Not very hard at all, especially since you'll give false information to the latter two groups in order to sign up, and the first one can't sell your info anyway.
That seems truly odd that you Americans have to pay for incoming calls. They say rapid spread of cell phones in Europe is partly due to no charge for incoming call - you can always answer a phone without worrying about your bill.
I'm getting slightly peeved at all the messages going "you have to pay for incoming cell phone calls?!" I think it seems truly odd that large portions of the technologically-advanced world have to pay to make local phone calls on a landline. US$55/month for phone service (in North Texas, USA) includes extended metro service, and I can call an area of about 250 square miles.
Anyway, back on topic: VoiceStream has GSM service in good portions of the US, and their phones are capable of roaming internationally. A friend of mine just got one, and she's never going back to SWBell. The coverage where she lives is excellent, and she's out in the Middle Of Nowhere(tm).
Denton County actually keeps more bits of information private than other counties, say Dallas and Tarrant (home to Dallas and Fort Worth, respectively). Take a quick look at PublicData, their original market was being able to search a lot of public records about residents of Texas, Dallas County primarily.
Note that the actual records of how you vote are not exposed, as they can't be. Ballots have no identifying markings on them (unless we're using paper markings ) and they go into a locked box with every other anonymous ballot.
/me will go back to munching on a delicious burger from The Denton County Hamburger Factory and listen to reports of the horrible traffic over the Lake Lewisville bridge.. there's nothing to see here.
Is BattleBots roughly similar to, or the same as, Robot Wars, made by BBC and hosted by the guy who plays Lister on Red Dwarf (Craig Charles)? Good to see the Americans are finally getting the benefit of British television.:)
Speaking of their CTO, I wonder if this is the same Doug Davis who used to be ddavis@seas.smu.edu, and ran either the Dallas UUCP feed or managed the.lonestar.org domain. That sounds like a quote from him, of course Doug Davis is probably a fairly common name.
Not particularly. Texas is part of the Fifth Circuit (helloooo Judge Jerry Buckmeyer), not the Ninth. According to the Ninth Circuit's website, they "[include] all federal courts in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands."
That means that the decision only really applies to the Ninth Circuit. Now, it would provide a great prior-case background for a suit in another Circuit, but that judge is not bound by judicial law to rule the same way.
Nor by trying to set a good example by being unbiased and impartial myself; that too is too big of a job. Instead I think what I will try to avoid is any suggestion that I am unbiased. Here, let's make it clear: I AM BIASED
I think a distinction needs to be made here, and I congratulate you for making it. Slashdot doesn't exist to be a "general interest" news site, designed solely for getting the facts out. It is, as its tagline says, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters [to them]. You are rightfully biased, because that's what Slashdot exists for.
I write news shorts, based on the AP wire and Reuters reports, for our local newspaper. This job depends on being able to condense two pages worth of text into about 3 paragraphs, and I must still do it in an unbiased fashion (preserving the original author's meaning as well). This requires that I be unbiased, shrinking a story about Windows ME being released into the same balanced clump as I'd also shrink a story about a new Linux security hole.
In short, you're biased because you can be. Newswriters, in my [biased] opinion, should be unbiased because they have to be.
It's all there. I've had August.Net as my ISP and GTE as my DSL carrier since Day 1, and I've never had a problem. They've been a bit unstable since upgrading the CO I just moved to, but nothing bad otherwise.
Remember that the vehement complaints are coming from the minority of people who are peeved. There are lots of customers out there, every day, using their service without a hitch or error. Also, most of the complaints are coming from the northeast (i.e. New York) where the phone lines are crap, in short supply, the unionized labour force is lazy, and your only real hope for good service is to go through the pain of a CLEC.
Put simply, I wouldn't trade my service for anything, but North Texas seems to be, based on reviews, the only place who has gotten DSL right (with GTE no less!).
can't afford to drop 4 grand a year on a new system
Well now, that depends greatly on what your other needs are. Personally, I could afford this every year, if I didn't have a fiancee and son to support. However, I do, and I wouldn't trade them for anything, much less a decent-sized piece of metal that'll be useful only as a paperweight in the next 5 years.
A well-paying job is one that lets you pay all your bills on time and have money left over to enjoy life, while even (gasp) saving some for later. Anything after that is pure gravy.
I didn't receive *anything* with my Wired subscription, except the magazine. This odd-looking cat shaped red flashlight came with a very handy audio conversion cable in a box that said "delta-air.com" on the side, along with the name of a company I happen to get a magazine from. It wasn't in a cellophane wrapper over the magazine. Just another random box at my front door.
in the U.S., where there is constitutionally guranteed separation of church and state (I'm right there, aren't I?).
