Re:Answer to title. (Actual experience)
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2
I couldn't agree more. On a reasonably old iMac, operations that take essentially no time at the shell can take several minutes using the dreaded Finder. The time to delete or copy a large chunk of files is amazing - several minutes with the GUI, but instantaneous with rm or cp. I now use the command line almost exclusively for file management in OX, which is too bad....
To put it bluntly.. BT are a bunch of cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life,snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless,hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sacks of monkey shit who couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
No, you could do much worse. Much worse, trust me.
At any large university there is a small problem of people stealing textbooks and selling them back. It's not an earth-shattering problem, but it exists. There's nothing you can do about it, some theft is inevitable when you have 40,000 students. That doesn't mean schools should end book buybacks.
If you want to steal things that are readily tradeable for cash, you've got a lot of options. Anything that can go to a pawn shop, for example.
Umm, because they sell a commodity. If I don't like what I get from Compaq or Dell, I blame them and switch. When Red Hat 7.2 was screwed up out of the box on my machine, I didn't spend days trying to fix and calling tech support. I ditched it for Mandrake. There's a large contingent of Mac (and Linux) users who don't think like this. They blame themselves. OS 9 crashes a lot not because you did anything wrong, but because it's a hulking pile of crufty crap. No real memory protection, suprise, it crashes a lot.
Apple has convinced people that they're "different" and that if you want to be "different" and "special" you'll buy their machines. It's about advertising, not about products. "Different" in this case means proprietary, expensive, unupgradeable hardware, software, and protocols to an outside observer. For a very long time it meant one of the worst operating systems ever brought to market but it had prettier widgets combined with obscene amounts of sugar-coating. WTF does "rebuild the desktop" actually mean? I've never seen a company that treats its customers like total morons get so much adoration.
5 percent bought a computer that was completely inoperable within the first month; another 11 percent said they had problems in the first month but the computer was usable.
This seems ridiculously high to me. 5% of computers are unusable in the first month? No explanation is give of what constitutes "unusable". Does it mean the hard drive is physically crapped out or something like "the Internet is broken again"?
Furthermore, Apple is a terrible company to include in this kind of survey. A very large percentage of their customers are Mac enthusiasts. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that comparing an Apple customer's perception of Apple support with a Dell customer's perception of Dell support is hardly an accurate picture - the Dell customer has no particular love for the company.
IMHE Mandrake 8.2 has excellent PMCIA support. Might want to try it.
My story is the opposite Windows 98 freezes instantly when I pop in my 3Com ethernet card - after 3 tries and one corrupted partition I gave up. Mandrake 8.2 detects the NIC, loads the driver, and calls up the DHCP server without any trouble.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. You are obligated to pay for the sales tax (usually when you file your income tax at the end of the year).
I've never heard of any state requiring this.
In addition, if the company has even the smallest presence in the customer's state, they are obligated to collect that sales tax on behalf of the state.
Correct. This is why Amazon concentrates its operations in as few states as possible, for example.
The ex-CEO of Tyco is going to go to jail for sales tax evasion using the mechanisms you describe. Care to join him?
The ex-CEO of Tyco is going to jail for something far more creative which is actually illegal - fraud. He had empty boxes shipped from New York City to Tyco's New Jersey office, claimed that the cartons contained works of art, and declared he didn't need to pay the NY or NJ sales tax. Then he had boxes full of art shipped from the art dealer in New York to his apartment in New York. That's illegal, because a NY-to-NY sale is definitely taxable, and it also involves a little mail fraud.
yes, but who gave the FTC the power to do this mandating? certainly not the constitution.
Article 1, Section 8: The Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.
Sure looks like it's right there as long as search engines engage in interstate commerce. The Constitution is a fascinating document. You might want to read the whole thing some time.
There was a book about this - a future where the Olympic athletes undertake any and all performance-enhancing measures. The winners are granted near-immortality and their bodies are repaired. The losers die within a few years.
Totally offtopic, does anybody know the title of the book I'm talking about? I've searched everywhere and I can't find it.
There are some real aggregate genetic differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds. People of European descent never have sickle-cell anemia. This is because the genes that cause this disease are never beneficial in the European climate. Having one copy of the allele that causes sickle cell anemia provides better resistance to malaria, while two makes you deathly ill - so many people of African origin have inherited one allele from their ancestors because of the prevalence of malaria in their ancestral environment.
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.
Not in America, at least, where we elect prosecutors...
