look, fuckers, we fled england for a reason. we wanted freedom, and force morality is just another form of shackles regardless of the end. the means are simply not just.
Uh... Maybe you could say that some 20th century immigrants came here for freedom "from forces morality", but holy crap you need to go back to civics class if you think that's why settlers came here in and before the 18th century. Most of the original European settlers of the US were Puritan and Calvinist sects that specifically desired the "freedom" to force strict morality within their settlements! The Dutch and English weren't really down with their fire-and-brimstone cultishness and wouldn't let them practice or preach it in Europe, so they went and tried to be pure in their own little corner of the world. Meanwhile, they strictly enforced their moral codes and had little tolerance for dissent or emmigration within settlements.
The history (and future) of morality is much, much more complicated than you suppose, and you really oughtn't slough it off so flippantly.
People gripe when big, evil corporations develop proprietary code and then when these corporations open it up, they gripe that there must be a hidden agenda.
I think some folks just like to gripe.
Or else maybe there's more than one 'people' out there. But whatever, gripe away.
I imagine you already gave up on IE. But it's had what you've wanted for a long, long time.
Tools > Internet Options > Security
You are given three zones, each of which can have different security settings applied to them. For your blacklist, just add the domains you dislike to "Restricted Sites". Done.
Conversely, you could also set up a whitelist system and save yourself even more trouble. Just the "Internet" zone's settings to disable JavaScript, and add any domains you would like to whitelist to the "Trusted Sites" zone.
The only problem is that you are limited to the specified number of "zones", and therefore lose some granularity. i.e. You can't have one zone for "cookies:yes, javascript:no", and another for "cookies:no, javascript:no" unless you want to sacrifice the "Trusted Sites" zone.
Another option would be to get a VOIP phone (i.e. Vonage) for home, and have it simultaneously ring your cell phone when it's called. Then you can just have people dial the VOIP phone when they want to reach you, leaving you to decide which line to pick up.
Of course, this means you'd need to get a new line with a recurring fee if you don't already have a VOIP line, which will cost you $20+ per month instead of whatever fixed rate the cell-socket costs. But its worth considering.
Re:./ers aren't always the brightest bulbs
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 1
I didn't think we were supposed to talk about that.
./ers aren't always the brightest bulbs
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Several of the highest moderated comments are complaining about aspects of this project.
"$100 is more than a years salary for many third-worlders!" "Selling to the governments only? But developing governments are especially corrupt!" "Hmm... I'd like on of these for my car."
Okay. Well, here's the thing folks. This project isn't meant to be a personal computer to be installed in the hut of some starving family. This computer is something that developing governments can choose to buy cheaply and install in public locations or sell to third-party providers. Primary schools, libraries, vocational training centers--those kinds of things. Currently, many of these places need a completely out-of-reach IT budget of thousands of dollars (or else a patchwork of random donated PCs) to get set up at all. This project is a means to reduce that problem. It'll make it more likely that some 15 year old in rural Africa will at least have had access to a computer a couple times.
He means that EA doesn't want to piss off the great senior talent at Ubisoft. The game industry as a whole is talent-centric, just like the movie industry. There are lots of peons on the bottom that get abused like crazy, but there are also a number of key talents in production, concept, art design, and maybe even programming that determine whether a company has any value.
In response to a hostile takeover, it's likely that many of these people would leave. Then the taken over corporation is just a worthless and empty shell and all the money spent buying into it did nothing but destroy a brand and earn the runaway talent a bunch of news for their next competing project.
He's obliquely referring to Armstrong Williams who owned the last week of non-tsunami news. The Department of Education gave him about $240,000 of taxpayer money to promote the No Child Left Behind program. Neither he nor the department disclosed this payoff while he received frequent airtime as an independent commentator and television host. Since we generally pretend that independent means "not paid gross sums of government money to promote government policy" there was a big stir when this news broke.
It's not a conspiracy, and very few on either side of the aisle have stepped up to defend him. His story is what has prompted current coverage of payoffs and disclosures.
OPTION 1:
Take picture of street corner with camera phone. Connect cameraphone to Internet connection. Upload to wherami.cooldatabases.com. Wait 30 seconds for processing. Get location.
