Paranoid admins who like to practice "information denial techniques" on their systems, making them essentially unfixable. The thinking is, "We don't want a hacker to have any information about our network. We don't want him to even know what kind of system he's on if he ever does get in. So we've got to hide as much system stuff as possible."
We've got quite a few of those here, most of who have had "security at ANY COST" drilled into them by the higherups. Here are a few gems:
One of my managers from a few years back forbid putting manpages on any DMZ systems. Just in case a hacker got in and needed to know how to use a command. Of course, if it's 3AM and we're working on something esoteric in there, we wouldn't have to walk to another system to check the manpages. We keep all the commandline args in our heads. And manpages, as we all know, are secret information -- they're not available on Google. No sir.
The other day, someone asked me how we could hide the route info in our outgoing email headers indicating that internal servers (192.168, etc) were sending mail to our mail gateway. Best if no one has any clue what mail servers sent the mail. At least they didn't ask me to spoof all senders to secret@myorg.gov -- I was expecting that, by that point.
Our password policy requires a password that has letters, alphanumeric chars, and numbers. Every thirty days, you've got to change your password. OK, that's not so bad. But wait, there's more! It remembers your last three passwords and won't let you use them. Up to a short time ago, if you entered a password wrong three consecutive times, it locked you out of all systems on the network until further notice. The potential DOS is left as an exercise for the reader.
A short time ago, one of our admins created a "locked down" DMZ system incorporating the minimum amount of packages he could use. Something went haywire in our network connectivity using an update program, so I tried to do some troubleshooting. Telnet to the remote server on port 80 to see if we could get HTTP connectivity? Nope, telnet (the CLIENT) was gone. How 'bout snoop? Nope, I couldn't watch network packets short of going into the room and plugging in an ethernet tap. I ended up doing the same stuff from another system in the DMZ that had not been locked down in this fashion.
I'm sure there's another super-paranoid person on this topic who may flame me for this and say I'm a rotten admin for keeping any debugging tools on a system. But a lot of people forget that 50% of security is keeping the bad guys out, and the other 50% is allowing the good guys to do their job without a huge hassle. Sure, having people logging in via telnet, or allowing "password" as a password sucks. But timely patching, keeping an eye on your system services, EDUCATING YOUR USERS, and having a good firewall policy will keep far more trouble out than instituting the Fourth Reich on a production system.
I had one of those (the original Kaypro). No hard disk...but who needs a hard disk when you have two 360K disk drives? And no DOS...but who needs DOS when you've got good ol' CP/M?
Like (IIRC) the Osborne, it was portable under the military definition; a team of two soldiers would have been able to lug it through a battlefield without a problem. A 12-year-old who hadn't hit his growth spurt yet was SOL, however.
With a built-in 6" green TTY monitor, internal 300 baud modem (which I never managed to get working), a collection of the most frustrating pac-man clones ever made, and WordStar, which is probably one of the best word processors in existence to this day, the Kaypro was a force to be feared.
I got a look at some of these units for sale on eBay a couple weeks back. Ah, memory lane. Looking at this behemoth-sized luggable from my childhood, I felt like a guy who, now happily married, sees at a bus stop the girl he had a huge crush on back when he was a kid. For a second I thought of bidding...
Then I realized what an ugly bitch the Kaypro was now, came to my senses, and used an emulator instead.
I wasn't complaining about the fact that everyone pays for the school system; I was merely mentioning that there was precedent for paying for a city-wide service that not everyone (homeschoolers or those taught at private schools, for instance), but at least a clear majority, uses. The goods or evils of the public school system will perhaps be the subject of a different post.
I know I'm going to get some flames for this because quite a lot of Slashdotters seem to believe that everything should be free, but I'm not absolutely comfortable with free city-sponsored wireless.
Telecom companies rank just below HMOs on the vileness scale, but having Chicago put up wireless APs everywhere is not going to result in a socialist Internet dream where the city pays for your pr0n downloads. What it does result in is some lucky corporation's dream, where everyone in Chicago pays the city (some more indirectly than others) to pay a single contracted telecom to give them wireless Internet.
