What if you're up in a tree with binoculars trying to hide your presence (similar to using stealth techniques)? Is that legal?
Yes, if it's your tree or if you have permission to be in it. Again, suspicious, but not a crime.
Now, what if a half naked coed walks by the window 20 times a day? Still legal?
It may be. You wouldn't stand naked by a window facing someone else's house and not expect to be seen. That's what curtains are for. Although there might be state anti-stalking laws that complicate a case like this.
The use of basic network security tools such as portscanners should not automatically be considered a crime any more than climbing a tree or using binoculars should be.
SANS seems to take it for granted that portscanning is illegal and immoral. However, I can't find anything on Google, and of course, IANAL. Is there any case precedent in the United States for the illegality of portscanning?
I would hazard a guess that it is not illegal. It is the equivalent of looking at a house from a public vantage point to see if any windows are open. Although such an action is suspicious (the person may next try to get in through a window), it certainly isn't illegal, at least in the United States. SANS seems to be overreacting.
Comparing this to washing hands is probably the best point you have. Like washing hands, it's regularly drummed into people's heads, and just as regularly goes ignored by a minimum of 30% of people.
As for your idea of influential people decrying spam, it's pretty weak, since it assumes total obedience in those influenced. Marital infidelity is regularly condemned by Oprah and probably 99% of religious leaders (and usually by the president, although we should make an exception at least in the case of the last president;) ). It still happens all the time.
I'm surprised, so far no BOFHs have posted yet. Here are some ways to save time that probably haven't been mentioned in the book:
Redirect the backups to/dev/null. This frees up lots of cumbersome time checking status and changing tapes, and backup time gets reduced to...oh, about 1.35 seconds.
Kill -9 is your friend. Generally, if it's not part of the OS, it should probably be killed occasionally, and at random times. After all, if the process isn't running, you don't have to answer questions about it, you just say it isn't running out there and that they should try starting it. And the users love it, really, because it makes them faster; nothing like racing against the imminent death of your process to hurry you up.
Forward your phone. That test line in the basement works well. The cafeteria will also appreciate UNIX-related calls; gives 'em something to do. And it gives you time to attack that pit of Ringwraiths in Angband Level 40 while they're sorting it out.
If another tech department calls, remember the magic words: "It must be something on your end". A little tinkering with their on-server diagnostic tools will be sure to keep them busy for hours sorting out the nonexistant problem.
Keep an Excuse Calendar for those troublesome times when a user actually gets through to you (which is about once a day, if you do it right).
For all the humorless pedants that are about to reply saying "This will get you fired"...what was your username again?
Saying "one is lead to believe" instead of "I believe" is just another form of lying.
I don't know about you, but in several of my high school English classes, using a personal pronoun for anything nonfiction, short of an autobiography, was considered poor style. In one of my college science classes, using a personal pronoun in a lab journal entry resulted in losing 10% of your grade on that lab. I'm guessing that saying "I believe" violates some stylistic rule of journalism.
Of course, I'm replying to a poster who said "one is lead to believe" instead of "one is led to believe", so perhaps you were asleep in English class when this got discussed.;)
I've already seen hundreds of "The US is a dictatorship based on world domination, RIAA MPAA Microsoft Bush corporations hate hate hate" comments as a result of this article. Before everyone starts screaming about the same thing in a frenzy of knee-jerk reactions, keep in mind that many developing nations run factories dedicated to producing illegal copies of software, mostly American, Japanese, and European. In Indonesia one used to be able to find whole software stores with not one legitimate copy of a product in them (probably still can; I was there about six months ago). Lawmakers and judges in these countries officially support intellectual property, but wink at it in practice.
I don't know, let me put this question up to Slashdot's tender mercies: Do we advocate illegal copying of commercial software, and if so, why? Although I know we're supposed to be for the "little guy", and against the corporations, these guys aren't Johnny Downloader; they're companies that make their living solely from copying the products of other people's labor. Is it because "information wants to be free", and that the very idea of exchanging money for software is evil? Is it because Microsoft or Redhat or Oracle are evil, and they should be punished for their crimes by the piracy of their software?
The United States has a big software business. It has copyright laws that are, on paper, agreed to by other countries by international agreement. So why the big fuss when they want them to be enforced?
A quick side note: The availability of illegal proprietary software hinders the adoption of open source in developing nations because Windows is so readily available (about $3 in USD per copy). In addition, the GPL is an intellectual property agreement. If we stand for the violation of commercial intellectual property, we must allow for the violation of open-source intellectual property. Legally, they are no different.
Here at slashdot, we don't believe in such things as god or religion, it's just the twisting of words & IT related stories in a bitterly geekish way for us.
Speak for yourself, please. Some of Slashdot (including myself) take such beliefs 100% seriously. As for myself, I believe as much in God and in the tenets of the Christian religion as I do in the laws of physics.
It makes me sick to believe that these beliefs are actually taken seriously in social circles, and even more scary, in the educational field.
Prior to the early 1920s or so, these beliefs were taken quite seriously in the educational field (in the United States, anyway, and this depends heavily on geographical area). Depending on the social circle, they have either always been taken seriously, were once taken seriously and now paid only lip service, or are no longer taken seriously.
You appear to be worried more about the very idea that people will believe in religion, than about any consequence proceeding from it. There's a reason why "these people" are all over the place. Science alone cannot provide a good reason for existence. Religion can.