Caution... This is a rant:
No. The Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of religion. It makes no such guarantees that the church will be seperate from the state, only that the state cannot pick and choose what religions it will allow. The way I see it is this: It is illegal for the city of Lewisville to order my church to not hold services just because we spell church with a lowercase 'c.' However, its not illegal, and is in fact expressly allowed, for my minister to run for (and possibly be elected to) a city council position.
I have realized for a while that someone needs to release a decent mod for a FPS without violence
Would Starsiege Tribes count? That is an excellent game, especially if you have a dedicated connection and love multi-player games. I'm eagerly awaiting Tribes2.
We really need to put this on the front page, and not just for people who have found the YRO section.
On-topic: One of the biggest fears I've had of a shared registration system is the ability to do exactly what AOL has apparently done.. Since there's apparently no user-level authentication built into the registry (why should there be? you don't own your name, according to the Big Boys), as evidenced by having to prove your identity to the registrar, then what's to prevent slipping someone who has the technical equivalent of "root" access a bit of cash to harass your competitors by swapping their names around?
Unfortunately, there's probably not a way to fix this in the current system, as adding authentication for the individual domain name holder would most likely require a re-write of the existing shared registry system, and I think we can guess the chances of NSI&Cartel letting that go through.
I believe that somewhere, a study concluded that most sites are only 8-9 links away from each other. (This is purely anecdotal, as I have no link[oops!] to back it up) That means you're 8-9 links away from getting sued, unless your website contains no external links whatsoever.
Has anyone here been to law school? Do they really beat you that stupid before you're let out upon an unsuspecting public?
or, who give every user their own/28 (well, not really... I pay extra for the extra 8. my ISP usually gives a/29)? Also, why do Hewlett Packard, DEC (defunct), Public Data Network, Apple, MIT, Ford Motor Company??, CSC and a company/group called Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (might be government, so its understandable) get their very own Class A block of addresses? How about asking *them* to return some to the available pool?
It's time for the Internet community at large to make a decision: are we going to keep applying these little fixes at the bottom end of the totem pole, such as requiring Name Based virtual hosts, or are we actually going to fix the problem? We can fix it short-term by reallocating some of these huge grants made long before the Internet became popular (which is politically sensitive to do), or we can fix it for a good long while by migrating to IPv6.
MP3Board is currently getting sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement by distributing MP3s. MP3Board has turned around and sued AOL because their subsidiary, Nullsoft created Gnutella. MP3Board wants AOL to share some of the liability for music piracy if MP3Board is found guilty. MP3Board's reasoning is that piracy wouldn't be happening as much if AOL's subsidiary hadn't created Gnutella.
What you describe is exactly how my Linux (redhat) machine is set up. It has a video card, but no monitor and no keyboard (not even a switchbox) attached. The BIOS is set to "Halt on Critical Only (No KB)," and if yours doesn't have that setting, many BIOSes have a "Halt on No Errors" setting. It doesn't seem to care about video, and the only complaint I ever get from Linux are a couple messages in the bootup log saying "keyboard: Too many NACKs -- noisy kbd cable?"
Slashdot Mirror
The hard transfer limit for this user has been reached.
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Happy turkey day, all.
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Not very hard at all, especially since you'll give false information to the latter two groups in order to sign up, and the first one can't sell your info anyway.
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"Thank you for calling Merilus; our regular business hours are..."
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I'm getting slightly peeved at all the messages going "you have to pay for incoming cell phone calls?!" I think it seems truly odd that large portions of the technologically-advanced world have to pay to make local phone calls on a landline. US$55/month for phone service (in North Texas, USA) includes extended metro service, and I can call an area of about 250 square miles.
Anyway, back on topic: VoiceStream has GSM service in good portions of the US, and their phones are capable of roaming internationally. A friend of mine just got one, and she's never going back to SWBell. The coverage where she lives is excellent, and she's out in the Middle Of Nowhere(tm).
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Sure .. send me an e-mail and we'll arrange lunch sometime. Meet you on the square? ;)
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Note that the actual records of how you vote are not exposed, as they can't be. Ballots have no identifying markings on them (unless we're using paper markings ) and they go into a locked box with every other anonymous ballot.
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It was done that way so the people who rail on about Hellmouth stories appearing on their JonKatz-filtered home page will quit whining.
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I pity whoever in Virginia has this address ... Washington might be a better state to ditch it in, anyway. :)
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http://www.wyvern.org/images/msad.jpg
(Crusin' at +2 today)
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Is BattleBots roughly similar to, or the same as, Robot Wars, made by BBC and hosted by the guy who plays Lister on Red Dwarf (Craig Charles)? Good to see the Americans are finally getting the benefit of British television. :)
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Speaking of their CTO, I wonder if this is the same Doug Davis who used to be ddavis@seas.smu.edu, and ran either the Dallas UUCP feed or managed the .lonestar.org domain. That sounds like a quote from him, of course Doug Davis is probably a fairly common name.
oh well, just curious.