Why do you elect them in the first place?:-)
Short answer: We made a stupid mistake and overreacted to a problem that's now long gone. Societies have an annoying tendency to do this, and the United States is no exception.
Long answer: Originally, it was to deal with astounding corruption, especially at the lower levels of government. The Progressive Movement felt that if you elect every official they would be accountable and the crooked ones would be voted out, which worked suprisingly well. What they neglected is that elected officials in administrative posts can be too responsive to public opinion, and lack the ability to do necessary but unpopular things, or to refuse to do unjust but popular things. Elected judges are worse, I assure you.
The Progressives did a pretty good job of cleaning up our government, but they also made those charged with executing laws hyper-responsive to popular passions of the moment. It's one thing to have a legislature that is extremely responsive to public opinion, they have to debate, agree, and compromise to take any action. It is entirely different to have a single person who has both the authority to act and must answer to the public, often only about the most sensational issues. Incumbents only lose such elections if they have "screwed up", i.e. done something controversial. Otherwise, no one gives a damn. This also means a few extremists from the left or right can get their candidate elected to these minor offices just by caring enough to vote. (Such elections are often held in odd-numbered years, when neither the President, Congress, the governor, or the state legsislature stands for election.)
You always fall back to simple disagreement, or an offensive presentation of disagreement, as if hate speech would not exist.
I suppose I have in examples. And I agree words have power. The pen truly is often mightier than the sword. And I agree hate speech is not a good thing. But I think we give too much credit to blatant hate speech by banning it.
Come on! Of course we can go to extremes both ways. There is no simple answer.
But the US Supreme Court found my extreme compelling enough to rule for the plaintiff in ACLU v Reno and strike down the COPA, which theoretically banned all such works.
Does a civilised justice system work the same way? Yes. It is not about mechanical rules. They do not apply either to people or to speech. Example: We know what terrorism is (killing civilians) and we know what collateral damage is (killing civilians), but there is a world of a difference between the two, and we do see it.
Agreed. Laws have to consider certain non-mechanical standards all the time. Due dilligence, reasonable person, probable cause, you name it. It's not a crime to throw away an incriminating document because you don't need it anymore, but it is a crime to do so to conceal a crime - tricky ground. Sometimes, as is the case with objectionable speech, the ground is too tricky and a civillized justice system also rejects laws which are vague, arbitray, capricious, or overbroad. Consider this piece by George Carlin. Is it hate speech? I think it's insightful and witty, and it makes a compelling argument against religion IMHO, while being incredibly blunt. A friend thought it should be banned as promoting anti-Catholic bigotry. The "reasonable person" test falls apart pretty fast when we start talking about speech.
We should be mature enough and we should regard ourselves mature enough to at least try to judge what we do (and that includes speech) and what it leads to.
Not in America, at least, where we elect prosecutors who must come up with sensational cases to gain reelection. (I infer from your spelling you are not an American). Consider this example of a man prosecuted for writing stories which involved sexual acts with children. While actual child pornography is a horrible thing, the child pornography boogeyman is used to justify the prohibition of anything distateful to the majority.
But who gets to judge whether my means are harmful? Presumably it depends largely on the supposed victims. Such rules would have a chilling effect on all speech on controversial issues.
And then there's the problem that offensive speech is a vital part of public discourse. Sometimes the best way to convince people of your position is to let them have it full bore. Some of the most compelling arguments ever made did not mince words. The Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King's speeches, and the pamphlets of the anti-slavery revolution did not mince words. Sometimes one must make judgements and criticize harshly.
BTW, child pornography might not be a good reference point, because it is such a brutal and disgusting act of violence, and I do not think that any sane person would promote it as a "form of expression"
Child pornography actually illustrates the problem with your position very well. Cameron's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet depicts two children having sex as explicitly as one can in US film. (The actors are of course adults). IMHO it adds to the film substantially; it is a story of passionate love after all. But critics of anti-child porn measures cite this movie as a prime example of the dangers in banning representations of child pornography (as opposed to pornography actually involving children). Should those involved in the film be sent to prison? What about written works that describe sexual activities among minors? Of course, actual sexual depictions of actual minors are and should be illegal but beyond that we enter a dangerous zone.
Libel is not a criminal offense. One may sue for libel and collect damages based on harm to one's reputation. Our standards for libel are pretty high compared to many European states.
Besides defamation, perjury and terroristic threats are about the only things that are illegal non-commercial speech in the US. False advertising and other such things are punishable not because of the speech aspect but because of the commercial aspect.
