We're skidding off topic, but since you brought this up....
But remember that this is a lawsuit in the US. You can get several millions of dollars for being too stupid to open a McDonalds coffee cup there.
Missing from your analysis of McDonalds' coffee is that McDonalds manages to make coffee from otherwise marginal beans by extracting it with super-heated water. So if you make coffee at home, and can drink it just as soon as it drips through the filter (I can - that's too hot for my girlfriend though), you're going to be unpleasantly surprised that fresh-brewed McDonalds coffee is hotter than that - hotter enough for serious burns. So someone experienced with coffee, with a high tolerance for hot coffee will still be endangered by McDonalds' coffee - and this is enough that their not providing a warning was found legally to be negligence. The point is not that the person burned lacks common sense, but that the common sense doesn't work here since McDonalds has cut an economic corner and made the coffee hotter than people with normal coffee experience expect.
Give US law a break. It may usually be about letting corporations get away with anything that fattens the bottom line, but occassionally it actually protects people injured by them.
SCO recently changed its number of resellers from 16,000 to 11,000.
Should I stand up for SCO because I'm one of their resellers? I became a Caldera Authorized Reseller when they first started, when it looked like they might have a future. Their future never quite came, so I've always led clients to other versions of Linux. But I'm still in SCO's system as a reseller, and still get all of the mailings inviting attendance at various of their meetings, and trumpting the brilliance of their present strategy.
And then it occurs to me: There may be more SCO resellers here on Slashdot (according to the resellers list as SCO has maintained it) than there are people with any business relationship with IBM.
For the record, aside from turning down a job offer from them at about the same time I signed up to resell Caldera - IBM wanted someone to administer a Solaris Webserver - I have had no relations with that company - except for whatever enhancements they've added to the kernels I run. As an SCO partisan I have to insist that SCO has contributed more!
You simply have no idea about the level of cluelessness amongst photographers with regards to computers.
But is that really the point? Designers and prepress folks more often than not are true geeks - or at least hire true geeks to tend their equipment. And it really matters when you're working on a deadline if your system crashes - this can be more important than raw speed when it doesn't, if crashing is a factor. Now that photographers are going digital, some of them are using Photoshop, but that's not the core user base. It's not the photographers who do the final Photoshop prep of their images for publication. Photographers are not just "not the only users," they're basically insignificant users. No offense.
Have no idea if this is the cause, but I've been running MIMEDefang/SpamAssassin/Razor on a relatively low-volume mail daemon for awhile, set to bounce anything that comes in scoring over 8 in the likely-spam scale. Generally it's been rejecting in the range of 8 to 12 an hour. Today it's been accelerating. The last couple hours have had about 25 spams beyond that threshold each (and not-a-few ducking under it).
The ethics of criminal defense are clear: Everyone accused of a crime deserves good representation. So there's nothing wrong with a lawyer willing to defend those accused of the worst crimes; indeed, something to commend.
But the ethics of civil offense are quite different: There is no inherent right to abuse our legal system and attack the innocent through it on false charges. Judges can - and we hope they will in this case - sanction the lawyers who enable such actions. But even beyond that, the lawyers working with SCO deserve complete sanction by civil society, and particularly by the tech industry they are trying to carve a niche out for themselves in. We must make it very clear that any company which hires them in the future will be subject to boycott. Any news organization which hires them for commentary - on anything - will be subject to boycott. Anyone who invites them to attend their party or join their club will be subject to boycott. We must learn to see them as tainted by their association with SCO in a way which in which a criminal defense attorney should not be seen as tainted. We must treat them as the moral equals of child abusers and meth manufacturers, and give them the same cold welcome in our neighborhoods.
There's a question of whose data was at risk. In this case, it was the customers who had data at risk. His notifying them was proper to the cause of enabling those with possibly sensitive data to protect it. To repeat: It was not the data of the e-mail provider that was at risk, it was instead data belonging to the customers, and the provider which was putting that data at risk.
Define the "system" for purposes of interpreting the law in virtual terms, as a data-space. Consider that primary rights in that space belong to whoever leases it. If you break into a business office, the breakin is against the occupant of that office, not the landlord. And if you discover that the landlord has left the master key to the building's offices where thieves can make copies, your moral responsibility is to the tenants, to warn them the locks are insecure, rather than to the landlord, to help cover up the collusion with thieves.
