Nothing specifically wrong with that picture (or with transvestites, drunk or sober) except that the kid is family to the President of the friggin' United States! Some would argue that that requires a higher standard of behaviour from the kid, because of either political or national security risks. If your uncle is President you should be bright enough to understand that your behaviour can do him damage, or someone older and wiser should have drummed that understanding into your head.
In the real world actions have consquences, and for ol' Neil those consequences could be pretty far reaching.
Moderate your drinking. Moderate your drug use. Be selective in the company you keep. If you can't keep your pants on after two beers then maybe you should stay home.
Potential employers want to know that you can exercize good judgement.
Am I really unusual in understanding that there are some things that one does not broadcast to the World? Am I alone is understanding that you don't post pictures of yourself drunk with transvestites on Facebook? Am I alone in understanding that you don't film youself in illegal acts and then stick it on YouTube?
Honestly, I don't care what someone does in their private life, but if they don't understand the line between private and public I probably don't want them working for me. Really people, is it that hard to use a pseudonym and a hotmail address?
Ok, I actually read TFA, and what's not mentioned is whether or not these actions are even illegal in Russia. Just because something is against the law in the U.S. does mean it's illegal everywhere in the world.
I'm also in Canada. Instead of offering the age old complaint that musicians need to get paid (with which I don't argue) you need to tell us all how to make sure that that happens in a technologically changing environment. Wishing won't make it so, neither will bullying, so what does the music industry (and/or performers) need to do?
As is the case with spam, the technology will always stay one step
ahead of the government. For instance, many of the big ISPs have been
throttling or otherwise crippling traffic from Bittorrent clients, even
though many quite legitimate and legal downloads are well suited to
using that technology. The solution turned out to be relatively
simple. Most Bittorrent clients now offer the option of encrypting
traffic so that it can't be identified as Bittorrent, and speeds pop
right back up.
Beyond that there is a generation of music lovers who have grown up
with file trading and peer to peer, and who either see nothing wrong
with up and downloading songs, or who at least see it as just one of
the ways that they may acquire music. Just as my friends and I traded
mix tapes, these kids trade songs and albums on-line.
Even I have finally started ripping my CD collection to MP3. Sometime
this month I realized that I had more music in digital format (much
from emusic.com) than on disc, and I was listening to five albums on
the computer or MP3 player for every one that I heard off of CD.
The discussion is not about how or if you can stop file sharing - you
can't. It's about how working musicians adapt to that changing
technology and make a living from their music.
The vast majority of of people walk in to Staples or Best Buy and buy a computer. That computer includes Vista. They use it.
They don't "upgrade" to Vista, they don't decide to buy a Mac, they sure don't try out Ubuntu, they use Vista because that's what came on their new laptop.
Microsoft doesn't need exponential sales of Vista, they don't need the whole world to change overnight. All that they need is to wait as millions of people eventually upgrade their systems. As long as Dell or Best Buy will sell them a laptop for $599 (compared to Apple, whose offerings start at about $1000) that's what people will buy, and Microsoft can watch the adoption continue apace. Widespread use of Vista is pretty much inevitable.
My PC is still running Windows 2000. Its fine, mostly, except for some apps that actually insist on XP. Still, I have conceded that at some point I will upgrade and have "acquired" a copy of XP from one of the usual sources. I don't need it today, but acknowledge that one day soon I'll take a day or two off and upgrade.
In fact my first experience with Vista was in the last month, helping a girlfriend set up her new HP laptop. Based on the problems that we ran into I'd be wary of encouraging people to buy Vista yet, but I also accepted that if she was buying a system that's what she would get so I was prepared for a steep learning curve. If anything Vista reminds me a lot of OS X - very pretty but very frustrating if you don't want to do exactly what Redmond or Cupertino want you to do.
I'm sure that Apple will sell quite few of these things, but to my mind the point of a laptop is to carry around less stuff, not more.
Sitting around at home with a reliable WIFI connection it may be fine, but if I were travelling I'd feel obliged to also drag along the external DVD, the external Ethernet dongle, an external USB hub (probably powered), and I suspect a few other things that I would later realize Apple has left out.
It's interesting that no-one seems to comment on the lack of a dial up modem. There are still many places - small rural motels come to mind - where you won't find WIFI, and will still need to dial up to download e-mail. Guess that an external modem is another thing to haul around.
