You are correct in assuming that the FP Server Extensions are a different animal from the "FrontPage Web Components".
You are incorrect in stating that the server extensions are "required to serve frontpage HTML". FP will indeed work on a web server without the server extensions installed. Some extra server-side functionality provided by the extensions will be disabled, but everything else works just fine, including serving the pages.
This may likely be a dumb question, but, given the unique elevator configuration used in the WTC towers, could any passenger or freight elevators (or even escalators) still have been physically operational after the attacks? I'm sure they wouldn't be safe, but neither is the alternative. (Especially if you're in a wheelchair and forced to rely on panic-stricken people to carry you down 30 stories.)
Perhaps you're right, but I think it's a generational thing, too. Newer admins often lack any such ethical standards, not because they're evil or incompetent, it just never came up in their training or experience.
I think that _all_ sysadmins need to take a stand and speak up when something like this violates their professional ethics. If the company fires you just because you object to unjust policies then you really didn't want to work there anyway.
I think part of the reason that some administrators are so compliant lies in the fact that they themselves are seldom subject to the same level of monitoring. They can easily cover their own tracks, and often do so with a clear conscience because they know they know the rules don't make much sense. They escape scrutiny, so who cares what the silly rules say?
Unless, of course, the other sysadmins they work with feel the same way...
"Porn, mp3, etc. are all things that a given corporation has a right (and in the case of porn, a responsibility) to keep out of its network."
Why? Because of some rather ill-concieved laws that make employers responsible for things that they should not be responsible for. Or, better put, laws which might conceivably do so, under certain circumstances. Or maybe not. We're really not sure. But our lawyer says we need to be careful.
The "potential legal liability" canard can be used to justify almost anything, no matter how unfair or illogical, and it's very difficult to argue against. Raise an objection and you're likely to have people wondering aloud why you want the company to get sued. It's pretty much the modern equivalent of the high priest claiming that the wrath of the gods will surely befall the unbelievers.
I compare the Internet to a Lord of the Flies situation. Let them be animals and they will be animals. If Americans weren't so blindly protective of "Free Speech", we could regulate it like other information mediums and return to an Internet with CONTENT!
Let me make sure I understand your premise. Web advertising and spam are annoying, so it follows that the logicial remedy to this annoyance is to ask the government to place further restrictions on the fundemental human right of free communication.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's just stupid. Stop whining for other people to spare your delicate sensibilities and start building some of that corporate-free CONTENT you claim to value so much.
Evil corporations don't control my web sites or the sites I choose to visit. Corporations don't control my email. Corporations can talk all day and I won't hear them because I choose to ignore them. They can go hang themselves for all I care, and I'm not about to throw away my rights so that I can avoid pop-up ads and unsolicited email messages.
I didn't mind the little barrels and palm trees and cameras and flame bits so much. They're kind of handy to lend atmosphere, and I've seen some imaginative applications. Even boat hulls have a place, since they're watertight.
It's the huge pre-formed pieces that serve no other useful purpose that bother me. They've become increasingly common over the last few years. For example, I saw a small dinosaur set the other day that appeared to be a single dino-shaped chunk of yellow plastic with two studs on top for you to attach the included minifig. Whee.
Why not have a bunch of smaller pieces and let kids build their own dinosaur? Or at very least a set of dino head and body pieces that could be shuffled around a bit.
They also have a giant dirigible set that's flawed in this same way. A big gray oval thing with a few standard pieces to tack on around the edges. Sad.
Simply and slowly, that depends. If you're a freelancer or consultant working from a home office, that broadband connection makes all the difference in the world.
I might agree with it, too, were it not for the fact that much of the R&D that makes these drugs possible is done with public money. Massive amounts of medical research (for AIDS, cancer, and lots of other medical conditions) are done at universities or other centers of learning, funded largely by grants from the government or other sources of income. The drug companies step in (or are called in) when it looks like they have something marketable or patentable.
