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User: ichimunki

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  1. Re:Uh, doubtful on Spammer Pleads Guilty · · Score: 2

    And this seems very reasonable. I don't like unsolicited email as much as the next person, but in the grand scheme of things, computer hijacking is relatively benign... even if it was used for the nefarious purpose of forgery. Unless it can be shown that this guy bilked old people of the money they needed to eat, or that his forgeries created some real hardship for someone else, the crime is a nuisance, but it's hardly an anti-social danger that deserves punishment like being locked in small cages with people who think shooting their friends over sports paraphernelia or minor grudges is a good idea.

  2. Re:So much for legal Pirate radio... on Webcasters Have To Pay · · Score: 3

    This has no effect on your ability to operate a "radio" station on the internet. You are quite free to jabber endlessly into a mic and stream that out to the masses. You are free to line up several hosts and thereby have a 24-7 operation. You are free to offer a webcam into the studio. You are free to host live performance of original music. You are free to play music by artists who have retained control of their music and give you permission to play it without royalty. Freedom impaired? Not at all.

    As for "legitimate" radio stations having to pay twice. Well, in effect they are operating two stations, one on the radio and one on the internet. If they use central recording, and feeds to play the same songs on multiple radio stations in different cities, do you think they end up paying only once for that (many stations and national shows like Top-40 work this way)? Is this going to affect big stations, most of whom are owned by the media conglomerates anyway? No. Is this going to hurt small community stations and college stations? Maybe. But again. They are effectively creating two broadcasts, so I don't see this as a problem.

  3. Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy on How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed? · · Score: 2

    I realize that the way I put it implies that I think PDF is platform dependent. Yes, it works better on some systems, and I've seen some instances where a PDF from one platform looks different on a different platform, but mostly my gripe is with how inaccessible it makes the information. It's great if you want to distribute forms intended for printing, like tax forms, but that's about it. Personally I'd prefer .txt, .csv, and .jpg for just about anything-- with perhaps the PDF as an option, not a requirement.

  4. Re:This electricity waste makes me ill on Wired Homes of the Rich · · Score: 2

    I think you have it backwards. I support nationalization of industry. But I am not a socialist. I am a monarchist.

  5. Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy on How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed? · · Score: 2

    Great link, thanks. I want to emphasize one of his primary points. Text is actually text. I don't care how gifted you are with the alt tag, using graphics when they are not necessary is really annoying. I find it amusing that he uses a right-arrow graphic on his navigation bar at the top, but it is alt="->" why not just use the "=>" in the first place, or some variation on that theme, like >>?

    For a while I used to think the old web (back in the Mosaic days) was ugly, and was thankful for the new, enhanced pages which were so pretty. Until most designers took all that stuff way too far. Now, especially with government sites, I think every page should work well with text browsers. This is important since the user base has a right to get at your information and access should not be an issue (and AFAIK most accessibility solutions rely on standards which tend to render well in Lynx-type browswers).

    I also think any downloadable information provided on government sites should be in a form which is as platform independent as possible. Text goes in .txt files, which can be provided inside of .tgz, .sit, and .zip files if they are large. Pictures should probably be JPG-- GIF is great for inline transparency and animation tricks, but haven't there been some patent issues? PNG is great in theory, but face facts, it's just not a standard option yet. If you have spreadsheet type data, please include a csv or some other delimited file. Please avoid .doc, .xls, and .pdf.

    Government web sites should strive to be cutting-edge not in the human interface department, but in the back-end department, with rigorous server-side work to assist in indexing, searching, organization, maintenance, and things like that. If my tax dollars are at work, I'd prefer them to be used to get the information together and to make it accessible. Any money spent paying designers to write little roll-overs and flashy graphics is not efficient. It hasn't added enough value to most dotcoms to get them out of the red ink, and it's not adding value to the state either.