OPTION 2:
Pull out $400 GPS with map software.
OPTION 3:
Read street signs. Check index of road atlas.
This column is just an superficial attempt by the WSJ to combat the "news is junk" meme that's been building over the last few years. They're trying to make it look like: "hell, we've got people who write fricking columns about statistical manipulation!" so that you don't think the rest of their paper prints it.
But odds are that in todays super-competitive least-necessary-change news market the WSJ has done nothing substantial to improve the accuracy of their paper and instead just inserted a column to improve the image.
a) Big company with a trained staff and warehouse full of warranty/replacement parts. b) The guy who put it together over two weeks while reading a HOWTO. c) Nobody, and your business misses a week of calls while guy from (b) tries to figure out what happened.
Consider: you download a suspicious binary--a game, perhaps--with Firfox. Being a good *nix user, you run it as a user that has limited access rights to the system and your personal data. Sadly, you later learn that the binary contained this exploit, has escalated its priveleges to root level, infected a bunch of other files on your computer, and sets up a spam relay.
These kinds of exploits completely nullify the huge security benefits of multi-user systems, and leave you in the same vulnerable position as the windows user who always log in as Administrator.
No. Bounces never reach the spammer. Ever. Spammers always use fake sender addresses, so the bounces will go to an innocent bystander.
You're an idiot. Have you actually ever talked civilly with a spammer? The average spammer uses real, though automated, addresses and cares very much about bounces. They're running a business, and the key to efficiency for them is in keeping a clean list of live fishes. They often set up list management bots on the other ends of the email addresses such that they can drop or flag leads that are dead at a higher level than SMTP errors.
Sure, there are some spam operations that don't do this, but those ones probably won't even be wasting cycles tracking SMTP errors. They just blindly flood ads to every list they can get their hands on, using as much brute force and as many drone machines as they can muster.
"Leaving" shouldn't be the first option. But generally, if the ideas viable, and the originator isn't an irreplacable "key man" he can sell out the rest of his shares if things are going sour. It won't be the best consequence, and it may not even be necessary if the VC's are good, but it makes for a good exit strategy if they aren't. You end up getting out with a good CV for your next venture, and X-months of top-tier salary plus whatever you sell off the idea for. You can then fold that back into another project and get a better deal on it because you've got more experience and a bigger stake.
The problem is probably just a matter of competition and growth. Unless its just a local service product, any 'tech' idea that's prompting Ask Slashdot questions has a very limited window of success these days. If the Original Poster doesn't act on the idea soon, by either growing the whole company or at least securing a patent, Big Company X could indepedently develop the idea and make him irrevelevant before he knows what happens. And then there's no more money to fold back in.
You need to balance stability against aggressiveness. Too much of one and you'll be out-competed, too much of the other and you'll stumble, burn-out, or outgrow your market.
Most people can't easily give up control of they're pet projects.
Of course, you're right. I was just trying to point out to him/her that there's good reason to sometimes. Good ideas tend to cluster around certain people, and if they came up with one, they can probably come up with more. Especially if they give themselves the breathing room of a share in a profitable business that somebody else is running.
But you're completely right to say that a lot of people have a hard time doing that.
If you have the opportunity to close a venture deal for a few million dollars, take it. Do what you can with what control you have left, and walk off with your share of the money if you can't take the pressure anymore.
If you've made one good project, odds are you'll be able to make more. Don't be sentimental about the project and worry about control; just think about the other projects you'd be able to start-up with the money you earn from this. And if the VC does well with the project, they'll be there for your next and more ambitious idea too.
Further more, why do we have the electorate almost evenly split? It could be that both candidates and policies are so aligned that the population is simply guessing, which averages out to 50/50 with suble varioations depending on date, mood, the location of UFO's overhead etc.
I think more of it has to do with the momentum of "loyalty", which was abused post-9/11 when national loyalty was intentionally conflated with political/party loyalty. But otherwise your post is pretty well right.
While some idiots have 'lost faith' from a lack of understanding of the electoral process, others have reasons that are more sound.
The country is very divided. The results of the 2000 presidential election fell within the noise of the system. A few thousand votes statewide is what seperated those who received electoral votes from those that didn't in many states. As long American races continue to look that close, its important that we minimize the margin of error, so that we can be confident in the results.