So the question is not whether medical research will continue if drug patents are loosened. The question is whether a drug company will continue to make exclusive profits from research that they did not conduct and to which we all contributed. I don't see any reason why they should.
Of course Africa needs clean water, medical care, peace, etc. No one can argue about that. Unfortunately a network engineer or computer technician volunteering his services in Africa can't help much with any of those things, but he can help with an Internet connection.
It's not like providing Internet access is mutually exlusive with any of the long term goals you mention. To your list I'd also add "reliable and unfetttered communication". Africa is a big place with lots of natural and political barriers to communication, and until people can communicate effectively you're never going to have an efficient and self-sustaining system. We've already got the greatest communications network in the history of the planet just waiting for them to log on.
And just on general principles, when you have people willing and able to help in their area of expertise it just doesn't make sense to tell them to go away until a social Utiopia springs forth at some indeterminate time in the future.
Nope. I appreciate that they go to a lot of hard work and all, but that doesn't give them the right to restrict how a public document is used.
It's not as though the codes would do anyone any good if they weren't enshrined into law, and it's not as though the professional organizations would stop writing them if I could go make a copy for free.
If _they_ want to sell me a copy, maybe with some value added in the form of annotations or a more convenient format or something, then that's fine. But claiming that they own the law itself is just ridiculous.
"Cops choose to do their job knowing that their lives are in danger every day. If this makes it easier for them to do their job, without worrying about some asshole posting a recording of their actions on the Internet without their permission, than I'm for it."
I was agreeing with you up until that paragraph. I don't know many police officers personally, but all the ones I have met have been courteous and professional. I have a public safety scanner with me almost all the time, and I've heard the police handle some pretty dangerous and weird situations and very seldom lose their cool.
I'm all for police officers who do their jobs well. But why would allowing "some asshole" to record a police officer during a traffic stop or other public interaction hurt the officer's job performance? (Incidentally, is it being pulled over that makes one an "asshole" in this situation, or is it making the recording? Both? Please clarify.)
Are you claiming that it would damage morale? Recording an officer _not_ doing something mean or abusive hardly seems like something to worry about. If some bad cops _are_ doing something that they should be ashamed of then I think it's to all our benefit that we find out about it and stop it right away. Don't you agree?
Most games I've tried work just fine on Windows 2000, especially if you install the compatibility updates from MS. The disclaimers generally are typical support CYA.
Even older titles will often run fine if you can work around brain-dead installers that refuse to start on version of Windows they don't recognize and which offer no user override.
Hmm. So Girl Scouts with cookies, door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah's Witnessess, Mormon missionaries, trick-or-treaters, and kids selling candy bars for high school bands are all apparently guilty of this same crime. They all claim to have innocent purposes, but no doubt they've just been casing our neighborhoods all this time.
Forgive my skepticism, but I somehow doubt that it's a simple as that.
How the heck can you prove that the person knocking on the door is doing so just to see if someone's home? Can I call on the phone and see if they answer? Ring a doorbell? Wave at a security camera? What's the difference?
To futher clarify (I hope) TiVo branded units are currently manufactured and/or sold by two companies, Sony and Philips. As far as I know, the units are very nearly identical, differing only slightly in firmware, the appearance of the case, and the remote control that comes with the system. I have a Sony unit.
"If you read part 1 of the NYT story, you find out that many more students were penalized by incorrect answer keys than by computer errors. Thus, if we are to trumpet open-source as the appropriate way to deal with risks of errors in the algorithm for normalizing percentiles for test difficulty, then do we also conclude that all answers must be revealed so that erroneous answer keys can be caught?"
Hmmm. It's not like the answers are unfathomable mysteries revealed only by divine inspiration. Presumably any given answer on these tests could be easily verified by someone who actually knows the topic being tested. Just like that father in the NYT story did. But look at all the nonsense that father had to go through to even find out what the heck his own kid did wrong.
