I think what you meant is that we should stop suing junk faxers/spammers/telemarketers and just shoot them, or, even better, suicide bomb their homes and businesses.
Which is really the point. As messy as the legal system is, at least it can give a recourse short of violence. It is imperfect, it reduces some of our individual rights, and often ends up with stupid compromises. OTOH, we have saved a lot of blood in the revolutions of the past hundred years or so.
There is now a significant likelihood that the judge will be forced to throw out the SCO v IBM case due to non compliance by SCO. There goes the billion dollars.
Novell is making noises that SCO is in breach of contract. Unlike SCO, whose noises are mostly PR flack, Novell is actually in a position to go to court and get a retraining order against SCO.
Novell is asserting that SCO owes Novell 95% of all those millions of dollars in licensing fees received in the SCO extortion campaign. Novell could get a court to freeze assets to cover such fess. This would be an especially critical blow because it might leave the law firm exposed.
At this point this lawsuit is in the best interest of the lawyers and probably SCO. It puts them in more control of the fight. It has at least the possibility of making them the owner of the UNIX property. It forces Novell to immediately prove points that they may not be in an immediate position to prove. Most importantly, it lets the market knows that SCO is going to fight for the big payoff, which encourages the gamblers to hold onto their lottery tickets.
I think this is the confusion. Is the net like tv, magazines, direct marketing, sales calls, or what.
I think that initially many had a reasonable expectation of the net. It was a print media. You put ads on the page, and, like a newspaper or magazine, consumers would look at the ones they wanted. The nice thing about the net was that ads could be more directed, but frankly, weren't ads already pretty well directed? I mean magazines have already pretty much mastered the art of delivering a demographic to an advertiser.
I think the place where everyone messed up was ignoring the branding effect, and expecting excessive numbers of immediate responses. Many print and TV ads are not made so the consumer will make an immediate purchase, and those that are tend to be slimy products that a self respecting retail outlet would not touch.
Yet magazines survive. Companies pay massive amounts of money for slick pull out ads that most will just rip out and trash without even a single look. The ads layout of magazines themselves, with 20 pages of ads hiding a table of contents, makes me want to not buy the magazine. I suppose if we take the rational view that the editorial content of the magazine is irrelevant, then the fact that the table of contents is less important that the ads is a defensible maneuver. The ad formats of the web will be the same. The sites that use the most aggressive advertising will be those whose editorial content is meaningless and main purpose is delivering the impressions.
Anyway, some people will enjoy downloading these commercials. I won't because they tend to crash my browser. I learned this from The Onion and no longer go to that site. Also, if the ads are as badly designed as those on/., these companies are going to miss important branding opportunities for those that do not play the full ad.
It is interesting that the "he started it argument", the favorite tool of seven year old children, depends so sensitively on where you start.
Like you, many like to start with the Hitler.
We can also start with the end of the great war. Maybe if the vengeful and self serving Europeans would have listened to Wilson instead of using the treaty process to satisfy their own personal greed, perhaps if the U.S. would have ratified the treaty rather than focusing on the possible loss to their own personal power, perhaps if the U.S. would have been less focused on consumerism and profiteering off the reconstruction, then perhaps Germans would not have been placed in the desperate situation.
We can go back further. Perhaps if Europe had not been so ravenous for land and wealth, perhaps if they had not built up such a military force so they could take whatever the hell they needed, perhaps if they had not lost sight that diplomacy can often work, perhaps if everyone had not assumed by the late 19th century that war was inevitable, and the best thing to do was to form alliances, then perhaps a single assassination would not have lead to the murder of millions of humans.
If is easy to justify one's action as forced by others people. It is easy to let your life be controlled by the actions of others. We have seen time and time again where such irresponsibility has lead. People beat the shit out of each other all the time. To return to your grade school analogy, you have the choice of returning the next day and taking revenge, or understanding that your action will just used as the justifications for even worse atrocities further down the line.
I know my history is bit whack. But so is everyone else's in this thread.
Really what you are talking about are different kinds of innovation. MS started with a couple products, DOS and Basic, and evolved them. Over time some of the innards are the same, some of the innards are different. Some of the interfaces are the same, some are different. DOS had a GUI tacked on. Windows had networking tacked on. Basic had a GUI tacked on, then had it's mid level codes generalized, then had other languages tacked on. This evolution provided a level of comfort. You could buy a MS product and know that with relatively minor changes things would still work. The innovations would mostly be cosmetic. MS would never innovate too much.
Apple, OTOH, never limited itself to the current platform. It built a product that worked well, and then tweaked the product with small improvements. If we were still working with a glorified Apple ][ in 1995, would you have said it was innovative to put a GUI on ProDos?(I wonder if shape tables would have made it better than Windows?) The early mac very quickly had a hard disk, networking, fonts, all the things we think as modern, by the late 80's. It did not have to deal with TSR kludge, and multifinder allowed everything one would need for the common office and creative tasks. During this time, Apple was creating the basics of home desktop publishing. MS spent the time catching up, until the early 90's. By the time they did, Apple knew that the 6800 platform was not sufficient. So it working in a new chip. Thank god for that. And then Apple realized that the original MacOS was insufficient, so it developed OS X. Thank god for that.
