I heard someone right behind me and I turned in a very slowly scared way and boom the lights came on and the door bell rang. I walked very slowly and creepy and turned the knob ding dong the door bell went again. I said just a minute and I will be right there and I looked through the little hole in the door and Robin said Boo. I told him to come in and have a seat and we both wated and wated for Ismael because he was supposed to bring the ounce so we could get high but half an hour later still no Ismael so I got the idea of freeon and we grabbed a bag and a knife and ran out back to the airconditionar. We througth the bag over the nostle and covered it tightly and used the knife to press the volv. We started to hear something after we got high so we ditched everything we quickly run to the door to see who it was and there wasn't anybody there then we heard someone at the back door to see who it was I thought it was a crook so I busted out with a 12 guage and Ismael busted out with 9 mm and we step off the porch and this bloody body droped down in front of us and scared us half to death and about 20 kids started cracking up and pissed me off so I shot Matt, Jake, and Ben started laughing so hard that I acssedently shot Mrs. Henry. Ismael saw somebody steeling antifreeze so Ismael shot over ther near the airconditonar and hit somebody [indecipherable word] also scattered out and went home and my mom drove up and everything was back to normal but they didn't have any heads. ---
Even so, if it was read properly, it could be fairly good. Reading in front a group is a lot different than writing something.
Also, the grade depends on the intent of the assignment. The teacher would grade differently if she was wanting a plot development type-of-thing rather than simple grammer. Or perhaps it was just to get the student to speak in front of the class, get them used to public-speaking..
You just can't say this didn't deserve a good grade because you don't know the intent of the assignment.
I am 17 years old. Honestly I would not kill anyone.
Can you say that never, ever, in your entire life, you have never, or will never, ever even THINK about killing another person.
Because that's what this is about. THOUGHT. Not action, thought.
This boy harmed nobody. He did not kill anyone. He did not bring a gun to school. He did not bring a knife. He didn't say "I'm going to kill you" to anyone. He made no threats. He harmed no-one in any way at all.
He wrote some words on a page, at the request of his teacher, and read them aloud. He spent 10 days in jail for this non-crime.
Face up to it. They said to write a scary story. The Columbine massacre sure scared the hell out of me, and I'm a grown man, not a child. Just think of how much it must have scared some kids, that a thing like this could happen. Then a kid writes a story similar to that, that he considers scary, and goes to JAIL for it?
Yes, there should be rules. Yes, there should be limits. No, the rules and limits should not be absolutely insane.
First off, he probably shouldn't have got 100, but perhaps the true brillance was in the reading of it, okay people? Interpretation is everything...:-)
Stories like this anger me, because it causes me to recall back to my high school days, just under a decade ago..
Mainly, however, it reminds me of a story..:-)
<rant>
My sister is diabetic. We discovered this maybe three or four years ago. She has to take two shots per day. No problem.
Except, the idiot people at the school won't allow her to bring a needle to school. Fir enough, easy compromise we suggest, keep the needles and insulin in the nurse's office, so she can come there to take her shot. Many kids did this when I was a child (this is 7th grade, BTW).
School's response? No, we can't do that because if some other kid wandered in and shot themselves full of insulin, we'd be liable... WTF!?!?!? The stuff is in a locked cabinet, in a locked room behind the principals office, which has two people in it at all times. They must be joking right?
Not at all. In fact, they wouldn't even allow her to take her shots ON SCHOOL PROPERTY because then they could be held as encouraging DRUG ABUSE! Can you believe it? I sat there with my mother as the principal spouted this nonsense off. I almost hit him.
He convieniently ignored the fact that without the shots, my sister would probably die. It was all we could do to get him to allow her out of classes to take the shots. Even then, she had to go out to the PARKING LOT where my mom had to be waiting in the car with her medication and blood-sugar testing equipment. Needless to say, they moved away from there soon after, but I still say we should have sued their asses.
Remember, this whole story is pre-Columbine. The point is that schools are now so concerned about liability, esp. after the shootings and so forth, that all forms of common sense in the school system has been lost. NOBODY, not the principal, not the superintendant, no-one, is allowed to use their brain in any form whatsoever, because they fear that they'll be accountable if something happens down the road.
And that of course is the problem. Brainless droids mindlessly implementing a policy that's open to interpretation. Ever read those "zero-tolerance" policies? You could get expelled for a year for having a single aspirin at some schools. Seriously.