With a machine graded test, why not prepare two or more seperate answer keys independently? Making an proper answer key can't be _that_ hard. Run the tests through once with each key, compare the bulk results, and any problems like this immediately become glaringly obvious. I think a test that determines a student's entire academic future deserves a little simple error checking.
The larger problem is that the testing companies have no independent oversight. They should be required to place their answer key and a copy of every question into the hands of a neutral party who can check these things if there's a dispute. (That's not necessarily some random government agency, as the gov't also has a pretty dismal track record as far as customer service and full discosure are concerned.) How about requiring the different major testing companies to hold and audit each other's tests? Competition in action!
There's nothing wrong with automated missions, as far as they go. But if our real goal is (as it should be IMHO) to establish a permanent human presence somwhere off Earth, then the robotic stuff is at best a first step and at worst a distraction.
I think part of NASA's problem is that they have become too darn skittish about accidents. No one wants to see people die needlessly because of stupid stuff like the Challenger accident. But when you do new things and go to new places, there will be accidents and people will die. Exploration and experimentation are inherently dangerous, be they extraterrestrial or otherwise. NASA needs to start subtly getting people used to that fact again, or another nation with a more realistic view of things (maybe China) will have the edge.
Yeah, if Alien Space Bats dropped in tomorrow and created a nationwide solar and wind infrastructure for us, then it would indeed be much more efficent and cheaper, too. But it doesn't seem like something we should plan around.
I sometimes wish that advocates of solar, wind, geothermal, alternate fuels etc. would stop shouting about how stupid everyone else for not agreeing with them. Yes, we need to investigate alternate power sources, but until they make economic sense (by becoming a heckuva lot more efficent, or more cost effective than current power sources) then they're not going to happen on a large scale, and wishful thinking alone isn't going to make it so.
It seems as though some people are willing to grudgingly accept that the world of the 19th century did have color, but still insist that it couldn't possibly have had nice _bright_ colors.:-)
The site explains that there was some retouching to account for defects in the original image and deterioration of the original plates. Photographers have been doing that one way or another for as long as we've had cameras, so it's a little late to decide that it's "fake" now. Restoring and conserving old documents and photos is what the LOC is all about; I doubt that they would have knowingly gone off the deep end in presenting these pictures just to make them all pretty.
Also remember that these photos were originally created for projection, not for print. That whole process would have introduced anomalies of its own, especially since the light sources and filters used would probably not be "pure" in color. It may well be that the images on the web site are actually truer to life than it was possible to attain when the images were originally shown.
Ah, I see. So only by restricting freedom can freedom be made to flourish. What a remarkable insight.
As we all know, enduring a hateful word, or even co-existing in the same room as someone who's thinking offensive thoughts, is much more dangerous and hurtful than being killed in cold blood, so those laws are completely justified.
And, of course, the people who happen to be in power are clearly the ones best qualified to decide what sorts of speech are OK, and which are just too dangerous or offensive for the masses.
And if you happen to disagree with their decisions, well, clearly you're up to no good. It makes everything so much simpler. I wonder why anyone would think otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct in assuming that the FP Server Extensions are a different animal from the "FrontPage Web Components".
You are incorrect in stating that the server extensions are "required to serve frontpage HTML". FP will indeed work on a web server without the server extensions installed. Some extra server-side functionality provided by the extensions will be disabled, but everything else works just fine, including serving the pages.
This may likely be a dumb question, but, given the unique elevator configuration used in the WTC towers, could any passenger or freight elevators (or even escalators) still have been physically operational after the attacks? I'm sure they wouldn't be safe, but neither is the alternative. (Especially if you're in a wheelchair and forced to rely on panic-stricken people to carry you down 30 stories.)
Perhaps you're right, but I think it's a generational thing, too. Newer admins often lack any such ethical standards, not because they're evil or incompetent, it just never came up in their training or experience.
I think that _all_ sysadmins need to take a stand and speak up when something like this violates their professional ethics. If the company fires you just because you object to unjust policies then you really didn't want to work there anyway.
