Where does the misconception that Opera can't do "a lot of Ajax" come from?
Well, since you asked...
After making more than one call to an XMLHttpRequest object, the readyState sticks at 1 (aka the open as been run without sending the request). The page is sending requests based on keyboard input, but only when the readyState is 0 (uninitialized) or 4 (last request is done) and so it was hanging on my one opera user. In all of my code, the open is quickly followed by a send, so there's no reason to ever see the readyState stuck at 1.
To reproduce, try something like
new XMLHttpRequest
function sendrequest {
open(somepage)
onreadystatechange=anotherrequest
send(null)
}
function anotherrequest {
display current readystate and time
if readyState == 4 sendrequest
}
sendrequest
(this was properly indented but slashdot doesn't like the pre tag)
You raise a good point on property taxes. There is some fairness built into the system, because while renters don't pay the tax, they pay rent, which goes to a landlord, who pays the tax, so it's still there, just much more indirect. Personally, I'd like to see the end of tax credits and handouts to families with children, or even better, add a tax because of the added burden those families place on our communities. If you can't afford to have children, then please stop having me subsidize your sex habit, there are lots of people happy to adopt. If children grew up in families that cared about their child's development instead of working 3 jobs to make ends meet and being happy for the government subsidized childcare (elementary school) it would be a good start. I know it sounds heartless to those having a hard time making ends meet and even more so to the children they have, but if we keep a system that rewards those that do wrong and penalizes those that do good, eventually no one will care to do good.
Also, I really like the idea on longer school days, but we need to be sure to have proportionally less homework and adjust the schedule to when students perform their best. Starting the school day later and moving extra curricular activities into the middle of the day would help. A financial education in addition to more technology classes are needed which certainly weren't available when I was a kid. And lets leave the religious eduction for our private schools please. Vouchers so that kids have a choice in where they go to school would be nice too. I grew up in a world of busing and teaching to the lowest common denominator. Lets get the smart kids into the smart schools so that everyone have an equal opportunity to the best eduction they are capable of, regardless of race. A system where merit determines which school you can go to instead of your location will do a lot to turn out the best and brightest in our society.
[ Sorry for being completely off topic, but a few points seemed appropriate to be addressed ]
There are two things that will likely happen before the US goes completely bankrupt.
First, there will be some kind of massive plague or catastrophe to eliminate 10% or more of our population. There are simply too many people in the world causing problems with our food supply, environment, etc. Perhaps it will be a spin off of bird flu, but I suspect it will be something that no one ever considered. It's best if the impact hits the elderly hardest to reduce the strain on our medical and retirement systems.
Second, the US will crank up the printing presses. They are already considering what to do for blind people to be able to differentiate denominations, so printing a little extra will be no big deal. When push comes to shove, the choices are to raise taxes, cut spending, raise interest or other income generators, or print more money. Printing more money will have the smallest negative impact on the voters and will begin to turn around all the damage we have down with massive imports from China and other countries. If China refuses to increase the value of their currency, it's entirely possible we'll respond by devaluing ours to protect the US economy (negative side effects be damned).
But like I say, the second will have all kinds of negative side effects, which is why you will see even more of a run up in gold, real-estate, foreign investments, and other non-cash assets before the big day comes. As for the little guy, he will continue to be screwed. It's a side effect of the mega corporations that got rid of all the mom and pop shops. As they went away, so did the entrepreneurs, and as more people turned from being an employer to being an employee, income naturally redistributed. There's no easy fix for that, economies of scale won't unscale. The recovery from a bankrupt country isn't the masses getting their wealth back, it's foreign companies moving in to make a buck off of us, just look at what we do to most third world countries. But a good start would be to give our school kids a financial education instead of having them figure out how a credit card works from some guy on the sidewalk when they get to college.
Anyway, as an attempt to be on topic, I'd love to see a moon base. People need to stop thinking of their backyards and consider how we will exist when the planet tells us our time is up. The clock is ticking and it's definitely getting more angry at us these days.