  6. Re:This electricity waste makes me ill on Wired Homes of the Rich · · Score: 2

    Perhaps since electricity is billed based on usage, they should raise the rates on usage above a set amount (like the amount required to operate an average late model fridge, reasonable climate control device, one television, two clocks, and ten 60 watt bulbs for 15 hours a day) to a larger rate. This would enable Larry to keep his house turned on, but make the decision to operate frivolities like Christmas lights or thin clients in every room of the house a direct economic decision. Or for those of us who wear lots of sweaters, sit in the dark, and eat only corn chips and drink water... we'll be able to get the power for our wired homes at a cut rate.

  7. solid OT now, will attempt to tie back to topic on Major Linux Deployments · · Score: 2

    WRT credit checks by employers: Are you sure they aren't just making sure in debt up to your neck so they know for a fact that they can jack you around as much as they want, without fear that you'll walk since you will be desperate to keep up on the payments?

    As far as this or any other hiring practice affecting my decision to shop at Home Depot... I'm more likely to be (positively) influenced by the fact that they are a major supporter of Linux than I am to care that the people who work there are subject to privacy invasions. Maybe if the workers unionized or organized or supported politicians with brains, it wouldn't be a problem. But after much reflection I have decided that the average American deserves exactly what he or she is getting.

  8. Re:TWO per person? Nuts. on FCC Considering 10-Digit Dialing [UPDATED] · · Score: 2

    It was a starting place. I assume that some of those technologies will get more and more multiplexed and multifunctional so that less numbers will be necessary. I especially envision faxes becoming rarer and hopefully modems. Besides, by adding a digit you can make 2 numbers per person into 20 numbers per person. Which should be more than enough.

  9. Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it. on The Future Of The GUI? · · Score: 3

    Hmmm. Completely objectively, I use Enlightenment to manage my Linux X windows. It is certainly innovative to a level that I find lacking in both Windows (unless they've vastly changed the GUI in Win2k, which I've not yet used) and Mac OS.

    A docking bar with a mini-preview-snapshot deal for each "minimized" application. Multiple virtual desktops, with a small map with previews of each application. The ability to scroll over the edge of the screen and have it flip up the next window.

    No start bar. No task bar. No stupid menu bar stuck across the top of my screen. No silly pull out control bar. No shortcut bar. BUT a configurable start-type menu that appears anywhere on the background that I left-click. How much more innovative should Linux be before it is released from this myth that the Linux GUI is nothing more than a copy of windows & macintosh?

  10. this is stupid on FCC Considering 10-Digit Dialing [UPDATED] · · Score: 2

    They should nationalize telephone service and assign numbers of sufficient digit length to satisfy the requirement of two numbers for each American projected to be alive twenty-five years from now. All numbers should be charged the same way via regulated prices. This way I don't have to determine which of the three carriers I need actually can serve my needs at what price. The original phone service was granted a monopoly by the government, which one of the reasons we have a phone service at all-- they were able to charge as much as they needed to in order to cover all those great Bell Labs and all the infrastructure building they needed to. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there were heavy subsidies and tax schemes used to assist in the build-up process as well.

    Now we've given all this over to a bunch of competing firms who are entangled in goofy FCC regulations, and whose main competitive advantage seems to be brand recognition and confusing price structures. None of the emerging technologies (except maybe the internet, another great public project) hold even a birthday cake candle to POTS for voice transmission-- not when you consider range limitations, dropped calls, cost to build whole new infrastructure, etc etc.

    Frankly, I'd prefer a government bureaucracy to the insane patchwork of regional fiefdoms for local service and insensitive ubernationals for all other service. It's not as though the prices or service can get that much worse. And then instead of this whole huge department at the FCC doing an incredible number of pseudo-regulatory activities on all those companies, we just need one congressional oversight committee.

  11. Re:actually... on Up, Up, Down, Down: Part Two · · Score: 2

    Wow. I always thought Indiana and Ohio sounded like scary places, but now I have proof! Thanks for the tip.

    I'm ever aware of Lieberman and Tipper and their Thought Police ilk, but I really don't see a mass movement where kids are forced to play these games in secret-- I mean how could most kids afford these games if their folks didn't buy them for their kids? Certainly the games industry has done a lot to make sure that objections over certain games are not applicable to all games. Hence the rating system and all the fairly decent kid-oriented games out there.