I think part of the reason that some administrators are so compliant lies in the fact that they themselves are seldom subject to the same level of monitoring. They can easily cover their own tracks, and often do so with a clear conscience because they know they know the rules don't make much sense. They escape scrutiny, so who cares what the silly rules say?
Unless, of course, the other sysadmins they work with feel the same way...
"Porn, mp3, etc. are all things that a given corporation has a right (and in the case of porn, a responsibility) to keep out of its network."
Why? Because of some rather ill-concieved laws that make employers responsible for things that they should not be responsible for. Or, better put, laws which might conceivably do so, under certain circumstances. Or maybe not. We're really not sure. But our lawyer says we need to be careful.
The "potential legal liability" canard can be used to justify almost anything, no matter how unfair or illogical, and it's very difficult to argue against. Raise an objection and you're likely to have people wondering aloud why you want the company to get sued. It's pretty much the modern equivalent of the high priest claiming that the wrath of the gods will surely befall the unbelievers.
Well put, and largely accurate.
Let me make sure I understand your premise. Web advertising and spam are annoying, so it follows that the logicial remedy to this annoyance is to ask the government to place further restrictions on the fundemental human right of free communication.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's just stupid. Stop whining for other people to spare your delicate sensibilities and start building some of that corporate-free CONTENT you claim to value so much.
Evil corporations don't control my web sites or the sites I choose to visit. Corporations don't control my email. Corporations can talk all day and I won't hear them because I choose to ignore them. They can go hang themselves for all I care, and I'm not about to throw away my rights so that I can avoid pop-up ads and unsolicited email messages.
So put the trees back. Or stick something else in there to serve the same purpose. They gonna fire you for that?
It's the huge pre-formed pieces that serve no other useful purpose that bother me. They've become increasingly common over the last few years. For example, I saw a small dinosaur set the other day that appeared to be a single dino-shaped chunk of yellow plastic with two studs on top for you to attach the included minifig. Whee.
Why not have a bunch of smaller pieces and let kids build their own dinosaur? Or at very least a set of dino head and body pieces that could be shuffled around a bit.
They also have a giant dirigible set that's flawed in this same way. A big gray oval thing with a few standard pieces to tack on around the edges. Sad.
-Bryan
Simply and slowly, that depends. If you're a freelancer or consultant working from a home office, that broadband connection makes all the difference in the world.
So the question is not whether medical research will continue if drug patents are loosened. The question is whether a drug company will continue to make exclusive profits from research that they did not conduct and to which we all contributed. I don't see any reason why they should.
And here's another cool article about Spacewar, also from the late lamented Creative Computing magazine:
http://www.enteract.com/~enf/lore/spacewar/spacewa r.html
It's not like providing Internet access is mutually exlusive with any of the long term goals you mention. To your list I'd also add "reliable and unfetttered communication". Africa is a big place with lots of natural and political barriers to communication, and until people can communicate effectively you're never going to have an efficient and self-sustaining system. We've already got the greatest communications network in the history of the planet just waiting for them to log on.
And just on general principles, when you have people willing and able to help in their area of expertise it just doesn't make sense to tell them to go away until a social Utiopia springs forth at some indeterminate time in the future.
Actually either is correct. British versus American usage.
It's not as though the codes would do anyone any good if they weren't enshrined into law, and it's not as though the professional organizations would stop writing them if I could go make a copy for free.
If _they_ want to sell me a copy, maybe with some value added in the form of annotations or a more convenient format or something, then that's fine. But claiming that they own the law itself is just ridiculous.
I was agreeing with you up until that paragraph. I don't know many police officers personally, but all the ones I have met have been courteous and professional. I have a public safety scanner with me almost all the time, and I've heard the police handle some pretty dangerous and weird situations and very seldom lose their cool.
I'm all for police officers who do their jobs well. But why would allowing "some asshole" to record a police officer during a traffic stop or other public interaction hurt the officer's job performance? (Incidentally, is it being pulled over that makes one an "asshole" in this situation, or is it making the recording? Both? Please clarify.)