But you're welcome to convey any true message you want. I like it, because the most offensive ideas have a habit of becoming common sense in a few decades.
Anti-abortionists in the USA probably send that type of letter and are protected against any legal action by your noble constitution.
I hate to break it to you, but sending such letters is probably not constitutionally protected. They're most likely libelous - you can be sued for maliciously accusing a specific individual of a crime they did not commit. Thus, while one can say "abortion is murder", one cannot say "she is a murderer" to a woman who had an abortion.
then that too is deliberately offensive and upsetting speech.
But so is telling a devout Christian that there is no god, or telling an atheist that he or she must repent or go to hell. It's arguably "deliberately upsetting" when you explain post-1775 economics to libertarians. Take a look at Ann Coulter, who says things that I find very disturbing, but many people find quite compelling and eloquent.
And in the US even that exception applies only to actual child pornography, which inherently involve child abuse. You are free to write erotic fiction with children in it or to portray adults as children in a dramatic or pictorial work. These are constitutionally protected expressions.
Well, I would put in racial, sexual etc. and religious abuse, too.
I wouldn't, unless a person is harmed in the making of the work. As others have pointed out, these things are incredibly subjective. The potential for abuse is quite real. The most famous example is the Canadian anti-pornography laws. Andrea Dworkin's book advocating such laws was deemed in violation and banned from Canada. And hate speech is always is in the eye of the beholder. France, Germany, and Italy have such laws, for example, but they have not been against anti-immigrant candidates.
Religious hate speech, however, does hurt these "other people" the same way as racial hate speech does.
This is an incredibly slippery slope. If someone takes a reprehensible position and declares it to based on their religion, I'm no longer allowed to tell them that their religion is wrong or immoral? I can't tell people there is no God, because it might hurt them? Are religious people no longer allowed to tell me I should follow Jesus to be saved? This is the least justifiable one, because people choose their religion, unlike their gender or color.
If it were, say, a small white button, somewhere out of the way, which was obviously NOT an alarm button or a doorbell.
You are absolutely correct. My father is a judge. His first day on the bench, he noticed a little white button. He wondered what it did, so he pushed it. Three sheriff's deputies arrived in under a minute. They stood around patiently until the end of that hearing.
Then they asked if he was the new judge. Upon confirming this, they said that happens every time they forget to mention the white button.
Interpreting the Commerce Clause, which I am well aware of, in such a manner is a gross exaggeration of what was intended.
That's nice. The rest of us, including the Supreme Court, have been interperting this way for a few centuries.
The intention of the Commerce Clause was the negotiation of treaties and trade agreements between foreign nations, "the several states" which at that time were much more regional than our current monolithic governmental structure
The Constitution explicitly forbids states from entering into treaties or trade agreements with other states or nations. That can't be it. Maybe Congress was supposed to regulate national commerce, like capital markets.
No doubt every CEO of every Fortune 500 firm has been on the phone or in a meeting with their respective CFO's in the last few months, getting assurances that no funny business is going on.
Or they've been figuring out how to quickly raid the company before everybody finds out. Or how they obsfucate their finances longer without anybody finding out. The vast majority of their compensation is in stock options so they make more money by raising stock prices in the short term. Once their options vest, they lose nothing if the company goes bankrupt the next day. Sadly, many Fortune 500 companies are currently being managed as pump-and-dump schemes. Skilling and Lay set an example - sell while you still can.
Those that haven't been doing so will eventually be found and burned at the stake...all without the government lifting a finger because private investors will DEMAND it.
Enron's top 140 managers paid themselves more than $700 million immediate period preceding its descent into bankruptcy. If that's what constitutes a stake-burning today, sign me up.
Have faith that people and organizations can function, even thrive, without government playing nursemaid to every bump and bruise.
Characterizing billions of dollars of theft as a "bump and bruise" seems like a bit of an understatement. You're asking for a lot of faith. Reality seems to contradict it. I've met communists who are less utopian.
Shockingly enough, I don't see that function enumerated ANYWHERE in the Constitution.
Article 1: Congress shall have the power... to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with Indian tribes.
Commonly referred to as the Commerce Clause. You may wish to consider reading the Constitution, specifically Article 1, the enumerated powers. Seems like an enumerated power to me, unless you wnat to claim WorldCom or other publicly traded companies do not engage in interstate or international commerce?
This is one of the better comments on this thread. Until manufacturing figured out an assembly line that worked, understood proper tolerances and specifications, put in quality control - lots of other things sucked too, and sometimes sucked worse than software does today. It's a wonder some of the early internal combustion engines worked at all.