Dish is a superior alternative, and should be rewarded for not acting like DirecTV (or your typical cable provider, for that matter). This reward is provisional, but there are other reasons to go with Dish:
1. Doesn't compress its signals as much as DirecTV. 2. Isn't owned by Murdoch (Mr. "Fair and Balanced"), but is run by Americans. 3. Offers good PVR's, and doesn't charge extra for using them like DirecTV does (you'll hardly notice it's not a Tivo). 4. Offers lower-priced basic service.
I'm quite happy with Dish so far.
The South African economy?
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Granted that deBeers should be out of business, what would that do to the South African economy? The conflict diamonds farther north, if devalued, will be a great blessing to the populations there. But in South Africa being a diamond miner is actually a relatively high-paying job, in the most Westernized black-majority democracy in the world. What portion of South Africa's economy - both employment and foreign income - currently depends on deBeers? This could be the equivalent of somebody foreign coming up with something that would obsolete the American auto industry. Thus it may not just be deBeers' own agents to watch out for - there's a strong national interest about to be trampled here. Not that I'd advise or expect the synthetics makers to pull back... yet friends in high military positions may be just what they need.
SpamAssassin has Bayesian learning, which I have running but not for long enough to test. I recently set up MIMEDefang as a Sendmail milter calling SpamAssassin (which calls Razor). This setup allows Sendmail to reject e-mail beyond an arbitrary SpamAssassin score. The remote mail daemon is informed the mail cannot be delivered.
Setting that score at 8 has resulted in no false positives over a week (I log From and Subject information - it's all obvious spam). Then stuff that scores between 5 and 8 I divert to a separate mail box, which I comb through every day or two. There have been two false positives that ended up in that over the week. This is with hundreds of e-mails for a half-dozen users coming in a day. I also end up, with this setup, with 2-4 spams making it through to my own mailbox (the bussiest on the system). These are, because of the filtering, the least obnoxious, and easily enough report to Razor to spare others. Meanwhile, I like to keep a window open to the mail server running "tail -f mail.info | grep REJECT" and watch a dozen or so attempted spams an hour refused acceptance with a message like "554 5.7.1 SpamAssassin score of 15, rejected" back to the origin, which is enough that if it wasn't spam any good mail daemon will inform the sender, and they can find another way to get through.
Even if this gives spammers a clue about ducking SpamAssassin, the spams that can get by it are by far the least obnoxious. I look forward to seeing if the Bayesian feature helps (it feeds itself anything ti scores at over 15 by default). But it's a pretty good system short of that. If it became standard for ISPs to reject all mail with a SpamAssassin score of 8 or higher, the loss of legitimate communications would be exceedingly rare, and politeness standards would be encouraged.
First off, the selection of mags is even worse than what the local teenager comes to the door trying to sell you so they can "realize their future." Second, after scanning that, I discovered they've added code to the site so you can't use your browser's Back button to get out of it. Did they hire porn techs to program it for them? Will they bring along other ethical practices from the porn industry?
In most any bar in NYC during happy hour (and probably later - but I mostly get happy then go home) a recent Asian immigrant will come in with a bag or briefcase full of pirate CDs - mostly classic rock and current best sellers. Typically they'll easily sell about a half-dozen per bar at $10 each. Since bars in NYC tend to be in concentrations where a someone on foot can easily visit a dozen bars per hour, if the salesperson is making $5 per CD, that's real money.
From the ethnicity I assume the stuff is coming out of China. It's easy enough to stash some CDs in the containers coming into Chinatown, and hardly the thing Customs is most anxious about in Newark and NYC these days. Then again, if Customs is paying attention, it would be easy enough to set up a CD replication plant in the same digs as the garment sweatshops the Chinese are also running around the city.
Attributing this to "gangsters" seems a bit much though. I doubt the tongs are especially involved. This is more just the way Chinese culture does business - ducking the government as much as possible is considered common sense, not criminal. If we had their experience with government, we would too. (Or, if we were enterprising friends of Geo. Bush like Ken Lay, we would anyhow.)
In 1900 the majority of Americans still lived and worked on farms. In 2000 it was below 2%. This is almost entirely the result of progress in technology. So is half the population out of work? No, we've radically expanded the workforce by setting wages so as to require most women to work (not as if farm wives didn't, but...) and by bringing in millions of legal and illegal immigrants. So, as labor was to farming in 1900, so it is to x in 2000.