I look at friends with several years of e-mail sitting on Yahoo, or Hotmail, or Gmail, and always think that they're rather foolish. Aside from the chance that their entire filing system could go poof at any time, or that the company holding it could go bankrupt, those interfaces just aren't intended for archiving and managing large volumes of e-mail.
And of course, if your Internet connection goes down you're cut off from everything.
Still, I can't believe that the ISP doesn't have a backup somewhere. Charter may be looking at a lawsuit in this.
What strange and pointless article. Macs have all sorts of well documented deficiencies in either hardware or design, and even the most loyal fanbois will usually acknowledge them.
I'll still argue that the biggest weaknesses with Macs is the "we have decided what you need, and that's exactly what you get" attitude. Regardless of how much one may love Apple design, it still remains that one size does not fit all, and a lot of Apple's decisions work against people who have every good reason to do things in another way.
To wit - my preference for a Delete key instead of dragging files to a trash icon is not a weakness on my part, it's a more than reasonable preference. Regardless of all the keyboard options and such, there are many times when I simply prefer to press Delete.
Of course Vista is no better, and wrestling it into submission can also be frustrating, but I have heard few Vista users trying to argue that its deficiencies are in fact strengths.
"essentially (Chinese anti-satellite tests) increase the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth by about 20 percent"
So what you're saying is that the 70-80% of orbiting space junk that is American or Russian doesn't pose a hazard?
I call bullshit and scaremongering
Re:Hyperlinks, O God hyperlinks
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have never been successful at entirely turning those "features" off. It always seemed to involve tracking down at least two obscure settings, and even then it seemed to reappear at random intervals. Admittedly I haven't yet tried to disable them in Office 2007.
Hyperlinks, O God hyperlinks
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The one thing that I ask of a word processor is that it begin with the assumption that I am writing something that will be printed on paper, not as a web page. Why oh why do programs like Word default to turning blue and underlining anything beginning with http or containing an @?
Would "... anti-game presidential candidates didn't fare so well in the Iowa caucuses..." actually inspire seemingly serious debate. Can't we at least judge our political leaders on something of true significance, like whether their laptop is PC or Mac?
Actually, now that I think of it, I don't know that I'd be comfortable knowing that the Leader of the Free world was a Mac person.
I am growing sick of these juvenile debates. Scobie and everyone else went to the Facebook site, filled in a registration form then clicked to accept the Terms and Conditions. What is left to debate? Nothing!
Don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Don't sign up!
Want to use Facebook but still don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Sign up with a one time Hotmail address and then don't fill in any of the personal data!
For God's sake people, this is not rocket science.
As far as Scobie - and no, I haven't read TFA - his gripe does not seem to be about his own personal data, aka the phone number mentioned above, it seems to be that Facebook wants to prevent him from collecting other user's data in an automated fashion. Surely it is Facebook's option to provide those people with at least that minimal amount of privacy?
Honestly, this thing feels like it crosses some kind of line. I'll bet that government will be first in line to adopt it (if they aren't already doing it) to "look for terrorists."
But Vista, yeah. I'd ignored it thus far til a girlfriend bought a new laptop over Christmas. Wow. If this is a finished product Microsoft really needs to rethink some things. Even when we manage to fix a problem - and every problem is described over and over in forums, but never seemingly with a reliable fix, just lots of "try this" suggestions - I find that I am never sure what did it, and whether it will stay fixed.
I still haven't figured out where they hid Windows Explorer, and what fool decided that Internet explorer should default to not having a toolbar?
On those rare occasions when I got a bad cough, bad enough that I actually sought treatment, I bought off the shelf commercial cough medicine - the ones using dextromethorphan. I'll swear that they did nothing, and just now see that there is actual research suggesting the same.
Finally during one particularly bad illness a pharmacist gave me cough medicine containing codiene. Wow - the first night's sleep in two weeks.
Too often these days the medicines that are given are chosen less for their efficacy than for their lack of any of those "bad" drugs. It's frustrating that anti-drug paranoia is influencing medical decisions.
As regards the cocaine vaccine - how long before some dimwitted politician decides to start vaccinating elementary school students?
