I wouldn't argue the point that there are pleanty of intellegent and talented soldiers in the Army (and presumably all branches of the armed forces). From my personal experience, there are quite a few geeky types. I didn't see them in basic training, but they sure came out of the woodwork in AIT, and they're all over in my unit.
I wasn't trying to put down the type of people in the military. I simply was suggesting that the environment the military fosters is counterintuitive to fostering the creative habits of several hackers.
Sure, you're going to need SF teams to go in and handle onsite hacking. (I honestly hadn't considered that, and you're absolutely right)
But I doubt any commander is going to allow one of his or her soldiers stay up all night chain smoking in front of a computer while drinking Code Red cola then crash out at dawn, missing PT and the regular duty day.
You may call them lazy slobs in Spock ears, but those lazy slobs are often some of the most talented people in figuring out how to muck things up electronically. If those lazy slobs can prove themselves to be trustworthy and serve the needs of the US, I'd rather have them handling all non field hacking then anyone like you, or me, who can tone their personality down enough to handle the discipline of the military.
I wouldn't want a soldier doing remote hacks any more then I'd want a soldier being an artist or a poet for their primary MOS. Again, I'm not saying the soldier couldn't do it, I'm simply saying that the structure and discipline of the military would probably end up curbing those talents rather then encouraging them.
I was thinking the same type of thing when I first read this. I belong to the military (reservist), and I highly doubt any of my friends who are talented at this sort of thing (hacking) would bode well in a military environment.
The military does a great job acting as the "muscle" arm of foreign policy. When it comes to destroying, moving, or intimidating people and things in the physical world, the military is who you want to call. If you want a precision surgical strike to destroy a data-center, the armed forces could do that just fine.
But I don't think any branch of the military could really create an effective unit of "electronic warriors". The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.
I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.
What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new, or at least as an extension of a civilian agency like the CIA.
Yes. I've dealt with filtering at the server level before. What perplexed me is how, while at a school I tried to visit one of my own webpages which had no photos and zero profanity or discussions of sex or violence, the server preempted the page with it's own page which read "This website was blocked for content". Though for fun, I found that it was very happy to allow "fatchicksinpartyhats.com".
I swear, I think the filtering software that district had just blocked random pages with no reason, and somewhere there's a vendor out there laughing hysterically, wearing a top-hat and a monicle, holding large sacks with dollar signs printed on the side.
To date, no filtering software can successfully filter out pornographic or obscene materials. We simply haven't developed the AI that can distinguish between benign (or even educational) content and unacceptable content.
When the government starts putting stock in these filtering packages, it opens them up to two types of problems.
1. Lawsuits from organizations that produce otherwise perfectly acceptable content that are mistakenly labeled as obscene and blocked by the filters. We haven't seen this happen en masse yet, but I suspect liable suits will eventually become quite common.
2. Lawsuits from individuals who are exposed to obscene content, and claim that the government was being remiss in its implied promise that the content would be safe "I only let my kids surf the web at the rest-stop because the state told me naughty websites wouldn't be allowed to get through. The government failed to do this, and now my kids have been exposed to naked women pooping on puppies".
I am not a lawyer, so I may be missing something, but I'm really surprised the above two things haven't been happening more often with libraries and schools using filtering.
Meanwhile, I'm just pissed off that when I'm away from home, so many of the websites I frequent are blocked. And not all of those websites are porno.
I've always been of the opinion that the Internet culture went downhill with the advent of the World Wide Web.
When internet connections were nothing more then terminal windows, and only the truly elite had slip or PPP.
mIRC wrecked IRC. The chat network changed from a gaggle of lonely geeks, usually from a university, to the monstrosity we have today.
But, you can't go back in time. I still use telnet, I still prefer a command line FTP client, and I still am chatting with ircII (to the same nerds I did back in '92).
I guess I now have two groups of people I don't like.
First, it was just the people who responded to spam, making it profitable to spamers.
Now I guess I really don't like people who have grown tolerent of it.
When I first got an Internet email address in 1992, it took me all of 2 unsolicted emails in my inbox before I started hating spam, and I still hate it.
The only good news out of this study is that people don't trust email. That's good. If you didn't ask for a company to send you an email, I mean, if you didn't explicitly ask them (sorry, clicking 'I agree' to an EULA that has a 'we will send you spam' statement buried deep inside does not mean you want to get it), the company that sends it to you is unethical and you shouldn't do business with it.
Period.
Spam pisses me off. It should piss other people off too.
I do the same thing. The alarm clock sits on a table at the other end of the bedroom.
To make it more devious, I have it set on the radio, to an AM station that plays one of those hard core right wing talk shows, at full blast. So even if I try to cover my head with a blanket, I still have incredibly loud talk which almost always pisses me off.
So I *have* to get out of bed, *have* to walk over to the other side of the room if I want to shut it off.
Since I've employed this scheme, I've never even touched the snooze button, because once your up, your up. And typically once your body has gone upright, the first thing in your mind is to expell your bladder, not going back to sleep.