First of all, they cheat. Physical engineers build rather robust safety tolerances into their products. A bridge with an advertised weight limit of 10 tons is most likely capable of carrying much more than that. How much more is something that you don't want anyone to know, lest they try it. In certain calculations, the safety factor is normally an order of magnitude.
I have no idea how you can get the same form of cheating in software. If a user asks for data on order #1234, returning order #1235 is just as bad as returning #4321.
Second, they're willing to throw away designs that don't work. My significant other has spent years designing an industrial material that looks like it's not going anywhere. There's no shame in this, nobody gets fired, they just realize it didn't work. If they employed the engineering/management priniciples of software they would take what they've got and hand it off to marketing, in hopes they could sell it anyway while the development team tries harder to make it work.
People who write software should take a piece of learning from those who write the code that becomes digital integrated circuits. Engineering those designs is just that - engineering - because a bug here or there is usually a very serious matter. Tremendous amounts of time are spent verifying your design works correctly. The same thing is true with most embedded systems as well, although those lines are getting blurred with system-on-chip development.
If only it were that simple. As quite a few people have pointed out, hardware designs are orders of magnitude simpler. And the problem domain is so much smaller, limited to a single device. The inputs are finite and have no higher meaning to worry about. Some things which are easy in hardware, like CRCs, are hard in software.
The software that most resembles hardware is is the low-level libraries. They have a defined task to preform, the task never changes, the task is bounded in size. If you have a task that requires several libary routines you chain them together and pass the results from one as arguments to the next. And low-level libraries tend to be rather bug-free.
And it's expensive to design state-of-the-art hardware. The really high end of hardware, CPUs, has very few contenders. It's just too damn expensive for a competitive market.
...calligraphy? (sic) Its a process of hiding data into pictures, and lots of it.
You'll be really pissed off what the non-assuming 500k browser-cached picture off the Internet quietly hides a MEGA virus that will toast your entire machine, innocently awaken by a harmless worm you mistakenly opened up elsewhere.
As I read the McAfee press release, it didn't give the virus a severity, just an "FYI" stuff like this will be happening down the road (which it will). I guarantee we will see a virus like this eventually, given the massive amount of images on the web.
No, a stenograph could not be used to transmit a virus. Viruses can't be secret. A program designed to view the "correct" data must be unaware of the stenograph or it has failed.
Let's say I have an old-fashioned bitmap image and I use the least significant bit of every byte to encode one bit code or text. My bitmap viewer will display an image that looks almost exactly the image prior to stenography. Then I widely distribute my bitmap, but only people who know where to look (every 8th bit) will be able to extract the hidden message. When certain people read the file using their Secret Decoder Programs they'll know what the message was.
Stenography is a sophisticated form of security by obscurity for data, not a method for transmitting mobile code.
It doesn't make sense to distribute a virus in two parts. A virus doesn't need to be 30K to be really malicious or destructive. And you'd still have to get the decoder in somehow and have the stenographic data already downloaded. A stenographic encoder or decoder for lossy formats like jpeg or mp3 is rather large by itself. The initial virus would have to include a decoder for the stenographic data, which would probably exceed the size of the code it could hide. It just isn't very feasible.
The exploit asks for a font that's utterly ridiculous - a 166666667 size font, give or take a few 6's. Mozilla tries to get X to display such a font. X dutifilly attempts to draw at that size, which requires a tremendous amount of memory, eventually bringing the whole machine down. You could get the same result by putting a malloc or fork call in a while(1) loop.
I personally think Mozilla should implement some short-term patch to prevent exploitation of this bug until it's patched in XFree, but as the register article says, the fault doesn't lie with them.
They already did. It's obviously a trivial fix - no fonts larger than 1,000 (or whatever). I'm suprised it took that long.
George F. Will wrote a very famous apologia for the Pinochet regime where he claims that Pinochet saves the country from a democratically elected socialist (gasp). He notes that Allende was elected with abput 38% of the vote, the exact same percentage as Hitler! Does Godwin's law apply to conservative blowhards?
In the US of A, it is perfectly legal for any American to purchase any politician. You don't need to be from Virgina to contribute to Mr. Boucher's reelection efforts. I'm sure certain nefarious organizations will fund his opponents. Do your part and keep this guy from getting crushed for standing up to legalized racketeering.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. On a reasonably old iMac, operations that take essentially no time at the shell can take several minutes using the dreaded Finder. The time to delete or copy a large chunk of files is amazing - several minutes with the GUI, but instantaneous with rm or cp. I now use the command line almost exclusively for file management in OX, which is too bad....