Personally I prefer to buy from small-scale, organic producers. Even if we all started buying that way it would only raise the proportion of the population in farming by a few percent. If those producers can use ecologically-sound robotics, perhaps even the poor in the future can afford the fruits of intensive, organic agriculture.
... most people live in neighborhoods where there's nothing to do but go to the mall or stay home and listen/watch because everything else is either ugly or private property or a parking place and then we'll make sure that even when they're not at the mall there's nothing to do without continually buying something.
It's through the creation of virtual worlds that Hollywood enables the wretched environmental degradation and commercialization of the real one. I'm not saying this is criminal, per se, but only that they should collect their rewards from the pollutersand shopping center/housing tract developers and not from the poor saps who require the narcotics they distribute to live in this degraded/degrading reality of ours, where the best adventure a young person of normal means can hope for is an extended tour of Iraq.
Let's simply have a proportion of corporate tax revenue redirected to support authorized "artists." Either that or close down Hollywood and distribute drugs so we can break the trance and develop our own imaginations again.
I have in mind to set up a simple wireless network in my home. I don't need speed, but in spending many hours searching for the known-good cards that are listed on the several sites specializing in Linux wireless I've discovered thet the manufacturers and vendors are only dealing in their latest models at the moment - most all of which are 802.11b+ or g and not supported under Linux. The standard geek shopping sites like newegg.com and ajump.com don't have anything in 802.11 for Linux. Sites that specialize in Linux like linuxcentral.com and thinkgeek.com don't, either. Using google or froogle to search for known-good chipsets or older card models has been fruitless. Rarely in America is it so hard to shop!
Finally I ordered a TRENDnet TEW-303PI from Tigerdirect.com because Tiger's site said it supported Linux (although it's a + card) - but it looks like that was Tigerdirect overpromising, since the box the card's in and TRENDnet's Website don't list Linux support for this card. TRENDnet doesn't tell the chipset either. Anyone know if it's the TI?
being a programmer in the future will be like being a writer.
writers are very talented, but they are a dime a dozen.
Awk. Bull. Talented writers are very rare on the ground. And that's a large part of the reason for the current slump in the US economy. The tech "bubble" wasn't based on programmers or sysadmins becoming suddenly brilliant. It was based on writers - the original Wired crew for instance - giving the general public a vision of a new future worth moving to that just happened to require giving a lot of work to programmers and sysadmins for awhile.
Then this general enthusiasm got coopted by other writers who were more interested in hyping economic rather than cultural plenty - still, some were very talented as writers. With the crash of the illusion of instant economic plenty, we've also lost the vision of tech-based cultural plenty. Programmers will be lacking work just as long as it takes to restore that vision. That restoration can be helped by a few real-world examples of neat new stuff from programmers and engineers, but finally is only sold to the wider world through excellent writers (who, what with public speaking fees plus their book royalties make a pretty dime indeed when riding a wave).
If we had more good, insightful writers, programmers wouldn't be out of work.
Radio stations don't pay royalties at all. Broadcast of music is seen as working to advertise it, thus the musicians and distributors are compensated for the use of their work by the free advertising it receives through that use.
The Internet, for totally arbitrary reasons, isn't treated that way. However, in the RIAA scheme, a radio station that simulcasts over the Net will pay less than an outfit that only uses the Net, and not the airwaves at all. So existing radio stations receive an effective subsidy for Net broadcasts of their largely-monopolistic trash.
Yes, the statistics are just the same for accidents with hands-off and hands-on cell phones.
The statistics are also the same for driving when really tired and driving when just over the legally-drunk line. But it's legal to drive when tired, and in New York it's legal to use that cell phone while driving as long as you hands are off it. The corporations like laws that just require more technology be consumed for perceived safety.
So let's arm cops with devices to make sure drivers are fully caffeinated. Caffeine jitters probably cause more accidents too - but this will sell more colas and coffee, so it's good.
Breaking MySQL support - what *sses
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Considering that I've been a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP developer since they each were available, it's just disgusting that they're making it harder to support MySQL at a time when LAMP is a recognized contender against Microsoft. I am not going to fscking rebuild a bunch of sites' dbs and recode MySQL-specific PHP code just because the GPL gives these guys a rash. Certainly when PHP was under Rasmus's authorship and control, he was never this sort of jerk.