The fact is that when any policy gets implemented with NO exceptions, you get some unfair occurances. Sometimes extremely unfair, esp. in the public school system.
What's really sad is that a lot of the policies are downright illegal. Many take away the kids rights (yes, kids have rights too) without informing the parent, informing the kid, or informing the state. If any parent actually read these things, they'd disagree with many.
But how many people would take a school to court over these policies, until it directly affected their child? Few. Damn few.
These are PUBLIC schools. The public should decide these things, true, but they must be WITHIN THE LAW. That's all I ask. If a child can have an aspirin outside the school, he should be able to have one inside the school.
</rant> ---
Re:Looking at the pictures
on
RoboFly
·
· Score: 1
Read more next time yourself;-P
I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
I was saying that perhaps THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG in saying that it had FOUR wings, since I only saw two.:-)
What this means, more importantly, is that the manufacturer of a DVD may say that: only X players will play our disk.
That's bad. I didn't realize how bad it really was. I can just see Sony forming a deal with Warner (pick any two names you like) such that Warner's movies only play on Sony players..
Slashdot has moderators. So is slashdot responsible for spreading lies and slander should it appear?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: No, because the/. forums could be said to have common carrier status./. moderation is different from other forms, in that no posts are actually removed. Posts are assigned numbers or ranks to determine worth. Each user then can filter according to this worth. So,/. doesn't do any censoring at all, really.
The scary thing about this is that if you remove messages, you are supposedly liable for the rest of them. Its definitely a sticky situation.
The fact that Yahoo! knows this (any lawyer should) and still decided to remove messages based on content is an indicator of things to come.
Common carrier status enforces free speech in a public forum by exempting the carrier from liability due to content (Correct me if this is wrong).
They're not worried about liability. They either think that they can moderate the hell out of it so well they won't have any problems, or that if anyone sues 'em they'll fight it to the teeth and win.
If they want to spend all their time moderating, more power to 'em, I say.
But if they win a case because they fought tooth and nail, they could end up setting a precedent that overturns the liability status due to moderation, thus making common carrier pretty worthless.
In other words, lets say Joe sues Yahoo! because Bill posted something evil about Joe's mother on their board, and they didn't remove it. Yahoo! goes balls out to win the case, based on the fact that they didn't post the content, and does in fact win because they have a lot of money and can hire all sorts of lawyers to blow the opposition away.
Suddenly, there's a precedent set. Now, even if you censor the hell out of your board, you're still not liable for any content you leave behind. Naturally, the owners of any public forum who wanted to censor before, but didn't because of common carrier status and exemption from liability, will censor the heck out of their boards now, AND STILL be exempt from liability.
The whole window idea just doesn't seem to work for a 3d environment. I don't see any good way of porting it either.
Probably, the only way anyone is ever going to get a true 3d gui to be accepted is to write a ton of new "3d" apps for it. The 3d object idea is a good one.
Another problem is controllers. The mouse is a pretty poor 3d manipulation tool.
Another problem is the screen. The screen is a 2d window into your 3d gui? No, until some form of holographic display, you'll still have a hard time getting this accepted.
Here's what it all boils down to: Everything you currently have in terms of hardware and software is linked to that 2d window metaphor. None of it fits a 3d metaphor. Trying to link them together is trying to use the 3d metaphor with hardware that doesn't fit and with software not made for it. Just doesn't work.
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
Little sucker though isn't it?
Still, I have to wonder about specs? What is the weight of this thing? Any ideas on speed of the wings? Are we talking hummingbird here or what? Give us details...
sir, you may talk like that in the privacy of your own home, but this is a family web site that is often frequented by children.. it is not the boiler room of some steam ship in the middle of the atlantic. please try to keep a civil tongue.
Up yours, you bloody stupid AC..
Welcome to free speech. BTW, this is not a site for children.
Yay.. Politicians realize the internet is a big deal. Whooptie-friggin-doo! The rest of the world figured it out when every TV commercial started having a web address 3 years ago..
I do like the comment that says they should "start acting on Internet Time rather than Washington Time".. Struck me as supremely true.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they can. The whole government is setup to be slow from the start. It's almost intentional. The whole system of checks and balances is not there just to keep it fair, it's there to prevent government from doing things. Any things. I simply don't think the government can cope with any speedy processes.
The internet (and the computer world in general) moves in exponential time. Witness Moore's Law. Governments seem to move in inverse linear time. The more important a thing is, the longer it will take to do.