Before I am called an idiot by someone else who is just looking for a good chance to bash the french because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside
I don't want to give off the wrong impression. I wasn't calling you an idiot because I thought it would help me feel better by bashing the French. Now I won't lie; bashing the French is fun. But I was calling you an idiot because you gross misunderstanding of what I said and your completely off the mark accusations. You could be American and the AFP could be a German organization. That still wouldn't change the fact that you're wrong.
I'm happy that you can look up the decimation of fair use. But once again, who the heck is talking about fair use? I haven't said one thing about this being fair use. I haven't even said what Google did in the case was right. It appears to be a clear case of IP theft on the part of Google. What I was suggesting that working out a fair agreement with Google would be a better management decision the dropping a lawsuit on them.
It doesn't matter if AFP's business model is in line with Google linking to them. In the grand scheme of things, it is typically better for an organization to get more exposure. If I was an independent news agency trying to decide on an international news service, I'd probably go with the one that was more well known. Before this article came out, I wasn't even aware of the AFP (but I was quite aware of AP and Reuters).
My criticism is only with AFPs management decision. From the understanding I got from the article, what Google did was wrong. That's not in contention.
What confounds me is how you bring up robots. That's sort of out of left field, isn't it? I never said anything that AFP should modify it's robots.txt files. Nor did I suggest that AFP is suing just for money. I'm sure they're doing it to prove the point that they don't want Google to steal their stuff by hurting them financially.
I just think there is a better, more sane way of dealing with it. Google could be a powerful ally for AFP, and ultimately could help them out. You can say AFP doesn't need or want Google until you're blue in the face. That doesn't change the fact that ultimately they would be better off if they worked with Google instead of trying to go after them.
It's almost as if you are reading all the posts on this thread, and picking out everything you don't agree with and attributing it to me. Before you reply to a post criticizing the author, try to make sure what you are in disagreement with is something the author actually said, not with what somebody else said.
In the meantime, I'm going to still make fun of the French (I never thought, said, or even implied that you were French). Making of the French is fun, it's easy, and it's usually warranted.
Typically I have a policy of not feeding the trolls, but I had to do a quick breakdown on this.
Did you even read TFA?
Yes, I have.
AFP is complaining because its photographs are having its copyright data removed.
The article in question (http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=1147351) refers to AFP being upset that Google is using their copyrighted works with out permission. I checked it again. From TFA: Agence France Presse had sued Google for displaying their photo's, stories, and news headlines on Google News without permission. I don't see anything in the article talking about copyright data being removed from photographs.
That is not fair use,
Who said it was? I wasn't suggesting that AFP should let Google use its material without compensation, I was suggesting that a better solution, other then a lawsuit, would be to work out a deal with Google so they could make a few bucks and keep the international exposure. I'm not sure you quite understand what "fair use" is, or how it doesn't apply to this situation at all, or moreover how nobody has even brought it up.
and if you actually thought about the issue before having some mindless knee-jerk reaction you might even notice.
I'm trying to notice. But so far the only mindless knee jerk reaction being shown without understanding things has come from you. Though I do have to wonder, are you really that stupid, or is this a joke?
Like I said, I generally don't feed the trolls, but sometimes a person can be so good at being misinformed, spewing forth the most insane things that are so totally wrong I have to break it down just to make sure I'm not in some sort of bizzaro world where up is down and cats chase dogs.
Considering the last laptop I bought was a Dell I got on special for $399, which does far more then I need it to, it's stil tough to justify spending an additional $600 (or even $400 to get the special deal you got) just for longer battery life.
The.net is neat, and the pocket versions of MS Office would be used. Having Firefox ported is an added bonus. But I'm thinking of applications like Premivera's Suretrack or MS Project.
Yes, I want my cake and I want to eat it too.
Realisticlly, a conventional laptop with a 300mhz celery CPU and 64megs of ram could do everything I need... If I could only get one with a reasonable battery life.
The $999 price tag is a little steep, but overall it looks as if it's been custom tailored to address the laundry list of features I put above.
The only question would be how it runs some of the third party apps I have to use for work. I know next to nothing about CE, or how it runs applications developed for other flavors of Windows.
A HDD would be nice, even a small one, but if I can plug in USB thumb drives, I think that would probably take care of my needs.
Heck, if it had a better price point, I'd look into pre-ordering one right now.
The eight hour battery life sounds impressive. But what I want to know is, why can't we get that kind of long lasting power out of boring old regular laptops? I don't need exotic features, but it seems that every time I go shopping for a working laptop power is at the bottom of the list, but there are tons of impressive power hogging features that are bundled with the product that I usually don't want or need.
When I'm on the road, typically the only thing I need a laptop for is MS office (writing documents, working with spreadsheets), and occasionally working with some other third party apps like Primavera's Suretrak (which, incidentally, I hate).