I'm not saying I can't take the trouble to link in MySQL libraries, just that there's no good excuse for the PHP folks to make me - and thousands of others - go to this trouble. They could, if nothing else, distribute their nonGPL PHP, plus a GPL kit that adds MySQL support, if they're too scared that the GPL will give them cooties.
Re:Does it have Heinlein's extreme right-wing view
on
Altered Carbon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So let's ignore Citizen of the Galaxy and Stranger in a Strange Land and just focus on Starship Troopers with the idea that only a "right-wing" nut could be in favor of exterminating hive societies like Nazi Germany. We'll just ignore that the left-wing Ruskies were alongside us in that. We'll just rule out of bounds as politically incorrect the notion that nonhuman societies might only have a hive modality, and none of the redeming qualities the Germans, for instance, can show in other socio-historical phases.
We'll will, however, so as not to be entirely off-topic here, mention that Heinlein delt with the consequences of brain transfer to another body (in a late novel that's so marginally readable I can't remember the title - executive with rare blood type ends up in secretary's body, thus involving Heinlein in his normal - not right-wing I think - fantasizing about people who happen to be women but are every bit as brilliant and capable as his men).
If you live in the wilderness, is getting broadband really a priority?
Sure. I used to live in the wilderness of Brooklyn. Now I'm in a New England town of 3000. Had to find a place with a DSL connection as good as I had there. Managed to. I get the same 35ms pings to Manhattan I used to. If I could be even more rural and get those pings, I just might. I do remote administration for clients in Manhattan. Also have some servers here. This works as well as being in Brooklyn, the living costs are a hell of a lot cheaper, and the beauty ain't bad.
Part of why the wild stuff isn't well enough defended is it's "far away from civilization." Put it inside civilization, and maybe we'll take better care of it. Having it inside, means having civilization's nervous system extend thoroughly through it. There's no reason for civilization to be limited to artificially dense puddles of muck, nor for it to have as its other option suburban sterility. The wilder our civilization gets, the greater its ecological subtlety, and the more impregnable in a multitude of dimensions to assault from one-dimensional fundamentalists, whether Islamic, Bush League, or the next misfortune on the world stage.
Personally, while I'm totally against informing on random contacts who might be "suspicious," I'm totally for mobilizing the citizenry to jail spammers. The difference is: spammers are not random contacts - we wouldn't even notice them if they weren't in fact doing evil. So don't waste government employee resources, just set up a system where citizen leads are entered into an intelligent database that then is directly used by special prosecutors whose budget is financed by total confiscation of any home, building, vehicle, computers or other property used in conjunction with the crime of spamming.
This is a case where abundantly redundant evidence can easily be gathered if hundreds of thousands of pissed off citizens can report. Set a threshold of, say 1,000 complaints to jail any particular spammer, and employ people who know how to analyze e-mail headers, and the chance of frameups will closely approach zero. At that threshold, set a minimum sentence equal to first time sales of crack cocaine, and impose a three strikes=life penalty beyond that. Make some exception for minors, but impose the death penalty for employing minors in the act of spamming. Provide the same penalties as for spamming to those who knowingly sell network resources directly to a spammer (with a threshold for "knowingly" that also reflects a certain number of citizen reports - say 100).
Technology and citizen vigilance can make this the most fairly enforce set of laws in history. We need to free ourselves from this climate of anything-goes commercial abuse of honesty and business standards. Criminal law belongs here as much as anywhere - but unlike most of criminal law, citizen vigilance can be particularly effective, cost-saving, and preclusive of a government agency itself achieving too much power or secret police status. Because the crime is computer- and internet-enabled, so can be the solution, using the strengths of our systems and online community to put these bastards beyond all access to the net and the streets.
What a brain scan shows
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
What a brain scan shows is the relative activity of different regions. Presuming that it actually works out that some particular range of balances of activity is optimal for productive workforce participation, there's nothing to worry about. We'll simply employ stimulator and suppressor devices to keep your brain in balance. We have no desire to leave you out of the workforce. And dammit, you will be a happy worker.
Slashdot Mirror
We're skidding off topic, but since you brought this up....