The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day.
Umm, any hard data (from an impartial site, please) for this? I'm guessing you pulled this out of your ass.
Reason why I don't believe it is that my building has thousands of computers, usually running all the time. One circus tent, according to De Boers (warning: large PDF), is 44x44x12 meters, or somewhat less than 23,232 cubic meters Your quote means that every day a computer uses about 46,464 cubic meters of coal every day.
To keep things in perspective, the United States produced about 2936986.3 tons of coal per day in 2003. Let's say that coal is about 52 pounds per cubic foot on average. That means we produced an average of 112,961,000 cubic feet of coal, or 3,196,796.29 cubic meters, per day. (2936986 * 2000 / 360/52 *.0283), tons/year->lbs/year->lbs/day->ft^3/day->m^3/day)
If my math is correct (and I did do this in kind of a hurry, so be kind), your statement would mean that only 68 computers (3196796.29 / 46464) running all year long would exhaust the yearly coal production of the United States.
The parents that DO home school their kids probably do so because they know that they are qualified (and probably have some actual classroom teaching experience in the past).
To give a Slashdot-specific example of why that's such a ridiculous thing to say, that's like saying, "The nerds who recompile their Linux kernels probably do so because they know they are qualified (and probably have submitted Linux code in the past).
Homeschooling is very similar to Linux hacking, actually. Like hacking, a lot of amateurs are in it, doing it on an extremely low budget. It's easy to screw up, but most mistakes aren't permanent unless you don't learn from them.
Also like Linux hacking, you get a range of users, from the person who decides to try a year of homeschool and eventually sends the kid back to public...to the individualist who might like public schools better if they didn't have so many nasty quirks, but feels better education can be done on his/her own...to the complete zealot who homeschools his/her kids because public schools are Evil(tm).
As in any field with a lot of amateurs (again, including the Linux community), you get some very poor results and some spectacular results that were not necessarily expected, depending on the parents. Homeschooling is unpredictable but not as hard for the amateur to do as one might think.
I'm guessing that the parent poster, with frequent use of the word "probably", has not been homeschooled or known many homeschoolers. I have. My parents ended up homeschooling all of their four kids (including myself, until high school), without previous training as teachers. IMHO, they achieved superior results to the public school system, and did it on a shoestring.
I'm surprised, actually, that so many Slashdotters, in such a do-it-yourself community, are skeptical of homeschooling. It's a rare kid who really doesn't like to learn; what kills the drive to learn is busywork, a mass-produced and cookie-cutter atmosphere (those who work in cubicles will know what I mean), and a culture of achievement through on-time mediocrity. A great deal of these factors are sadly present in many public schools.
- Raise taxes. Gap! yes! raise *YOUR* taxes so that *YOUR* children may go to school and have a chance at a good education and a good future, a concept America as a whole has completely forgotten for some reason.
I don't know about your state, but in Oregon we've raised taxes repeatedly for schools. In Multnomah County, whose residents never met a tax they didn't like, we raised taxes again via a county income tax, after one too many tax increases were suggested in Oregon and citizens outside of Multnomah started rebelling, rejecting the new tax. It's only sufficed to keep the schools afloat for another few years, and the tax (temporary) is soon to end (I fully expect local politicians to bamboozle the public into making it permanent, however).
The problem actually lies in our state retirement system, PERS, which is a money sink guaranteeing huge benefits to state employees. Legislators and judges alike are on PERS, so it is unlikely that this will be fixed in the near future. But here it's become almost a proverb: "You won't fix the schools before you fix PERS."
This may be the case in other states as well, I don't know. My point is that shoveling more money into the public school system is not going to fix a problem whose root cause lies outside of it.
I always enjoy these little reminders of how close the American public is to hysteria.
Actually, every public is close to hysteria. It's the way we're wired. We act much more calmly in a crisis when there's one of us; on the other hand, we look for cues in others when we're in groups without leadership, resulting in inaction or horrendously bad herd-mentality decisions. That's one reason why drums, flags, and trumpets were such an effective tool in warfare until the 20th century; there are few more powerful and flexible ways to control a large group of individuals while making them face what is likely to be one of the most frightening experiences of their lives.
This is proven time and time again, in news reports about people attacked in New York in a crowd and onlookers just staring stupidly, in accounts by rioters who just got caught up in the swing of things, and during disasters when people see everyone else stampeding and run too. It's a psychological thing; which is why if you ever have a heart attack or are attacked and call for help, you should be as specific and as calm as possible: "You, over there in the red shirt! Yeah, you! I'm having a heart attack. I need you to call 911 immediately, please!" If you yell to a crowd, it is quite possible that everyone will just keep on going.
In this case, there were thousands of people with no leadership (the police force was pitifully small). All it took was a few people running, and they were instantly the leaders; everyone else immediately followed suit without even thinking. It's a classic example of mass psychology, and could have been easily avoided if the county government hadn't been making some idiotic decisions of their own.
Disclaimer: IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but I do read their books.:)
Played LORD all the time in the middle '90s. I'd use up all my connect time, have to connect the next day, and find out that someone had killed me.:(
In a way I suppose these were precursors, in that you had to spend all your available time playing them to make your character any good, score with the barmaid, etc...but since you were always kicked off after a period of time, and your character was auto-run instead of disappearing from the game whenever you weren't there, it wasn't quite like that. I'd say MUDs were more like MMORPGs than BBS door games, but maybe that's just me.