To put it bluntly.. BT are a bunch of cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life,snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless,hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sacks of monkey shit who couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
No, you could do much worse. Much worse, trust me.
At any large university there is a small problem of people stealing textbooks and selling them back. It's not an earth-shattering problem, but it exists. There's nothing you can do about it, some theft is inevitable when you have 40,000 students. That doesn't mean schools should end book buybacks.
If you want to steal things that are readily tradeable for cash, you've got a lot of options. Anything that can go to a pawn shop, for example.
Umm, because they sell a commodity. If I don't like what I get from Compaq or Dell, I blame them and switch. When Red Hat 7.2 was screwed up out of the box on my machine, I didn't spend days trying to fix and calling tech support. I ditched it for Mandrake. There's a large contingent of Mac (and Linux) users who don't think like this. They blame themselves. OS 9 crashes a lot not because you did anything wrong, but because it's a hulking pile of crufty crap. No real memory protection, suprise, it crashes a lot.
Apple has convinced people that they're "different" and that if you want to be "different" and "special" you'll buy their machines. It's about advertising, not about products. "Different" in this case means proprietary, expensive, unupgradeable hardware, software, and protocols to an outside observer. For a very long time it meant one of the worst operating systems ever brought to market but it had prettier widgets combined with obscene amounts of sugar-coating. WTF does "rebuild the desktop" actually mean? I've never seen a company that treats its customers like total morons get so much adoration.
5 percent bought a computer that was completely inoperable within the first month; another 11 percent said they had problems in the first month but the computer was usable.
This seems ridiculously high to me. 5% of computers are unusable in the first month? No explanation is give of what constitutes "unusable". Does it mean the hard drive is physically crapped out or something like "the Internet is broken again"?
Furthermore, Apple is a terrible company to include in this kind of survey. A very large percentage of their customers are Mac enthusiasts. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that comparing an Apple customer's perception of Apple support with a Dell customer's perception of Dell support is hardly an accurate picture - the Dell customer has no particular love for the company.
IMHE Mandrake 8.2 has excellent PMCIA support. Might want to try it.
My story is the opposite Windows 98 freezes instantly when I pop in my 3Com ethernet card - after 3 tries and one corrupted partition I gave up. Mandrake 8.2 detects the NIC, loads the driver, and calls up the DHCP server without any trouble.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. You are obligated to pay for the sales tax (usually when you file your income tax at the end of the year).
I've never heard of any state requiring this.
In addition, if the company has even the smallest presence in the customer's state, they are obligated to collect that sales tax on behalf of the state.
Correct. This is why Amazon concentrates its operations in as few states as possible, for example.
The ex-CEO of Tyco is going to go to jail for sales tax evasion using the mechanisms you describe. Care to join him?
The ex-CEO of Tyco is going to jail for something far more creative which is actually illegal - fraud. He had empty boxes shipped from New York City to Tyco's New Jersey office, claimed that the cartons contained works of art, and declared he didn't need to pay the NY or NJ sales tax. Then he had boxes full of art shipped from the art dealer in New York to his apartment in New York. That's illegal, because a NY-to-NY sale is definitely taxable, and it also involves a little mail fraud.
yes, but who gave the FTC the power to do this mandating? certainly not the constitution.
Article 1, Section 8: The Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.
Sure looks like it's right there as long as search engines engage in interstate commerce. The Constitution is a fascinating document. You might want to read the whole thing some time.
There was a book about this - a future where the Olympic athletes undertake any and all performance-enhancing measures. The winners are granted near-immortality and their bodies are repaired. The losers die within a few years.
Totally offtopic, does anybody know the title of the book I'm talking about? I've searched everywhere and I can't find it.
There are some real aggregate genetic differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds. People of European descent never have sickle-cell anemia. This is because the genes that cause this disease are never beneficial in the European climate. Having one copy of the allele that causes sickle cell anemia provides better resistance to malaria, while two makes you deathly ill - so many people of African origin have inherited one allele from their ancestors because of the prevalence of malaria in their ancestral environment.
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.
Not in America, at least, where we elect prosecutors...
:-)
Why do you elect them in the first place?
Short answer: We made a stupid mistake and overreacted to a problem that's now long gone. Societies have an annoying tendency to do this, and the United States is no exception.