As i said, it is different forms on innovation. Even now what MS is doing cannot really be compared to what apple is doing. They are moving towards different goals. Apple has developed the pay for download music industry. MS is going to make people use it. Both innovative, but different. A few years likely will not make a difference. Both companies will do what they do best.
I don't know how much is a presumption of guilt, and how much is the schools duty to build good habits and demonstrate fairness.
While 'trust' and 'fairness' are important, when a student uses them they are more often than not trying to avoid work and negotiate a better grade than they deserve. I know this is harsh, but the contemporary student tends to be very sophisticated at using the educational system against itself. They purposefully try to create a dilemma into which school must be fair, i.e. enforce all rules equally, and trusting, i.e. use almost no enforcement measures.
Such dilemma are fictional. School has a responsibility to create boundaries and scaffolding that will encourage students to practice good habits and gain the skills needed to learn. When we separate out students for a test and have several versions of a test, it is not a matter of trust, it is a matter of education. We are encourages students to do their own work, to study for their test. We trust them to do other work in groups. We need to teach them that sometimes your work is your responsibility. If we did not do this, then everyone would say that we were not being fair by not enforcing out own boundaries. As an aside, i have hear parent defend their dishonest students by saying that allowing group work sometimes and alone work sometimes 'confuses' their child. I wonder if such parents give their children and boundaries, or if such children are allowed to run amok at home.
If we think that writing your own paper is important, then we must establish procedures to encourage that behavior. Like in class exams, the issue is not trust, it is education. We have to create a situation in which the student will do the work needed to learn. Many reasonable students will make the decision to buy a guaranteed B paper rather than risk their future with an unknown. If a student has not been taught the intrinsic value of the process of education, then the school must use extrinsic methods to teach those values. And if doing your own paper is not worthwhile, then why waste the students and professors time. Given that students are increasingly searching the internet for papers they present as their own, school must be fair and do the same.
I do not see where in the article the student must pay to submit a paper. I do not see how this imposes an additional burden at all. All paper must be typed, and young'ens tend to type papers in the computer. The university provides internet access. Perhaps students can use some of that bandwidth for school work instead of play.
Anyway, college is all abut student burdens and student obligations. The student has the burden and obligations to do certain things and meet certain milestones in order to graduate. Sometimes those burdens are as simple as paying tuition and dozens of fees. Sometimes those burdens are as hard as dealing with the apparently arbitrary requirements of professors. If one is in college to learn, then none of this matters. If one is there just to graduate and care nothing about training one's mind, then I can see the problem.
And yes, there will be a day, in the next 5 years, when all freshmen, and many sophomore, papers will be turned into a school licensed business for grading. A gad student will still take a look to grade for content, but software will be able to make must more objective assessments of the technical part of the writing than a human grader.
College is not secondary school. No one is holding students' hands. No one is going to beg students to come to class or do work or behave. Students have the obligation to act responsibly so that an effective learning environment can be maintained, or get the hell out so that another student who cares can get an education. In fact, bravo to the professors who have the courage to expel those college students who are just trying to make a grade.
Most site are 99% standards complient. They either work acceptably with any contemporary browser or they would with minor tweaks.
The problem is that management seems to believe supporting anything other than IE will cost them tons of money. They have the web kiddies put in the IE filter. They have the web kiddies only test on IE. The tell everyone that IE is the only thing that matter. There is also the issue that by designing for 'IE only' the web kiddies think that thye are cutting edge web gods.
The problem with the way we current do space travel is we ship everything up from Earth. If we go to the moon, we have to pack all the things we need for the two way trip. All the fuel. A new lunar lander. A new command module. We have to ship these things up every time. At a cost of several thousand dollars per kilogram.
Which is why a one way trip is so much cheaper. We could design a ship capable to two way trip. But it would be expense to supply that ship with rations and fuel. The issue is not science. It is infrastructure.
It does take a a lot of fuel to get off of mars and back to earth. It takes a lot of fuel to get to mars. And we have to carry all that fuel, the trip is expensive. Fuel, however, is just hydrogen and oxygen or perhaps nitrogen. Perhaps processed, perhaps not.
Which is why we need infrastructure. We need a space station that can provide a relay point to other destinations. Non stop trips are expensive. We need a station that has some manufacturing capability. We can mine LEO for what we need. We need to send unmanned missions to the moon and mars with equipment that will be used by us whenever we get there.
Without infrastructure you objections are valid. Sending someone on a one way trip to mars without years of launches of equipment, without a space station in which to train on, is just stupid. Saying we will go to mars and the moon when we cannot get a simple space station up and running is stupid.
I think the software was the Kaleds. Like so much old scifi, there was really no concept of electronic circuits capable of branching, loops, and error correction. At best, it was a Babbage machine. More than likely, it was on the level of a mid-20th-century tank, albeit one with lasers. The technological innovation, and basic function, of a Dalek was to provide life support for the mutated life forms. The practical purpose was to provide an attack vehicle. The organics were in complete control of the vehicle.
The question we can ask is were the Daleks meant to live forever, or was there some facility for biological reproduction of the software. We know the original facility that grew the mutated kaleds and produced the containers was destroyed. Presumable another facility was created, as we know that the original produced could not have produced the numbers that were to later antagonized the universe.