Real Ultimate Power was almost in the "All Your Base" class. I'm amazed it wasn't up in the top 10, and it certainly qualified as more of a fad than Friendster, which is more like a permanent fixture (among 12-year-old Asian girls, that is).
Real Ultimate Power was cool, and yes, by cool I mean totally sweet.
And I guess that pretty much sums up the views of many nerds reading this site. Not many of us (myself included, and obviously this person) get to see the ugly underbelly of totalitarian governments. Especially when we're protected by the guns, missiles, economy, and diplomacy of a powerful Western country which has safeguards built in to protect it from becoming totalitarian.
It's easy to think, "It can't be that bad", from our comfortable office chairs, in a country where we can say pretty much anything we like, with enough technology around us to buy a farm in some places of the world. It's even easy to think that way if one's an expat living in a totalitarian country, but under the protection of the most powerful republic in world at this time. As a poster in this thread mentioned, get a Chinese citizenship and say something even vaguely critical of the government, and see what happens.
A while back, someone posted an Ask Slashdot article on how to dissent in a dictatorship. I was amazed at so many utterly clueless posts: "Oh, just use Freenet or Tor", "Use strong encryption", "Don't leave any evidence because you're innocent until proven guilty". The assumption is that everyone in the world is as comfortable as we are and that the resources are just lying around.
The fact that there are so many Slashdot stories on abuse of power in the US proves that freedom of speech is anything but suppressed here. How many stories of abuse of power are there in China, on a Chinese news site? Abuse of power exists everywhere; it's the lack of information on it that you should worry about, not the other way around.
I won't even get into why we keep voting Republicrats in, that's the subject for a different post...but let me ask, how many parties were on the ballot in the last Chinese election? The fact that the two richest, largest parties control the American political system is because they advocate things that a majority of Americans like, not because they squash dissent with an iron fist.
Maybe that works when you are rich and can afford to defend your patent in court.
That's a problem with the court system, not the patent system.
Personally, I would never bother patenting an invention because I could never afford to sue anyone.
Then if your invention was any good, someone would copy it and sell it for a lower price. A small company, in general, cannot hope to sell a new invention for a lower price than a large one, because they need to make back R&D money. A large company, on the other hand, could make the money back via established products, by driving weaker competitors out of the market by an initially low price, or by selling addons for a high price (for instance, Sony is losing money on the PS2 with every sale, but the games and licensing for them make up for this).
If patents are so great for the lone inventor and so bad for large corporations, why are the large corporations the main supporters of intellectual property and patents in particular?
Because as I mentioned (you obviously read only one line of my post), the patent system has been damaged by intangible property such as software and algorithms. Notice that the biggest proponents of patents are not necessarily the wealthiest corporations; they are the wealthiest software corporations. There is a loophole in the patent system at present that they wish to keep open, and if it went away, a lot of this nonsense about intellectual property involving common-sense things would go away too.
I'm surprised this got modded up as much as it did. Because of this, I'll answer.
I still don't understand much of these laws. They seem stupid and dumb to me, designed to protect the rich corporations, not people.
Patent law exists for a reason; among other things, it keeps predatory groups (including rich corporations) from using small inventors as a free R&D playground. Imagine, you do all the work to develop a new product, then someone with $$$$ buys your product, reverse-engineers it, and sells an exact copy on the street, for a lower price.
The serious problems with the patent laws can, IMO, be traced to the emergence of three things: 1. Intangible technology (among which are software patents), which leads to people patenting the way things get done rather than a mechanism to do those things, 2. The inability of the patent office to keep up with the latest fads, leading to people patenting "Doing ______ on the Internet", and 3. The rise of intellectual-property "piranhas", small shops that patent the obvious, using the problems described above, then sueing anyone with cash in order to make a profit without ever producing a product or creating something original. The issue is in current patent law behavior, not in the fact we have such laws.
What if there is an idea that everyone would have, but someone out there patents it first? Does that mean that everyone else can not use that idea for their own benifit or profit?
You can use it for your own benefit. You cannot use it to make a profit if someone has patented it until the patent expires. One of the benefits of patents is that everyone can see the new idea and how to do it, so when the patent expires, anyone can use it. And yes, if several people have the idea at once, the one who applies first gets it; US history is full of such cases.
And an interesting question. Why can anyone make a tire?
Proof of prior art invalidates a patent. Now if it's a special kind of tire, then it would be patented...but frankly, if Ford figured out how to make a better tire, and spent their time and money to do it, chances are that it wasn't "easy and stupid", and that they ought to have a limited monopoly on the making of it for a short time (the patent).
Your argument, in your example of the poor black family dying in a car accident because of the lack of a high-priced patent tire, seems purely based on emotion. The fact is that if something like that happened, someone would get sued, no doubt about it, but not the holder of a high-priced patented application. Rather, the makers of a dangerous tire would, rightly, get sued.
I was going to mod up your post, but I decided to reply instead to play Devil's Advocate.
When that day comes, and they're distributed among all of the bars, restaurants, coffee shops and libraries in a a given area, no one will worry about the one or two Wi-Fi moochers in their establishment at a given moment.