Are you claiming that it would damage morale? Recording an officer _not_ doing something mean or abusive hardly seems like something to worry about. If some bad cops _are_ doing something that they should be ashamed of then I think it's to all our benefit that we find out about it and stop it right away. Don't you agree?
Wouldn't a "wreckless" driving ticket the kind they only give to safe drivers?
Even older titles will often run fine if you can work around brain-dead installers that refuse to start on version of Windows they don't recognize and which offer no user override.
Forgive my skepticism, but I somehow doubt that it's a simple as that.
How the heck can you prove that the person knocking on the door is doing so just to see if someone's home? Can I call on the phone and see if they answer? Ring a doorbell? Wave at a security camera? What's the difference?
-Bryan
To futher clarify (I hope) TiVo branded units are currently manufactured and/or sold by two companies, Sony and Philips. As far as I know, the units are very nearly identical, differing only slightly in firmware, the appearance of the case, and the remote control that comes with the system. I have a Sony unit.
Hmmm. It's not like the answers are unfathomable mysteries revealed only by divine inspiration. Presumably any given answer on these tests could be easily verified by someone who actually knows the topic being tested. Just like that father in the NYT story did. But look at all the nonsense that father had to go through to even find out what the heck his own kid did wrong.
With a machine graded test, why not prepare two or more seperate answer keys independently? Making an proper answer key can't be _that_ hard. Run the tests through once with each key, compare the bulk results, and any problems like this immediately become glaringly obvious. I think a test that determines a student's entire academic future deserves a little simple error checking.
The larger problem is that the testing companies have no independent oversight. They should be required to place their answer key and a copy of every question into the hands of a neutral party who can check these things if there's a dispute. (That's not necessarily some random government agency, as the gov't also has a pretty dismal track record as far as customer service and full discosure are concerned.) How about requiring the different major testing companies to hold and audit each other's tests? Competition in action!
-Bryan
I think part of NASA's problem is that they have become too darn skittish about accidents. No one wants to see people die needlessly because of stupid stuff like the Challenger accident. But when you do new things and go to new places, there will be accidents and people will die. Exploration and experimentation are inherently dangerous, be they extraterrestrial or otherwise. NASA needs to start subtly getting people used to that fact again, or another nation with a more realistic view of things (maybe China) will have the edge.
I sold my HP CD-R drive last year, so I suppose that in some ways I'm as much a reseller as the place I bought it from.
If it contained the Mystery Magnets of Doom am I now liable for patent infringement?
-Bryan
I sometimes wish that advocates of solar, wind, geothermal, alternate fuels etc. would stop shouting about how stupid everyone else for not agreeing with them. Yes, we need to investigate alternate power sources, but until they make economic sense (by becoming a heckuva lot more efficent, or more cost effective than current power sources) then they're not going to happen on a large scale, and wishful thinking alone isn't going to make it so.
-Bryan
The site explains that there was some retouching to account for defects in the original image and deterioration of the original plates. Photographers have been doing that one way or another for as long as we've had cameras, so it's a little late to decide that it's "fake" now. Restoring and conserving old documents and photos is what the LOC is all about; I doubt that they would have knowingly gone off the deep end in presenting these pictures just to make them all pretty.
Also remember that these photos were originally created for projection, not for print. That whole process would have introduced anomalies of its own, especially since the light sources and filters used would probably not be "pure" in color. It may well be that the images on the web site are actually truer to life than it was possible to attain when the images were originally shown.
-Bryan
As we all know, enduring a hateful word, or even co-existing in the same room as someone who's thinking offensive thoughts, is much more dangerous and hurtful than being killed in cold blood, so those laws are completely justified.
And, of course, the people who happen to be in power are clearly the ones best qualified to decide what sorts of speech are OK, and which are just too dangerous or offensive for the masses. And if you happen to disagree with their decisions, well, clearly you're up to no good. It makes everything so much simpler. I wonder why anyone would think otherwise?
-Bryan