But remember that this is a lawsuit in the US. You can get several millions of dollars for being too stupid to open a McDonalds coffee cup there.
Missing from your analysis of McDonalds' coffee is that McDonalds manages to make coffee from otherwise marginal beans by extracting it with super-heated water. So if you make coffee at home, and can drink it just as soon as it drips through the filter (I can - that's too hot for my girlfriend though), you're going to be unpleasantly surprised that fresh-brewed McDonalds coffee is hotter than that - hotter enough for serious burns. So someone experienced with coffee, with a high tolerance for hot coffee will still be endangered by McDonalds' coffee - and this is enough that their not providing a warning was found legally to be negligence. The point is not that the person burned lacks common sense, but that the common sense doesn't work here since McDonalds has cut an economic corner and made the coffee hotter than people with normal coffee experience expect.
Give US law a break. It may usually be about letting corporations get away with anything that fattens the bottom line, but occassionally it actually protects people injured by them.
SCO recently changed its number of resellers from 16,000 to 11,000.
Should I stand up for SCO because I'm one of their resellers? I became a Caldera Authorized Reseller when they first started, when it looked like they might have a future. Their future never quite came, so I've always led clients to other versions of Linux. But I'm still in SCO's system as a reseller, and still get all of the mailings inviting attendance at various of their meetings, and trumpting the brilliance of their present strategy.
And then it occurs to me: There may be more SCO resellers here on Slashdot (according to the resellers list as SCO has maintained it) than there are people with any business relationship with IBM.
For the record, aside from turning down a job offer from them at about the same time I signed up to resell Caldera - IBM wanted someone to administer a Solaris Webserver - I have had no relations with that company - except for whatever enhancements they've added to the kernels I run. As an SCO partisan I have to insist that SCO has contributed more!
You simply have no idea about the level of cluelessness amongst photographers with regards to computers.
But is that really the point? Designers and prepress folks more often than not are true geeks - or at least hire true geeks to tend their equipment. And it really matters when you're working on a deadline if your system crashes - this can be more important than raw speed when it doesn't, if crashing is a factor. Now that photographers are going digital, some of them are using Photoshop, but that's not the core user base. It's not the photographers who do the final Photoshop prep of their images for publication. Photographers are not just "not the only users," they're basically insignificant users. No offense.
the corresponding spike in spam volume
Have no idea if this is the cause, but I've been running MIMEDefang/SpamAssassin/Razor on a relatively low-volume mail daemon for awhile, set to bounce anything that comes in scoring over 8 in the likely-spam scale. Generally it's been rejecting in the range of 8 to 12 an hour. Today it's been accelerating. The last couple hours have had about 25 spams beyond that threshold each (and not-a-few ducking under it).
The ethics of criminal defense are clear: Everyone accused of a crime deserves good representation. So there's nothing wrong with a lawyer willing to defend those accused of the worst crimes; indeed, something to commend.
But the ethics of civil offense are quite different: There is no inherent right to abuse our legal system and attack the innocent through it on false charges. Judges can - and we hope they will in this case - sanction the lawyers who enable such actions. But even beyond that, the lawyers working with SCO deserve complete sanction by civil society, and particularly by the tech industry they are trying to carve a niche out for themselves in. We must make it very clear that any company which hires them in the future will be subject to boycott. Any news organization which hires them for commentary - on anything - will be subject to boycott. Anyone who invites them to attend their party or join their club will be subject to boycott. We must learn to see them as tainted by their association with SCO in a way which in which a criminal defense attorney should not be seen as tainted. We must treat them as the moral equals of child abusers and meth manufacturers, and give them the same cold welcome in our neighborhoods.
There's a question of whose data was at risk. In this case, it was the customers who had data at risk. His notifying them was proper to the cause of enabling those with possibly sensitive data to protect it. To repeat: It was not the data of the e-mail provider that was at risk, it was instead data belonging to the customers, and the provider which was putting that data at risk.
Define the "system" for purposes of interpreting the law in virtual terms, as a data-space. Consider that primary rights in that space belong to whoever leases it. If you break into a business office, the breakin is against the occupant of that office, not the landlord. And if you discover that the landlord has left the master key to the building's offices where thieves can make copies, your moral responsibility is to the tenants, to warn them the locks are insecure, rather than to the landlord, to help cover up the collusion with thieves.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in an article on this, reports that "public safety systems in Seattle don't use Windows software." Talk about not recognizing a prophet in his home town....