In summary, this is a really dorky and embarrassing post. My only defense is that I grew up with dr. Who. I will not date myself by indicating how much of my life the series covered. I think we need a poll of our most embarrassing trivia knowledge.
I don't know which version of Eudora you run, but in my old paid for version, I can go the 'display' settings to disable auto download of HTML images, and then in styled text disable all other tags. If nothing else I can read the mail in 'blah blah' mode which does no processing. If the new version can no longer do this, it is another reason not to pay for an upgrade.
This is another subtle feature of modern email that allows spam to propagate: the HTML/RTF mail. Many mailers now default to the HTML setting. This is to allow lusers to put in obnoxious color schemes and use every font on their computer. It reminds of 15 years ago when we were first doing desktop publishing.
The real benefit is to the spammers. They can put inline images that make the email look like it came from a legitimate company, they can have the text version look random, but the HTML rendered version human readable. Almost all spam is going to be HTML, and my experience is that 95% of HTML mail is spam.
Which means that if we filtered HTML most spam would go away overnight, and the bandwidth wasted by the remainder would be significantly reduced. We would also significantly reduce the security risks. Unfortunately the lusers that use services such as Yahoo! would also be filtered. I wonder if the decision to default to HTML is purely to satisfy the general customer, or a feature targeted directly to facilitate advertising.
You make an interesting point. The first question is will these new rules guarantee you will not die. I think the answer is no, as nothing will guarantee you will not die. Therefore, the point is to enjoy the life you have, and part of that enjoyment is a certain level of civil liberties.
The next question is will these rules insure we live longer, or, to put it another way will the reduction in freedoms be balanced by a suitable longer life. Given the history, i think the best we can hope for is a perfect balance. Years ago the airlines started requiring identification for all passengers as a means to make flights more secure. Did this make flights safer? Who knows. A statical study might point to an answer. What is known is that the identification system did nothing to stop a few fundamentalists from taking over three planes and killing thousands of people.
What is also known is the simplest defense against such an attack has not been fully implemented. Make the cockpits impenetrable and make it the pilots prime directive to maintain control of the plane at all costs. The passengers safety is best insured by the pilots remaining in control. This may result in passenger deaths. However, as all of us in the United States seem to be universally patriotic, I don't think any of us would be unwilling to give our lives to protect the country if such a situation raised. We may reasonably ask then, why are we created complex new systems when the simple stuff is being ignored?
We can also look at the deeper meaning of your question by seeing what other countries do in the name of safety.. In some countries, women are not allowed to go out in public without a chador. Some more liberal countries only require a long coat and scarf. This is a severe restriction of civil liberties, but is absolutely necessary as any visible hair or skin might so entice a male as to cause him to rape or kill. If such a situation occurred, it would not be the males fault. He was just reacting to a slut. In this case, the chador seems absolutely necessary if public life is to remain secure.
Likewise, in these countries, musician are sometimes allowed to play, but they are not allowed to get the crowd riled. Concerts, and public gatherings of any sort, are rare muted events. If the rules were not in place, unmarried couples might be lead to impure acts, which would inevitable lead the unfortunate necessity of stoning the slutty women. Some music might als lead to impure western thoughts, which would also lead to the inevitable execution of those who profess those thoughts.
So, it may very well be that this system is necessary. But if there ever comes a day when we cannot get a plane without a background check, or unwarranted strip searches, with the associated occasional rape, becomes common, let me just say now that I told you so.
The second head was a thing that worked well for the book and radio, but was just a distraction on TV. It would just be better to take that bit out in rewrites. It won't be a big problem, since any fans knows that the main character is the Guide, not the people.
and playing with their dogs Luxor, an Egyptian Pharaoh hound, and Ludwig, a Doberman pinscher. periodically heads aloft in a 1954 Piper Tri-Pacer recently donated to the abbey and maintained by private donations he will use it for travel to business meetings as LaserMonks continues to grow. McCoy, like his brethren, is allowed no possessions other than a few mementos with deep meaning.
I think this is why some religious organizations have such a bad name. Although they preach humility, piety and charity, as you dig deeper you find pure bred dogs, private aircraft, and a desire not to mix with unwashed masses by flying commercial. Sure they don't own anything, but that is almost like a rich man transferring assets to a proxy to avoid taxes and insure entrance to heaven. These things have to be more than technical requirements.
Combine this with their heavy sales pitch that a purchase will help those less fortunate, and one gets close to the likes of girl scout extortion, the selling of papal indulgences, and claiming to be the protector of the environment while sucking electricity like there is no next generation.
There are a lot of fine religious leaders out there. I have worked with many of them, and the come from all faiths. Most of them would not consider excessive luxuries for themselves before the needs of others. Most of them would take responsibility for they blessings they use, and not hide behind technicalities.
The fact that MIT is the owner of one of a very limited supply of class A networks is the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I did not RTFA.
But if we think of IP addresses as commodities certain things become clear. Scarcity of the commodity creates value. Those that own large reserves of the commodity will have the ability to use the commodity to create power. Anything that threatens the scarcity of the commodity will tend to reduce the influence of those that have cornered the commodity.
