If I want to know how mozilla works, I can look at the source and try to figure it out.
And if you want to know how IE works, you can run debug tools on the binaries and try to figure it out.
The same way a mechanic can look inside a car's hood and find out how a car works.
That's exactly my IE example. Looking at the "source code" of a car would be studying the design documents, blueprints, etc. that the car company used to build the car. And that is closed-source.
The car analogy still doesn't work, because source code is not the product. The GPL recognizes this as truth; why shouldn't we?
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
I respect RMS for his steadfastness and I'm glad there's someone like him around to advocate his kind of position, but I find the ways he expresses his viewpoints to be excessively shrill and unfriendly.
XSS, on the other hand, relies as much in your lack of escaping as in browser-specific "features" such as the ability of MSIE to execute arbitrary Javascript code embedded in CSS.
There's no reason to allow a user to inject their own CSS code into site content.
Filter out all style definitions from user-provided content before sending it to the client for rendering.
Better yet, use a whitelist approach. If you're going to display the user's name, don't accept anything other than letters and whitespace. If you're letting the user submit "free text", don't accept anything that's not alphanumeric, whitespace, punctuation, or a standard subset of HTML markup, like <b> and <i%gt;.
Know what your data type is SUPPOSED to be, and it will make it much easier to identify cases where invalid data is offered.
she has had it made clear to her by her bosses that it is completely illegal to give such information out without a warrent - the data protection act simply doesn't allow it. She always finds it amusing to be having to explain to the police what the law is!
Amusing, yes, but is it all that unexpected?
Even distinguished legal scholars sometimes disagree about "what the law is". For a police officer to have more than a shallow understanding, we'd have to send them through law school as part of their training.
And that would just cost the taxpayers a lot more and create a lot more lawyers, neither of which cannot be considered a good thing.
If the USA were a true fascist state, the police would have gotten what they wanted without a subpoena and the library director might have become a non-person for resisting.
I don't deny that government bodies in the United States are constantly trying to grab more and more power from themselves. But the full conversion to fascism hasn't happened yet, and as long as the people are vigilant in pointing out abuses when they occur, it never will. Calling the present-day America a fascist state makes you look like you've given up the fight already.
The police are not the Access Control Lists of society. They're not there to prevent you from doing things. They're there to aid in repremanding or removing you from society if you fail to abide by its laws.
Explain, then, the transit police checkpoints I occasionally go by in the New York City subway system.
They don't have 3 officers searching bags all day long because they think some schmuck is going to volunteer his bag for searching and they'll find a container of sarin and they'll arrest him and save the day. Rather, if a terrorist tried to bring weapons into the system, seeing cops there waiting for him is going to convince him to abort the mission.
I happen to think this is a waste of resources, but I cannot deny that the police's role in this scenario is more deterrent than detergent.
It's not even obvious it should be followed up. There is no "right not to be offended".
I will concede that it's a subject open to reasonable debate, but if a stranger made sexual remarks to MY daughter, I'd want the police to check up on this guy and try to make sure he's not a psycho rapist.
There's no "right to not be offended", but everyone has a right to feel safe.
And for a desktop having a 5400 rpm harddrive (as a new project) is pretty slow.
Depends what kind of access pattern on the drive there will be.
If all you will be doing with it is sequential access (like playing back MP3's for example), then 5400rpm would probably be just fine. A use case with a lot of random access, like the swap partition or an active database, would benefit from higher rotational speeds like 7200 or 10,000 rpm.
Our brains are wired to work in 3 dimension and time, computers will always be far too "flat" for ordinary people without some kind of "crutch"
I don't see how this product provides that kind of crutch, though.
The computer desktop will still be a finite 2-dimensional plane on a screen. The interaction of elements within it will still be virtualized, not physical. Is it going to help that much for individual elements to be "sheets of paper" rather than "windows"? The window metaphor has been in popular use for over 20 years -- haven't we grown accustomed to it yet?
"If embryos are considered human beings, which at least according to statistics of religious affiliation (add up the number of Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and non-mainline Protestants) is a belief held by the vast majority of the Western world"
That's a fallacy -- argumentum ad populum, specifically.
Just because a majority of people believe something (eg, that embryos are human beings) would not make it objectively True.
Who paralyzes the rats in the first place? Do the scientists step on 'em?
Not the scientists, no. That what lab assistants are for! I wish I was joking.
Actually, they probably design some sort of rat-spine-breaking device so the assistants can paralyze them more uniformly than could be achieved just by stepping on them. I wish I was joking about that too.
Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue.
It does? It's not as though Vincent was asking "Would you pretty please do me a special favor and cancel my account?".
"Cancel my account" is a direct demand for action, and the action is one specifically allowed for in the contract between AOL and customer. The AOL representative has no grounds on which to refuse to execute the cancellation action.