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that coffeehouses are a lot more "hip" than the local McDonalds, and will still end up attracting more leeches even if restaurants get Wi-Fi. I notice posters above complaining about iPod-wearing hipsters with laptops, Wi-Fi, and a strong desire to live their interactionless lifestyle in a coffee shop all day. For this kind of person (and this is a reach; I haven't studied iPod-hipster psychology much), a coffee shop might be a place to be seen as well as to surf (or blog, these days). The fact that coffee is served there, of course, is incidental. The other reason why a coffee shop gets picked is that in a restaurant or bar, they usually ask you right away what you want. In a coffee shop, you go up to the counter and ask them. You can hide out all day in a comfortable seat and no one will bother you about any mundane issue such as actually ordering food or drink.
All this leads up to a darker view of the future: When Wi-Fi is everywhere, Wi-Fi leeches will still gather in the places they want to be seen in. Mickey D's and Joe's Restaurant will have a few businessmen or college students using Wi-Fi in them, and the coffee shops will be jammed with the latest trend in unbearable coolness, madly leeching bandwidth for free.
Couldn't agree more. As nerds, it's easy to recommend gimmick after technological gimmick. It's not so easy to imagine ourselves in a repressive regime. Consider that the very possession of cryptographic software, or even a computer, in some countries marks a person, if not as guilty, at least as under deep suspicion. I have heard that in North Korea, probably at this point the most repressive regime on the planet, radios are forbidden to all but a select few for fear that the populace might hear Voice of America or something. With restrictions like this, arguments on whether the dissident should use FreeNet or Tor suddenly sound pretty stupid.
As the parent poster quoth, movies about the Mob show an excellent example of information security. The top people only talk to a few guys, who talk to a few more. In "The Godfather" (the book), Don Corleone won't even use a telephone because he's afraid the FBI will be able to splice together tape to frame him even if he reveals nothing over the phone. Now that's paranoid.
The best way not to get busted is not to fall under suspicion (in a truly repressive country, once you're suspected, you're already tried, convicted, and headed for prison or worse). And if you get caught, the next best thing is not to know your fellow dissidents, so the authorities can't make you sing.
Sure, there are plenty of hard workers in government. However, the fact is that a huge percentage are lazy and do very little all day while looking busy to the outside worker. They are heavily protected by unions and it's almost impossible to get fired.
Before you come down too hard on lazy government workers, keep in mind that there's a lot of politics in government workplaces (ya think?). A lot of little people building little empires, then stepping on the wrong person and getting smacked down. And when a petty person comes to power, generally (due to the unions) he can't fire someone, so a common form of revenge is to deny all the person's projects. Take all his work away. Leave him twiddling his thumbs behind a desk all day. CBS News covered an instance of this at the NIH, of a doctor who hasn't done any work for six years for this very reason.
One other thing that must be understood. Often, a government agency exists to protect the status quo -- which in America is mostly a good thing. Before any armchair revolutionaries start posting about class wars, oppression, Iraq, Bush, or social justice, I understand that the status quo isn't perfect and is unlikely to be -- I said mostly. Lights stay on, clean water runs when a tap gets turned on, criminals are usually forced to pay for their crimes if they get caught, kids get reasonably educated year after year, people can't build a firetrap and call it a house, we don't get invaded and pwned by some other country, etc -- YMMV, but as a general rule this is what happens; and this is not necessarily what happens in certain other countries. The government does not exist to expand and make a profit; in most cases it exists to maintain something. Public order, dam operation, roads, forests, public health -- these are all maintainance jobs.
The downside of this is that a maintainance job attracts timeservers who only want to warm a seat until retirement. In many cases it also attracts anal-retentives who are terrified of change or anything outside strict procedure signed in triplicate -- droids, in other words. Plenty of brilliant people get into government -- it's just that it's easy to get worn down, to quit in disgust, or to excel and bubble out of the system, ending up in a managerial desk and never doing what you're good at again.
The other downside is that lack of growth produces stagnation, so a department has a dilemma; expand unecessarily, or continue doing the same old thing, usually getting forgotten by the politicians (who tend to give money to the sexiest things). Generally the former solution is picked, which is why that old saying in government of "spend all your money this year, or we won't get more next year" is 100% true.
I was agreeing with him all the way up until he started extolling "Smallville". He's saying Star Trek was sci-fi in which the characters were not allowed to develop, and then mentions SMALLVILLE as an alternative?!
Smallville is basically "The OC". Or Gilmore Girls, or 7th Heaven. Except they happen to have some kryptonite and a kid with super powers in this particular show. So it's sci-fi. Right?
My wife and I used to watch it until we realized that we were able to predict which teen was next going to turn into an angst-ridden (or sex-crazed) temporary supervillain about half an hour before the first preview. At this point, we quietly stopped watching.
I loved Ender's Game (yeah, I know that's a real controversial thing to say to Slashdotters), and I liked some of the authors and shows he mentioned in his article...but Smallville was worse than Enterprise ever was.
I use Knoppix or TomsRTBT when I need a "full" featured OS to troubleshoot with.
That's good if you can afford to take your system down and boot from CD, but not if a mission-critical app is on there and a minor part is malfunctioning (which was happening in this case). Although I'm sure that if you had a debugging suite on disk, mounted that, and chrooted to the mount directory you could get away with some operations.