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Not particularly. Texas is part of the Fifth Circuit (helloooo Judge Jerry Buckmeyer), not the Ninth. According to the Ninth Circuit's website, they "[include] all federal courts in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands."
That means that the decision only really applies to the Ninth Circuit. Now, it would provide a great prior-case background for a suit in another Circuit, but that judge is not bound by judicial law to rule the same way.
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I think a distinction needs to be made here, and I congratulate you for making it. Slashdot doesn't exist to be a "general interest" news site, designed solely for getting the facts out. It is, as its tagline says, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters [to them]. You are rightfully biased, because that's what Slashdot exists for.
I write news shorts, based on the AP wire and Reuters reports, for our local newspaper. This job depends on being able to condense two pages worth of text into about 3 paragraphs, and I must still do it in an unbiased fashion (preserving the original author's meaning as well). This requires that I be unbiased, shrinking a story about Windows ME being released into the same balanced clump as I'd also shrink a story about a new Linux security hole.
In short, you're biased because you can be. Newswriters, in my [biased] opinion, should be unbiased because they have to be.
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Remember that the vehement complaints are coming from the minority of people who are peeved. There are lots of customers out there, every day, using their service without a hitch or error. Also, most of the complaints are coming from the northeast (i.e. New York) where the phone lines are crap, in short supply, the unionized labour force is lazy, and your only real hope for good service is to go through the pain of a CLEC.
Put simply, I wouldn't trade my service for anything, but North Texas seems to be, based on reviews, the only place who has gotten DSL right (with GTE no less!).
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My God, I had to ... sheeesh, this was excellent! that movie gets burned to a CD and saved for all time
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Well now, that depends greatly on what your other needs are. Personally, I could afford this every year, if I didn't have a fiancee and son to support. However, I do, and I wouldn't trade them for anything, much less a decent-sized piece of metal that'll be useful only as a paperweight in the next 5 years.
A well-paying job is one that lets you pay all your bills on time and have money left over to enjoy life, while even (gasp) saving some for later. Anything after that is pure gravy.
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I didn't receive *anything* with my Wired subscription, except the magazine. This odd-looking cat shaped red flashlight came with a very handy audio conversion cable in a box that said "delta-air.com" on the side, along with the name of a company I happen to get a magazine from. It wasn't in a cellophane wrapper over the magazine. Just another random box at my front door.
---
Caution ... This is a rant:
No. The Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of religion. It makes no such guarantees that the church will be seperate from the state, only that the state cannot pick and choose what religions it will allow. The way I see it is this: It is illegal for the city of Lewisville to order my church to not hold services just because we spell church with a lowercase 'c.' However, its not illegal, and is in fact expressly allowed, for my minister to run for (and possibly be elected to) a city council position.
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Would Starsiege Tribes count? That is an excellent game, especially if you have a dedicated connection and love multi-player games. I'm eagerly awaiting Tribes2.
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On-topic: One of the biggest fears I've had of a shared registration system is the ability to do exactly what AOL has apparently done .. Since there's apparently no user-level authentication built into the registry (why should there be? you don't own your name, according to the Big Boys), as evidenced by having to prove your identity to the registrar, then what's to prevent slipping someone who has the technical equivalent of "root" access a bit of cash to harass your competitors by swapping their names around?
Unfortunately, there's probably not a way to fix this in the current system, as adding authentication for the individual domain name holder would most likely require a re-write of the existing shared registry system, and I think we can guess the chances of NSI&Cartel letting that go through.
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Has anyone here been to law school? Do they really beat you that stupid before you're let out upon an unsuspecting public?
---
It's time for the Internet community at large to make a decision: are we going to keep applying these little fixes at the bottom end of the totem pole, such as requiring Name Based virtual hosts, or are we actually going to fix the problem? We can fix it short-term by reallocating some of these huge grants made long before the Internet became popular (which is politically sensitive to do), or we can fix it for a good long while by migrating to IPv6.
My box talks IPv6, how about yours?
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MP3Board is currently getting sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement by distributing MP3s. MP3Board has turned around and sued AOL because their subsidiary, Nullsoft created Gnutella. MP3Board wants AOL to share some of the liability for music piracy if MP3Board is found guilty. MP3Board's reasoning is that piracy wouldn't be happening as much if AOL's subsidiary hadn't created Gnutella.
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What you describe is exactly how my Linux (redhat) machine is set up. It has a video card, but no monitor and no keyboard (not even a switchbox) attached. The BIOS is set to "Halt on Critical Only (No KB)," and if yours doesn't have that setting, many BIOSes have a "Halt on No Errors" setting. It doesn't seem to care about video, and the only complaint I ever get from Linux are a couple messages in the bootup log saying "keyboard: Too many NACKs -- noisy kbd cable?"
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