I'm among those who would be happy if existing apps could get fixed, Firefox being the prime example. On my G4 Mac every new realease of FF brings more crashes, more memory leaks, and generally more sluggish performance. I finally abandoned it last month for Opera, which I am liking very much.
When most Open Source apps were small, simple and fast I could tolerate the inevitable bugs, and assume that they would be fixed up in the next release. Now it feels like everyone is working to add more and more features and "widgets," but no-one is worrying about overall stability and reliability.
What about all the people with old ovens, refrigerators, microwaves, etc that require incandescent bulbs?
I'm amused by your definition of "freedom", but in fact appliance bulbs, and a number of other incandescents, are exempted. The much ballyhooed ban on incandescents only affects general use bulbs, such as youd put in a standard light fixture. There are quite a number of exemptions. Appliance bulbs are one. Marine and mine lamps, rough service lamps, vibration resistant lamps, reflector base lamps and sign service lamps are among the common sense exemptions. If you have a candelabra type fixture, its exempt. The same with showcase lamps and something called a silver bowl lamp.
An additional step would be to ensure the data leaving on the laptop is only appropriate data for the case(s) the auditor is leaving for and not old cases lying around that they forgot to delete.
Exactly. What I was thinking of are those stories of X million customer records being lost when some idiot loses a laptop or DVD. What possible reason could there be for carrying that much data off-site? (Backups excepted obviously)
...more than half of its 94,000 employees have permission to take taxpayer information to locations outside the IRS offices.
It seems to me that most of the data breaches from large corporations and government come from just this - employees taking data files out of the office and losing them. Why of why don't employers simply insist that data stays on the premises? Surely keeping data in a secure physical location is the first step to safeguarding it.
And there is even a risk that the ones who opened it were subtly corrupted by viewing it.
Some things you can't unhear and you can't unsee.
So logically there must be tens of thousands of cops, psychologists, prosecutors, jury members and judges who have become child molestors as a result of viewing this dreck.
If you're going to claim a causal link, explain how it only affects people that you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing specifically wrong with that picture (or with transvestites, drunk or sober) except that the kid is family to the President of the friggin' United States! Some would argue that that requires a higher standard of behaviour from the kid, because of either political or national security risks. If your uncle is President you should be bright enough to understand that your behaviour can do him damage, or someone older and wiser should have drummed that understanding into your head.
In the real world actions have consquences, and for ol' Neil those consequences could be pretty far reaching.
Moderate your drinking. Moderate your drug use. Be selective in the company you keep. If you can't keep your pants on after two beers then maybe you should stay home.
Potential employers want to know that you can exercize good judgement.
Am I really unusual in understanding that there are some things that one does not broadcast to the World? Am I alone is understanding that you don't post pictures of yourself drunk with transvestites on Facebook? Am I alone in understanding that you don't film youself in illegal acts and then stick it on YouTube?
Honestly, I don't care what someone does in their private life, but if they don't understand the line between private and public I probably don't want them working for me. Really people, is it that hard to use a pseudonym and a hotmail address?
Damn! Preview THEN submit.....
Just because something is against the law in the U.S. doesn't mean it's illegal everywhere in the world.
Ok, I actually read TFA, and what's not mentioned is whether or not these actions are even illegal in Russia. Just because something is against the law in the U.S. does mean it's illegal everywhere in the world.
I'm also in Canada. Instead of offering the age old complaint that musicians need to get paid (with which I don't argue) you need to tell us all how to make sure that that happens in a technologically changing environment. Wishing won't make it so, neither will bullying, so what does the music industry (and/or performers) need to do?
As is the case with spam, the technology will always stay one step ahead of the government. For instance, many of the big ISPs have been throttling or otherwise crippling traffic from Bittorrent clients, even though many quite legitimate and legal downloads are well suited to using that technology. The solution turned out to be relatively simple. Most Bittorrent clients now offer the option of encrypting traffic so that it can't be identified as Bittorrent, and speeds pop right back up.
Beyond that there is a generation of music lovers who have grown up with file trading and peer to peer, and who either see nothing wrong with up and downloading songs, or who at least see it as just one of the ways that they may acquire music. Just as my friends and I traded mix tapes, these kids trade songs and albums on-line.