That would be the fair thing to do, but the government doesn't always play fair. Taxes on stock options or a huge example of this, where in some cases (when you hit the AMT threshold) you are responsible for the "income" you received from the difference between the cost of the option and the value of the stock, even if you never cashed out of the stock. There are lots of sad stories of people broke because they owe taxes on stocks that crashed during the dot come on money that they never saw. The Libertarian in me wants to see a few changes made to our tax system, and eliminating taxes on any kind of virtual money is a big one.
Clearly, we don't want people calling up our phone or credit card companies, pretending to be us, and getting private information. That's bad.
And I believe it's illegal for the phone company to give those records out without some kind of warrant (but IANAL).
But, we also don't want to prevent law enforcement from pretending to be a drug dealer in order to bust drug dealers, or pretending to be a kiddie porn trader in order to bust kiddie porn producers. On a more germaine front, we probably don't want it to be illegal for you to register at the hotel as John Smith when your real name is Ed Johnson.
I haven't read the law, but if it prevented law enforcement from getting a warrant to impersonate a dealer for a bust, that would be bad. But we have rules that require warrants to search your home and to authorize wire taps, I don't see how this is so different. It's all about oversight and a balance of power.
It sounds like this is a case of a law with a very popular goal that was written in way, way, way too broad a manner, and caught up a lot of things that shouldn't have been included. This shouldn't be a concept that's so hard to understand for Slashdotters, who are quick to point out when laws proposed by groups we don't like have broad, nasty consequences.
If this is the case, then bravo to the MPAA for stopping it. But I don't know this law enough to make that conclusion.
Just because the MPAA was the most organized party pushing for the law to be changed doesn't mean that (necessarily) the law didn't need to be changed.
True. But I'd say the biggest problem with the laws being passed everywhere are all the special interest groups getting loopholes inserted for themselves. The result is a system so complex that individuals no longer know or understand the law and it's only a question as to how much your are liked or how connected you are that rules our land. It also results in a government that is no longer by the people and for the people, but rather for the well connected special interest groups.
If you need to stop something illegal, it shouldn't be necessary to lie and impersonate someone to prevent the activity. Why is it necessary to impersonate another to "think of the children" or to stop illegal downloads? If you have proof of a wrong doing, you take it to a judge, get a warrant, and put an end to it. If you don't have proof, then lets end all the witch hunts.
I'd recommend a high deductible plan if you're self employed. You should already have money saved up to weather the rough times, so just add some more to cover the deductible. The amount you save is significant. The baby will most certainly have you going to the doctor a lot. I've used eHealthInsurance myself, and my only complaint is that the fine print is hard to find or not available until after you purchase a policy. But the policies they offer are from the major carriers.
For the record, the place I got in trouble was picking the cheaper plan and then getting a physical. Burried back in the fine print was a clause that they don't cover anything preventative, but that wasn't obvious when I was ordering the plan or looking through the main section of the booklet. Had I clicked a link to the provider's comparison of all their plans, it would have jumped out like a sore thumb. Personally I think it borders on criminal when a company doesn't make it obvious where you risk owing a lot of money and what coverage is missing that many others would frequently include.
And a final note, always get the price an uninsured person will be responsible for up front for everything! This is what you'll be stuck paying when the insurance company says they aren't responsible, and you should be able to afford it. My family's neighbor (a doctor), myself, and many others agree, the medical system in the US is broken. Insurance is complicated, costs are going up, and lawsuits are giving insane sums of money for just about anything. My biggest peeve is that you aren't told how much you owe until a month after the procedure is done. Admittedly this is a service and things may fluctuate when you find a problem, but every doctor uses charge codes and their office knows their fee for that code, and the insurance companies know what they have agreed for those codes. But no one will tell you those numbers until after you've had the service. Congress would do a lot for people by requiring every insurance provider to publish how much they cover and what the patent is responsible for on a standard list of charge codes, and make it available before signing up for that coverage.
After graduating with much of what you mentioned above, I wish my list also had the following:
I'd start with C, add scripting early on to make everyone more efficient, and then add on an object oriented language after they have the fundamentals. This ensures OO is used when appropriate and the benefits are better understood.