This means streamlining the process and having (theoretically) neutral supervisors around to make sure that nothing untoward happens.
Re:Where is American Society going
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The comparison has nothing to do with a disparity between what "we" call poor and what "industrialized" nations call poor.
Using a single and comparable measure of poverty, the United States ranks behind every single European nation. The only traditionally industrialized nation with a higher poverty rate than the United States is Russia.
Now, do you think poverty--as a condition of living--impacts national productivity? Do you think someone who can't pay their current bills, let alone afford skills training, while working diligently 80 hours per week, and never seeing their children, impact the economy positively or negatively?
If you're proud of the national results of the American economy, that's great. I encourage you to be proud of it. The economic figures are wonderful, and for that very large majority that can afford the benefits, we may offer one of the best standards of living.
But just imagine how much better it would be if we could drop the poverty rate by 10% more Americans, so that they can concentrate on their jobs and be more productive?
Reducing poverty is about equality of opportunity. Poverty is something that often strikes people by chance and circumstance, not personal decision, but once you've fallen into it, it's incredibly difficult to pull yourself out. Poverty is not the same thing as not having enough money for all the things you want, or all the things other people have. Poverty is when you don't have sufficient access to the very minimal resources you and your family need to survive--food, housing, health care, child care.
Imagine being impoverished. The first thing you're probably going to imagine is living in some trailer with a car up on block, eating cheap fatty ground beef. But you'd be wrong. That's not poverty. That's just not doing as well as a lot of people.
If you really want to understand it, think about being a married 40-something, with a few kids, while the industry you were trained for evaporates and goes overseas. Your bills don't stop just because you got laid off, and you know that because this episode of outsourcing is industry-wide, you can't get another job in your field of skill/expertise.
In the interest of paying the bills, you get a couple part-time jobs doing unskilled work. Your partner, who used to be able to stay at home with the kids, does the same. You start paying out-of-pocket for day-care while you and your partner are each working 60 or more hours per week in dumb jobs that your far over-qualified for. You start paying out-of-pocket for health-care, because not a single one of the employers between you and your wife offers benefits to part-timers.
You and your partner think about taking a skills-training class, to prepare you for a new industry, but realize that there's just no way to fit it into your schedule let alone pay for it.
So in the course of a year, you've now gone from:
*being a successful, but not rich, skilled-worker living contendly in a single-income family, whose family was taken care of.
to:
*being someone who works 60 hours per week in embarrassing jobs; who never sees your partner, who also works 60 hours per week; who barely gets to see, let alone supervise your kids; who has neither the free time or needed capital to change direction;
At the same time your monthly bills went up, and you and your partner combined still can't seem to cover them all. So you constantly face decisions between day-care and leaving the kids home alone, getting medical treatment and waiting out some undiagnosed symptom, buying food and paying rent, losing the car and buying your kid a single birthday gift, moving your whole family in with your parents and maintaining your dignity.
That's poverty. That's the economic and psychological burden that
Re:Where is American Society going
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Big deal. People lose their jobs and think they can start a little business until they find another. But almost all entrepreneurial ventures fail.
The real statistic you want to consider is the poverty rate. The percentage of people who don't earn enough to make ends meet. The percentage of people who need to decide whether to eat or buy medical care. The percentage of people who need two work two 30hr/wk jobs with no benefits because low-wage employers refuse to hire one full-timer with expensive benefits when they can hire two part-timers for the same work.
The poverty rate is higher in the United States than in any other first-world nation. When you look at the child poverty rate, which measures the percentage of children who live in poverty, the difference between the United States and other first-world nations is even greater.
So obviously there's a problem in the American model somewhere. We can't just rest on our heels and pretend that current market regulations, taxes, and social programs are working according to plan. They aren't, and they haven't been for quite a long time.
We need someone with the vision to either try something innovative and new or someone who can learn from the nations that have had more success. While neither presidential candidate is spectacular in this regard, one certainly stands out in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
look, fuckers, we fled england for a reason. we wanted freedom, and force morality is just another form of shackles regardless of the end. the means are simply not just.