Even I have finally started ripping my CD collection to MP3. Sometime this month I realized that I had more music in digital format (much from emusic.com) than on disc, and I was listening to five albums on the computer or MP3 player for every one that I heard off of CD.
The discussion is not about how or if you can stop file sharing - you can't. It's about how working musicians adapt to that changing technology and make a living from their music.
The vast majority of of people walk in to Staples or Best Buy and buy a computer. That computer includes Vista. They use it.
They don't "upgrade" to Vista, they don't decide to buy a Mac, they sure don't try out Ubuntu, they use Vista because that's what came on their new laptop.
Microsoft doesn't need exponential sales of Vista, they don't need the whole world to change overnight. All that they need is to wait as millions of people eventually upgrade their systems. As long as Dell or Best Buy will sell them a laptop for $599 (compared to Apple, whose offerings start at about $1000) that's what people will buy, and Microsoft can watch the adoption continue apace. Widespread use of Vista is pretty much inevitable.
My PC is still running Windows 2000. Its fine, mostly, except for some apps that actually insist on XP. Still, I have conceded that at some point I will upgrade and have "acquired" a copy of XP from one of the usual sources. I don't need it today, but acknowledge that one day soon I'll take a day or two off and upgrade.
In fact my first experience with Vista was in the last month, helping a girlfriend set up her new HP laptop. Based on the problems that we ran into I'd be wary of encouraging people to buy Vista yet, but I also accepted that if she was buying a system that's what she would get so I was prepared for a steep learning curve. If anything Vista reminds me a lot of OS X - very pretty but very frustrating if you don't want to do exactly what Redmond or Cupertino want you to do.
I'm sure that Apple will sell quite few of these things, but to my mind the point of a laptop is to carry around less stuff, not more.
Sitting around at home with a reliable WIFI connection it may be fine, but if I were travelling I'd feel obliged to also drag along the external DVD, the external Ethernet dongle, an external USB hub (probably powered), and I suspect a few other things that I would later realize Apple has left out.
It's interesting that no-one seems to comment on the lack of a dial up modem. There are still many places - small rural motels come to mind - where you won't find WIFI, and will still need to dial up to download e-mail. Guess that an external modem is another thing to haul around.
I look at friends with several years of e-mail sitting on Yahoo, or Hotmail, or Gmail, and always think that they're rather foolish. Aside from the chance that their entire filing system could go poof at any time, or that the company holding it could go bankrupt, those interfaces just aren't intended for archiving and managing large volumes of e-mail.
And of course, if your Internet connection goes down you're cut off from everything.
Still, I can't believe that the ISP doesn't have a backup somewhere. Charter may be looking at a lawsuit in this.
What strange and pointless article. Macs have all sorts of well documented deficiencies in either hardware or design, and even the most loyal fanbois will usually acknowledge them.
I'll still argue that the biggest weaknesses with Macs is the "we have decided what you need, and that's exactly what you get" attitude. Regardless of how much one may love Apple design, it still remains that one size does not fit all, and a lot of Apple's decisions work against people who have every good reason to do things in another way.
To wit - my preference for a Delete key instead of dragging files to a trash icon is not a weakness on my part, it's a more than reasonable preference. Regardless of all the keyboard options and such, there are many times when I simply prefer to press Delete.
Of course Vista is no better, and wrestling it into submission can also be frustrating, but I have heard few Vista users trying to argue that its deficiencies are in fact strengths.
REboots should only be used when you need to update the system.
I'm still trying to figure out why I need to reboot after every update to iTunes - which seems to happen at least weekly.
Honestly, some of us are really tired of the endless coverage of the US election primaries. Especially the Republicans of which you speak...
"essentially (Chinese anti-satellite tests) increase the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth by about 20 percent"
So what you're saying is that the 70-80% of orbiting space junk that is American or Russian doesn't pose a hazard?
I call bullshit and scaremongering
I have never been successful at entirely turning those "features" off. It always seemed to involve tracking down at least two obscure settings, and even then it seemed to reappear at random intervals. Admittedly I haven't yet tried to disable them in Office 2007.
The one thing that I ask of a word processor is that it begin with the assumption that I am writing something that will be printed on paper, not as a web page. Why oh why do programs like Word default to turning blue and underlining anything beginning with http or containing an @?