Dish is a superior alternative, and should be rewarded for not acting like DirecTV (or your typical cable provider, for that matter). This reward is provisional, but there are other reasons to go with Dish:
1. Doesn't compress its signals as much as DirecTV.
2. Isn't owned by Murdoch (Mr. "Fair and Balanced"), but is run by Americans.
3. Offers good PVR's, and doesn't charge extra for using them like DirecTV does (you'll hardly notice it's not a Tivo).
4. Offers lower-priced basic service.
I'm quite happy with Dish so far.
Granted that deBeers should be out of business, what would that do to the South African economy? The conflict diamonds farther north, if devalued, will be a great blessing to the populations there. But in South Africa being a diamond miner is actually a relatively high-paying job, in the most Westernized black-majority democracy in the world. What portion of South Africa's economy - both employment and foreign income - currently depends on deBeers? This could be the equivalent of somebody foreign coming up with something that would obsolete the American auto industry. Thus it may not just be deBeers' own agents to watch out for - there's a strong national interest about to be trampled here. Not that I'd advise or expect the synthetics makers to pull back ... yet friends in high military positions may be just what they need.
SpamAssassin has Bayesian learning, which I have running but not for long enough to test. I recently set up MIMEDefang as a Sendmail milter calling SpamAssassin (which calls Razor). This setup allows Sendmail to reject e-mail beyond an arbitrary SpamAssassin score. The remote mail daemon is informed the mail cannot be delivered.
Setting that score at 8 has resulted in no false positives over a week (I log From and Subject information - it's all obvious spam). Then stuff that scores between 5 and 8 I divert to a separate mail box, which I comb through every day or two. There have been two false positives that ended up in that over the week. This is with hundreds of e-mails for a half-dozen users coming in a day. I also end up, with this setup, with 2-4 spams making it through to my own mailbox (the bussiest on the system). These are, because of the filtering, the least obnoxious, and easily enough report to Razor to spare others. Meanwhile, I like to keep a window open to the mail server running "tail -f mail.info | grep REJECT" and watch a dozen or so attempted spams an hour refused acceptance with a message like "554 5.7.1 SpamAssassin score of 15, rejected" back to the origin, which is enough that if it wasn't spam any good mail daemon will inform the sender, and they can find another way to get through.
Even if this gives spammers a clue about ducking SpamAssassin, the spams that can get by it are by far the least obnoxious. I look forward to seeing if the Bayesian feature helps (it feeds itself anything ti scores at over 15 by default). But it's a pretty good system short of that. If it became standard for ISPs to reject all mail with a SpamAssassin score of 8 or higher, the loss of legitimate communications would be exceedingly rare, and politeness standards would be encouraged.
"I can say this about the data, much of it was nonsensitive information."
I can say this about this gun I'm pointing at you, much of it is innert material.
First off, the selection of mags is even worse than what the local teenager comes to the door trying to sell you so they can "realize their future." Second, after scanning that, I discovered they've added code to the site so you can't use your browser's Back button to get out of it. Did they hire porn techs to program it for them? Will they bring along other ethical practices from the porn industry?
Plus, many Chinese avoid phone numbers with "4" in them, believing that number to be associated with death.
In most any bar in NYC during happy hour (and probably later - but I mostly get happy then go home) a recent Asian immigrant will come in with a bag or briefcase full of pirate CDs - mostly classic rock and current best sellers. Typically they'll easily sell about a half-dozen per bar at $10 each. Since bars in NYC tend to be in concentrations where a someone on foot can easily visit a dozen bars per hour, if the salesperson is making $5 per CD, that's real money.
From the ethnicity I assume the stuff is coming out of China. It's easy enough to stash some CDs in the containers coming into Chinatown, and hardly the thing Customs is most anxious about in Newark and NYC these days. Then again, if Customs is paying attention, it would be easy enough to set up a CD replication plant in the same digs as the garment sweatshops the Chinese are also running around the city.
Attributing this to "gangsters" seems a bit much though. I doubt the tongs are especially involved. This is more just the way Chinese culture does business - ducking the government as much as possible is considered common sense, not criminal. If we had their experience with government, we would too. (Or, if we were enterprising friends of Geo. Bush like Ken Lay, we would anyhow.)