Database design (I did have a DB course, but it was so theoretical, I really didn't have a clue how to get the database running so I could run any sql selects).
User Interface: beyond the command line, using GUI libraries, web pages with cgi, and making service/daemon applications manageable and monitored.
Multi-threaded and distributed programming.
Enterprise architecture: putting everything together into the big picture with data centers, networking, firewalls and proxies, servers, pc's, databases, sans, backup, monitoring, ticketing, etc.
Internships and jobs at the college should be strongly encouraged. I had some friends that managed the campus network. I took on a part time job managing a server for a small research group.
Anyone that wants to learn how to setup a firewall, build a web server, configure a database, and so on, should have a sandbox/lab environment available to play in.
I did take a software dev class, and like others have joked, it taught me to work with people that didn't want to do that much work. In reality, if you are expected to know everything, it's hard to specialize in only one part and ignore all the other programming work. And in the course of one semester, you can't specialize enough to have a real understanding of how group work is really supposed to work.
However, my biggest pet peeve is that most CS students are being taught to be a coder, and if you didn't notice, those are the jobs that have shifted overseas. We need a more rounded course structure that teaches how IT works with a company and doesn't leave students with a blank stare when they hear terms like load balancer, SNMP, SAN, logical volume, cluster, fault tolerant, VPN, VLAN, and disaster recovery.
From the part-of-your-job-to-explain-it-in-their-terms dept.
Lets try this. When you forget to lock your Lexus and it's not there when you are ready to go golfing, that sucks. Almost as much as when you go to use the server and some hackers are using it to joy ride the net and sell all your customer records while you are liable. But unlike the car, where you can buy a new one, it's a pain in the ass to buy a new company image.
I love my Nikon D70 (especially since I used hotel points to buy it), but for every shot I get that others don't have a chance because of shutter speed or ability to use another lens, there's one that I missed because I didn't consider lugging out my camera bag for some event. With compact cameras being as small as ipods these days, I'd recommend that you start with one of those first, and when you want to take it to the next level, get a second camera as a dslr.
Being a Libertarian myself, I would have. But alas, they weren't running in my district this year. And when I voted for them last year, it was out of protest since they were so extreme I would have much rather had a moderate Republican or Democrat in office than them. However, considering all the people that aren't voting because they don't like one party or another, a 3rd party would have an easy time getting elected if all those people got out of the house and cast a protest vote.
think about them before shrugging the warning off as a computer glitch
The thread was mentioning how predicting an exact date like 2048 is error prone and seemed like the best place for a 2k observation. I think most people here agree that there is an issue, it's the accuracy, severity, and response that we can't agree on. No reason to get your panties in a bunch thinking we are shrugging things off. As for me, I'm still routing for a good plague to kill off at least half of humanity and solve all of our problems, but that thread is over here.
Anyone else find it suspicious that they picked 2048? Did anyone double check their simulation for a 2k buffer filling up? Just seems like the first thing I would check had my program spit out such a nice round (in binary land) number.
Wars are too inefficient. A plague would do much better. Heck, even some more contaminated spinach and bird flu outbreaks would help.
I'm pretty sure you were joking, but you're closer to the truth than most people realize. The planet does have too many humans on it, and at some point nature will correct that problem. The question is whether it happens by war, disease, a lack of food, or by releasing too much carbon. It's just a matter of time, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a correction come within a hundred years. But, look at the bright side. When it's all said and done with, the housing, traffic, outsourcing, social security, and a whole list of other problems will suddenly go away.
The United States now has preliminary evidence of radioactivity from North Korea's nuclear test ground, indicating it did indeed carry out a test, a U.S. official tells CNN.
Ice Weasel sounds like it will be only installable on Debian, perhaps Debian-descended platforms like Ubuntu.