Would "... anti-game presidential candidates didn't fare so well in the Iowa caucuses..." actually inspire seemingly serious debate. Can't we at least judge our political leaders on something of true significance, like whether their laptop is PC or Mac?
Actually, now that I think of it, I don't know that I'd be comfortable knowing that the Leader of the Free world was a Mac person.
I'm serious.
I am growing sick of these juvenile debates. Scobie and everyone else went to the Facebook site, filled in a registration form then clicked to accept the Terms and Conditions. What is left to debate? Nothing!
Don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Don't sign up!
Want to use Facebook but still don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Sign up with a one time Hotmail address and then don't fill in any of the personal data!
For God's sake people, this is not rocket science.
As far as Scobie - and no, I haven't read TFA - his gripe does not seem to be about his own personal data, aka the phone number mentioned above, it seems to be that Facebook wants to prevent him from collecting other user's data in an automated fashion. Surely it is Facebook's option to provide those people with at least that minimal amount of privacy?
Yes, and No, respectively......
Honestly, this thing feels like it crosses some kind of line. I'll bet that government will be first in line to adopt it (if they aren't already doing it) to "look for terrorists."
But Vista, yeah. I'd ignored it thus far til a girlfriend bought a new laptop over Christmas. Wow. If this is a finished product Microsoft really needs to rethink some things. Even when we manage to fix a problem - and every problem is described over and over in forums, but never seemingly with a reliable fix, just lots of "try this" suggestions - I find that I am never sure what did it, and whether it will stay fixed.
I still haven't figured out where they hid Windows Explorer, and what fool decided that Internet explorer should default to not having a toolbar?
On those rare occasions when I got a bad cough, bad enough that I actually sought treatment, I bought off the shelf commercial cough medicine - the ones using dextromethorphan. I'll swear that they did nothing, and just now see that there is actual research suggesting the same.
Finally during one particularly bad illness a pharmacist gave me cough medicine containing codiene. Wow - the first night's sleep in two weeks.
Too often these days the medicines that are given are chosen less for their efficacy than for their lack of any of those "bad" drugs. It's frustrating that anti-drug paranoia is influencing medical decisions.
As regards the cocaine vaccine - how long before some dimwitted politician decides to start vaccinating elementary school students?
I'm among those who would be happy if existing apps could get fixed, Firefox being the prime example. On my G4 Mac every new realease of FF brings more crashes, more memory leaks, and generally more sluggish performance. I finally abandoned it last month for Opera, which I am liking very much.
When most Open Source apps were small, simple and fast I could tolerate the inevitable bugs, and assume that they would be fixed up in the next release. Now it feels like everyone is working to add more and more features and "widgets," but no-one is worrying about overall stability and reliability.
What about all the people with old ovens, refrigerators, microwaves, etc that require incandescent bulbs?
I'm amused by your definition of "freedom", but in fact appliance bulbs, and a number of other incandescents, are exempted. The much ballyhooed ban on incandescents only affects general use bulbs, such as youd put in a standard light fixture. There are quite a number of exemptions. Appliance bulbs are one. Marine and mine lamps, rough service lamps, vibration resistant lamps, reflector base lamps and sign service lamps are among the common sense exemptions. If you have a candelabra type fixture, its exempt. The same with showcase lamps and something called a silver bowl lamp.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail497.html#Wednesday
An additional step would be to ensure the data leaving on the laptop is only appropriate data for the case(s) the auditor is leaving for and not old cases lying around that they forgot to delete.
Exactly. What I was thinking of are those stories of X million customer records being lost when some idiot loses a laptop or DVD. What possible reason could there be for carrying that much data off-site? (Backups excepted obviously)
...more than half of its 94,000 employees have permission to take taxpayer information to locations outside the IRS offices.
It seems to me that most of the data breaches from large corporations and government come from just this - employees taking data files out of the office and losing them. Why of why don't employers simply insist that data stays on the premises? Surely keeping data in a secure physical location is the first step to safeguarding it.
And there is even a risk that the ones who opened it were subtly corrupted by viewing it. Some things you can't unhear and you can't unsee.
So logically there must be tens of thousands of cops, psychologists, prosecutors, jury members and judges who have become child molestors as a result of viewing this dreck.
If you're going to claim a causal link, explain how it only affects people that you don't like.