I will not assert that this is a valid analogy. I will not assert that MIT leverages it ownership of a class A network is any particular fashion. I also do not believe that we face an IP crisis any more than we face a telephone number crisis, as I do not believe that every device requires a unique IP address. (Each household, for example, could own a single IP address with a router that could detect codes for particular devices. It is like the need for several serial ports merely because we did not implement rs-422) I do, however, always find it suspicious when organizations with possible conflicts of interests speak forcibly against something that many would consider a done deal.
Re:when we're finished patting ourselves on the ba
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2003: Year of Apache
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We ask what server is seen by the world. It may be that ISS is running all the stuff in the back, but why is it that companies do not feel comfortable exposing ISS to the world?
It is not so much that crime pays. For many people it does not. The issue is that most people never do the profit calculation, and those that do tend to outsource the risk so they can claim innocence. This is why organizations like Walmart and Tyson's can engage in routine conspiracies to commit crimes and never get significant fines. OTOH, the contractors are in jail with assets seized.
So, there are a few firms and ISPs that make a great deal of money off the spamming business. The firms pay spammers to advertise, and the ISPs allow the spammer a conduit. When the spammers get caught, both deny any knowledge of wrongdoing, allow the spammer to fall, then just find someone else willing to continue the spam.
The similarity between average music and average weed are interesting. Both are grown easily in the home, and can be distributed at almost no cost. The effects on the consumer largely depend on the maturity and natural tendency of the user. Neither, on it's own, is are more dangerous than other products that are traded with fewer regulations.
Both products become expensive because of government regulations. To protect the profitability of both products, distributors employ tactics typical of criminal organizations. Both products derive their power from the fear of the people who would have a tendency to abuse it, or those that see a threat to other more acceptable means of domination.
And finally, the real danger appears not because of the product itself, but because of the additives that must be used in the mass market to maximize and protect profit margins. The additives create unknown levels of toxicity to your body and your mind.
Of course, manufactured weed and manufactured music are both bad for you, and I would suggest that squirrels and humans avoid their consumption.
Does this mean that when consumers have a choice, much less than 90% of consumers choose MS? Which is to say that MS is a good firm, but in fact has gained it's monopoly status through methods other than technical innovation.
If the management team is payed a flat salary, they have no incentive to make, say, 15% instead of 8% profit.
Which is why sales people are put on flat commission. If management was put on commission based on performance, the argument would be valid. However, most management is put on a very large base salary, plus very large bonuses, often for very few results, or results which can be fabricated.
To be fair, other staff's bonuses can also be excessive. The difference is that management is in a unique position in that it is often in direct control of the data that is used to determine the bonuses. Therefore there is a real motivation to fabricate data in order to maximize personal bonuses, not shareholder profit or company fundamentals. It is the classic fallacy of putting control and data signals on the same line. Sales people usually have separate control lines to insure they are not lying. Management usually does not.
The reason I think an MBA is worthless is because of this crap that is spouted as good governance. The only reason such people exist is to propagate the myths that allow a few people to earn so much.
The above should be modded down for trying to show off by nitpicking on what one does not understand.
The word 'average' is a general term often used instead of the words 'mean', 'median', or 'mode'. The original article specifically mentioned the median as the type of average the ISP used as basis fro their complaint. The parent substituted the less general term 'average' which should only be construed as some yet unspecified average, and in context is quite clearly referring to the 'median'. The reply then made a much graver error of assuming the term average had a more specific meaning.
This is a grave error in the use of language and mathematics.
In any case, we can fault the ISP for not provided a context for their complaint. Do do the bottom two quartiles of the users download 0.5 meg of email a day, while the third quartile download 5 meg of porn a day, and the top quartile downloads at least 30 meg of movies a day? Since they give us no shape, the number is meaningless
People want to own things with the minimum opportunity cost. Manufacturers create a demand, and people reasonably have come to expect the ability to fulfill that demand. Part the demand that the manufacturers create is the 'first on your block' mentality, and people who are particularly susceptible to such manipulations will tend to do whatever is necessary to fill that need.
For some physical products, products that are physical and have good branding, it makes good business sense to create a demand, then minimize the availability of the product. This will tend to maximize price and profits. However, such a strategy runs the risk of the potential customer switching to another similar product that is marketed less aggressively.
For products that are not fundamentally physical, and are licensed, such a strategy is death, especially is such a product is commodity. The adolescent that needs the content for peer group recognition, the adult that is used to having the desire for content fulfilled, will realize that the opportunity cost for licensed acquisition of the content is orders of magnitude higher than the those of unlicensed acquisition. It quickly becomes apparent that there is no need to live by the rules of the enforced and artificial scarcity. The consumer downloads the content.
The content owner can either raise the opportunity cost for unlicensed acquisition, or lower then for licensed acquisition, or both. The former, as we have seen, has the risk of destroying the brand image, as have seen not only with RIAA, but previously with MS. The later requires a fundamental shift in business outlook that is impossible for most corporations. It is really stupid for copyright owners to be yelling 'they are stealing our stuff.' All that is happening is that consumers are changing the rules. Business owners do this everyday. Recorded music and movies spelled the death of the previous content delivery system. The current system, which depends on an artificial scarcity, will also die. Such is life.