In 1900 the majority of Americans still lived and worked on farms. In 2000 it was below 2%. This is almost entirely the result of progress in technology. So is half the population out of work? No, we've radically expanded the workforce by setting wages so as to require most women to work (not as if farm wives didn't, but ...) and by bringing in millions of legal and illegal immigrants. So, as labor was to farming in 1900, so it is to x in 2000.
Personally I prefer to buy from small-scale, organic producers. Even if we all started buying that way it would only raise the proportion of the population in farming by a few percent. If those producers can use ecologically-sound robotics, perhaps even the poor in the future can afford the fruits of intensive, organic agriculture.
... most people live in neighborhoods where there's nothing to do but go to the mall or stay home and listen/watch because everything else is either ugly or private property or a parking place and then we'll make sure that even when they're not at the mall there's nothing to do without continually buying something.
It's through the creation of virtual worlds that Hollywood enables the wretched environmental degradation and commercialization of the real one. I'm not saying this is criminal, per se, but only that they should collect their rewards from the pollutersand shopping center/housing tract developers and not from the poor saps who require the narcotics they distribute to live in this degraded/degrading reality of ours, where the best adventure a young person of normal means can hope for is an extended tour of Iraq.
Let's simply have a proportion of corporate tax revenue redirected to support authorized "artists." Either that or close down Hollywood and distribute drugs so we can break the trance and develop our own imaginations again.
I have in mind to set up a simple wireless network in my home. I don't need speed, but in spending many hours searching for the known-good cards that are listed on the several sites specializing in Linux wireless I've discovered thet the manufacturers and vendors are only dealing in their latest models at the moment - most all of which are 802.11b+ or g and not supported under Linux. The standard geek shopping sites like newegg.com and ajump.com don't have anything in 802.11 for Linux. Sites that specialize in Linux like linuxcentral.com and thinkgeek.com don't, either. Using google or froogle to search for known-good chipsets or older card models has been fruitless. Rarely in America is it so hard to shop!
Finally I ordered a TRENDnet TEW-303PI from Tigerdirect.com because Tiger's site said it supported Linux (although it's a + card) - but it looks like that was Tigerdirect overpromising, since the box the card's in and TRENDnet's Website don't list Linux support for this card. TRENDnet doesn't tell the chipset either. Anyone know if it's the TI?
being a programmer in the future will be like being a writer.
writers are very talented, but they are a dime a dozen.
Awk. Bull. Talented writers are very rare on the ground. And that's a large part of the reason for the current slump in the US economy. The tech "bubble" wasn't based on programmers or sysadmins becoming suddenly brilliant. It was based on writers - the original Wired crew for instance - giving the general public a vision of a new future worth moving to that just happened to require giving a lot of work to programmers and sysadmins for awhile.
Then this general enthusiasm got coopted by other writers who were more interested in hyping economic rather than cultural plenty - still, some were very talented as writers. With the crash of the illusion of instant economic plenty, we've also lost the vision of tech-based cultural plenty. Programmers will be lacking work just as long as it takes to restore that vision. That restoration can be helped by a few real-world examples of neat new stuff from programmers and engineers, but finally is only sold to the wider world through excellent writers (who, what with public speaking fees plus their book royalties make a pretty dime indeed when riding a wave).
If we had more good, insightful writers, programmers wouldn't be out of work.
Radio stations don't pay royalties at all. Broadcast of music is seen as working to advertise it, thus the musicians and distributors are compensated for the use of their work by the free advertising it receives through that use.
The Internet, for totally arbitrary reasons, isn't treated that way. However, in the RIAA scheme, a radio station that simulcasts over the Net will pay less than an outfit that only uses the Net, and not the airwaves at all. So existing radio stations receive an effective subsidy for Net broadcasts of their largely-monopolistic trash.
Yes, the statistics are just the same for accidents with hands-off and hands-on cell phones.
The statistics are also the same for driving when really tired and driving when just over the legally-drunk line. But it's legal to drive when tired, and in New York it's legal to use that cell phone while driving as long as you hands are off it. The corporations like laws that just require more technology be consumed for perceived safety.
So let's arm cops with devices to make sure drivers are fully caffeinated. Caffeine jitters probably cause more accidents too - but this will sell more colas and coffee, so it's good.