Uh... Maybe you could say that some 20th century immigrants came here for freedom "from forces morality", but holy crap you need to go back to civics class if you think that's why settlers came here in and before the 18th century. Most of the original European settlers of the US were Puritan and Calvinist sects that specifically desired the "freedom" to force strict morality within their settlements! The Dutch and English weren't really down with their fire-and-brimstone cultishness and wouldn't let them practice or preach it in Europe, so they went and tried to be pure in their own little corner of the world. Meanwhile, they strictly enforced their moral codes and had little tolerance for dissent or emmigration within settlements.
The history (and future) of morality is much, much more complicated than you suppose, and you really oughtn't slough it off so flippantly.
People gripe when big, evil corporations develop proprietary code and then when these corporations open it up, they gripe that there must be a hidden agenda.
I think some folks just like to gripe.
Or else maybe there's more than one 'people' out there. But whatever, gripe away.
I imagine you already gave up on IE. But it's had what you've wanted for a long, long time.
Tools > Internet Options > Security
You are given three zones, each of which can have different security settings applied to them. For your blacklist, just add the domains you dislike to "Restricted Sites". Done.
Conversely, you could also set up a whitelist system and save yourself even more trouble. Just the "Internet" zone's settings to disable JavaScript, and add any domains you would like to whitelist to the "Trusted Sites" zone.
The only problem is that you are limited to the specified number of "zones", and therefore lose some granularity. i.e. You can't have one zone for "cookies:yes, javascript:no", and another for "cookies:no, javascript:no" unless you want to sacrifice the "Trusted Sites" zone.
Good point. If she wrote a book about it, she must know a lot about what she's written here.
What's wierd is that it almost seemed like you were trying to be critical...
Another option would be to get a VOIP phone (i.e. Vonage) for home, and have it simultaneously ring your cell phone when it's called. Then you can just have people dial the VOIP phone when they want to reach you, leaving you to decide which line to pick up.
Of course, this means you'd need to get a new line with a recurring fee if you don't already have a VOIP line, which will cost you $20+ per month instead of whatever fixed rate the cell-socket costs. But its worth considering.
I didn't think we were supposed to talk about that.
Several of the highest moderated comments are complaining about aspects of this project.
"$100 is more than a years salary for many third-worlders!"
"Selling to the governments only? But developing governments are especially corrupt!"
"Hmm... I'd like on of these for my car."
Okay. Well, here's the thing folks. This project isn't meant to be a personal computer to be installed in the hut of some starving family. This computer is something that developing governments can choose to buy cheaply and install in public locations or sell to third-party providers. Primary schools, libraries, vocational training centers--those kinds of things. Currently, many of these places need a completely out-of-reach IT budget of thousands of dollars (or else a patchwork of random donated PCs) to get set up at all. This project is a means to reduce that problem. It'll make it more likely that some 15 year old in rural Africa will at least have had access to a computer a couple times.
So quit complaining and pay attention.
You mean with Windows Scripting Host? Okay...
Now, how do you bring down a network interface in Microsoft Windows with a single command?
You right click on the connection's system tray icon and click disable.
Smartass.
Haha. He's not trolling folks... Somebody's got to know that.
He means that EA doesn't want to piss off the great senior talent at Ubisoft. The game industry as a whole is talent-centric, just like the movie industry. There are lots of peons on the bottom that get abused like crazy, but there are also a number of key talents in production, concept, art design, and maybe even programming that determine whether a company has any value.
In response to a hostile takeover, it's likely that many of these people would leave. Then the taken over corporation is just a worthless and empty shell and all the money spent buying into it did nothing but destroy a brand and earn the runaway talent a bunch of news for their next competing project.
He's obliquely referring to Armstrong Williams who owned the last week of non-tsunami news. The Department of Education gave him about $240,000 of taxpayer money to promote the No Child Left Behind program. Neither he nor the department disclosed this payoff while he received frequent airtime as an independent commentator and television host. Since we generally pretend that independent means "not paid gross sums of government money to promote government policy" there was a big stir when this news broke.
It's not a conspiracy, and very few on either side of the aisle have stepped up to defend him. His story is what has prompted current coverage of payoffs and disclosures.