Long answer: Originally, it was to deal with astounding corruption, especially at the lower levels of government. The Progressive Movement felt that if you elect every official they would be accountable and the crooked ones would be voted out, which worked suprisingly well. What they neglected is that elected officials in administrative posts can be too responsive to public opinion, and lack the ability to do necessary but unpopular things, or to refuse to do unjust but popular things. Elected judges are worse, I assure you.
The Progressives did a pretty good job of cleaning up our government, but they also made those charged with executing laws hyper-responsive to popular passions of the moment. It's one thing to have a legislature that is extremely responsive to public opinion, they have to debate, agree, and compromise to take any action. It is entirely different to have a single person who has both the authority to act and must answer to the public, often only about the most sensational issues. Incumbents only lose such elections if they have "screwed up", i.e. done something controversial. Otherwise, no one gives a damn. This also means a few extremists from the left or right can get their candidate elected to these minor offices just by caring enough to vote. (Such elections are often held in odd-numbered years, when neither the President, Congress, the governor, or the state legsislature stands for election.)
You always fall back to simple disagreement, or an offensive presentation of disagreement, as if hate speech would not exist.
I suppose I have in examples. And I agree words have power. The pen truly is often mightier than the sword. And I agree hate speech is not a good thing. But I think we give too much credit to blatant hate speech by banning it.
Come on! Of course we can go to extremes both ways. There is no simple answer.
But the US Supreme Court found my extreme compelling enough to rule for the plaintiff in ACLU v Reno and strike down the COPA, which theoretically banned all such works.
Does a civilised justice system work the same way? Yes. It is not about mechanical rules. They do not apply either to people or to speech. Example: We know what terrorism is (killing civilians) and we know what collateral damage is (killing civilians), but there is a world of a difference between the two, and we do see it.
Agreed. Laws have to consider certain non-mechanical standards all the time. Due dilligence, reasonable person, probable cause, you name it. It's not a crime to throw away an incriminating document because you don't need it anymore, but it is a crime to do so to conceal a crime - tricky ground. Sometimes, as is the case with objectionable speech, the ground is too tricky and a civillized justice system also rejects laws which are vague, arbitray, capricious, or overbroad. Consider this piece by George Carlin. Is it hate speech? I think it's insightful and witty, and it makes a compelling argument against religion IMHO, while being incredibly blunt. A friend thought it should be banned as promoting anti-Catholic bigotry. The "reasonable person" test falls apart pretty fast when we start talking about speech.
We should be mature enough and we should regard ourselves mature enough to at least try to judge what we do (and that includes speech) and what it leads to.
Not in America, at least, where we elect prosecutors who must come up with sensational cases to gain reelection. (I infer from your spelling you are not an American). Consider this example of a man prosecuted for writing stories which involved sexual acts with children. While actual child pornography is a horrible thing, the child pornography boogeyman is used to justify the prohibition of anything distateful to the majority.
But who gets to judge whether my means are harmful? Presumably it depends largely on the supposed victims. Such rules would have a chilling effect on all speech on controversial issues.
And then there's the problem that offensive speech is a vital part of public discourse. Sometimes the best way to convince people of your position is to let them have it full bore. Some of the most compelling arguments ever made did not mince words. The Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King's speeches, and the pamphlets of the anti-slavery revolution did not mince words. Sometimes one must make judgements and criticize harshly.
BTW, child pornography might not be a good reference point, because it is such a brutal and disgusting act of violence, and I do not think that any sane person would promote it as a "form of expression"
Child pornography actually illustrates the problem with your position very well. Cameron's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet depicts two children having sex as explicitly as one can in US film. (The actors are of course adults). IMHO it adds to the film substantially; it is a story of passionate love after all. But critics of anti-child porn measures cite this movie as a prime example of the dangers in banning representations of child pornography (as opposed to pornography actually involving children). Should those involved in the film be sent to prison? What about written works that describe sexual activities among minors? Of course, actual sexual depictions of actual minors are and should be illegal but beyond that we enter a dangerous zone.
Libel is not a criminal offense. One may sue for libel and collect damages based on harm to one's reputation. Our standards for libel are pretty high compared to many European states.
Besides defamation, perjury and terroristic threats are about the only things that are illegal non-commercial speech in the US. False advertising and other such things are punishable not because of the speech aspect but because of the commercial aspect.
But you're welcome to convey any true message you want. I like it, because the most offensive ideas have a habit of becoming common sense in a few decades.
Anti-abortionists in the USA probably send that type of letter and are protected against any legal action by your noble constitution.