I can think of a number power hungry features that I don't want or need, that takes away my battery life:
High-power graphics: I don't play 3d games on the laptop. I have a desktop at home for playing games, and if I'm bored on the road, my phone has enough entertainment titles installed on it to placate me. I don't do professional quality graphic arts work on the laptop. In reality, a 800x600 screen with 16 bit color would be aptly handle my work. So a power hungry graphics accelerator isn't needed, or any advanced graphics features. Also, I often find myself in well lit areas, and it would be nice to be able to easily turn off the backlight on the LCD display to save on juice, but I've yet to see that implemented.
CPU hogging apps: Why is it every time I unpack a laptop, there seem to be dozens of background applications pre-installed? I don't need them, and I don't want them, and I always end up having to spend lots of time uninstalling them. I get this with desktops, too. Windows appears to love including all sorts of unnecessary bloat which gobbles up CPU cycles. If there was some way to get rid of all this crud, I could easily get by with slower (and less power hungry) CPU. I don't follow mobile technology closely, but if I remember the whole hub-bub surrounding Transmeta's Crusoe chip (other then Torvald's name being attached) was that it could husband the cpu's power requirements based on needs of the OS. Something like that would work great for me, since most of the time I'm just typing into a MS Word document which shouldn't require that much in terms of CPU cycles.
Sound: Does anyone really need stereo sound on a laptop? I hardly need sound to begin with, and I certainly don't need to be driving two speakers on my laptop. I'm somewhat of an audiophile, and I like good sound from my home stereo and portable music devices. But from my laptop computer it's more or less wasted. Granted, I can always (and usually do) mute the sound on my laptop to save energy, but it seems that a lot of power is being driven towards something that really only serves the purpose of giving warning bells and beeps. Sure, some people like to use their laptops as portable DVD players while on flights, but for me that's really not a necessity.
Peripherals: I've never used or needed the CD-Rom burner on my laptops. Lately when I need to quickly transfer data from one machine to another, I'll use a USB thumb drive (a technology which I've learned to love!) In fact, I've never used any removable storage drives on my computer while mobile. Yet when I turn the laptop on, I can hear the drives spinning up, sucking power away. On my old laptop I had a secondary battery I could put in the slot where the CD-Rom goes, but I still had to carry around the drive in my laptop bag. That's not to say that I'd never need a CD-Rom drive, but it would be nice if I could easily just turn it off (as opposed to yanking it out of the laptop).
Networking: Wifi is great. There are times when I can and do use wired or wireless networking when the laptop isn't plugged in. But I don't see why the integrated 802.11x device in my laptop needs to be on and taking up power while I'm in flight, or when I'm on the side of the road just trying to finish up a report. From what I understand, the wifi device is always running in the back
I can't imagine how any reasonable person would think this sort of law, as I understand it from reading the article, could possibly be effective.
for hot girl on moose action, go to http://www.girlsgoingnutsformoose.com. Citizens of Utah go to http://www.randomlychangingurlforgirlonmooseaction.com.
So porn opperators, still trying to meet Utah's citizen's insatiable demand for hot porno action, can keep changing URLs to get past the blocked senders list, and the only one who gets punished are the ISPs, who despite their best efforts cannot possibly keep up with the "unsafe" websites and maintain a list to block them.
There is only one surefire way to protect your kids from questionable material on the Internet: Keep the computer out of your kid's rooms and in a general area where you can keep tabs on them!!!.
It's bad enough when the state thinks it should set decency standards for raising children, but when the state makes a law that puts that responsibility on ISPs, when the ISPs can not possibly comply, is pure insanity.
I was away on vacation three days ago and didn't read slashdot. I'm sorry, this was all my fault. The kind folks at Slashdot knew that this would be the kind of story I'd be interested in, so they decided to post it again for my benefit. I'm deeply sorry.
I'm also sorry for Windows ME. That was my fault too.
And the DMCA, that was all me.
Oh, don't forget the war in Iraq. I pretty much caused that.
And when I told that guy 14 years ago that it would be a keen idea to advertise his product by sending emails to everyone, regardless of they were interested, that was probably a bad idea too. I know it was a really bad idea to convince porn website opperators to say they were free, when they really weren't.
In all seriousness, I'm glad to see a country going all digital. I was initially against digital in the theaters, until I saw a screening of Starwars Part One in Burbank back in '99.
A few of the colors weren't right, and I noticed a few glitches, but generally I was impressed with it, and thought to myself "You know, this is going to be good when all film goes this way".
Oddly enough, almost 6 years later we still don't have digital projectors in the vast majority of America's theaters, and we have to look to Ireland for adopting the more innovative technology.
IRELAND!!!??? Now, I'm half Irish, but I'm pretty sure my ancestors fled Ireland because it was a smelly filthy drunken impoverished third world cesspool. How do they manage to get digital theaters while us Americans are still stuck with brand new mega-plexes popping up every time it rains still using the old analog 35mm projection?