Not everyone is going to use this service. That's OK, not everyone uses the school system, but we all pay for it...but in this case, I'm not even sure that a clear majority in Chicago use the Internet. And even if they do, some use it much less than others. Most Slashdotters probably would have a hard time going back from their broadband accounts to $10/mo dialup, but the average person who checks their AOL email once a day is probably under no pressure to switch anytime soon.
Furthermore, due to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which I firmly believe in, I expect the city would end up having to do (or contract out) major security work to handle people with too much time on their hands. The issue of censorship comes up as well -- the city now acts as the ISP for a host of activities that may include breaking Illinois state law. This can probably be ironed out, but why deal with it at all?
As much as I love getting stuff free, I have to say that this screams "boondoggle". The potential waste and corruption (this is the Chicago city government we're talking about) of a deal like this, as well as the small number of potential beneficiaries, makes me very dubious.
What do I like better? Portland's Personal Telco Project. It's not sponsored by (read: under control of) the city government. It's done by private contributors who choose their own ISP, allowing a wider range of solutions to be chosen, are responsible for the cells of their own network, and -- apparently -- make group decisions by consensus as opposed to mandate (as the city would be the primary controller of a municipal network, I'm guessing most decisions would be by mandate of some controlling committee). There is also less potential for fuckwad-related damage, since the people who put these up generally are nerds or assisted by nerds who know what they're doing. In short, it's much more decentralized and, IMHO, essentially more free.
Of course, it's not as easy to get city-wide municipal Internet the Personal Telco way as it is to simply tell all your fellow citizens to pay for a luxury that you want.
So it stands to reason that all you fuckwits who elected an administration who believes that a corporation has the same civil and legal rights as a person woyuld also champion laws that turn civil or contract disputes into criminal laws.
As explained ad nauseum above, this is in regard to Chinese counterfeiting operations that are winked at by the PRC and are hurting US businesses. This isn't about those Britney Spears tracks you just downloaded, or the neighbor's WoW CD you copied; this is about major operations which are strictly designed to copy someone else's product en masse to make money for the group doing it. This is exactly the sort of group that the government should be prosecuting (as opposed to P2Pers, etc). The difference between file sharers and these groups is like the difference between someone going over the speed limit and a scam artist who intentionally has accidents to fraudulently collect the insurance money.
It really IS time to overthrow the state.
No. It isn't time. If it was, you'd be organizing people or joining an organization to overthrow the state (such organizations do exist). Instead, you are bitching on Slashdot like the rest of us. This is a clear sign to me that you don't really think it's time to overthrow the state; rather, you're just saying it because you're frustrated and it sounds like a nice thing to say.
We tried on a pair of goggles that gave the person wearing them a virtual cinema, projecting what appeared to be a 80" screen for TV, movies, and computer systems (!) in front of the user, complete with stereo sound. The cost? About $400.
They sell these in the US on eBay. And in my personal experience, they are truly horrible.
I bought a pair for about $400. They're basically two small LCD TVs with a headband around them. You can watch a movie with a halfway-decent picture on them, but keep in mind that they're TV resolution and using them for anything with text (games, etc) is pretty much impossible. I realized that I had wasted $400, but as long as I marketed them on eBay as "VR Goggles L@@k!@!1!" I knew I could get some sucker to buy them for the same price I had bought them for. Which one did. I wonder just how many hands those goggles went through before they reached me; how many people tried them, realized how impractical they were, and put 'em back up on eBay?
I know the goggles were probably cool in Akihabara, but I assure you that once you've got them into the States, their coolness factor immediately plummets. They're neat gadgets, but any extended use will reveal their miserable shortcomings.
Really, this just underscores the article. The Japanese love the whiz-bang factor of a new gadget. Americans are more conservative in their gadget-buying, and much more likely to take the extended-use factor into account.
This extends across Asian cultures; the Chinese are (again from personal experience) also much more likely to buy a gadget based on its coolness, without caring much about how useful it will be in the long term.