Remember, it's probably easier to get the AOL rep to concede that the account is cancelled than to deal with credit card fraud departments, collections agencies, and credit bureaus after the fact.
If he stops paying without AOL acknowledging that the contract has been terminated, they'll just keep sending him larger and larger bills. Eventually the account will be turned over to a collections agency, and the customer will be hounded by scumbags who don't know or care whether the debt is valid, and the customer's credit rating could be compromised.
Every new computer I have ever purchased - Dells included (Inspiron laptop was the last Dell) -- The FIRST thing I do is reformat the drive.
That's be great it new computers came with install discs for any of the software that's preloaded on them anymore. If you're lucky, you'll get a set of "restore" discs that you can use to re-image your drive to the exact same crufty bloated state you're trying to get rid of. (If you're unlucky, they steal part of your drive capacity and create a restore partition, and expect you to burn the discs yourself.)
I just go through Add/Remove programs and purge any item where I don't know what it's for or why I'd want it, and hope for the best.
I was confused about why the Slashback headline and story summary both mentioned WebTV. Microsoft renamed that product to "MSN TV" years ago, and it didn't make any sense that ABC would be giving out hardware for free.
It wasn't until I read the source article that I discovered that they meant "web TV" (television programming watched over the web) rather than "WebTV" (the underpowered and obsolete set-top email and web browsing box).
Thanks for making the story less clear than it actually was, Slashdot. I appreciate it.
Oh, and buying a $400-500 retail phone from a "psst...wanna buy a cell phone" type vendor in the Subway constitutes purchasing stolen goods if it is in fact not the person's to sell- it's a known or should have known" issue
I don't know that it's that simple.
The base retail price of a brand new Sidekick may be around $350, but with rebates and new service contract deals, it's not unreasonable that one could obtain a handset for a net cost of under $100. Heck, when I signed up with T-Mobile for my Sidekick service a few years ago, the rebates were large enough that I ended up paying -$50 for my handset. They gave me fifty free dollars.
While I still think the woman is dumb for buying a cellphone from a random stranger at a subway station, I don't know that her failure to have common sense is criminal in this case.
Come on, it's not like wrists weren't designed to flex. If Buddy Rich could play drums for 68 years, I would expect most people in good health are capable of flicking a 2-ounce remote control with their writes for a few minutes a day.
I imagine you couldn't play this game without taking frequent breaks (which might be good for RSI but aren't very good for immersion).
Depends on what definition of 'immersion' you're using.
The old idea about immersive gaming is kind of like being in a hot tub -- you ease yourself in, but once you're comfortable you can stay there for hours.
Nintendo's new idea of immersion is like a diving board -- you climb up, leap off, in an instant you're enveloped by the water, and then quickly you're at the side of the pool again, ready to take another dive.
Education increases in value as more people have it.
Does it?
Employers today expect every applicant to have a bachelor's degree, even for work that might not have required a high school diploma a couple of generations ago. Many workers today are finding it a barrier to career advancement if they don't have a masters degree, or even a doctorate.
far more than in the past news is being delivered by wire services like Reuters, AP, AFP etc.
I don't think this happened as recently as you think it has. Print newspapers have been relying on wire copy for a large amount of their content for a long time now, since well before the growth of the Internet. You didn't think your local small-city paper sent its own reporters to Washington D.C. or the Middle East, did you?
Let's be realistic, their 1st gen stuff (Altered Beast, Super Thunder Blade, Golden Axe was very very bad, they were basically technical showcases. No exciting gameplay whatsoever.)
Can't really fault the console division for that. A lot of the Genesis/Megadrive launch titles were just near-perfect translations of popular Sega arcade games.
one thing i think they could do to improve their userbase tremendously would be to include every city in the world.
I wouldn't be surprised if they planned to eventually, but it's going to have to happen in phases. They have to make sure they have enough resources (both hardware and staff) to support the site as it grows to encompass more and more locations.
I'm talking about charging them a reasonable fee for a service they find valuable.
Craigslist, unlike most of the classified advertising industry, recognizes that its customers are not the people who PLACE ads, but rather the people who RESPOND to ads.
Take the New York real estate listings as an example: the fees have been imposed not because NYC realtors have deep pockets (though many do), but rather because with no cost of entry, the signal-to-noise ratio on the listings pages was dropping too low and causing customer dissatisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
If I want to know how mozilla works, I can look at the source and try to figure it out.
And if you want to know how IE works, you can run debug tools on the binaries and try to figure it out.
The same way a mechanic can look inside a car's hood and find out how a car works.
That's exactly my IE example. Looking at the "source code" of a car would be studying the design documents, blueprints, etc. that the car company used to build the car. And that is closed-source.