  12. Re:What about application support? on The "Glory" Of Tech Support · · Score: 2

    I think this kind of stuff can be attributed to ANY inbound call center. If you yourself are at all talented, you quickly realize that you are getting customers who have called others in your call center only to have a terrible experience because your coworkers are by and large average, hence not very good at being excellent.

  13. Mythology on Up, Up, Down, Down: Part Two · · Score: 3

    This article relies on a straw man argument that there is some sort of moral panic about video games in our society. There are no serious quotes from mainstream sources to back this up, other than the ubiquitous political fear-mongering related to the entertainment industry as a whole. So first Katz sets up this panic using circumstantial evidence (since direct evidence, like masses of parents burning their childrens' video games in quantity just doesn't exist), then he proceeds to almost knock it down.

    I say almost because he goes on to equate the very limited modeling capabilities of a Playstation 2 to that of a supercomputer and then talk benignly about the wonders of technology in a discussion that avoids that issue and instead supposedly reinforces his other strawman argument: that there is some ever-widening rift between the old and the young. Then he assigns (as is typical of the rose-tinted worldview) to the younger generations' supposed side of the rift values that are supposed to convince us that the geezers just don't get it.

    What he fails to recognize is that the only rift (i.e. that of the teenage wasteland) is mostly a marketing ploy used to sell kids stuff they wouldn't normally buy.

    That is "hey kids, your folks just don't get these baggy pants and those stringy tanktops. Shop at the Gap and assert your independence!" The young are no more auto-dissidents than the old are auto-conformists. Much of what passes for generational rift is simply the by-product of living in a society where teenagers are given no real power and no real meaning other than consumer choices. The only way the PS2 is going to change all this is if kids suddenly start using it to hack into school computers to change their grades, or mess up the computers that control nuclear bombs.

  14. Re:Necessity of anti-aliasing on Anti-Aliased Text in X11 Continued · · Score: 2

    I have to agree with the comment about AA on non-Linux systems. When I've turned on the font-smoothing in MacOS it turns all the beautiful system fonts into an illegible mess.

    It's goddamn computer. Personally I want all my on-screen text to look like I'm using a computer. I prefer Courier and the even more classic computer type fonts. These are displayed in very clear contrast colors (like black on white) that make it simple to detect the edges of the letters.

    The only time anti-aliasing is enjoyable for me is when I'm doing layout in graphics applications, or creating text in a JPG/GIF/PNG.

  15. Re:Why? on Programming Perl, 3rd Edition · · Score: 1

    I vaguely suspect this entire post is not "insightful" but rather "flamebait", and in fact, may be indicative of an individual who has a highly organized set of troll and dummy accounts with which to moderate inane posts into a position where they will be perceived by others in such a way as to engender pointless debates.

    If that is not the case, I would like evidence that any serious comparison of the 2nd and 3rd editions went into recommending buying a remaindered 2nd edition to save a measly $10. I mean, duh. The 3rd is a much thicker tome and although I have not compared it content-wise to the 2nd, I assume that ORA and the writers did not produce the 3rd simply to snare idiots into upgrading. If you don't already have the Camel, I don't see why you would buy the 2nd instead of the 3rd. The 2nd is great, but I can think of numerous improvements that could have made the book much more accessible.

    Finally, further discussions about Perl vs. PHP vs. ASP are just plain lame... and a fair indication that the poster intends to start a religious war. Perl users like Perl for their own reasons. Others may like other things for other reasons. But since this is a book review of a Perl book, let's stick to the topic, which is not a flame war about which web scripting method is best.

  16. Re:His chances on the Senate... on U.S. Supreme Court Issues Election Ruling · · Score: 2

    I was going to mention New York as a good place for him to do this. *grin*

  17. Re:He's done- no matter what the outcome. on U.S. Supreme Court Issues Election Ruling · · Score: 2

    I don't think his conduct post-election has anything to do with his potential electability in 2004. If he couldn't win by a definite margin as the sitting VP, he has no chance to do it in four years. I'd say it's time for him to run for Senate again. Or maybe he could just get a real job, you know, like a real person, instead of a member of a ruling family.