On the contrary, that's one of the worst examples you could possibly think of. Go into a Fry's Electronics or some other store with a DDR display, and you will almost always see some teenager dancing on it. And there's no one as fashion-conscious or worried about being "uncool" as a teenager.
I'm not even sure tech in general is dorky anymore here (now take this with a grain of salt, this is a Slashdotter talking about tech). Even building one's computer from parts, once a pastime strictly confined to nerds, is now a Vin-Diesel-esque affair of snapping together neon-colored parts that reminds one more of ricing out a Honda than building a computer. Video games now boast celebrity appearances, product placements, and midnight openings.
Let's face it. The guys who stuffed us in lockers and stole our lunch money back in the 80s came back, and this time they stole our nerdy hobbies. What was once geeky is now cool. Even here in the US.
There's more too it than that...in many non-Western (especially Islamic) countries, the left hand is used for only one thing. I don't know if "cack-handed" comes from this...use...of the hand, but if so, it's certainly an amazing coincidence.
(For those who still haven't caught on to why you never eat or shake hands with the left hand in most Islamic countries, think about how you'd answer the call of nature in a hot country where water pressure is a luxury and everything starts to smell in the heat.)
Drawing a parallel between religion's animosity toward the left wing and medieval persecution of left handed people is rather weird considering that much of the left wing used to be religious (the Progressives of the early last century, who pushed the Constitutional ban on liquor, had their roots in the Christian Temperance movement). The religious right is hostile towards the left because of its belief (rightful or not is a subject for a flamewar) that the left is composed of people who spit on, and want to eventually abolish, the Christian religion. Not because of the side of the room they sat on a hundred years ago.
Yeah, and it used to be the case that to make a purchase you had to leave your house.... I'm bored of people who say that it's only revolution if people bleed, it's only activism if you spend a night in jail, it's only significant if it's significant in the particular way prescribed by the self-appointed arbiter of meaningfulness.
The original poster's first statement gives away the "blogosphere" mentality. Blogging to information is like dot-coms were to business. Like online companies, blogs are a great new tool that can have quicker turnaround than their brick-and-mortar, dead-tree counterparts. Some blogs, like some dot-coms, are quite good. Millions have sucked and will continue to suck.
The other thing that the two phenomenons have in common is the thousands of self-important pundits that come out of the woodwork claiming that their Pretty Good pet project is, in fact, Great. If anyone disagrees, the immediate response implies that the one disagreeing is disturbingly primitive and behind the times, and after all, who is he to judge their masterpiece anyway? If one can't give an intelligent counterexample, it always helps to introduce relativism into the argument.
By now, we are jaded by bizzare ideas like this. But most chinese are still relatively naive about such things, and so they get caught up in the frenzy.
China had groups that got into these "bizarre ideas" long before Western cynicism. A recent example (by Chinese standards) that Westerners might remember was the Boxer Rebellion, very similar to the Falun Gong, which occured about a hundred years ago.
I wouldn't write the Falun Gongs off as unsophisticated rubes just yet. There's a reason why the Beijing government wants to get rid of them, and it's not because they care how superstitous their people are; China is filled with superstitions. It's because when lots of people in China (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, other countries) start joining a religious society, it's generally because they're tired of their political society. Those guys may sound like they're talking daft superstition, but what they're really talking about is a change in the government, and I'm quite sure that Beijing knows this.
Things like, call centers, could easily be distributed. VPN (or Internet)-based helpdesk app for support, paid per call handled. While you're "logged in", calls to the company PBX line for helpdesk are forwarded to a random selection of your phone numbers.
Won't work, for two reasons.
1. Corporations don't trust the call center worker much farther than they can throw Mt. Everest, and therefore are afraid that (s)he might be screwing around at home instead of being busy. My place of work (not a call center) won't allow anyone but managers to work from home. My wife's call center did not allow employees to do anything when calls were not coming in. You couldn't read a magazine in slack hours, etc; you could only read the "official guidelines" (i.e. boring rules written in legalese). They're also randomly monitored -- "this call may be recorded for quality assurance".