The car analogy still doesn't work, because source code is not the product. The GPL recognizes this as truth; why shouldn't we?
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
I respect RMS for his steadfastness and I'm glad there's someone like him around to advocate his kind of position, but I find the ways he expresses his viewpoints to be excessively shrill and unfriendly.
So which one of your insults do I merit?
XSS, on the other hand, relies as much in your lack of escaping as in browser-specific "features" such as the ability of MSIE to execute arbitrary Javascript code embedded in CSS.
There's no reason to allow a user to inject their own CSS code into site content.
Filter out all style definitions from user-provided content before sending it to the client for rendering.
Better yet, use a whitelist approach. If you're going to display the user's name, don't accept anything other than letters and whitespace. If you're letting the user submit "free text", don't accept anything that's not alphanumeric, whitespace, punctuation, or a standard subset of HTML markup, like <b> and <i%gt;.
Know what your data type is SUPPOSED to be, and it will make it much easier to identify cases where invalid data is offered.
42 minutes... Oy!
Yeah, but, 25GB. That's about equivalent to a 60x CD-R drive in terms of throughput.
Heck, I remember the days when it took over half an hour to burn a single 650MB CD-R. I'm not about to complain about 25 in 42.
she has had it made clear to her by her bosses that it is completely illegal to give such information out without a warrent - the data protection act simply doesn't allow it. She always finds it amusing to be having to explain to the police what the law is!
Amusing, yes, but is it all that unexpected?
Even distinguished legal scholars sometimes disagree about "what the law is". For a police officer to have more than a shallow understanding, we'd have to send them through law school as part of their training.
And that would just cost the taxpayers a lot more and create a lot more lawyers, neither of which cannot be considered a good thing.
Citizens of the United States of America, you do realize you live in a fascist state, don't you?
Bleh bleh bleh bleh, bleh bleh bleh, bleh bleh bleh bleh?
If the USA were a true fascist state, the police would have gotten what they wanted without a subpoena and the library director might have become a non-person for resisting.
I don't deny that government bodies in the United States are constantly trying to grab more and more power from themselves. But the full conversion to fascism hasn't happened yet, and as long as the people are vigilant in pointing out abuses when they occur, it never will. Calling the present-day America a fascist state makes you look like you've given up the fight already.
The police are not the Access Control Lists of society. They're not there to prevent you from doing things. They're there to aid in repremanding or removing you from society if you fail to abide by its laws.
Explain, then, the transit police checkpoints I occasionally go by in the New York City subway system.
They don't have 3 officers searching bags all day long because they think some schmuck is going to volunteer his bag for searching and they'll find a container of sarin and they'll arrest him and save the day. Rather, if a terrorist tried to bring weapons into the system, seeing cops there waiting for him is going to convince him to abort the mission.
I happen to think this is a waste of resources, but I cannot deny that the police's role in this scenario is more deterrent than detergent.
It's not even obvious it should be followed up. There is no "right not to be offended".
I will concede that it's a subject open to reasonable debate, but if a stranger made sexual remarks to MY daughter, I'd want the police to check up on this guy and try to make sure he's not a psycho rapist.
There's no "right to not be offended", but everyone has a right to feel safe.
And for a desktop having a 5400 rpm harddrive (as a new project) is pretty slow.
Depends what kind of access pattern on the drive there will be.
If all you will be doing with it is sequential access (like playing back MP3's for example), then 5400rpm would probably be just fine. A use case with a lot of random access, like the swap partition or an active database, would benefit from higher rotational speeds like 7200 or 10,000 rpm.
Our brains are wired to work in 3 dimension and time, computers will always be far too "flat" for ordinary people without some kind of "crutch"
I don't see how this product provides that kind of crutch, though.
The computer desktop will still be a finite 2-dimensional plane on a screen. The interaction of elements within it will still be virtualized, not physical. Is it going to help that much for individual elements to be "sheets of paper" rather than "windows"? The window metaphor has been in popular use for over 20 years -- haven't we grown accustomed to it yet?
"If embryos are considered human beings, which at least according to statistics of religious affiliation (add up the number of Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and non-mainline Protestants) is a belief held by the vast majority of the Western world"
That's a fallacy -- argumentum ad populum, specifically.
Just because a majority of people believe something (eg, that embryos are human beings) would not make it objectively True.
Who paralyzes the rats in the first place? Do the scientists step on 'em?
Not the scientists, no. That what lab assistants are for! I wish I was joking.
Actually, they probably design some sort of rat-spine-breaking device so the assistants can paralyze them more uniformly than could be achieved just by stepping on them. I wish I was joking about that too.
Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue.
It does? It's not as though Vincent was asking "Would you pretty please do me a special favor and cancel my account?".