With the exception of a few Debian native packages, everything in Debian is a fork that is designed to only be installed on a Debian or a derivative distribution. The source of a Debian package is the original source files and a diff (aka fork) of everything needed to make that software bug free, comply with the packaging standards, and work with other packages on the system. The only difference here from every other package is that Firefox doesn't want to allow Debian to distribute with the same name and logos if it's not released by them, and that's their right. The Debian developers will keep the changes to a minimum to reduce their work, so this will still be very similar to firefox, and I expect the developers to continue using updates from firefox and sending patches and bug reports, where appropriate, back to firefox. The whole thing would have been a lot easier if firefox just made some unofficial branding that could be applied to their product so that people know they are still using firefox that's been modified by a 3rd party vs the real firefox.
Censorship works best when people don't realize they are being restricted. So how do we know they are viewing the real wikipedia and not a government controlled and filtered proxy? Considering all the sites and people out there pointing to wikipedia, it's only logical to put up something to keep people from asking questions and trying to see what they are missing.
And seriously, can I see a quick show of hands of everyone who thinks that this will keep people from copying DVDs?...
This is fantastic news for the people that want to copy movies. You should specifically look for movies that have this protection if I were cheap. You can watch the movie, copy it using some more advanced tools, and then return the movie claiming it doesn't work in your player. They will be forced to give you a full refund or provide a copy of the movie without this protection. This will be better than renting. Sadly this will quickly go the way of the dodo but the mentality of those in the MPAA won't.
The United States uses 360 million US liquid gallons (1.36 gigalitres) of gasoline each day.
If the above wikipedia entry is accurate, that would mean raising the gas tax by 3 pennies would raise the same amount of funds per day. It would also make alternatives more competitive and ensure that as long as we are dependent on fossil fuels, the renewable energy has a source of funding. As an added bonus, people that adopt new technologies aren't taxed and the tax will eventually disappear.
I'm saying this as a libertarian, someone that hates taxes and big government. But this is exactly where government regulations and taxes should be used, when the free market doesn't value the environment and causes long term damage without intervention.
So as much as I hate and distrust the machines (I'm applying for an absentee ballot myself)
On the other side of the river (Fairfax, VA), I tend to do the "absentee in person" where you fill in the absentee application in person, and they let you vote right there, amazingly efficient. But unfortunately, when you do that, you are back to using the electronic machines *doh*. If the machines are able to be trusted, this has to be the best system I've ever seen, whole process takes maybe 10 minutes. Of course the little ole' ladies manning the booths didn't understand the concept that I can't be sure the machine is recording the same vote that I entered on the screen. I didn't really push the issue much with them since, hopefully, they aren't the ones making the decisions. The only way this will ever be fixed is if the majority party has actual proof of tampering by the minority party. Until then, it's politics as usual.
Me: "So these tools can help monitor for any issues you have on your system. Is there anything you'd like to see from the security side of things?" Them: "No" Me: "Have you ever had a security breach?" Them: "No, we have never had a security breach." Me: "You mean none that you know of?" Them: "No, we have never had a security breach." Me: "Yes sir"
Either they are much better at their job than anyone believes, or it's easier to ignore the truth than to try fixing the problems.
I have to say that it helps, but it doesn't solve the problem. I still get calls from mortgage companies almost a year after requesting some quotes from lending tree, and I had promptly notified all parties that I was no longer interested after refinancing, but that doesn't matter. I would get 4-5 calls per week from politicians around election time, and usually that many per day in the last few days. All of those are known loop holes.
The bad ones are the companies "conducting a survey to see if you are interested in being called later." I would also get a call about once a week by a mexican recording from a spoofed number that constantly changed. None of this would bother me if it wasn't for (a) my home number being my business number (self employed) and (b) forwarding all my home calls to my cell phone when I'm on the road.
The proper fix is to require all companies to: 1. Call from a working caller-id number 2. From any recording, make any key press stop the recording and allow the person to be placed on the do not call list 3. Require phone companies to maintain accurate records of the source of any call, even if blocked, so that all you need is the receiving phone number and time of the call to file a complaint with the do-not-call registry.
Also, I'll gladly migrate to any voip vendor with features similar to vonage (voice mail, automatic call forwarding, management by web page, good call quality) that can get anonymous call rejection, call blocking, and maybe even caller white list to either drop or send all non-approved calls to voice mail or an "identify yourself" menu.