The other thing is that some systems are not necessarily bootable in Knoppix -- particularly non-x86.:)
I don't mind hardening a system at all, but if something goes wrong, it needs to be fixable by less-than-superhuman means, at 3AM, and probably from a remote location, or any problem starts becoming a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
What if you're up in a tree with binoculars trying to hide your presence (similar to using stealth techniques)? Is that legal?
Yes, if it's your tree or if you have permission to be in it. Again, suspicious, but not a crime.
Now, what if a half naked coed walks by the window 20 times a day? Still legal?
It may be. You wouldn't stand naked by a window facing someone else's house and not expect to be seen. That's what curtains are for. Although there might be state anti-stalking laws that complicate a case like this.
The use of basic network security tools such as portscanners should not automatically be considered a crime any more than climbing a tree or using binoculars should be.
SANS seems to take it for granted that portscanning is illegal and immoral. However, I can't find anything on Google, and of course, IANAL. Is there any case precedent in the United States for the illegality of portscanning?
I would hazard a guess that it is not illegal. It is the equivalent of looking at a house from a public vantage point to see if any windows are open. Although such an action is suspicious (the person may next try to get in through a window), it certainly isn't illegal, at least in the United States. SANS seems to be overreacting.
Comparing this to washing hands is probably the best point you have. Like washing hands, it's regularly drummed into people's heads, and just as regularly goes ignored by a minimum of 30% of people.
As for your idea of influential people decrying spam, it's pretty weak, since it assumes total obedience in those influenced. Marital infidelity is regularly condemned by Oprah and probably 99% of religious leaders (and usually by the president, although we should make an exception at least in the case of the last president ;) ). It still happens all the time.
I'm surprised, so far no BOFHs have posted yet. Here are some ways to save time that probably haven't been mentioned in the book:
For all the humorless pedants that are about to reply saying "This will get you fired"...what was your username again?
Saying "one is lead to believe" instead of "I believe" is just another form of lying.
I don't know about you, but in several of my high school English classes, using a personal pronoun for anything nonfiction, short of an autobiography, was considered poor style. In one of my college science classes, using a personal pronoun in a lab journal entry resulted in losing 10% of your grade on that lab. I'm guessing that saying "I believe" violates some stylistic rule of journalism.
Of course, I'm replying to a poster who said "one is lead to believe" instead of "one is led to believe", so perhaps you were asleep in English class when this got discussed. ;)
I've already seen hundreds of "The US is a dictatorship based on world domination, RIAA MPAA Microsoft Bush corporations hate hate hate" comments as a result of this article. Before everyone starts screaming about the same thing in a frenzy of knee-jerk reactions, keep in mind that many developing nations run factories dedicated to producing illegal copies of software, mostly American, Japanese, and European. In Indonesia one used to be able to find whole software stores with not one legitimate copy of a product in them (probably still can; I was there about six months ago). Lawmakers and judges in these countries officially support intellectual property, but wink at it in practice.
I don't know, let me put this question up to Slashdot's tender mercies: Do we advocate illegal copying of commercial software, and if so, why? Although I know we're supposed to be for the "little guy", and against the corporations, these guys aren't Johnny Downloader; they're companies that make their living solely from copying the products of other people's labor. Is it because "information wants to be free", and that the very idea of exchanging money for software is evil? Is it because Microsoft or Redhat or Oracle are evil, and they should be punished for their crimes by the piracy of their software?
The United States has a big software business. It has copyright laws that are, on paper, agreed to by other countries by international agreement. So why the big fuss when they want them to be enforced?
A quick side note: The availability of illegal proprietary software hinders the adoption of open source in developing nations because Windows is so readily available (about $3 in USD per copy). In addition, the GPL is an intellectual property agreement. If we stand for the violation of commercial intellectual property, we must allow for the violation of open-source intellectual property. Legally, they are no different.
Here at slashdot, we don't believe in such things as god or religion, it's just the twisting of words & IT related stories in a bitterly geekish way for us.
Speak for yourself, please. Some of Slashdot (including myself) take such beliefs 100% seriously. As for myself, I believe as much in God and in the tenets of the Christian religion as I do in the laws of physics.
It makes me sick to believe that these beliefs are actually taken seriously in social circles, and even more scary, in the educational field.
Prior to the early 1920s or so, these beliefs were taken quite seriously in the educational field (in the United States, anyway, and this depends heavily on geographical area). Depending on the social circle, they have either always been taken seriously, were once taken seriously and now paid only lip service, or are no longer taken seriously.
You appear to be worried more about the very idea that people will believe in religion, than about any consequence proceeding from it. There's a reason why "these people" are all over the place. Science alone cannot provide a good reason for existence. Religion can.
The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day.
Umm, any hard data (from an impartial site, please) for this? I'm guessing you pulled this out of your ass.
Reason why I don't believe it is that my building has thousands of computers, usually running all the time. One circus tent, according to De Boers (warning: large PDF), is 44x44x12 meters, or somewhat less than 23,232 cubic meters Your quote means that every day a computer uses about 46,464 cubic meters of coal every day.
To keep things in perspective, the United States produced about 2936986.3 tons of coal per day in 2003. Let's say that coal is about 52 pounds per cubic foot on average. That means we produced an average of 112,961,000 cubic feet of coal, or 3,196,796.29 cubic meters, per day. (2936986 * 2000 / 360 /52 * .0283), tons/year->lbs/year->lbs/day->ft^3/day->m^3/day)
If my math is correct (and I did do this in kind of a hurry, so be kind), your statement would mean that only 68 computers (3196796.29 / 46464) running all year long would exhaust the yearly coal production of the United States.