2. The home is often a noisy, unprofessional place. The dogs barking or birds squawking in the background, screaming kids, the dishwasher...the list goes on and on. In addition, most call center people are not "IT professionals". They're assembly-line workers -- they are trained to do a very specific job from a script, and if anything deviates from this pattern, they call a supervisor. This doesn't work too well if the worker is at home.
3. Wages are already low enough. Call center workers are making absolute minimum wage, or maybe a couple dollars more than that, which invalidates any cost savings argument.
It would be nice to have VPN play a greater part in work, but I doubt the call center mentality (the two I used in my examples are Livebridge and ACS, formerly CyberRep -- both in Portland, OR) is geared to handle this. Livebridge, in particular, is little different from a slave camp, and should be avoided at all costs.
Because the same kind of people as you laughed at the idea of a PC operating system ever growing into something that could compete with Solaris workstations. Or that a gameboy could ever be as powerful as a Super Nintendo. Incidentally, a couple of generations of gameboys from now, a gameboy might actually be comparable with a PS2.
The Linux desktop might not be ready yet, but that does not imply that it will never be a Windows killer.
You can write good code in VB, but that's a non-statement; you can write good code in any reasonable computer language. VB is at the border of "reasonable", so why use it when you can use a cleaner, faster, or more flexible language?
The easier it is to write, the easier it is to maintain, and the easier it is to use good code form and techniques.
On the contrary. VB's dubious advantage is that you don't have to know much about programming, or even computers, to write a program. COBOL was the VB of its day: Constricting, dumbed down, and used by business managers worldwide. The result? Crappy code.
Imagine if Microsoft made a Unix distribution, but the commands were actually just a predetermined set of aliases that called relatively complex commands. Users would generally run the aliases; more experienced users would use the aliases until they needed to do something more complicated, and then would maybe call a special wrapper that would allow them to run the complicated ones.
In the same way, VB provides a lot of components with properties to do most things a beginning programmer would want. Want anything more? Start using hex values and special library calls -- exactly as if you were programming in MSVC++, except without the faster execution time whenever you aren't making a direct API call. This isn't a big deal if you're writing some little database frontend, but if you try anything ambitious you'll start running into real trouble.
VB is a design language, nothing more. It's great if you want to deliver a demo to the Big Boss, but if you want that demo to run in a production environment, you'd bloody well write it in a better language than VB. Especially since you might not have time to port it -- oh wait, did I say "port"? I meant "rewrite", because VB isn't portable.
Incidentally (to show I'm not an elitist moron), I first learned to program in BASIC (managed to shed all of its bad habits, I think), and I maintain VB code on a regular basis. The code's well-written, but it's just not a powerful enough language to be used in production, as compared to C, Java, or Perl. VB's OK for demos, assuming you're running Windows, but it's a bad servant and an awful teacher.
Campaign finance reform is worked on by the people who have the most to lose from it, so it's best to be wary, but to interpret a law that merely says campaigns, which are already regulated on the radio and TV, should be regulated on the Internet as well, as a law regulating free speech on the Internet, is overreaction.
Your answer, from Google. I don't know if this is the specific instance you quoted, but as shown below, the laws have been decided in favor of free speech, at least in this case.
Citizens for Property Rights did not violate state election law when it ran a series of newspaper advertisements critical of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, according to a July 10 decision by special prosecutor D. Scott Bailey.
"While it is true that many of these advertisements did target specific office holders, each was still tied to the overarching stated purpose of Citizens for Property Rights, that being land use issues in Loudoun County," Bailey wrote in his decision.
"This was an unmitigated victory for CPR, for its members, for the taxpayers," said CPR director Patricia Shockey. "It was a good thing for everyone in Loudoun that we won this fight for the first Amendment, for free speech. If people cannot criticize the government, there's a real problem."
Allegations that CPR violated state election laws by not registering as a political action committee were filed in Feb. 2002 by the PAC Voters to Stop Sprawl. VSS alleged that CPR ran a political campaign through a series of newspaper advertisements, and should have registered itself as a PAC. VSS claimed that CPR was funded by developers, and was keeping its membership out of the public eye by not registering as a PAC. Members of CPR said the group is a registered private non-stock corporation and as such is not required to register as a PAC.