I do believe in personal responsibilty and trying to only have those things that you can afford. However, at least in the US, we live in a highly competative psuedo-market economy, which depends on consumers have great needs and meeting those needs quickly. This is an expectation, and if people cannot do this legaly, then they will just bend the rules.
I wonder what this is going to do the domestic banking industry, and the US economy in general. We already have the wealthy funneling money to offshore accounts so it can be hidden from the IRS. We already have corporations leaving the US and reincorporating in foreign countries. One reason that this has not happened more is that US government is a often a more secure place to bank and operate a business than say, Bermuda.
But this laws says that all bank transactions of a business are public property. It would take only a few corrupt FBI agents to destroy a company by exposing it's banking records. No foreign company will want to bank in the US because it will afraid that the FBI will funnel sensitive information to US corporations. It has been done before.
And, as if the tinfoil wearing folk do not already have enough encouragement, this is the best reason of all to keep your money in you mattress.
In summary, if the money and business begin leaving the US in even greater numbers, I cannot blame them in the least. I thought some of the actions of US corporations over the past were quite selfish, but now I am not so sure. I cannot imagine a responsible firm using US banks anymore than is absolutely neccesary
This is a point i have been pushing of late. Most security, and anything that MS has or has announced, is not effective against the purposeful attacker. The password in MS Word has been broken for ages. Any DRM they implement is going to broken pretty quickly. It will not prevent motivated office worker of kiddie from doing what they want with the content. It may provide tacking of the activity, but the motivated person can and will use such tracking to target innocent parties.
As has been mentioned, the usefulness is protect the innocent. Such technology can and should be used to insure the innocent office worker cannot do damage to data and standard forms during the normal duty cycle. Such technology can and should be used to insure that sensitive information, like edits and internal company information, are redacted prior to their public release. And, of course, it is perfectly reasonable to mark internal emails as internal to prevent accidental distribution.
Of course, MS et al is so intent on making DRM a tool for the distributor of content, rather than a mechanism to protect the innocent, that it's product allows the regular release of sensitive and private information
Slashdot Mirror
Which is really the point. As messy as the legal system is, at least it can give a recourse short of violence. It is imperfect, it reduces some of our individual rights, and often ends up with stupid compromises. OTOH, we have saved a lot of blood in the revolutions of the past hundred years or so.
There is now a significant likelihood that the judge will be forced to throw out the SCO v IBM case due to non compliance by SCO. There goes the billion dollars.
Novell is making noises that SCO is in breach of contract. Unlike SCO, whose noises are mostly PR flack, Novell is actually in a position to go to court and get a retraining order against SCO.
Novell is asserting that SCO owes Novell 95% of all those millions of dollars in licensing fees received in the SCO extortion campaign. Novell could get a court to freeze assets to cover such fess. This would be an especially critical blow because it might leave the law firm exposed.
At this point this lawsuit is in the best interest of the lawyers and probably SCO. It puts them in more control of the fight. It has at least the possibility of making them the owner of the UNIX property. It forces Novell to immediately prove points that they may not be in an immediate position to prove. Most importantly, it lets the market knows that SCO is going to fight for the big payoff, which encourages the gamblers to hold onto their lottery tickets.
I think that initially many had a reasonable expectation of the net. It was a print media. You put ads on the page, and, like a newspaper or magazine, consumers would look at the ones they wanted. The nice thing about the net was that ads could be more directed, but frankly, weren't ads already pretty well directed? I mean magazines have already pretty much mastered the art of delivering a demographic to an advertiser.
I think the place where everyone messed up was ignoring the branding effect, and expecting excessive numbers of immediate responses. Many print and TV ads are not made so the consumer will make an immediate purchase, and those that are tend to be slimy products that a self respecting retail outlet would not touch.
Yet magazines survive. Companies pay massive amounts of money for slick pull out ads that most will just rip out and trash without even a single look. The ads layout of magazines themselves, with 20 pages of ads hiding a table of contents, makes me want to not buy the magazine. I suppose if we take the rational view that the editorial content of the magazine is irrelevant, then the fact that the table of contents is less important that the ads is a defensible maneuver. The ad formats of the web will be the same. The sites that use the most aggressive advertising will be those whose editorial content is meaningless and main purpose is delivering the impressions.
Anyway, some people will enjoy downloading these commercials. I won't because they tend to crash my browser. I learned this from The Onion and no longer go to that site. Also, if the ads are as badly designed as those on /., these companies are going to miss important branding opportunities for those that do not play the full ad.
Like you, many like to start with the Hitler.
We can also start with the end of the great war. Maybe if the vengeful and self serving Europeans would have listened to Wilson instead of using the treaty process to satisfy their own personal greed, perhaps if the U.S. would have ratified the treaty rather than focusing on the possible loss to their own personal power, perhaps if the U.S. would have been less focused on consumerism and profiteering off the reconstruction, then perhaps Germans would not have been placed in the desperate situation.