  18. Re:slashdot needs to mirror stuff on Alpha-Blending On KDE · · Score: 2

    Not to mention that the image links are to an FTP server, which is a pretty sorry place to link to when you know you're going to have more than 100 attempts in any given minute.

  19. Re:The loudest idiot in the crowd on Pro-Linux Mail Trojan Running Around · · Score: 3

    Thank you for this. I'd add that Linux being accepted by the mainstream is going to have a lot more to do with usability, affordability, and things that people care about, than any perceptions of the Linux community (if there is such a thing) as a whole.

    Also, obviously any serious Linux user/advocate isn't going to screw around writing viruses which work in Windows-- who would want to (I mean, isn't that one of the reasons we're using Linux, so we don't have to work in Windows)? Much more fun to write some great hack and gain GPL fame.

  20. Re:First the Linux Watch, now this? on Linux Cell Phone/PDA · · Score: 2

    Actually, I think it'd be great if I could open a socket with my washer and dryer. Then perhaps I'd finally have temperature and cycle controls that meant something to me, and I could set a notification app to alert me when the drier is done so that if I'm too busy fragging I can set the dryer to run on fluff/air so that my cottons don't get all wrinkled sitting in the machine (thus allowing me to finish said round before folding clothes).

  21. Re:Nasty precedents. on Linux to Fragment? · · Score: 2

    The only incompatibility I've heard of is with compiled binaries. I don't see how this is the start of some evil trend. Unless you are using a whole bunch of proprietary precompiled binaries, any package that needs it can simply be recompiled using the newer libraries or compiler.

    In fact, I have a hunch that Red Hat took care of most of the dirty work in doing that when they put 7.0 together. If anything, they've made more work for themselves, since they now have to recompile any patched 3rd party software with each compiler/library combination.

  22. Re:the issue of privacy on IBM Appoints Chief Privacy Officer · · Score: 2

    At the very least this helps them out when they get into hot water. The privacy officer is given the freedom to carp about the subject as much as necessary, but the end results are the responsibilities of IBM business managers. The privacy officer can unify and codify privacy policies for any/all subsidiaries and business lines to ensure the whole company is marginally consistent. Then, if there ever are questions from a legal standpoint there is both a person to be the lightning rod for resolution and for the board to point to and say, "hey, we care about privacy" and then hand the problem to that person.

  23. while ( is_flame( $this_msg ) ) {print $this_msg;} on The Origin Of The Shell · · Score: 2

    Same book available from fatbrain.

    Same book for less money at Barnes and Noble.

    I must say I'm a little surprised to see such an obvious shill for amazon.com on /. -- especially since their price of $29.95 bites, compared the BN price of $22.75. For $30 you can this book from any number of other online book retailers.

  24. Re:Scanning from Private IP??? on Collecting Logs from Firewalls to Detect Crackers · · Score: 2

    I definitely agree that every firewall should include directions to drop packets that appear to be from "outside" that have addresses in the 10.x.x.x range, as well as the other ranges. That's a big part of what these addresses are for, assisting in clearly demarcating between internal addresses and external addresses. And the RFC, if my recollection is correct, suggests that internet routers drop such packets. So while they shouldn't be getting through, they might due to someone else being negligent. If these do show up in your incoming traffic, it sounds like something to take to people upstream-- since they aren't supposed to be forwarding that stuff, since it's either there by accident, or is a deliberate spoof. But in the case of this particular DB, I think it has more to do with the source of the seed data.

  25. Re:Is this a good idea or a security hole? on Collecting Logs from Firewalls to Detect Crackers · · Score: 2

    Yeah, I have the same sense that giving out this information somehow creates a security risk as well, especially if it involves me sending logs of anything automatically... but I think this kind of thinking is mostly a desire for security through obscurity, i.e. the less "they" know, the less they will be able to crack my system. The best check would be to examine the output by hand for a while before sending it in and making sure that it seems like valid and useful information. I'm more concerned that if they accept anonymous or lightly IDed reporting that they will be spoofed or spammed in short order, which makes the information suspect.