I should not that I'm writing this post completely under the influence of Irish beer, so you'll understand if I'm a little flippant and surly.
Re:An actual usefull use
on
RFID Music Player
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It wasn't meant to be funny, but it was partially inspired by Irish beer. I suppose if you really thought about it, it's an absurd idea. But contemplating unusually complex solutions using technology to solve pointless problems, solutions that if anything would probably be more of a hindrance then a help is a hallmark of the Slashdot community.
Now, if I had suggested that RFIDs should be incorporated into Lego bricks with a blue tooth interface for license rights, and that the end user could build a Star Wars inspired spaceship model out of those legos to store the digital rights to their entire media collection, (perhaps even a Beowulf cluster of RFID enabled Lego bricks which could compress and decompress ogg music files) that would be more in line with Slashdot, and that would be funny.
I know this is slightly off topic, but it occurred to me that RFID tags could actually be useful in terms of music.
The value of music (or video, or software, or any other intellectual property) isn't so much in the media it's stored on, but in owning the license to legally play it. As it stands, when somebody purchases music, be it on a CD or in mp3 format, maintaining the license to the work can be a pain.
CDs can break or be scratched to the point of being unplayable. Hard drives can be erased accidentally. Owners of the copy write do their best to prevent users to copy media because despite many users otherwise benign intent to transfer media to a different format or to archive owned media, there is no guarantee that they aren't copying the work for a more nefarious purpose.
Enter RFIDs. They're cheap, there portable and they can be owned. A person simply purchases the RFID for a work, and then that RFID is scanned any player in any format before the work can be played.
Taking your mp3 player filled with music you own on vacation? Simply wave it over your box of RFID tags, and viola! The player knows you are legally entitled to play the songs you copied onto it.
You could make as many perfect digital copies as you like of your CDs or even DVDs and it wouldn't matter. As long as the player is able to check the RFID tag for ownership, the media will play.
Granted there are some problems. As they are small, RFID tags would be easy to lose, and all sorts of issues come up when you consider online purchase of media where physical objects like RFIDs can't be used. But it's an idea, nonetheless.
I always thought it would be fun to take Bill Nye's brain and put it into a robot. Then take Mr. Wizard's brain and put it into another robot.
Then make them battle on the surface of some far off desert planet.
My guess is, Mr. Wizard would win, but Nye would have fresher looking moves. Nye's downfall would be in showboating it up for the crowd, while Mr. Wizard would methodically find Nye's weakness and exploit it with some obscure weapon which most of us didn't know Mr. Wizard even had.
As a prize, the Mr. Wizard robot would be able to take home Xuxa, that really odd creepy lady (who was also strangely hot) who had her own children's television program back in the day. Together they would mate, and produce an offspring which would be the future of educationally themed children's television programs for the next thousand years.
I'm not sure where I got this idea. I think it was foretold somewhere in the Book of Mormon. Or maybe it was that guy who was trying to get me to take a personality test outside the Church of Scientology on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles.
Either way, I'm sure it will happen, if we all wish hard enough.
Golly, what will they think of next, a case made out of LEGO bricks?
Shhh!!! You'll give them ideas!
First lego cases, then cases made from lego mindstorms, then a few pousers will produce cases made from "Better Blocks". Then in 5 years when Lincoln Logs go back in vouge with the slashdot geek community, cases made to look like log cabins. Eventually the more tech savvy slashdotters will figure out a way to produce a combination LOTR/Cowboy Bebop case, though I can't imagine what it would look like.
I think you missed the point, while at the same time proving it.
I never said anything about creationism. I simply suggested that we should keep an open mind for other theories. When somebody questions evolution, the knee jerk reaction is to become guarded and dismiss the other person as being some religious nut, which runs contrary to the objectivity science is supposed to have.
Evolution is probably right. I've yet to see anything out there that explains things better. But at the same time I'm not going to to go out there and demand that others accept this as truth because it makes the most sense scientificially, because hey, science has this uncanny ability to prove us wrong. I'd hate to see research or thought thrown out because people don't react well to challenges to their initial assumptions of fact.
When we start burning bibles, then we'll be as bad as they are.
No, when we start discrediting scientists because they may be on to something different then our core believes, we're as bad as they are.
Slashdot Mirror
The recording industry is going through the classic self-distructive behavior that would be typical of a drug addict rockstar on a downward spiral.
1. Alienate all of your friends and supporters. (Charge too much money, then label online downloaders theifs and terrorists, keep abusing them)
2. Blame everyone but yourself for your problems (sue college students and children)
3. Make last ditch effort to try to make things right, then blow your last chance (try to build a legal online downloading model, then screw it up)
4. Hit rock bottom, be discovered in a ditch on the side of the road.
Quite honestly, I hope #4 comes soon for the recording industry.
I wouldn't argue the point that there are pleanty of intellegent and talented soldiers in the Army (and presumably all branches of the armed forces). From my personal experience, there are quite a few geeky types. I didn't see them in basic training, but they sure came out of the woodwork in AIT, and they're all over in my unit.