Will Slashdot be showing recipes for chicken wings?
<humor> Hey, a recipes section would be a great idea! Especially for all us bachelor geeks who can't cook and barely feed ourselves.. (I sadly fall into this category..)
Come on Taco! It's genius! Really!
Since we spend all day surfing/. ,/. tells us what's going on in that world outside our own front door./. can be the geek's answer to "get a life.."/. can tell us what to wear, who's the latest cool open source guy to listen to, what's good on tv, what to eat, how to think, and basically be big bro in real life! Sweet..
Maybe if you work it right, you can call it a cult and claim huge tax breaks!
Also, with the CDDB thing, it sounds like they are doing the right thing to protect peoples' privacy. i.e. they aren't allowing CDDB to rob the privacy of the Jukebox users. As long as they aren't abusing the info (which should be independantly confirmed), there is no problem.
Okay, firstly, Real lied about CDDB.
When you request data from the CDDB server, you send info about the CD you are looking up. That's it. No e-mail address gets sent at all in any way when looking up a CD, and Real damn well knows it. You do send an e-mail address to CDDB when you make an update or an addition of a CD. Naturally. The whole CD info is just e-mailed to the CDDB system so of course they have your e-mail... That's for an addition or update only, however.
Real was obviously caught with their pants down on this one.
Face it, this information that was being sent is EXTREMELY valuable. The whole damn world is wanting to go to digital distribution of music, and anyone with actual good stats on music tastes, music preferences, digital listening habits, etc, stands to make one hell of a lot of $$$... Later, no doubt, Real would introduce a system where they would e-mail the users of the RealJukebox suggestions based on their listening habits and, of course, based on how much the record companies pay them...
Actually, I have no problem with this. It's a damn good idea. But, it should have been: a) told to the users... b) optional c) defaulted to off, like any privacy reducing feature...
If they'd couched it in nice language, hell, I might even have gone for it (excepting the fact that RealJukebox is a bloated POS program, along with everything else Real still makes)...
Well, that definitely ends my association with Real. MPeg is the only way to go from now on...
Yes, this is the Macrovision encoding added by your DVD player. Get a remover.. They cost maybe $50 tops. Easy. Plug the remover inline and the Macrovision goes away...
In fact, Henderson Communications Laboratories, an independent testing lab, concluded that the 3Com Internet Gaming modem achieved up to 43 percent faster weighted average ping times than five other competitor modems tested this October when calling to 3Com Total Control® or Ascend Max server equipment. As with all 3Com U.S. Robotics V.90 56K modems, the Internet Gaming modem includes x2(TM) technology to ensure backward compatibility with x2-capable modems and server equipment.
So it only works with their hardware on both ends, but is backward compatible. Naturally. Also:
The Internet Gaming modem also takes advantage of 3Com's exclusive line probing technology. This feature allows 3Com modems to dynamically create a signal pattern that optimizes throughput for that particular line, ultimately leading to higher levels of performance than other V.90 designs.
Line Probing? Heheheheh good one Beavis...
It probably just shifts frequencies and so on to test which signals are least likely to have interference due to line static. Then it uses those.
Which is a bit interesting.. Makes you wonder why the hell something like this wasn't invented years ago. I mean, if the modems can sort out speeds and so forth between them, why not freq. as well? Would saved me a hell of a lot of redials and restarted downloads...
If they fork the kernel, then they have the responsibility of maintaining their new kernel and integrating new features and so forth. Fine. They have that right, as long as all the source is available. Good for them! Code forks make the linux world a better place, because they cause the best options to be produced. Plus, standard linux can steal their code (the good parts) and integrate it back into the normal kernel if they want. Good too!
However, if they don't want all that responsibility, they can release kernel patches to be applied to the standard kernel to make it work with their system. Good too. Those may be eventually integrated into the standard kernel distribution, if they're worthy.
Either way, who cares? The ONLY entity this could hurt is TurboLinux itself, for the fear of being incompatible with the standard kernel. And that's not likely anyway..
Slashdot Mirror
This link was on UserFriendly this morning.. :)
http://www.furryspace.com/istapler.jpg
---
Look, don't get angry that they are using your posts.
:-)
You can't sue them. Fair use allows quoting. Admittedly they should attribute the quote to you, but there's nothing that requires them to do so in a specific manner. "Howdy," said one guy on Slashdot is attribution enough for the law. The fact is that when you say something in a public forum, it is then public. Deal with it.