Among the targets of the CPR advertisements were individual members of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, special interest groups which have supported the Board's "smart growth" polices, including the Piedmont Environmental Council and Sustainable Loudoun Network, and VSS, the largest contributor to the 1999 campaigns of seven Supervisors.
"Look at what special interest groups are deciding Loudoun's future," said the headline on one full-page advertisement CPR ran in October, 2000. The ads included Supervisors home phone numbers.
According to Bailey, CPR's ads stayed within the boundaries of Virginia state election law.
"I would state that several of your client's ads do seem to step right up to the dividing line between an advocacy group and a political action committee," Bailey wrote to CPR lawyer Peter White. "It is possible that future literature in the same vein may in fact step over such a line, bringing your client to the other side. To date, however, such does not appear to be the case."
While Bailey said he was bringing to an end the 17-month investigation, the three-year-old war of words between CPR and VSS officials continued this week.
"Everyone knows that CPR is a front for financial special interests," said VSS founder Joe Maio. "Their hiding their donors identities reinforces everyone's perceptions."
"Joe Maio brought this action in an attempt to discredit CPR," Shockey said. "This was a frivolous lawsuit. It costs us thousands and thousands of dollars because VSS and the PEC wanted us to not have the ability to criticize the Board of Supervisors."
Shockey said members of her organization, who have been quieter than usual since VSS filed its complaint, will once again be making their opinions heard at Board of Supervisors meetings.
"For 17 months we waited to get a decision on this case," Shockey said. "That really did have a chilling effect on CPR and its members. They wanted to shut us up and shut us down, but they ain't seen nothing yet."
In May, Bailey took over the investigation, begun 15 months earlier by former Prince William Commonwealth's Attorney John Notarianni. No
I can't believe that the American people will continue to stand for much more. I know I won't.
Yes, you will -- and the American people will too. The fact that you are bitching on Slashdot rather than doing anything constructive indicates that you will. Mainstream politicians know this, and use it to their advantage. If enough people were outraged, they would vote for a third-party candidate who would do what they wanted, but they won't for two reasons:
They still believe that Republicans and Democrats are different enough that a third party candidate should be ignored, since the possibility exists that the "bad guy" will get voted in. They're not that different, it's true, but if they were viewed as the "Republicrats" that we view them as, we wouldn't care whether Bush or Kerry becomes President. We do, so they must be different to some degree.
Most people like a lot of things about third parties, but every third party in this country, to be honest, has at least 20% membership by complete wackos who turn people off. This ranges from extreme-right Libertarians who believe the government should only supply basic services, to extreme-left Greens who believe that all logging should be outlawed.
What is even more telling is that this article on campaign finance reform was misinterpreted as an attack on free speech. People who cannot understand the difference between regular laws such as this (which merely regulates previously-regulated campaigns, not The Internet), and evil laws (such as the INDUCE Act or the DMCA) are unlikely to mount an effective resistance against any laws, good or bad. And no, I don't count posting a Slashdot comment as "effective resistance".
Already being done, but not for protest; for survival.
My dad incorporated the family business a couple years ago for tax purposes. Apparently, the tax burden (in Oregon at least) is higher for small businesses than it is for corporations.
I'm surprised so many Slashdotters are making such a fuss about law enforcement finding the idea of crowds so unpalatable. Hasn't anyone been in a moshpit before (fun)? Or a riot (not so fun)?
A large, unpredictable crowd of people showing up, possibly for no good reason, in a possibly dangerous area, is something to be concerned about. Not that I'd advocate banning the technology, but I definitely see where the RCMP are coming from. Mobs are weird beasts at the best of times, and a charismatic figure can get them to do abominable things that they would never even think about doing as individuals.
As other posters have already mentioned, terrorists could lure bloggers to a predetermined point to maximize casualties in the case of an explosive attack. A quickly-organized protest without any expectation of it by authorities might get the point across to onlookers, but the lack of expectation might also lead to all the problems of a large crowd with none of its solutions -- trash everywhere, smashed windows, snarled traffic....and the possibility of an injurious riot breaking out.