I wasn't trying to put down the type of people in the military. I simply was suggesting that the environment the military fosters is counterintuitive to fostering the creative habits of several hackers.
Sure, you're going to need SF teams to go in and handle onsite hacking. (I honestly hadn't considered that, and you're absolutely right)
But I doubt any commander is going to allow one of his or her soldiers stay up all night chain smoking in front of a computer while drinking Code Red cola then crash out at dawn, missing PT and the regular duty day.
You may call them lazy slobs in Spock ears, but those lazy slobs are often some of the most talented people in figuring out how to muck things up electronically. If those lazy slobs can prove themselves to be trustworthy and serve the needs of the US, I'd rather have them handling all non field hacking then anyone like you, or me, who can tone their personality down enough to handle the discipline of the military.
I wouldn't want a soldier doing remote hacks any more then I'd want a soldier being an artist or a poet for their primary MOS. Again, I'm not saying the soldier couldn't do it, I'm simply saying that the structure and discipline of the military would probably end up curbing those talents rather then encouraging them.
I was thinking the same type of thing when I first read this. I belong to the military (reservist), and I highly doubt any of my friends who are talented at this sort of thing (hacking) would bode well in a military environment.
The military does a great job acting as the "muscle" arm of foreign policy. When it comes to destroying, moving, or intimidating people and things in the physical world, the military is who you want to call. If you want a precision surgical strike to destroy a data-center, the armed forces could do that just fine.
But I don't think any branch of the military could really create an effective unit of "electronic warriors". The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.
I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.
What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new, or at least as an extension of a civilian agency like the CIA.
Yes. I've dealt with filtering at the server level before. What perplexed me is how, while at a school I tried to visit one of my own webpages which had no photos and zero profanity or discussions of sex or violence, the server preempted the page with it's own page which read "This website was blocked for content". Though for fun, I found that it was very happy to allow "fatchicksinpartyhats.com".
I swear, I think the filtering software that district had just blocked random pages with no reason, and somewhere there's a vendor out there laughing hysterically, wearing a top-hat and a monicle, holding large sacks with dollar signs printed on the side.
To date, no filtering software can successfully filter out pornographic or obscene materials. We simply haven't developed the AI that can distinguish between benign (or even educational) content and unacceptable content.
When the government starts putting stock in these filtering packages, it opens them up to two types of problems.
1. Lawsuits from organizations that produce otherwise perfectly acceptable content that are mistakenly labeled as obscene and blocked by the filters. We haven't seen this happen en masse yet, but I suspect liable suits will eventually become quite common.
2. Lawsuits from individuals who are exposed to obscene content, and claim that the government was being remiss in its implied promise that the content would be safe "I only let my kids surf the web at the rest-stop because the state told me naughty websites wouldn't be allowed to get through. The government failed to do this, and now my kids have been exposed to naked women pooping on puppies".
I am not a lawyer, so I may be missing something, but I'm really surprised the above two things haven't been happening more often with libraries and schools using filtering.
Meanwhile, I'm just pissed off that when I'm away from home, so many of the websites I frequent are blocked. And not all of those websites are porno.
I've always been of the opinion that the Internet culture went downhill with the advent of the World Wide Web.
When internet connections were nothing more then terminal windows, and only the truly elite had slip or PPP.
mIRC wrecked IRC. The chat network changed from a gaggle of lonely geeks, usually from a university, to the monstrosity we have today.
But, you can't go back in time. I still use telnet, I still prefer a command line FTP client, and I still am chatting with ircII (to the same nerds I did back in '92).
I think I'm going to cry now.
Out of pure curiosity, what would be considered an interesting, creative, or amazing prank in your book?
I mean, other then detonating a nuclear device in Boston?
Perhaps you could start a rivalry with Stanislaus State? All you'd have to do is throw turkeys at them.
But perhaps it's stuff that matters.
Somehow.
I guess I now have two groups of people I don't like.
First, it was just the people who responded to spam, making it profitable to spamers.
Now I guess I really don't like people who have grown tolerent of it.
When I first got an Internet email address in 1992, it took me all of 2 unsolicted emails in my inbox before I started hating spam, and I still hate it.
The only good news out of this study is that people don't trust email. That's good. If you didn't ask for a company to send you an email, I mean, if you didn't explicitly ask them (sorry, clicking 'I agree' to an EULA that has a 'we will send you spam' statement buried deep inside does not mean you want to get it), the company that sends it to you is unethical and you shouldn't do business with it.
Period.
Spam pisses me off. It should piss other people off too.
I do the same thing. The alarm clock sits on a table at the other end of the bedroom.
To make it more devious, I have it set on the radio, to an AM station that plays one of those hard core right wing talk shows, at full blast. So even if I try to cover my head with a blanket, I still have incredibly loud talk which almost always pisses me off.