The parents that DO home school their kids probably do so because they know that they are qualified (and probably have some actual classroom teaching experience in the past).
To give a Slashdot-specific example of why that's such a ridiculous thing to say, that's like saying, "The nerds who recompile their Linux kernels probably do so because they know they are qualified (and probably have submitted Linux code in the past).
Homeschooling is very similar to Linux hacking, actually. Like hacking, a lot of amateurs are in it, doing it on an extremely low budget. It's easy to screw up, but most mistakes aren't permanent unless you don't learn from them.
Also like Linux hacking, you get a range of users, from the person who decides to try a year of homeschool and eventually sends the kid back to public...to the individualist who might like public schools better if they didn't have so many nasty quirks, but feels better education can be done on his/her own...to the complete zealot who homeschools his/her kids because public schools are Evil(tm).
As in any field with a lot of amateurs (again, including the Linux community), you get some very poor results and some spectacular results that were not necessarily expected, depending on the parents. Homeschooling is unpredictable but not as hard for the amateur to do as one might think.
I'm guessing that the parent poster, with frequent use of the word "probably", has not been homeschooled or known many homeschoolers. I have. My parents ended up homeschooling all of their four kids (including myself, until high school), without previous training as teachers. IMHO, they achieved superior results to the public school system, and did it on a shoestring.
I'm surprised, actually, that so many Slashdotters, in such a do-it-yourself community, are skeptical of homeschooling. It's a rare kid who really doesn't like to learn; what kills the drive to learn is busywork, a mass-produced and cookie-cutter atmosphere (those who work in cubicles will know what I mean), and a culture of achievement through on-time mediocrity. A great deal of these factors are sadly present in many public schools.
- Raise taxes. Gap! yes! raise *YOUR* taxes so that *YOUR* children may go to school and have a chance at a good education and a good future, a concept America as a whole has completely forgotten for some reason.
I don't know about your state, but in Oregon we've raised taxes repeatedly for schools. In Multnomah County, whose residents never met a tax they didn't like, we raised taxes again via a county income tax, after one too many tax increases were suggested in Oregon and citizens outside of Multnomah started rebelling, rejecting the new tax. It's only sufficed to keep the schools afloat for another few years, and the tax (temporary) is soon to end (I fully expect local politicians to bamboozle the public into making it permanent, however).
The problem actually lies in our state retirement system, PERS, which is a money sink guaranteeing huge benefits to state employees. Legislators and judges alike are on PERS, so it is unlikely that this will be fixed in the near future. But here it's become almost a proverb: "You won't fix the schools before you fix PERS."
This may be the case in other states as well, I don't know. My point is that shoveling more money into the public school system is not going to fix a problem whose root cause lies outside of it.
I always enjoy these little reminders of how close the American public is to hysteria.
Actually, every public is close to hysteria. It's the way we're wired. We act much more calmly in a crisis when there's one of us; on the other hand, we look for cues in others when we're in groups without leadership, resulting in inaction or horrendously bad herd-mentality decisions. That's one reason why drums, flags, and trumpets were such an effective tool in warfare until the 20th century; there are few more powerful and flexible ways to control a large group of individuals while making them face what is likely to be one of the most frightening experiences of their lives.
This is proven time and time again, in news reports about people attacked in New York in a crowd and onlookers just staring stupidly, in accounts by rioters who just got caught up in the swing of things, and during disasters when people see everyone else stampeding and run too. It's a psychological thing; which is why if you ever have a heart attack or are attacked and call for help, you should be as specific and as calm as possible: "You, over there in the red shirt! Yeah, you! I'm having a heart attack. I need you to call 911 immediately, please!" If you yell to a crowd, it is quite possible that everyone will just keep on going.
In this case, there were thousands of people with no leadership (the police force was pitifully small). All it took was a few people running, and they were instantly the leaders; everyone else immediately followed suit without even thinking. It's a classic example of mass psychology, and could have been easily avoided if the county government hadn't been making some idiotic decisions of their own.
Disclaimer: IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but I do read their books. :)
Played LORD all the time in the middle '90s. I'd use up all my connect time, have to connect the next day, and find out that someone had killed me. :(
In a way I suppose these were precursors, in that you had to spend all your available time playing them to make your character any good, score with the barmaid, etc...but since you were always kicked off after a period of time, and your character was auto-run instead of disappearing from the game whenever you weren't there, it wasn't quite like that. I'd say MUDs were more like MMORPGs than BBS door games, but maybe that's just me.
Real Ultimate Power was almost in the "All Your Base" class. I'm amazed it wasn't up in the top 10, and it certainly qualified as more of a fad than Friendster, which is more like a permanent fixture (among 12-year-old Asian girls, that is).
Real Ultimate Power was cool, and yes, by cool I mean totally sweet.
And I guess that pretty much sums up the views of many nerds reading this site. Not many of us (myself included, and obviously this person) get to see the ugly underbelly of totalitarian governments. Especially when we're protected by the guns, missiles, economy, and diplomacy of a powerful Western country which has safeguards built in to protect it from becoming totalitarian.