I don't see why anyone would be angry (as many commenters seem to be) in the first place. Guess what people, that means they're listening! Certainly took 'em long enough.
Instead of focusing on this new power for itself, perhaps we should focus on making all our comments a little more well-reasoned and thought out. After all, the world (via the media) may be paying attention to what you say.
Stop shooting from the hip so much. THINK about what you say, and make sure that it's your honest opinion. Opinions are good, disagreeing opinions are even better. But when what you say really gets the point across, more people will read it.
(You realize I'm just angling for a major news organization to quote me, don't you?
---
All this thing is is a tuner card on a pci board.
BFD. Ham radio people have been making stuff like this for years. Maybe not so nice a version, but hey...
Of course, it is a difference when it's a mass-market item, and more people have the ability to hack away at the software.
Anyway, basically the card is a variable tuner to go through the spectrum and see what's out there. Pipe any signals you may find into the system and decode to your hearts content...
It's pretty entertaining what's out there on the airwaves.. Fun with HAM radios.
---
A long time ago I was writing a simple CD player program for myself, mainly to do Auto-DJing with. I never finished it, but one of the things I did look at very hard was the CDDB protocol.
When you send an update to the database, you are sending an e-mail with a special format.
However, when you QUERY for info, all you send is data about the CD so it can return the cd data. NO EMAIL ADDRESS IS SENT in the query.
Now, they have a new protocol, called cddb2 (cddb-squared, actually), and I haven't looked at it. So I don't know about it. But the standard CDDB protocol does NOT gather personal info in this way.
They do gather info on number of queries as a whole done to their database, of course. This is a handy way to determine popular playing choices. But they have no way to determine an individual's popular playing choices.
---
My goal is not revenge. My goal is to weed.
Stupid people like the prinicpal who caused all this crap in the first place should not be in charge. Toss him out, put someone else in his place.
Revenge is a bad thing. Taking stupid idiots out of power is not.
A student at MIT dies from binge drinking that was involved with a frat. The dead student's parents decide they're going to stick it to the school, since its their fault.
I agree that your example is not a case where sticking it to the school (and the frat) is an option. The student did this dumb thing himself.
But that's entirely different from one person doing nothing wrong, and having wrong come to him because of some idiot in power.
---
I've noticed that under Solaris that I've got core files after a crash.
:-)
As I understand it, the core files (which are not just Solaris, BTW) are a memory dump when an application crashes. I believe that it wasn't possible to do this with a kernel, because the kernel is the guy who is actually writing the core file. I'm probably wrong in specific bits here.
Anyway, core files can be extremely handy for debugging and such. They're just not very easy to examine.
---
I was not overjoyed to notice comments on /. of the form "whoo, so the Royal Web site has moved to Linux. I've got a rootkit with your name on it" (you know who you are). Consider. I have just moved some high profile web sites to the OS of choice to you readers. You want to see that OS taken seriously.
/. too. You don't think all these "First Post!" morons actually have a clue do you?
/. crowd and point out that not everyone who is a /. fan is a open-source/linux fan.
Hey, script kiddies read
I just wanted to exonerate the Linux-lovin'
/. is bigger than that.
---
Our sue-happy society pisses me off to no end.
:-)
I will be enraged if the parents of this kid attempt to sue the school. And I am sure they are getting plenty of offers from lawyers this minute. Yes, it was stupid of the school and they over-reacted... but to sue them, and waste education funds because of it!?
I don't think the school should be sued either. I think that the principal and the teacher should be fired and banned from working for the state (at a minimum) ever again.
You just really can't understand how much this angers me.
Yes, society is to blame.. Yes, sueing people has gotten entirely out of control..
However, beating the crap out of 'em doesn't seem like a feasible option.
Honestly, I feel that there should be punishment against the people who caused this outrage to occur. Yes, it is an outrage. No, nothing will probably happen from it. That's the real tragedy, because this teacher and principal are still in charge of myriads of students, and one just can't help but feel sorry for those poor kids.
Damnit.
---
Well, the story is total crap that deserves an F, in any case. I'll give them that.