So I *have* to get out of bed, *have* to walk over to the other side of the room if I want to shut it off.
Since I've employed this scheme, I've never even touched the snooze button, because once your up, your up. And typically once your body has gone upright, the first thing in your mind is to expell your bladder, not going back to sleep.
Before I am called an idiot by someone else who is just looking for a good chance to bash the french because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside
I don't want to give off the wrong impression. I wasn't calling you an idiot because I thought it would help me feel better by bashing the French. Now I won't lie; bashing the French is fun. But I was calling you an idiot because you gross misunderstanding of what I said and your completely off the mark accusations. You could be American and the AFP could be a German organization. That still wouldn't change the fact that you're wrong.
I'm happy that you can look up the decimation of fair use. But once again, who the heck is talking about fair use? I haven't said one thing about this being fair use. I haven't even said what Google did in the case was right. It appears to be a clear case of IP theft on the part of Google. What I was suggesting that working out a fair agreement with Google would be a better management decision the dropping a lawsuit on them.
It doesn't matter if AFP's business model is in line with Google linking to them. In the grand scheme of things, it is typically better for an organization to get more exposure. If I was an independent news agency trying to decide on an international news service, I'd probably go with the one that was more well known. Before this article came out, I wasn't even aware of the AFP (but I was quite aware of AP and Reuters).
My criticism is only with AFPs management decision. From the understanding I got from the article, what Google did was wrong. That's not in contention.
What confounds me is how you bring up robots. That's sort of out of left field, isn't it? I never said anything that AFP should modify it's robots.txt files. Nor did I suggest that AFP is suing just for money. I'm sure they're doing it to prove the point that they don't want Google to steal their stuff by hurting them financially.
I just think there is a better, more sane way of dealing with it. Google could be a powerful ally for AFP, and ultimately could help them out. You can say AFP doesn't need or want Google until you're blue in the face. That doesn't change the fact that ultimately they would be better off if they worked with Google instead of trying to go after them.
It's almost as if you are reading all the posts on this thread, and picking out everything you don't agree with and attributing it to me. Before you reply to a post criticizing the author, try to make sure what you are in disagreement with is something the author actually said, not with what somebody else said.
In the meantime, I'm going to still make fun of the French (I never thought, said, or even implied that you were French). Making of the French is fun, it's easy, and it's usually warranted.
Typically I have a policy of not feeding the trolls, but I had to do a quick breakdown on this.
Did you even read TFA?
Yes, I have.
AFP is complaining because its photographs are having its copyright data removed.
The article in question (http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=1147351) refers to AFP being upset that Google is using their copyrighted works with out permission. I checked it again. From TFA: Agence France Presse had sued Google for displaying their photo's, stories, and news headlines on Google News without permission. I don't see anything in the article talking about copyright data being removed from photographs.
That is not fair use,
Who said it was? I wasn't suggesting that AFP should let Google use its material without compensation, I was suggesting that a better solution, other then a lawsuit, would be to work out a deal with Google so they could make a few bucks and keep the international exposure. I'm not sure you quite understand what "fair use" is, or how it doesn't apply to this situation at all, or moreover how nobody has even brought it up.
and if you actually thought about the issue before having some mindless knee-jerk reaction you might even notice.
I'm trying to notice. But so far the only mindless knee jerk reaction being shown without understanding things has come from you. Though I do have to wonder, are you really that stupid, or is this a joke?
Like I said, I generally don't feed the trolls, but sometimes a person can be so good at being misinformed, spewing forth the most insane things that are so totally wrong I have to break it down just to make sure I'm not in some sort of bizzaro world where up is down and cats chase dogs.
Hey, we're a news agency in France, and a global orginization is using our information to increase our exposure and reach hundreds of times over.
Option 1: Work out a deal with the global orginization, so we can keep this incredible exposure and hopefully make a few bucks out of too.
Option 2: Sue the global orginization so we can make a few bucks then go back to inernational obscurity.
Ahh, the French. Nous sommes stupides, mais les gens nous prennent toujours au sérieux.
Considering the last laptop I bought was a Dell I got on special for $399, which does far more then I need it to, it's stil tough to justify spending an additional $600 (or even $400 to get the special deal you got) just for longer battery life.
.net is neat, and the pocket versions of MS Office would be used. Having Firefox ported is an added bonus. But I'm thinking of applications like Premivera's Suretrack or MS Project.
The
Yes, I want my cake and I want to eat it too.
Realisticlly, a conventional laptop with a 300mhz celery CPU and 64megs of ram could do everything I need... If I could only get one with a reasonable battery life.
Actually, that looks just about perfect.
The $999 price tag is a little steep, but overall it looks as if it's been custom tailored to address the laundry list of features I put above.
The only question would be how it runs some of the third party apps I have to use for work. I know next to nothing about CE, or how it runs applications developed for other flavors of Windows.
A HDD would be nice, even a small one, but if I can plug in USB thumb drives, I think that would probably take care of my needs.