We can go back further. Perhaps if Europe had not been so ravenous for land and wealth, perhaps if they had not built up such a military force so they could take whatever the hell they needed, perhaps if they had not lost sight that diplomacy can often work, perhaps if everyone had not assumed by the late 19th century that war was inevitable, and the best thing to do was to form alliances, then perhaps a single assassination would not have lead to the murder of millions of humans.
If is easy to justify one's action as forced by others people. It is easy to let your life be controlled by the actions of others. We have seen time and time again where such irresponsibility has lead. People beat the shit out of each other all the time. To return to your grade school analogy, you have the choice of returning the next day and taking revenge, or understanding that your action will just used as the justifications for even worse atrocities further down the line.
I know my history is bit whack. But so is everyone else's in this thread.
Apple, OTOH, never limited itself to the current platform. It built a product that worked well, and then tweaked the product with small improvements. If we were still working with a glorified Apple ][ in 1995, would you have said it was innovative to put a GUI on ProDos?(I wonder if shape tables would have made it better than Windows?) The early mac very quickly had a hard disk, networking, fonts, all the things we think as modern, by the late 80's. It did not have to deal with TSR kludge, and multifinder allowed everything one would need for the common office and creative tasks. During this time, Apple was creating the basics of home desktop publishing. MS spent the time catching up, until the early 90's. By the time they did, Apple knew that the 6800 platform was not sufficient. So it working in a new chip. Thank god for that. And then Apple realized that the original MacOS was insufficient, so it developed OS X. Thank god for that.
As i said, it is different forms on innovation. Even now what MS is doing cannot really be compared to what apple is doing. They are moving towards different goals. Apple has developed the pay for download music industry. MS is going to make people use it. Both innovative, but different. A few years likely will not make a difference. Both companies will do what they do best.
While 'trust' and 'fairness' are important, when a student uses them they are more often than not trying to avoid work and negotiate a better grade than they deserve. I know this is harsh, but the contemporary student tends to be very sophisticated at using the educational system against itself. They purposefully try to create a dilemma into which school must be fair, i.e. enforce all rules equally, and trusting, i.e. use almost no enforcement measures.
Such dilemma are fictional. School has a responsibility to create boundaries and scaffolding that will encourage students to practice good habits and gain the skills needed to learn. When we separate out students for a test and have several versions of a test, it is not a matter of trust, it is a matter of education. We are encourages students to do their own work, to study for their test. We trust them to do other work in groups. We need to teach them that sometimes your work is your responsibility. If we did not do this, then everyone would say that we were not being fair by not enforcing out own boundaries. As an aside, i have hear parent defend their dishonest students by saying that allowing group work sometimes and alone work sometimes 'confuses' their child. I wonder if such parents give their children and boundaries, or if such children are allowed to run amok at home.
If we think that writing your own paper is important, then we must establish procedures to encourage that behavior. Like in class exams, the issue is not trust, it is education. We have to create a situation in which the student will do the work needed to learn. Many reasonable students will make the decision to buy a guaranteed B paper rather than risk their future with an unknown. If a student has not been taught the intrinsic value of the process of education, then the school must use extrinsic methods to teach those values. And if doing your own paper is not worthwhile, then why waste the students and professors time. Given that students are increasingly searching the internet for papers they present as their own, school must be fair and do the same.
Anyway, college is all abut student burdens and student obligations. The student has the burden and obligations to do certain things and meet certain milestones in order to graduate. Sometimes those burdens are as simple as paying tuition and dozens of fees. Sometimes those burdens are as hard as dealing with the apparently arbitrary requirements of professors. If one is in college to learn, then none of this matters. If one is there just to graduate and care nothing about training one's mind, then I can see the problem.
And yes, there will be a day, in the next 5 years, when all freshmen, and many sophomore, papers will be turned into a school licensed business for grading. A gad student will still take a look to grade for content, but software will be able to make must more objective assessments of the technical part of the writing than a human grader.
College is not secondary school. No one is holding students' hands. No one is going to beg students to come to class or do work or behave. Students have the obligation to act responsibly so that an effective learning environment can be maintained, or get the hell out so that another student who cares can get an education. In fact, bravo to the professors who have the courage to expel those college students who are just trying to make a grade.
The problem is that management seems to believe supporting anything other than IE will cost them tons of money. They have the web kiddies put in the IE filter. They have the web kiddies only test on IE. The tell everyone that IE is the only thing that matter. There is also the issue that by designing for 'IE only' the web kiddies think that thye are cutting edge web gods.
Which is why a one way trip is so much cheaper. We could design a ship capable to two way trip. But it would be expense to supply that ship with rations and fuel. The issue is not science. It is infrastructure.
It does take a a lot of fuel to get off of mars and back to earth. It takes a lot of fuel to get to mars. And we have to carry all that fuel, the trip is expensive. Fuel, however, is just hydrogen and oxygen or perhaps nitrogen. Perhaps processed, perhaps not.
Which is why we need infrastructure. We need a space station that can provide a relay point to other destinations. Non stop trips are expensive. We need a station that has some manufacturing capability. We can mine LEO for what we need. We need to send unmanned missions to the moon and mars with equipment that will be used by us whenever we get there.