"Cancel my account" is a direct demand for action, and the action is one specifically allowed for in the contract between AOL and customer. The AOL representative has no grounds on which to refuse to execute the cancellation action.
Remember, it's probably easier to get the AOL rep to concede that the account is cancelled than to deal with credit card fraud departments, collections agencies, and credit bureaus after the fact.
If he stops paying without AOL acknowledging that the contract has been terminated, they'll just keep sending him larger and larger bills. Eventually the account will be turned over to a collections agency, and the customer will be hounded by scumbags who don't know or care whether the debt is valid, and the customer's credit rating could be compromised.
Every new computer I have ever purchased - Dells included (Inspiron laptop was the last Dell) -- The FIRST thing I do is reformat the drive.
That's be great it new computers came with install discs for any of the software that's preloaded on them anymore. If you're lucky, you'll get a set of "restore" discs that you can use to re-image your drive to the exact same crufty bloated state you're trying to get rid of. (If you're unlucky, they steal part of your drive capacity and create a restore partition, and expect you to burn the discs yourself.)
I just go through Add/Remove programs and purge any item where I don't know what it's for or why I'd want it, and hope for the best.
I was confused about why the Slashback headline and story summary both mentioned WebTV. Microsoft renamed that product to "MSN TV" years ago, and it didn't make any sense that ABC would be giving out hardware for free.
It wasn't until I read the source article that I discovered that they meant "web TV" (television programming watched over the web) rather than "WebTV" (the underpowered and obsolete set-top email and web browsing box).
Thanks for making the story less clear than it actually was, Slashdot. I appreciate it.
Oh, and buying a $400-500 retail phone from a "psst...wanna buy a cell phone" type vendor in the Subway constitutes purchasing stolen goods if it is in fact not the person's to sell- it's a known or should have known" issue
I don't know that it's that simple.
The base retail price of a brand new Sidekick may be around $350, but with rebates and new service contract deals, it's not unreasonable that one could obtain a handset for a net cost of under $100. Heck, when I signed up with T-Mobile for my Sidekick service a few years ago, the rebates were large enough that I ended up paying -$50 for my handset. They gave me fifty free dollars.
While I still think the woman is dumb for buying a cellphone from a random stranger at a subway station, I don't know that her failure to have common sense is criminal in this case.
Come on, it's not like wrists weren't designed to flex. If Buddy Rich could play drums for 68 years, I would expect most people in good health are capable of flicking a 2-ounce remote control with their writes for a few minutes a day.
I imagine you couldn't play this game without taking frequent breaks (which might be good for RSI but aren't very good for immersion).
Depends on what definition of 'immersion' you're using.
The old idea about immersive gaming is kind of like being in a hot tub -- you ease yourself in, but once you're comfortable you can stay there for hours.
Nintendo's new idea of immersion is like a diving board -- you climb up, leap off, in an instant you're enveloped by the water, and then quickly you're at the side of the pool again, ready to take another dive.
Education increases in value as more people have it.
Does it?
Employers today expect every applicant to have a bachelor's degree, even for work that might not have required a high school diploma a couple of generations ago. Many workers today are finding it a barrier to career advancement if they don't have a masters degree, or even a doctorate.
Most likely, he was much closer to her in maturity level than he was girls his own age.
I don't think it's a good idea to be speculating about the maturity level of a man who sexually assaults a 14-year-old girl.
far more than in the past news is being delivered by wire services like Reuters, AP, AFP etc.
I don't think this happened as recently as you think it has. Print newspapers have been relying on wire copy for a large amount of their content for a long time now, since well before the growth of the Internet. You didn't think your local small-city paper sent its own reporters to Washington D.C. or the Middle East, did you?
Let's be realistic, their 1st gen stuff (Altered Beast, Super Thunder Blade, Golden Axe was very very bad, they were basically technical showcases. No exciting gameplay whatsoever.)
Can't really fault the console division for that. A lot of the Genesis/Megadrive launch titles were just near-perfect translations of popular Sega arcade games.
one thing i think they could do to improve their userbase tremendously would be to include every city in the world.
I wouldn't be surprised if they planned to eventually, but it's going to have to happen in phases. They have to make sure they have enough resources (both hardware and staff) to support the site as it grows to encompass more and more locations.
I'm talking about charging them a reasonable fee for a service they find valuable.
Craigslist, unlike most of the classified advertising industry, recognizes that its customers are not the people who PLACE ads, but rather the people who RESPOND to ads.
Take the New York real estate listings as an example: the fees have been imposed not because NYC realtors have deep pockets (though many do), but rather because with no cost of entry, the signal-to-noise ratio on the listings pages was dropping too low and causing customer dissatisfaction.