Heck, if it had a better price point, I'd look into pre-ordering one right now.
The eight hour battery life sounds impressive. But what I want to know is, why can't we get that kind of long lasting power out of boring old regular laptops? I don't need exotic features, but it seems that every time I go shopping for a working laptop power is at the bottom of the list, but there are tons of impressive power hogging features that are bundled with the product that I usually don't want or need.
When I'm on the road, typically the only thing I need a laptop for is MS office (writing documents, working with spreadsheets), and occasionally working with some other third party apps like Primavera's Suretrak (which, incidentally, I hate).
I can think of a number power hungry features that I don't want or need, that takes away my battery life:
High-power graphics: I don't play 3d games on the laptop. I have a desktop at home for playing games, and if I'm bored on the road, my phone has enough entertainment titles installed on it to placate me. I don't do professional quality graphic arts work on the laptop. In reality, a 800x600 screen with 16 bit color would be aptly handle my work. So a power hungry graphics accelerator isn't needed, or any advanced graphics features. Also, I often find myself in well lit areas, and it would be nice to be able to easily turn off the backlight on the LCD display to save on juice, but I've yet to see that implemented.
CPU hogging apps: Why is it every time I unpack a laptop, there seem to be dozens of background applications pre-installed? I don't need them, and I don't want them, and I always end up having to spend lots of time uninstalling them. I get this with desktops, too. Windows appears to love including all sorts of unnecessary bloat which gobbles up CPU cycles. If there was some way to get rid of all this crud, I could easily get by with slower (and less power hungry) CPU. I don't follow mobile technology closely, but if I remember the whole hub-bub surrounding Transmeta's Crusoe chip (other then Torvald's name being attached) was that it could husband the cpu's power requirements based on needs of the OS. Something like that would work great for me, since most of the time I'm just typing into a MS Word document which shouldn't require that much in terms of CPU cycles.
Sound: Does anyone really need stereo sound on a laptop? I hardly need sound to begin with, and I certainly don't need to be driving two speakers on my laptop. I'm somewhat of an audiophile, and I like good sound from my home stereo and portable music devices. But from my laptop computer it's more or less wasted. Granted, I can always (and usually do) mute the sound on my laptop to save energy, but it seems that a lot of power is being driven towards something that really only serves the purpose of giving warning bells and beeps. Sure, some people like to use their laptops as portable DVD players while on flights, but for me that's really not a necessity.
Peripherals: I've never used or needed the CD-Rom burner on my laptops. Lately when I need to quickly transfer data from one machine to another, I'll use a USB thumb drive (a technology which I've learned to love!) In fact, I've never used any removable storage drives on my computer while mobile. Yet when I turn the laptop on, I can hear the drives spinning up, sucking power away. On my old laptop I had a secondary battery I could put in the slot where the CD-Rom goes, but I still had to carry around the drive in my laptop bag. That's not to say that I'd never need a CD-Rom drive, but it would be nice if I could easily just turn it off (as opposed to yanking it out of the laptop).
Networking: Wifi is great. There are times when I can and do use wired or wireless networking when the laptop isn't plugged in. But I don't see why the integrated 802.11x device in my laptop needs to be on and taking up power while I'm in flight, or when I'm on the side of the road just trying to finish up a report. From what I understand, the wifi device is always running in the back
I can't imagine how any reasonable person would think this sort of law, as I understand it from reading the article, could possibly be effective.
n .com.
for hot girl on moose action, go to http://www.girlsgoingnutsformoose.com. Citizens of Utah go to http://www.randomlychangingurlforgirlonmooseactio
So porn opperators, still trying to meet Utah's citizen's insatiable demand for hot porno action, can keep changing URLs to get past the blocked senders list, and the only one who gets punished are the ISPs, who despite their best efforts cannot possibly keep up with the "unsafe" websites and maintain a list to block them.
There is only one surefire way to protect your kids from questionable material on the Internet: Keep the computer out of your kid's rooms and in a general area where you can keep tabs on them!!!.
It's bad enough when the state thinks it should set decency standards for raising children, but when the state makes a law that puts that responsibility on ISPs, when the ISPs can not possibly comply, is pure insanity.
I was away on vacation three days ago and didn't read slashdot. I'm sorry, this was all my fault. The kind folks at Slashdot knew that this would be the kind of story I'd be interested in, so they decided to post it again for my benefit. I'm deeply sorry.
I'm also sorry for Windows ME. That was my fault too.
And the DMCA, that was all me.
Oh, don't forget the war in Iraq. I pretty much caused that.
And when I told that guy 14 years ago that it would be a keen idea to advertise his product by sending emails to everyone, regardless of they were interested, that was probably a bad idea too. I know it was a really bad idea to convince porn website opperators to say they were free, when they really weren't.
In all seriousness, I'm glad to see a country going all digital. I was initially against digital in the theaters, until I saw a screening of Starwars Part One in Burbank back in '99.