Here's the story: (it's on the Dallas Morning News Website)
---
My flashlight went out and I heard someone right behind me and I turned in a very slowly scared way and boom the lights came on and the door bell rang. I walked very slowly and creepy and turned the knob ding dong the door bell went again. I said just a minute and I will be right there and I looked through the little hole in the door and Robin said Boo. I told him to come in and have a seat and we both wated and wated for Ismael because he was supposed to bring the ounce so we could get high but half an hour later still no Ismael so I got the idea of freeon and we grabbed a bag and a knife and ran out back to the airconditionar. We througth the bag over the nostle and covered it tightly and used the knife to press the volv. We started to hear something after we got high so we ditched everything we quickly run to the door to see who it was and there wasn't anybody there then we heard someone at the back door to see who it was I thought it was a crook so I busted out with a 12 guage and Ismael busted out with 9 mm and we step off the porch and this bloody body droped down in front of us and scared us half to death and about 20 kids started cracking up and pissed me off so I shot Matt, Jake, and Ben started laughing so hard that I acssedently shot Mrs. Henry. Ismael saw somebody steeling antifreeze so Ismael shot over ther near the airconditonar and hit somebody [indecipherable word] also scattered out and went home and my mom drove up and everything was back to normal but they didn't have any heads.
---
Even so, if it was read properly, it could be fairly good. Reading in front a group is a lot different than writing something.
Also, the grade depends on the intent of the assignment. The teacher would grade differently if she was wanting a plot development type-of-thing rather than simple grammer. Or perhaps it was just to get the student to speak in front of the class, get them used to public-speaking..
You just can't say this didn't deserve a good grade because you don't know the intent of the assignment.
Anyway..
---
I am 17 years old. Honestly I would not kill anyone.
Can you say that never, ever, in your entire life, you have never, or will never, ever even THINK about killing another person.
Because that's what this is about. THOUGHT. Not action, thought.
This boy harmed nobody. He did not kill anyone. He did not bring a gun to school. He did not bring a knife. He didn't say "I'm going to kill you" to anyone. He made no threats. He harmed no-one in any way at all.
He wrote some words on a page, at the request of his teacher, and read them aloud. He spent 10 days in jail for this non-crime.
Face up to it. They said to write a scary story. The Columbine massacre sure scared the hell out of me, and I'm a grown man, not a child. Just think of how much it must have scared some kids, that a thing like this could happen. Then a kid writes a story similar to that, that he considers scary, and goes to JAIL for it?
Yes, there should be rules. Yes, there should be limits. No, the rules and limits should not be absolutely insane.
whew.
---
First off, he probably shouldn't have got 100, but perhaps the true brillance was in the reading of it, okay people? Interpretation is everything... :-)
:-)
Stories like this anger me, because it causes me to recall back to my high school days, just under a decade ago..
Mainly, however, it reminds me of a story..
<rant>
My sister is diabetic. We discovered this maybe three or four years ago. She has to take two shots per day. No problem.
Except, the idiot people at the school won't allow her to bring a needle to school. Fir enough, easy compromise we suggest, keep the needles and insulin in the nurse's office, so she can come there to take her shot. Many kids did this when I was a child (this is 7th grade, BTW).
School's response? No, we can't do that because if some other kid wandered in and shot themselves full of insulin, we'd be liable... WTF!?!?!? The stuff is in a locked cabinet, in a locked room behind the principals office, which has two people in it at all times. They must be joking right?
Not at all. In fact, they wouldn't even allow her to take her shots ON SCHOOL PROPERTY because then they could be held as encouraging DRUG ABUSE! Can you believe it? I sat there with my mother as the principal spouted this nonsense off. I almost hit him.
He convieniently ignored the fact that without the shots, my sister would probably die. It was all we could do to get him to allow her out of classes to take the shots. Even then, she had to go out to the PARKING LOT where my mom had to be waiting in the car with her medication and blood-sugar testing equipment. Needless to say, they moved away from there soon after, but I still say we should have sued their asses.
Remember, this whole story is pre-Columbine. The point is that schools are now so concerned about liability, esp. after the shootings and so forth, that all forms of common sense in the school system has been lost. NOBODY, not the principal, not the superintendant, no-one, is allowed to use their brain in any form whatsoever, because they fear that they'll be accountable if something happens down the road.
And that of course is the problem. Brainless droids mindlessly implementing a policy that's open to interpretation. Ever read those "zero-tolerance" policies? You could get expelled for a year for having a single aspirin at some schools. Seriously.
The fact is that when any policy gets implemented with NO exceptions, you get some unfair occurances. Sometimes extremely unfair, esp. in the public school system.