It's easy to think, "It can't be that bad", from our comfortable office chairs, in a country where we can say pretty much anything we like, with enough technology around us to buy a farm in some places of the world. It's even easy to think that way if one's an expat living in a totalitarian country, but under the protection of the most powerful republic in world at this time. As a poster in this thread mentioned, get a Chinese citizenship and say something even vaguely critical of the government, and see what happens.
A while back, someone posted an Ask Slashdot article on how to dissent in a dictatorship. I was amazed at so many utterly clueless posts: "Oh, just use Freenet or Tor", "Use strong encryption", "Don't leave any evidence because you're innocent until proven guilty". The assumption is that everyone in the world is as comfortable as we are and that the resources are just lying around.
The fact that there are so many Slashdot stories on abuse of power in the US proves that freedom of speech is anything but suppressed here. How many stories of abuse of power are there in China, on a Chinese news site? Abuse of power exists everywhere; it's the lack of information on it that you should worry about, not the other way around.
I won't even get into why we keep voting Republicrats in, that's the subject for a different post...but let me ask, how many parties were on the ballot in the last Chinese election? The fact that the two richest, largest parties control the American political system is because they advocate things that a majority of Americans like, not because they squash dissent with an iron fist.
Maybe that works when you are rich and can afford to defend your patent in court.
That's a problem with the court system, not the patent system.
Personally, I would never bother patenting an invention because I could never afford to sue anyone.
Then if your invention was any good, someone would copy it and sell it for a lower price. A small company, in general, cannot hope to sell a new invention for a lower price than a large one, because they need to make back R&D money. A large company, on the other hand, could make the money back via established products, by driving weaker competitors out of the market by an initially low price, or by selling addons for a high price (for instance, Sony is losing money on the PS2 with every sale, but the games and licensing for them make up for this).
If patents are so great for the lone inventor and so bad for large corporations, why are the large corporations the main supporters of intellectual property and patents in particular?
Because as I mentioned (you obviously read only one line of my post), the patent system has been damaged by intangible property such as software and algorithms. Notice that the biggest proponents of patents are not necessarily the wealthiest corporations; they are the wealthiest software corporations. There is a loophole in the patent system at present that they wish to keep open, and if it went away, a lot of this nonsense about intellectual property involving common-sense things would go away too.
I'm surprised this got modded up as much as it did. Because of this, I'll answer.
I still don't understand much of these laws. They seem stupid and dumb to me, designed to protect the rich corporations, not people.
Patent law exists for a reason; among other things, it keeps predatory groups (including rich corporations) from using small inventors as a free R&D playground. Imagine, you do all the work to develop a new product, then someone with $$$$ buys your product, reverse-engineers it, and sells an exact copy on the street, for a lower price.
The serious problems with the patent laws can, IMO, be traced to the emergence of three things: 1. Intangible technology (among which are software patents), which leads to people patenting the way things get done rather than a mechanism to do those things, 2. The inability of the patent office to keep up with the latest fads, leading to people patenting "Doing ______ on the Internet", and 3. The rise of intellectual-property "piranhas", small shops that patent the obvious, using the problems described above, then sueing anyone with cash in order to make a profit without ever producing a product or creating something original. The issue is in current patent law behavior, not in the fact we have such laws.
What if there is an idea that everyone would have, but someone out there patents it first? Does that mean that everyone else can not use that idea for their own benifit or profit?
You can use it for your own benefit. You cannot use it to make a profit if someone has patented it until the patent expires. One of the benefits of patents is that everyone can see the new idea and how to do it, so when the patent expires, anyone can use it. And yes, if several people have the idea at once, the one who applies first gets it; US history is full of such cases.
And an interesting question. Why can anyone make a tire?
Proof of prior art invalidates a patent. Now if it's a special kind of tire, then it would be patented...but frankly, if Ford figured out how to make a better tire, and spent their time and money to do it, chances are that it wasn't "easy and stupid", and that they ought to have a limited monopoly on the making of it for a short time (the patent).
Your argument, in your example of the poor black family dying in a car accident because of the lack of a high-priced patent tire, seems purely based on emotion. The fact is that if something like that happened, someone would get sued, no doubt about it, but not the holder of a high-priced patented application. Rather, the makers of a dangerous tire would, rightly, get sued.
If you even read the summary, you'd see that this pact was started by the US and the UK.
I know Slashdotters are famous for not reading the article...but geez.
This isn't over! Hopefully some "activist judge" will overrule it and....
Oh, wait. Crap.
I was going to mod up your post, but I decided to reply instead to play Devil's Advocate.
When that day comes, and they're distributed among all of the bars, restaurants, coffee shops and libraries in a a given area, no one will worry about the one or two Wi-Fi moochers in their establishment at a given moment.
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that coffeehouses are a lot more "hip" than the local McDonalds, and will still end up attracting more leeches even if restaurants get Wi-Fi. I notice posters above complaining about iPod-wearing hipsters with laptops, Wi-Fi, and a strong desire to live their interactionless lifestyle in a coffee shop all day. For this kind of person (and this is a reach; I haven't studied iPod-hipster psychology much), a coffee shop might be a place to be seen as well as to surf (or blog, these days). The fact that coffee is served there, of course, is incidental. The other reason why a coffee shop gets picked is that in a restaurant or bar, they usually ask you right away what you want. In a coffee shop, you go up to the counter and ask them. You can hide out all day in a comfortable seat and no one will bother you about any mundane issue such as actually ordering food or drink.