OPTION 1:
Take picture of street corner with camera phone. Connect cameraphone to Internet connection. Upload to wherami.cooldatabases.com. Wait 30 seconds for processing. Get location.
OPTION 2:
Pull out $400 GPS with map software.
OPTION 3:
Read street signs. Check index of road atlas.
Yeah. Option 1 sounds awesome...
This column is just an superficial attempt by the WSJ to combat the "news is junk" meme that's been building over the last few years. They're trying to make it look like: "hell, we've got people who write fricking columns about statistical manipulation!" so that you don't think the rest of their paper prints it.
But odds are that in todays super-competitive least-necessary-change news market the WSJ has done nothing substantial to improve the accuracy of their paper and instead just inserted a column to improve the image.
Who's going to have it fixed within 24 hours?
a) Big company with a trained staff and warehouse full of warranty/replacement parts.
b) The guy who put it together over two weeks while reading a HOWTO.
c) Nobody, and your business misses a week of calls while guy from (b) tries to figure out what happened.
This needn't involve physical access.
Consider: you download a suspicious binary--a game, perhaps--with Firfox. Being a good *nix user, you run it as a user that has limited access rights to the system and your personal data. Sadly, you later learn that the binary contained this exploit, has escalated its priveleges to root level, infected a bunch of other files on your computer, and sets up a spam relay.
These kinds of exploits completely nullify the huge security benefits of multi-user systems, and leave you in the same vulnerable position as the windows user who always log in as Administrator.
No. Bounces never reach the spammer. Ever. Spammers always use fake sender addresses, so the bounces will go to an innocent bystander.
You're an idiot. Have you actually ever talked civilly with a spammer? The average spammer uses real, though automated, addresses and cares very much about bounces. They're running a business, and the key to efficiency for them is in keeping a clean list of live fishes. They often set up list management bots on the other ends of the email addresses such that they can drop or flag leads that are dead at a higher level than SMTP errors.
Sure, there are some spam operations that don't do this, but those ones probably won't even be wasting cycles tracking SMTP errors. They just blindly flood ads to every list they can get their hands on, using as much brute force and as many drone machines as they can muster.
"Leaving" shouldn't be the first option. But generally, if the ideas viable, and the originator isn't an irreplacable "key man" he can sell out the rest of his shares if things are going sour. It won't be the best consequence, and it may not even be necessary if the VC's are good, but it makes for a good exit strategy if they aren't. You end up getting out with a good CV for your next venture, and X-months of top-tier salary plus whatever you sell off the idea for. You can then fold that back into another project and get a better deal on it because you've got more experience and a bigger stake.
The problem is probably just a matter of competition and growth. Unless its just a local service product, any 'tech' idea that's prompting Ask Slashdot questions has a very limited window of success these days. If the Original Poster doesn't act on the idea soon, by either growing the whole company or at least securing a patent, Big Company X could indepedently develop the idea and make him irrevelevant before he knows what happens. And then there's no more money to fold back in.
You need to balance stability against aggressiveness. Too much of one and you'll be out-competed, too much of the other and you'll stumble, burn-out, or outgrow your market.
Most people can't easily give up control of they're pet projects.
Of course, you're right. I was just trying to point out to him/her that there's good reason to sometimes. Good ideas tend to cluster around certain people, and if they came up with one, they can probably come up with more. Especially if they give themselves the breathing room of a share in a profitable business that somebody else is running.
But you're completely right to say that a lot of people have a hard time doing that.
If you have the opportunity to close a venture deal for a few million dollars, take it. Do what you can with what control you have left, and walk off with your share of the money if you can't take the pressure anymore.
If you've made one good project, odds are you'll be able to make more. Don't be sentimental about the project and worry about control; just think about the other projects you'd be able to start-up with the money you earn from this. And if the VC does well with the project, they'll be there for your next and more ambitious idea too.
Good luck.
Further more, why do we have the electorate almost evenly split? It could be that both candidates and policies are so aligned that the population is simply guessing, which averages out to 50/50 with suble varioations depending on date, mood, the location of UFO's overhead etc.
I think more of it has to do with the momentum of "loyalty", which was abused post-9/11 when national loyalty was intentionally conflated with political/party loyalty. But otherwise your post is pretty well right.