What's really sad is that a lot of the policies are downright illegal. Many take away the kids rights (yes, kids have rights too) without informing the parent, informing the kid, or informing the state. If any parent actually read these things, they'd disagree with many.
But how many people would take a school to court over these policies, until it directly affected their child? Few. Damn few.
These are PUBLIC schools. The public should decide these things, true, but they must be WITHIN THE LAW. That's all I ask. If a child can have an aspirin outside the school, he should be able to have one inside the school.
</rant>
---
Read more next time yourself ;-P
:-)
I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
I was saying that perhaps THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG in saying that it had FOUR wings, since I only saw two.
ahhh...
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What this means, more importantly, is that the manufacturer of a DVD may say that: only X players will play our disk.
That's bad. I didn't realize how bad it really was. I can just see Sony forming a deal with Warner (pick any two names you like) such that Warner's movies only play on Sony players..
Nasty...
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Slashdot has moderators. So is slashdot responsible for spreading lies and slander should it appear?
/. forums could be said to have common carrier status. /. moderation is different from other forms, in that no posts are actually removed. Posts are assigned numbers or ranks to determine worth. Each user then can filter according to this worth. So, /. doesn't do any censoring at all, really.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: No, because the
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A lot of people don't quite seem to get it...
The scary thing about this is that if you remove messages, you are supposedly liable for the rest of them. Its definitely a sticky situation.
The fact that Yahoo! knows this (any lawyer should) and still decided to remove messages based on content is an indicator of things to come.
Common carrier status enforces free speech in a public forum by exempting the carrier from liability due to content (Correct me if this is wrong).
They're not worried about liability. They either think that they can moderate the hell out of it so well they won't have any problems, or that if anyone sues 'em they'll fight it to the teeth and win.
If they want to spend all their time moderating, more power to 'em, I say.
But if they win a case because they fought tooth and nail, they could end up setting a precedent that overturns the liability status due to moderation, thus making common carrier pretty worthless.
In other words, lets say Joe sues Yahoo! because Bill posted something evil about Joe's mother on their board, and they didn't remove it. Yahoo! goes balls out to win the case, based on the fact that they didn't post the content, and does in fact win because they have a lot of money and can hire all sorts of lawyers to blow the opposition away.
Suddenly, there's a precedent set. Now, even if you censor the hell out of your board, you're still not liable for any content you leave behind. Naturally, the owners of any public forum who wanted to censor before, but didn't because of common carrier status and exemption from liability, will censor the heck out of their boards now, AND STILL be exempt from liability.
That is a bad thing.
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The whole window idea just doesn't seem to work for a 3d environment. I don't see any good way of porting it either.
Probably, the only way anyone is ever going to get a true 3d gui to be accepted is to write a ton of new "3d" apps for it. The 3d object idea is a good one.
Another problem is controllers. The mouse is a pretty poor 3d manipulation tool.
Another problem is the screen. The screen is a 2d window into your 3d gui? No, until some form of holographic display, you'll still have a hard time getting this accepted.
Here's what it all boils down to: Everything you currently have in terms of hardware and software is linked to that 2d window metaphor. None of it fits a 3d metaphor. Trying to link them together is trying to use the 3d metaphor with hardware that doesn't fit and with software not made for it. Just doesn't work.
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I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...
Picture 1 and Picture 2
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
Little sucker though isn't it?
Still, I have to wonder about specs? What is the weight of this thing? Any ideas on speed of the wings? Are we talking hummingbird here or what? Give us details...
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sir, you may talk like that in the privacy of your own home, but this is a family web site that is often frequented by children .. it is not the boiler room of some steam ship in the middle of the atlantic. please try to keep a civil tongue.
Up yours, you bloody stupid AC..
Welcome to free speech. BTW, this is not a site for children.
(yes, I know it was a joke to begin with)
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Interesting article that doesn't say much..
:-)
Yay.. Politicians realize the internet is a big deal. Whooptie-friggin-doo! The rest of the world figured it out when every TV commercial started having a web address 3 years ago..
I do like the comment that says they should "start acting on Internet Time rather than Washington Time".. Struck me as supremely true.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they can. The whole government is setup to be slow from the start. It's almost intentional. The whole system of checks and balances is not there just to keep it fair, it's there to prevent government from doing things. Any things. I simply don't think the government can cope with any speedy processes.