All this leads up to a darker view of the future: When Wi-Fi is everywhere, Wi-Fi leeches will still gather in the places they want to be seen in. Mickey D's and Joe's Restaurant will have a few businessmen or college students using Wi-Fi in them, and the coffee shops will be jammed with the latest trend in unbearable coolness, madly leeching bandwidth for free.
Couldn't agree more. As nerds, it's easy to recommend gimmick after technological gimmick. It's not so easy to imagine ourselves in a repressive regime. Consider that the very possession of cryptographic software, or even a computer, in some countries marks a person, if not as guilty, at least as under deep suspicion. I have heard that in North Korea, probably at this point the most repressive regime on the planet, radios are forbidden to all but a select few for fear that the populace might hear Voice of America or something. With restrictions like this, arguments on whether the dissident should use FreeNet or Tor suddenly sound pretty stupid.
As the parent poster quoth, movies about the Mob show an excellent example of information security. The top people only talk to a few guys, who talk to a few more. In "The Godfather" (the book), Don Corleone won't even use a telephone because he's afraid the FBI will be able to splice together tape to frame him even if he reveals nothing over the phone. Now that's paranoid.
The best way not to get busted is not to fall under suspicion (in a truly repressive country, once you're suspected, you're already tried, convicted, and headed for prison or worse). And if you get caught, the next best thing is not to know your fellow dissidents, so the authorities can't make you sing.
(BTW, I *highly* recommend checking out World Wind if you haven't seen it. It is one of the most awesome programs ever to exist, bar none.)
Unless you're running a non-Microsoft operating system. Guess I'll have to wait until I get home.
Sure, there are plenty of hard workers in government. However, the fact is that a huge percentage are lazy and do very little all day while looking busy to the outside worker. They are heavily protected by unions and it's almost impossible to get fired.
Before you come down too hard on lazy government workers, keep in mind that there's a lot of politics in government workplaces (ya think?). A lot of little people building little empires, then stepping on the wrong person and getting smacked down. And when a petty person comes to power, generally (due to the unions) he can't fire someone, so a common form of revenge is to deny all the person's projects. Take all his work away. Leave him twiddling his thumbs behind a desk all day. CBS News covered an instance of this at the NIH, of a doctor who hasn't done any work for six years for this very reason.
One other thing that must be understood. Often, a government agency exists to protect the status quo -- which in America is mostly a good thing. Before any armchair revolutionaries start posting about class wars, oppression, Iraq, Bush, or social justice, I understand that the status quo isn't perfect and is unlikely to be -- I said mostly. Lights stay on, clean water runs when a tap gets turned on, criminals are usually forced to pay for their crimes if they get caught, kids get reasonably educated year after year, people can't build a firetrap and call it a house, we don't get invaded and pwned by some other country, etc -- YMMV, but as a general rule this is what happens; and this is not necessarily what happens in certain other countries. The government does not exist to expand and make a profit; in most cases it exists to maintain something. Public order, dam operation, roads, forests, public health -- these are all maintainance jobs.
The downside of this is that a maintainance job attracts timeservers who only want to warm a seat until retirement. In many cases it also attracts anal-retentives who are terrified of change or anything outside strict procedure signed in triplicate -- droids, in other words. Plenty of brilliant people get into government -- it's just that it's easy to get worn down, to quit in disgust, or to excel and bubble out of the system, ending up in a managerial desk and never doing what you're good at again.
The other downside is that lack of growth produces stagnation, so a department has a dilemma; expand unecessarily, or continue doing the same old thing, usually getting forgotten by the politicians (who tend to give money to the sexiest things). Generally the former solution is picked, which is why that old saying in government of "spend all your money this year, or we won't get more next year" is 100% true.
I was agreeing with him all the way up until he started extolling "Smallville". He's saying Star Trek was sci-fi in which the characters were not allowed to develop, and then mentions SMALLVILLE as an alternative?!
Smallville is basically "The OC". Or Gilmore Girls, or 7th Heaven. Except they happen to have some kryptonite and a kid with super powers in this particular show. So it's sci-fi. Right?
My wife and I used to watch it until we realized that we were able to predict which teen was next going to turn into an angst-ridden (or sex-crazed) temporary supervillain about half an hour before the first preview. At this point, we quietly stopped watching.
I loved Ender's Game (yeah, I know that's a real controversial thing to say to Slashdotters), and I liked some of the authors and shows he mentioned in his article...but Smallville was worse than Enterprise ever was.
So when, oh when, will someone give me an RPG heroine who actually wears suitable clothing?
When the adolescent, videogame-playing male demographic ceases to exist.
You've got a long wait.
I use Knoppix or TomsRTBT when I need a "full" featured OS to troubleshoot with.
That's good if you can afford to take your system down and boot from CD, but not if a mission-critical app is on there and a minor part is malfunctioning (which was happening in this case). Although I'm sure that if you had a debugging suite on disk, mounted that, and chrooted to the mount directory you could get away with some operations.
The other thing is that some systems are not necessarily bootable in Knoppix -- particularly non-x86. :)
I don't mind hardening a system at all, but if something goes wrong, it needs to be fixable by less-than-superhuman means, at 3AM, and probably from a remote location, or any problem starts becoming a nightmare.