People mistrust photocopies because they didn't understand the technology. Now we just make sure there's toner.
People mistrust new technology because they do understand them (to a degree), and all the moving parts, and what can break. Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
The only truth to this is that knowing how to survive in the future without google may be as pointless as knowing how to survive during a power failure today. Actually, there's still a good reason to be able to survive on your own.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says they aren't already doing this? Unlike your credit report, you can't see everything they've been gathering on you.
Well, since you asked...
After making more than one call to an XMLHttpRequest object, the readyState sticks at 1 (aka the open as been run without sending the request). The page is sending requests based on keyboard input, but only when the readyState is 0 (uninitialized) or 4 (last request is done) and so it was hanging on my one opera user. In all of my code, the open is quickly followed by a send, so there's no reason to ever see the readyState stuck at 1.
To reproduce, try something like
new XMLHttpRequest
function sendrequest {
open(somepage)
onreadystatechange=anotherrequest
send(null)
}
function anotherrequest {
display current readystate and time
if readyState == 4 sendrequest
}
sendrequest
(this was properly indented but slashdot doesn't like the pre tag)
You raise a good point on property taxes. There is some fairness built into the system, because while renters don't pay the tax, they pay rent, which goes to a landlord, who pays the tax, so it's still there, just much more indirect. Personally, I'd like to see the end of tax credits and handouts to families with children, or even better, add a tax because of the added burden those families place on our communities. If you can't afford to have children, then please stop having me subsidize your sex habit, there are lots of people happy to adopt. If children grew up in families that cared about their child's development instead of working 3 jobs to make ends meet and being happy for the government subsidized childcare (elementary school) it would be a good start. I know it sounds heartless to those having a hard time making ends meet and even more so to the children they have, but if we keep a system that rewards those that do wrong and penalizes those that do good, eventually no one will care to do good.
Also, I really like the idea on longer school days, but we need to be sure to have proportionally less homework and adjust the schedule to when students perform their best. Starting the school day later and moving extra curricular activities into the middle of the day would help. A financial education in addition to more technology classes are needed which certainly weren't available when I was a kid. And lets leave the religious eduction for our private schools please. Vouchers so that kids have a choice in where they go to school would be nice too. I grew up in a world of busing and teaching to the lowest common denominator. Lets get the smart kids into the smart schools so that everyone have an equal opportunity to the best eduction they are capable of, regardless of race. A system where merit determines which school you can go to instead of your location will do a lot to turn out the best and brightest in our society.
There are two things that will likely happen before the US goes completely bankrupt.
First, there will be some kind of massive plague or catastrophe to eliminate 10% or more of our population. There are simply too many people in the world causing problems with our food supply, environment, etc. Perhaps it will be a spin off of bird flu, but I suspect it will be something that no one ever considered. It's best if the impact hits the elderly hardest to reduce the strain on our medical and retirement systems.
Second, the US will crank up the printing presses. They are already considering what to do for blind people to be able to differentiate denominations, so printing a little extra will be no big deal. When push comes to shove, the choices are to raise taxes, cut spending, raise interest or other income generators, or print more money. Printing more money will have the smallest negative impact on the voters and will begin to turn around all the damage we have down with massive imports from China and other countries. If China refuses to increase the value of their currency, it's entirely possible we'll respond by devaluing ours to protect the US economy (negative side effects be damned).
But like I say, the second will have all kinds of negative side effects, which is why you will see even more of a run up in gold, real-estate, foreign investments, and other non-cash assets before the big day comes. As for the little guy, he will continue to be screwed. It's a side effect of the mega corporations that got rid of all the mom and pop shops. As they went away, so did the entrepreneurs, and as more people turned from being an employer to being an employee, income naturally redistributed. There's no easy fix for that, economies of scale won't unscale. The recovery from a bankrupt country isn't the masses getting their wealth back, it's foreign companies moving in to make a buck off of us, just look at what we do to most third world countries. But a good start would be to give our school kids a financial education instead of having them figure out how a credit card works from some guy on the sidewalk when they get to college.