The internet (and the computer world in general) moves in exponential time. Witness Moore's Law. Governments seem to move in inverse linear time. The more important a thing is, the longer it will take to do.
Oh well. It'll all come crashing down anyway.
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Will Slashdot be showing recipes for chicken wings?
/. , /. tells us what's going on in that world outside our own front door. /. can be the geek's answer to "get a life.." /. can tell us what to wear, who's the latest cool open source guy to listen to, what's good on tv, what to eat, how to think, and basically be big bro in real life! Sweet..
<humor>
Hey, a recipes section would be a great idea! Especially for all us bachelor geeks who can't cook and barely feed ourselves.. (I sadly fall into this category..)
Come on Taco! It's genius! Really!
Since we spend all day surfing
Maybe if you work it right, you can call it a cult and claim huge tax breaks!
</humor>
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Also, with the CDDB thing, it sounds like they are doing the right thing to protect peoples' privacy. i.e. they aren't allowing CDDB to rob the privacy of the Jukebox users. As long as they aren't abusing the info (which should be independantly confirmed), there is no problem.
Okay, firstly, Real lied about CDDB.
When you request data from the CDDB server, you send info about the CD you are looking up. That's it. No e-mail address gets sent at all in any way when looking up a CD, and Real damn well knows it. You do send an e-mail address to CDDB when you make an update or an addition of a CD. Naturally. The whole CD info is just e-mailed to the CDDB system so of course they have your e-mail... That's for an addition or update only, however.
Real was obviously caught with their pants down on this one.
Face it, this information that was being sent is EXTREMELY valuable. The whole damn world is wanting to go to digital distribution of music, and anyone with actual good stats on music tastes, music preferences, digital listening habits, etc, stands to make one hell of a lot of $$$... Later, no doubt, Real would introduce a system where they would e-mail the users of the RealJukebox suggestions based on their listening habits and, of course, based on how much the record companies pay them...
Actually, I have no problem with this. It's a damn good idea. But, it should have been:
a) told to the users...
b) optional
c) defaulted to off, like any privacy reducing feature...
If they'd couched it in nice language, hell, I might even have gone for it (excepting the fact that RealJukebox is a bloated POS program, along with everything else Real still makes)...
Well, that definitely ends my association with Real. MPeg is the only way to go from now on...
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Yes, this is the Macrovision encoding added by your DVD player. Get a remover.. They cost maybe $50 tops. Easy. Plug the remover inline and the Macrovision goes away...
Just wanted to say that.
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Cool. Everyone send him a fish as a present..
Penguins like fish... Mmmmmmmmmm... Fish...
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In fact, Henderson Communications Laboratories, an independent testing lab, concluded that the 3Com Internet Gaming modem achieved up to 43 percent faster weighted average ping times than five other competitor modems tested this October when calling to 3Com Total Control® or Ascend Max server equipment.
As with all 3Com U.S. Robotics V.90 56K modems, the Internet Gaming modem includes x2(TM) technology to ensure backward compatibility with x2-capable modems and server equipment.
So it only works with their hardware on both ends, but is backward compatible. Naturally. Also:
The Internet Gaming modem also takes advantage of 3Com's exclusive line probing technology. This feature allows 3Com modems to dynamically create a signal pattern that optimizes throughput for that particular line, ultimately leading to higher levels of performance than other V.90 designs.
Line Probing? Heheheheh good one Beavis...
It probably just shifts frequencies and so on to test which signals are least likely to have interference due to line static. Then it uses those.
Which is a bit interesting.. Makes you wonder why the hell something like this wasn't invented years ago. I mean, if the modems can sort out speeds and so forth between them, why not freq. as well? Would saved me a hell of a lot of redials and restarted downloads...
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If they fork the kernel, then they have the responsibility of maintaining their new kernel and integrating new features and so forth. Fine. They have that right, as long as all the source is available. Good for them! Code forks make the linux world a better place, because they cause the best options to be produced. Plus, standard linux can steal their code (the good parts) and integrate it back into the normal kernel if they want. Good too!
However, if they don't want all that responsibility, they can release kernel patches to be applied to the standard kernel to make it work with their system. Good too. Those may be eventually integrated into the standard kernel distribution, if they're worthy.
Either way, who cares? The ONLY entity this could hurt is TurboLinux itself, for the fear of being incompatible with the standard kernel. And that's not likely anyway..
This article is FUD.
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