Considering that I've been a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP developer since they each were available, it's just disgusting that they're making it harder to support MySQL at a time when LAMP is a recognized contender against Microsoft. I am not going to fscking rebuild a bunch of sites' dbs and recode MySQL-specific PHP code just because the GPL gives these guys a rash. Certainly when PHP was under Rasmus's authorship and control, he was never this sort of jerk.
I'm not saying I can't take the trouble to link in MySQL libraries, just that there's no good excuse for the PHP folks to make me - and thousands of others - go to this trouble. They could, if nothing else, distribute their nonGPL PHP, plus a GPL kit that adds MySQL support, if they're too scared that the GPL will give them cooties.
So let's ignore Citizen of the Galaxy and Stranger in a Strange Land and just focus on Starship Troopers with the idea that only a "right-wing" nut could be in favor of exterminating hive societies like Nazi Germany. We'll just ignore that the left-wing Ruskies were alongside us in that. We'll just rule out of bounds as politically incorrect the notion that nonhuman societies might only have a hive modality, and none of the redeming qualities the Germans, for instance, can show in other socio-historical phases.
We'll will, however, so as not to be entirely off-topic here, mention that Heinlein delt with the consequences of brain transfer to another body (in a late novel that's so marginally readable I can't remember the title - executive with rare blood type ends up in secretary's body, thus involving Heinlein in his normal - not right-wing I think - fantasizing about people who happen to be women but are every bit as brilliant and capable as his men).
If you live in the wilderness, is getting broadband really a priority?
Sure. I used to live in the wilderness of Brooklyn. Now I'm in a New England town of 3000. Had to find a place with a DSL connection as good as I had there. Managed to. I get the same 35ms pings to Manhattan I used to. If I could be even more rural and get those pings, I just might. I do remote administration for clients in Manhattan. Also have some servers here. This works as well as being in Brooklyn, the living costs are a hell of a lot cheaper, and the beauty ain't bad.
Part of why the wild stuff isn't well enough defended is it's "far away from civilization." Put it inside civilization, and maybe we'll take better care of it. Having it inside, means having civilization's nervous system extend thoroughly through it. There's no reason for civilization to be limited to artificially dense puddles of muck, nor for it to have as its other option suburban sterility. The wilder our civilization gets, the greater its ecological subtlety, and the more impregnable in a multitude of dimensions to assault from one-dimensional fundamentalists, whether Islamic, Bush League, or the next misfortune on the world stage.
Personally, while I'm totally against informing on random contacts who might be "suspicious," I'm totally for mobilizing the citizenry to jail spammers. The difference is: spammers are not random contacts - we wouldn't even notice them if they weren't in fact doing evil. So don't waste government employee resources, just set up a system where citizen leads are entered into an intelligent database that then is directly used by special prosecutors whose budget is financed by total confiscation of any home, building, vehicle, computers or other property used in conjunction with the crime of spamming.
This is a case where abundantly redundant evidence can easily be gathered if hundreds of thousands of pissed off citizens can report. Set a threshold of, say 1,000 complaints to jail any particular spammer, and employ people who know how to analyze e-mail headers, and the chance of frameups will closely approach zero. At that threshold, set a minimum sentence equal to first time sales of crack cocaine, and impose a three strikes=life penalty beyond that. Make some exception for minors, but impose the death penalty for employing minors in the act of spamming. Provide the same penalties as for spamming to those who knowingly sell network resources directly to a spammer (with a threshold for "knowingly" that also reflects a certain number of citizen reports - say 100).
Technology and citizen vigilance can make this the most fairly enforce set of laws in history. We need to free ourselves from this climate of anything-goes commercial abuse of honesty and business standards. Criminal law belongs here as much as anywhere - but unlike most of criminal law, citizen vigilance can be particularly effective, cost-saving, and preclusive of a government agency itself achieving too much power or secret police status. Because the crime is computer- and internet-enabled, so can be the solution, using the strengths of our systems and online community to put these bastards beyond all access to the net and the streets.
What a brain scan shows is the relative activity of different regions. Presuming that it actually works out that some particular range of balances of activity is optimal for productive workforce participation, there's nothing to worry about. We'll simply employ stimulator and suppressor devices to keep your brain in balance. We have no desire to leave you out of the workforce. And dammit, you will be a happy worker.