A few of the colors weren't right, and I noticed a few glitches, but generally I was impressed with it, and thought to myself "You know, this is going to be good when all film goes this way".
Oddly enough, almost 6 years later we still don't have digital projectors in the vast majority of America's theaters, and we have to look to Ireland for adopting the more innovative technology.
IRELAND!!!??? Now, I'm half Irish, but I'm pretty sure my ancestors fled Ireland because it was a smelly filthy drunken impoverished third world cesspool. How do they manage to get digital theaters while us Americans are still stuck with brand new mega-plexes popping up every time it rains still using the old analog 35mm projection?
I should not that I'm writing this post completely under the influence of Irish beer, so you'll understand if I'm a little flippant and surly.
It wasn't meant to be funny, but it was partially inspired by Irish beer. I suppose if you really thought about it, it's an absurd idea. But contemplating unusually complex solutions using technology to solve pointless problems, solutions that if anything would probably be more of a hindrance then a help is a hallmark of the Slashdot community.
Now, if I had suggested that RFIDs should be incorporated into Lego bricks with a blue tooth interface for license rights, and that the end user could build a Star Wars inspired spaceship model out of those legos to store the digital rights to their entire media collection, (perhaps even a Beowulf cluster of RFID enabled Lego bricks which could compress and decompress ogg music files) that would be more in line with Slashdot, and that would be funny.
I know this is slightly off topic, but it occurred to me that RFID tags could actually be useful in terms of music.
The value of music (or video, or software, or any other intellectual property) isn't so much in the media it's stored on, but in owning the license to legally play it. As it stands, when somebody purchases music, be it on a CD or in mp3 format, maintaining the license to the work can be a pain.
CDs can break or be scratched to the point of being unplayable. Hard drives can be erased accidentally. Owners of the copy write do their best to prevent users to copy media because despite many users otherwise benign intent to transfer media to a different format or to archive owned media, there is no guarantee that they aren't copying the work for a more nefarious purpose.
Enter RFIDs. They're cheap, there portable and they can be owned. A person simply purchases the RFID for a work, and then that RFID is scanned any player in any format before the work can be played.
Taking your mp3 player filled with music you own on vacation? Simply wave it over your box of RFID tags, and viola! The player knows you are legally entitled to play the songs you copied onto it.
You could make as many perfect digital copies as you like of your CDs or even DVDs and it wouldn't matter. As long as the player is able to check the RFID tag for ownership, the media will play.
Granted there are some problems. As they are small, RFID tags would be easy to lose, and all sorts of issues come up when you consider online purchase of media where physical objects like RFIDs can't be used. But it's an idea, nonetheless.
I always thought it would be fun to take Bill Nye's brain and put it into a robot. Then take Mr. Wizard's brain and put it into another robot.
Then make them battle on the surface of some far off desert planet.
My guess is, Mr. Wizard would win, but Nye would have fresher looking moves. Nye's downfall would be in showboating it up for the crowd, while Mr. Wizard would methodically find Nye's weakness and exploit it with some obscure weapon which most of us didn't know Mr. Wizard even had.
As a prize, the Mr. Wizard robot would be able to take home Xuxa, that really odd creepy lady (who was also strangely hot) who had her own children's television program back in the day. Together they would mate, and produce an offspring which would be the future of educationally themed children's television programs for the next thousand years.
I'm not sure where I got this idea. I think it was foretold somewhere in the Book of Mormon. Or maybe it was that guy who was trying to get me to take a personality test outside the Church of Scientology on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles.
Either way, I'm sure it will happen, if we all wish hard enough.
"Which Australian paper did you say it was in?"
"A major one"
"Yeah, but which one?"
"A mass-circulation publication"
"Seriously, which one?"
"It has an article about open source!"
"I see".
Golly, what will they think of next, a case made out of LEGO bricks?
Shhh!!! You'll give them ideas!
First lego cases, then cases made from lego mindstorms, then a few pousers will produce cases made from "Better Blocks". Then in 5 years when Lincoln Logs go back in vouge with the slashdot geek community, cases made to look like log cabins. Eventually the more tech savvy slashdotters will figure out a way to produce a combination LOTR/Cowboy Bebop case, though I can't imagine what it would look like.
I think you missed the point, while at the same time proving it.
I never said anything about creationism. I simply suggested that we should keep an open mind for other theories. When somebody questions evolution, the knee jerk reaction is to become guarded and dismiss the other person as being some religious nut, which runs contrary to the objectivity science is supposed to have.
Evolution is probably right. I've yet to see anything out there that explains things better. But at the same time I'm not going to to go out there and demand that others accept this as truth because it makes the most sense scientificially, because hey, science has this uncanny ability to prove us wrong. I'd hate to see research or thought thrown out because people don't react well to challenges to their initial assumptions of fact.
When we start burning bibles, then we'll be as bad as they are.
No, when we start discrediting scientists because they may be on to something different then our core believes, we're as bad as they are.