While some idiots have 'lost faith' from a lack of understanding of the electoral process, others have reasons that are more sound.
The country is very divided. The results of the 2000 presidential election fell within the noise of the system. A few thousand votes statewide is what seperated those who received electoral votes from those that didn't in many states. As long American races continue to look that close, its important that we minimize the margin of error, so that we can be confident in the results.
This means streamlining the process and having (theoretically) neutral supervisors around to make sure that nothing untoward happens.
The comparison has nothing to do with a disparity between what "we" call poor and what "industrialized" nations call poor.
Using a single and comparable measure of poverty, the United States ranks behind every single European nation. The only traditionally industrialized nation with a higher poverty rate than the United States is Russia.
Now, do you think poverty--as a condition of living--impacts national productivity? Do you think someone who can't pay their current bills, let alone afford skills training, while working diligently 80 hours per week, and never seeing their children, impact the economy positively or negatively?
If you're proud of the national results of the American economy, that's great. I encourage you to be proud of it. The economic figures are wonderful, and for that very large majority that can afford the benefits, we may offer one of the best standards of living.
But just imagine how much better it would be if we could drop the poverty rate by 10% more Americans, so that they can concentrate on their jobs and be more productive?
Reducing poverty is about equality of opportunity. Poverty is something that often strikes people by chance and circumstance, not personal decision, but once you've fallen into it, it's incredibly difficult to pull yourself out. Poverty is not the same thing as not having enough money for all the things you want, or all the things other people have. Poverty is when you don't have sufficient access to the very minimal resources you and your family need to survive--food, housing, health care, child care.
Imagine being impoverished. The first thing you're probably going to imagine is living in some trailer with a car up on block, eating cheap fatty ground beef. But you'd be wrong. That's not poverty. That's just not doing as well as a lot of people.
If you really want to understand it, think about being a married 40-something, with a few kids, while the industry you were trained for evaporates and goes overseas. Your bills don't stop just because you got laid off, and you know that because this episode of outsourcing is industry-wide, you can't get another job in your field of skill/expertise.
In the interest of paying the bills, you get a couple part-time jobs doing unskilled work. Your partner, who used to be able to stay at home with the kids, does the same. You start paying out-of-pocket for day-care while you and your partner are each working 60 or more hours per week in dumb jobs that your far over-qualified for. You start paying out-of-pocket for health-care, because not a single one of the employers between you and your wife offers benefits to part-timers.
You and your partner think about taking a skills-training class, to prepare you for a new industry, but realize that there's just no way to fit it into your schedule let alone pay for it.
So in the course of a year, you've now gone from:
*being a successful, but not rich, skilled-worker living contendly in a single-income family, whose family was taken care of.
to:
*being someone who works 60 hours per week in embarrassing jobs; who never sees your partner, who also works 60 hours per week; who barely gets to see, let alone supervise your kids; who has neither the free time or needed capital to change direction;
At the same time your monthly bills went up, and you and your partner combined still can't seem to cover them all. So you constantly face decisions between day-care and leaving the kids home alone, getting medical treatment and waiting out some undiagnosed symptom, buying food and paying rent, losing the car and buying your kid a single birthday gift, moving your whole family in with your parents and maintaining your dignity.
That's poverty. That's the economic and psychological burden that
Big deal. People lose their jobs and think they can start a little business until they find another. But almost all entrepreneurial ventures fail.
The real statistic you want to consider is the poverty rate. The percentage of people who don't earn enough to make ends meet. The percentage of people who need to decide whether to eat or buy medical care. The percentage of people who need two work two 30hr/wk jobs with no benefits because low-wage employers refuse to hire one full-timer with expensive benefits when they can hire two part-timers for the same work.
The poverty rate is higher in the United States than in any other first-world nation. When you look at the child poverty rate, which measures the percentage of children who live in poverty, the difference between the United States and other first-world nations is even greater.
So obviously there's a problem in the American model somewhere. We can't just rest on our heels and pretend that current market regulations, taxes, and social programs are working according to plan. They aren't, and they haven't been for quite a long time.
We need someone with the vision to either try something innovative and new or someone who can learn from the nations that have had more success. While neither presidential candidate is spectacular in this regard, one certainly stands out in comparison.