I hate to break it to you, but sending such letters is probably not constitutionally protected. They're most likely libelous - you can be sued for maliciously accusing a specific individual of a crime they did not commit. Thus, while one can say "abortion is murder", one cannot say "she is a murderer" to a woman who had an abortion.
then that too is deliberately offensive and upsetting speech.
But so is telling a devout Christian that there is no god, or telling an atheist that he or she must repent or go to hell. It's arguably "deliberately
upsetting" when you explain post-1775 economics to libertarians. Take a look at Ann Coulter, who says things that I find very disturbing, but many people find quite compelling and eloquent.
Blockquoth the parent's parent:
The only exception is child pornography
And in the US even that exception applies only to actual child pornography, which inherently involve child abuse. You are free to write erotic fiction with children in it or to portray adults as children in a dramatic or pictorial work. These are constitutionally protected expressions.
Well, I would put in racial, sexual etc. and religious abuse, too.
I wouldn't, unless a person is harmed in the making of the work. As others have pointed out, these things are incredibly subjective. The potential for abuse is quite real. The most famous example is the Canadian anti-pornography laws. Andrea Dworkin's book advocating such laws was deemed in violation and banned from Canada. And hate speech is always is in the eye of the beholder. France, Germany, and Italy have such laws, for example, but they have not been against anti-immigrant candidates.
Religious hate speech, however, does hurt these "other people" the same way as racial hate speech does.
This is an incredibly slippery slope. If someone takes a reprehensible position and declares it to based on their religion, I'm no longer allowed to tell them that their religion is wrong or immoral? I can't tell people there is no God, because it might hurt them? Are religious people no longer allowed to tell me I should follow Jesus to be saved? This is the least justifiable one, because people choose their religion, unlike their gender or color.
If it were, say, a small white button, somewhere out of the way, which was obviously NOT an alarm button or a doorbell.
You are absolutely correct. My father is a judge. His first day on the bench, he noticed a little white button. He wondered what it did, so he pushed it. Three sheriff's deputies arrived in under a minute. They stood around patiently until the end of that hearing.
Then they asked if he was the new judge. Upon confirming this, they said that happens every time they forget to mention the white button.
Interpreting the Commerce Clause, which I am well aware of, in such a manner is a gross exaggeration of what was intended.
That's nice. The rest of us, including the Supreme Court, have been interperting this way for a few centuries.
The intention of the Commerce Clause was the negotiation of treaties and trade agreements between foreign nations, "the several states" which at that time were much more regional than our current monolithic governmental structure
The Constitution explicitly forbids states from entering into treaties or trade agreements with other states or nations. That can't be it. Maybe Congress was supposed to regulate national commerce, like capital markets.
No doubt every CEO of every Fortune 500 firm has been on the phone or in a meeting with their respective CFO's in the last few months, getting assurances that no funny business is going on.
Or they've been figuring out how to quickly raid the company before everybody finds out. Or how they obsfucate their finances longer without anybody finding out. The vast majority of their compensation is in stock options so they make more money by raising stock prices in the short term. Once their options vest, they lose nothing if the company goes bankrupt the next day. Sadly, many Fortune 500 companies are currently being managed as pump-and-dump schemes. Skilling and Lay set an example - sell while you still can.
Those that haven't been doing so will eventually be found and burned at the stake...all without the government lifting a finger because private investors will DEMAND it.
Enron's top 140 managers paid themselves more than $700 million immediate period preceding its descent into bankruptcy. If that's what constitutes a stake-burning today, sign me up.
Have faith that people and organizations can function, even thrive, without government playing nursemaid to every bump and bruise.
Characterizing billions of dollars of theft as a "bump and bruise" seems like a bit of an understatement. You're asking for a lot of faith. Reality seems to contradict it. I've met communists who are less utopian.
Shockingly enough, I don't see that function enumerated ANYWHERE in the Constitution.
Article 1:
Congress shall have the power... to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with Indian tribes.
Commonly referred to as the Commerce Clause. You may wish to consider reading the Constitution, specifically Article 1, the enumerated powers. Seems like an enumerated power to me, unless you wnat to claim WorldCom or other publicly traded companies do not engage in interstate or international commerce?
This is one of the better comments on this thread. Until manufacturing figured out an assembly line that worked, understood proper tolerances and specifications, put in quality control - lots of other things sucked too, and sometimes sucked worse than software does today. It's a wonder some of the early internal combustion engines worked at all.