Anyway, as an attempt to be on topic, I'd love to see a moon base. People need to stop thinking of their backyards and consider how we will exist when the planet tells us our time is up. The clock is ticking and it's definitely getting more angry at us these days.
That would be the fair thing to do, but the government doesn't always play fair. Taxes on stock options or a huge example of this, where in some cases (when you hit the AMT threshold) you are responsible for the "income" you received from the difference between the cost of the option and the value of the stock, even if you never cashed out of the stock. There are lots of sad stories of people broke because they owe taxes on stocks that crashed during the dot come on money that they never saw. The Libertarian in me wants to see a few changes made to our tax system, and eliminating taxes on any kind of virtual money is a big one.
If you need to stop something illegal, it shouldn't be necessary to lie and impersonate someone to prevent the activity. Why is it necessary to impersonate another to "think of the children" or to stop illegal downloads? If you have proof of a wrong doing, you take it to a judge, get a warrant, and put an end to it. If you don't have proof, then lets end all the witch hunts.
I'd recommend a high deductible plan if you're self employed. You should already have money saved up to weather the rough times, so just add some more to cover the deductible. The amount you save is significant. The baby will most certainly have you going to the doctor a lot. I've used eHealthInsurance myself, and my only complaint is that the fine print is hard to find or not available until after you purchase a policy. But the policies they offer are from the major carriers.
For the record, the place I got in trouble was picking the cheaper plan and then getting a physical. Burried back in the fine print was a clause that they don't cover anything preventative, but that wasn't obvious when I was ordering the plan or looking through the main section of the booklet. Had I clicked a link to the provider's comparison of all their plans, it would have jumped out like a sore thumb. Personally I think it borders on criminal when a company doesn't make it obvious where you risk owing a lot of money and what coverage is missing that many others would frequently include.
And a final note, always get the price an uninsured person will be responsible for up front for everything! This is what you'll be stuck paying when the insurance company says they aren't responsible, and you should be able to afford it. My family's neighbor (a doctor), myself, and many others agree, the medical system in the US is broken. Insurance is complicated, costs are going up, and lawsuits are giving insane sums of money for just about anything. My biggest peeve is that you aren't told how much you owe until a month after the procedure is done. Admittedly this is a service and things may fluctuate when you find a problem, but every doctor uses charge codes and their office knows their fee for that code, and the insurance companies know what they have agreed for those codes. But no one will tell you those numbers until after you've had the service. Congress would do a lot for people by requiring every insurance provider to publish how much they cover and what the patent is responsible for on a standard list of charge codes, and make it available before signing up for that coverage.
- I'd start with C, add scripting early on to make everyone more efficient, and then add on an object oriented language after they have the fundamentals. This ensures OO is used when appropriate and the benefits are better understood.
- Database design (I did have a DB course, but it was so theoretical, I really didn't have a clue how to get the database running so I could run any sql selects).
- User Interface: beyond the command line, using GUI libraries, web pages with cgi, and making service/daemon applications manageable and monitored.
- Multi-threaded and distributed programming.
- Enterprise architecture: putting everything together into the big picture with data centers, networking, firewalls and proxies, servers, pc's, databases, sans, backup, monitoring, ticketing, etc.
- Internships and jobs at the college should be strongly encouraged. I had some friends that managed the campus network. I took on a part time job managing a server for a small research group.
- Anyone that wants to learn how to setup a firewall, build a web server, configure a database, and so on, should have a sandbox/lab environment available to play in.
I did take a software dev class, and like others have joked, it taught me to work with people that didn't want to do that much work. In reality, if you are expected to know everything, it's hard to specialize in only one part and ignore all the other programming work. And in the course of one semester, you can't specialize enough to have a real understanding of how group work is really supposed to work.However, my biggest pet peeve is that most CS students are being taught to be a coder, and if you didn't notice, those are the jobs that have shifted overseas. We need a more rounded course structure that teaches how IT works with a company and doesn't leave students with a blank stare when they hear terms like load balancer, SNMP, SAN, logical volume, cluster, fault tolerant, VPN, VLAN, and disaster recovery.