Without infrastructure you objections are valid. Sending someone on a one way trip to mars without years of launches of equipment, without a space station in which to train on, is just stupid. Saying we will go to mars and the moon when we cannot get a simple space station up and running is stupid.
The question we can ask is were the Daleks meant to live forever, or was there some facility for biological reproduction of the software. We know the original facility that grew the mutated kaleds and produced the containers was destroyed. Presumable another facility was created, as we know that the original produced could not have produced the numbers that were to later antagonized the universe.
In summary, this is a really dorky and embarrassing post. My only defense is that I grew up with dr. Who. I will not date myself by indicating how much of my life the series covered. I think we need a poll of our most embarrassing trivia knowledge.
I don't know which version of Eudora you run, but in my old paid for version, I can go the 'display' settings to disable auto download of HTML images, and then in styled text disable all other tags. If nothing else I can read the mail in 'blah blah' mode which does no processing. If the new version can no longer do this, it is another reason not to pay for an upgrade.
The real benefit is to the spammers. They can put inline images that make the email look like it came from a legitimate company, they can have the text version look random, but the HTML rendered version human readable. Almost all spam is going to be HTML, and my experience is that 95% of HTML mail is spam.
Which means that if we filtered HTML most spam would go away overnight, and the bandwidth wasted by the remainder would be significantly reduced. We would also significantly reduce the security risks. Unfortunately the lusers that use services such as Yahoo! would also be filtered. I wonder if the decision to default to HTML is purely to satisfy the general customer, or a feature targeted directly to facilitate advertising.
The next question is will these rules insure we live longer, or, to put it another way will the reduction in freedoms be balanced by a suitable longer life. Given the history, i think the best we can hope for is a perfect balance. Years ago the airlines started requiring identification for all passengers as a means to make flights more secure. Did this make flights safer? Who knows. A statical study might point to an answer. What is known is that the identification system did nothing to stop a few fundamentalists from taking over three planes and killing thousands of people.
What is also known is the simplest defense against such an attack has not been fully implemented. Make the cockpits impenetrable and make it the pilots prime directive to maintain control of the plane at all costs. The passengers safety is best insured by the pilots remaining in control. This may result in passenger deaths. However, as all of us in the United States seem to be universally patriotic, I don't think any of us would be unwilling to give our lives to protect the country if such a situation raised. We may reasonably ask then, why are we created complex new systems when the simple stuff is being ignored?
We can also look at the deeper meaning of your question by seeing what other countries do in the name of safety.. In some countries, women are not allowed to go out in public without a chador. Some more liberal countries only require a long coat and scarf. This is a severe restriction of civil liberties, but is absolutely necessary as any visible hair or skin might so entice a male as to cause him to rape or kill. If such a situation occurred, it would not be the males fault. He was just reacting to a slut. In this case, the chador seems absolutely necessary if public life is to remain secure.
Likewise, in these countries, musician are sometimes allowed to play, but they are not allowed to get the crowd riled. Concerts, and public gatherings of any sort, are rare muted events. If the rules were not in place, unmarried couples might be lead to impure acts, which would inevitable lead the unfortunate necessity of stoning the slutty women. Some music might als lead to impure western thoughts, which would also lead to the inevitable execution of those who profess those thoughts.
So, it may very well be that this system is necessary. But if there ever comes a day when we cannot get a plane without a background check, or unwarranted strip searches, with the associated occasional rape, becomes common, let me just say now that I told you so.
The second head was a thing that worked well for the book and radio, but was just a distraction on TV. It would just be better to take that bit out in rewrites. It won't be a big problem, since any fans knows that the main character is the Guide, not the people.
periodically heads aloft in a 1954 Piper Tri-Pacer recently donated to the abbey and maintained by private donations
he will use it for travel to business meetings as LaserMonks continues to grow.
McCoy, like his brethren, is allowed no possessions other than a few mementos with deep meaning.
I think this is why some religious organizations have such a bad name. Although they preach humility, piety and charity, as you dig deeper you find pure bred dogs, private aircraft, and a desire not to mix with unwashed masses by flying commercial. Sure they don't own anything, but that is almost like a rich man transferring assets to a proxy to avoid taxes and insure entrance to heaven. These things have to be more than technical requirements.
Combine this with their heavy sales pitch that a purchase will help those less fortunate, and one gets close to the likes of girl scout extortion, the selling of papal indulgences, and claiming to be the protector of the environment while sucking electricity like there is no next generation.
There are a lot of fine religious leaders out there. I have worked with many of them, and the come from all faiths. Most of them would not consider excessive luxuries for themselves before the needs of others. Most of them would take responsibility for they blessings they use, and not hide behind technicalities.
But if we think of IP addresses as commodities certain things become clear. Scarcity of the commodity creates value. Those that own large reserves of the commodity will have the ability to use the commodity to create power. Anything that threatens the scarcity of the commodity will tend to reduce the influence of those that have cornered the commodity.
I will not assert that this is a valid analogy. I will not assert that MIT leverages it ownership of a class A network is any particular fashion. I also do not believe that we face an IP crisis any more than we face a telephone number crisis, as I do not believe that every device requires a unique IP address. (Each household, for example, could own a single IP address with a router that could detect codes for particular devices. It is like the need for several serial ports merely because we did not implement rs-422) I do, however, always find it suspicious when organizations with possible conflicts of interests speak forcibly against something that many would consider a done deal.