First of all, they cheat. Physical engineers build rather robust safety tolerances into their products. A bridge with an advertised weight limit of 10 tons is most likely capable of carrying much more than that. How much more is something that you don't want anyone to know, lest they try it. In certain calculations, the safety factor is normally an order of magnitude.
I have no idea how you can get the same form of cheating in software. If a user asks for data on order #1234, returning order #1235 is just as bad as returning #4321.
Second, they're willing to throw away designs that don't work. My significant other has spent years designing an industrial material that looks like it's not going anywhere. There's no shame in this, nobody gets fired, they just realize it didn't work. If they employed the engineering/management priniciples of software they would take what they've got and hand it off to marketing, in hopes they could sell it anyway while the development team tries harder to make it work.
People who write software should take a piece of learning from those who write the code that becomes digital integrated circuits. Engineering those designs is just that - engineering - because a bug here or there is usually a very serious matter. Tremendous amounts of time are spent verifying your design works correctly. The same thing is true with most embedded systems as well, although those lines are getting blurred with system-on-chip development.
If only it were that simple. As quite a few people have pointed out, hardware designs are orders of magnitude simpler. And the problem domain is so much smaller, limited to a single device. The inputs are finite and have no higher meaning to worry about. Some things which are easy in hardware, like CRCs, are hard in software.
The software that most resembles hardware is is the low-level libraries. They have a defined task to preform, the task never changes, the task is bounded in size. If you have a task that requires several libary routines you chain them together and pass the results from one as arguments to the next. And low-level libraries tend to be rather bug-free.
And it's expensive to design state-of-the-art hardware. The really high end of hardware, CPUs, has very few contenders. It's just too damn expensive for a competitive market.
...calligraphy? (sic) Its a process of hiding data into pictures, and lots of it.
You'll be really pissed off what the non-assuming 500k browser-cached picture off the Internet quietly hides a MEGA virus that will toast your entire machine, innocently awaken by a harmless worm you mistakenly opened up elsewhere.
As I read the McAfee press release, it didn't give the virus a severity, just an "FYI" stuff like this will be happening down the road (which it will). I guarantee we will see a virus like this eventually, given the massive amount of images on the web.
No, a stenograph could not be used to transmit a virus. Viruses can't be secret. A program designed to view the "correct" data must be unaware of the stenograph or it has failed.
Let's say I have an old-fashioned bitmap image and I use the least significant bit of every byte to encode one bit code or text. My bitmap viewer will display an image that looks almost exactly the image prior to stenography. Then I widely distribute my bitmap, but only people who know where to look (every 8th bit) will be able to extract the hidden message. When certain people read the file using their Secret Decoder Programs they'll know what the message was.
Stenography is a sophisticated form of security by obscurity for data, not a method for transmitting mobile code.
It doesn't make sense to distribute a virus in two parts. A virus doesn't need to be 30K to be really malicious or destructive. And you'd still have to get the decoder in somehow and have the stenographic data already downloaded. A stenographic encoder or decoder for lossy formats like jpeg or mp3 is rather large by itself. The initial virus would have to include a decoder for the stenographic data, which would probably exceed the size of the code it could hide. It just isn't very feasible.
The exploit asks for a font that's utterly ridiculous - a 166666667 size font, give or take a few 6's. Mozilla tries to get X to display such a font. X dutifilly attempts to draw at that size, which requires a tremendous amount of memory, eventually bringing the whole machine down. You could get the same result by putting a malloc or fork call in a while(1) loop.
I personally think Mozilla should implement some short-term patch to prevent exploitation of this bug until it's patched in XFree, but as the register article says, the fault doesn't lie with them.
They already did. It's obviously a trivial fix - no fonts larger than 1,000 (or whatever). I'm suprised it took that long.
George F. Will wrote a very famous apologia for the Pinochet regime where he claims that Pinochet saves the country from a democratically elected socialist (gasp). He notes that Allende was elected with abput 38% of the vote, the exact same percentage as Hitler! Does Godwin's law apply to conservative blowhards?
In the US of A, it is perfectly legal for any American to purchase any politician. You don't need to be from Virgina to contribute to Mr. Boucher's reelection efforts. I'm sure certain nefarious organizations will fund his opponents. Do your part and keep this guy from getting crushed for standing up to legalized racketeering.
The windows key is great in Linux!!
It's mapped to "hyper" in most distros. Go into gnomeconfig and you can make it do whatever you want without fear of colliding with other shortcuts.
On my box, Windows-x opens and xterm, windows-s executes "xmms -p playlist", windows-d minimizes all windows, and so on....