From the part-of-your-job-to-explain-it-in-their-terms dept.
Lets try this. When you forget to lock your Lexus and it's not there when you are ready to go golfing, that sucks. Almost as much as when you go to use the server and some hackers are using it to joy ride the net and sell all your customer records while you are liable. But unlike the car, where you can buy a new one, it's a pain in the ass to buy a new company image.
Convenience.
I love my Nikon D70 (especially since I used hotel points to buy it), but for every shot I get that others don't have a chance because of shutter speed or ability to use another lens, there's one that I missed because I didn't consider lugging out my camera bag for some event. With compact cameras being as small as ipods these days, I'd recommend that you start with one of those first, and when you want to take it to the next level, get a second camera as a dslr.
Being a Libertarian myself, I would have. But alas, they weren't running in my district this year. And when I voted for them last year, it was out of protest since they were so extreme I would have much rather had a moderate Republican or Democrat in office than them. However, considering all the people that aren't voting because they don't like one party or another, a 3rd party would have an easy time getting elected if all those people got out of the house and cast a protest vote.
Anyone else find it suspicious that they picked 2048? Did anyone double check their simulation for a 2k buffer filling up? Just seems like the first thing I would check had my program spit out such a nice round (in binary land) number.
I'm pretty sure you were joking, but you're closer to the truth than most people realize. The planet does have too many humans on it, and at some point nature will correct that problem. The question is whether it happens by war, disease, a lack of food, or by releasing too much carbon. It's just a matter of time, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a correction come within a hundred years. But, look at the bright side. When it's all said and done with, the housing, traffic, outsourcing, social security, and a whole list of other problems will suddenly go away.
Censorship works best when people don't realize they are being restricted. So how do we know they are viewing the real wikipedia and not a government controlled and filtered proxy? Considering all the sites and people out there pointing to wikipedia, it's only logical to put up something to keep people from asking questions and trying to see what they are missing.
I'm saying this as a libertarian, someone that hates taxes and big government. But this is exactly where government regulations and taxes should be used, when the free market doesn't value the environment and causes long term damage without intervention.
Had the same thing happen while at the DoD.
Me: "So these tools can help monitor for any issues you have on your system. Is there anything you'd like to see from the security side of things?"
Them: "No"
Me: "Have you ever had a security breach?"
Them: "No, we have never had a security breach."
Me: "You mean none that you know of?"
Them: "No, we have never had a security breach."
Me: "Yes sir"
Either they are much better at their job than anyone believes, or it's easier to ignore the truth than to try fixing the problems.
I have to say that it helps, but it doesn't solve the problem. I still get calls from mortgage companies almost a year after requesting some quotes from lending tree, and I had promptly notified all parties that I was no longer interested after refinancing, but that doesn't matter. I would get 4-5 calls per week from politicians around election time, and usually that many per day in the last few days. All of those are known loop holes.
The bad ones are the companies "conducting a survey to see if you are interested in being called later." I would also get a call about once a week by a mexican recording from a spoofed number that constantly changed. None of this would bother me if it wasn't for (a) my home number being my business number (self employed) and (b) forwarding all my home calls to my cell phone when I'm on the road.
The proper fix is to require all companies to:
1. Call from a working caller-id number
2. From any recording, make any key press stop the recording and allow the person to be placed on the do not call list
3. Require phone companies to maintain accurate records of the source of any call, even if blocked, so that all you need is the receiving phone number and time of the call to file a complaint with the do-not-call registry.
Also, I'll gladly migrate to any voip vendor with features similar to vonage (voice mail, automatic call forwarding, management by web page, good call quality) that can get anonymous call rejection, call blocking, and maybe even caller white list to either drop or send all non-approved calls to voice mail or an "identify yourself" menu.
People mistrust photocopies because they didn't understand the technology. Now we just make sure there's toner.
People mistrust new technology because they do understand them (to a degree), and all the moving parts, and what can break. Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
The only truth to this is that knowing how to survive in the future without google may be as pointless as knowing how to survive during a power failure today. Actually, there's still a good reason to be able to survive on your own.