We ask what server is seen by the world. It may be that ISS is running all the stuff in the back, but why is it that companies do not feel comfortable exposing ISS to the world?
So, there are a few firms and ISPs that make a great deal of money off the spamming business. The firms pay spammers to advertise, and the ISPs allow the spammer a conduit. When the spammers get caught, both deny any knowledge of wrongdoing, allow the spammer to fall, then just find someone else willing to continue the spam.
Both products become expensive because of government regulations. To protect the profitability of both products, distributors employ tactics typical of criminal organizations. Both products derive their power from the fear of the people who would have a tendency to abuse it, or those that see a threat to other more acceptable means of domination.
And finally, the real danger appears not because of the product itself, but because of the additives that must be used in the mass market to maximize and protect profit margins. The additives create unknown levels of toxicity to your body and your mind.
Of course, manufactured weed and manufactured music are both bad for you, and I would suggest that squirrels and humans avoid their consumption.
Does this mean that when consumers have a choice, much less than 90% of consumers choose MS? Which is to say that MS is a good firm, but in fact has gained it's monopoly status through methods other than technical innovation.
Which is why sales people are put on flat commission. If management was put on commission based on performance, the argument would be valid. However, most management is put on a very large base salary, plus very large bonuses, often for very few results, or results which can be fabricated.
To be fair, other staff's bonuses can also be excessive. The difference is that management is in a unique position in that it is often in direct control of the data that is used to determine the bonuses. Therefore there is a real motivation to fabricate data in order to maximize personal bonuses, not shareholder profit or company fundamentals. It is the classic fallacy of putting control and data signals on the same line. Sales people usually have separate control lines to insure they are not lying. Management usually does not.
The reason I think an MBA is worthless is because of this crap that is spouted as good governance. The only reason such people exist is to propagate the myths that allow a few people to earn so much.
The word 'average' is a general term often used instead of the words 'mean', 'median', or 'mode'. The original article specifically mentioned the median as the type of average the ISP used as basis fro their complaint. The parent substituted the less general term 'average' which should only be construed as some yet unspecified average, and in context is quite clearly referring to the 'median'. The reply then made a much graver error of assuming the term average had a more specific meaning.
This is a grave error in the use of language and mathematics.
In any case, we can fault the ISP for not provided a context for their complaint. Do do the bottom two quartiles of the users download 0.5 meg of email a day, while the third quartile download 5 meg of porn a day, and the top quartile downloads at least 30 meg of movies a day? Since they give us no shape, the number is meaningless
For some physical products, products that are physical and have good branding, it makes good business sense to create a demand, then minimize the availability of the product. This will tend to maximize price and profits. However, such a strategy runs the risk of the potential customer switching to another similar product that is marketed less aggressively.
For products that are not fundamentally physical, and are licensed, such a strategy is death, especially is such a product is commodity. The adolescent that needs the content for peer group recognition, the adult that is used to having the desire for content fulfilled, will realize that the opportunity cost for licensed acquisition of the content is orders of magnitude higher than the those of unlicensed acquisition. It quickly becomes apparent that there is no need to live by the rules of the enforced and artificial scarcity. The consumer downloads the content.
The content owner can either raise the opportunity cost for unlicensed acquisition, or lower then for licensed acquisition, or both. The former, as we have seen, has the risk of destroying the brand image, as have seen not only with RIAA, but previously with MS. The later requires a fundamental shift in business outlook that is impossible for most corporations. It is really stupid for copyright owners to be yelling 'they are stealing our stuff.' All that is happening is that consumers are changing the rules. Business owners do this everyday. Recorded music and movies spelled the death of the previous content delivery system. The current system, which depends on an artificial scarcity, will also die. Such is life.
I do believe in personal responsibilty and trying to only have those things that you can afford. However, at least in the US, we live in a highly competative psuedo-market economy, which depends on consumers have great needs and meeting those needs quickly. This is an expectation, and if people cannot do this legaly, then they will just bend the rules.
But this laws says that all bank transactions of a business are public property. It would take only a few corrupt FBI agents to destroy a company by exposing it's banking records. No foreign company will want to bank in the US because it will afraid that the FBI will funnel sensitive information to US corporations. It has been done before.
And, as if the tinfoil wearing folk do not already have enough encouragement, this is the best reason of all to keep your money in you mattress.
In summary, if the money and business begin leaving the US in even greater numbers, I cannot blame them in the least. I thought some of the actions of US corporations over the past were quite selfish, but now I am not so sure. I cannot imagine a responsible firm using US banks anymore than is absolutely neccesary
As has been mentioned, the usefulness is protect the innocent. Such technology can and should be used to insure the innocent office worker cannot do damage to data and standard forms during the normal duty cycle. Such technology can and should be used to insure that sensitive information, like edits and internal company information, are redacted prior to their public release. And, of course, it is perfectly reasonable to mark internal emails as internal to prevent accidental distribution.
Of course, MS et al is so intent on making DRM a tool for the distributor of content, rather than a mechanism to protect the innocent, that it's product allows the regular release of sensitive and private information