Now for a moment, switch away from my comment and browse at -1. Imagine the Slashdot crowd all yelling the contents of their individual post at the top of their lungs -- or carrying signs summarizing it, or both -- in the middle of downtown New York. This is (IMHO) a good analogy because New York, like Slashdot, is high-traffic, and usually there are only two or three distinct positions taken on an issue, which can be compared to shouting slogans. Some, not many, of these people have extreme ideas and are willing to commit violence to get this across. Some of them have pointy sticks.
The reason why this is contained on Slashdot (for the most part) is that everyone's talking at once, but it never cuts off anyone else since you're only reading one at a time. This means that slogans, etc usually aren't required. Even then, an anti-MS post laden with slogans, even faulty info, can be modded up, showing that even this is not perfect.
You are isolated on Slashdot -- or a blog -- as well. In addition, a certain percentage of Slashdotters (the moderators) are assigned to police the others through (meta-)modding -- this works to a pretty decent extent. The assignment is by fiat and people know who's in charge. A crowd has no such thing.
Even the crappiest, most reviled blog has far better signal-to-noise ratio than a crowd, and the worst that someone can do is troll...or attempt a DOS. In real life, crowds are really something to be concerned about.
This has to be the most insightful post on this article I've seen, and it's a shame people appear to be modding it down.
You may prefer Bush or Kerry as President, but their knowledge of science begins and ends at the poll stand. If enough people believe something, even if it's crackpot, one of these candidates will choose that position to gain a few more votes.
Anything impartial to back your post up? An editorial from "economyincrisis.com", basically an anti-free-trade and anti-foreign-import site from my reading of its solutions, is not a particularly good counterargument. Just sayin'...
Disclaimer: I'm not an economist, and I think economics is boring as hell. Real economists, please correct any of the points I screw up.
For those of us over 20 years old, you might remember another Asian economy that was steamrolling us. Everyone was complaining that the US was really going under this time, and fingers were pointing at all our shortcomings compared to that economy.
They've figured out a way to repeal or circumvent Adam Smith's laws. Our education isn't good enough. We work harder, not smarter. We don't work hard enough. We watch too much useless TV. We don't appreciate the power of multimedia. We aren't an ancient enough culture to appreciate the strategy of business. We're buying too many of the other country's products. We're selling too much of our real estate. We aren't pragmatic enough to give up drugs/religion/sexual habits/hobbies/music that holds us back.
Does anyone remember this attitude? I seem to recall people saying this about Japan when I was a kid. Anyone remember those guys? They're still recovering from an economic slowdown that lasted about 15 years. But they were pretty worrying at the time. They were an economic bogeyman -- Better work harder, or the Japanese will 0wn us. I recall a sarcastic commentator on some of the pushes for diversity education, "Diversity training is essential for the global marketplace. We've got to push for understanding and appreciation of other cultures. So we can beat hell out of the Japs."
I'm mentioning this because I see people in the thread saying all the same stuff we used to say about the Japanese. "There's nothing we can compete against them in. It's because we're conservative (it would be 'liberal' if Slashdot didn't lean to the left). It's because we're lazy." This attitude is not surprising; it's natural to assume that something that seems huge today is going to be even bigger in the future. It's why all William Gibson's futuristic books imagine a world dominated by zaibatsu.
Although I do believe that software patents, draconian laws regarding intellectual property, weird political bans on scientific research, etc are going to hurt us in several ways, I have trouble believing the extent of the gloomy scenarios imagined by Slashdotters here simply because I've lived through at least one of them. Really, all of us have lived through another, opposite one: The dot-com era. Remember how everyone was saying "It's the new economy! Everyone is making millions from web design and advertising! We're all going to keep getting richer, forever!" This, too, is a result of basing tomorrow's predictions on a literal interpretation of today's economic climate.
I'm sure China will end up dominating one or another sections of the market, and I'm sure a lot of blue-collar workers (such as call-center workers; they may have been "support engineers" here in the dot-bomb age, but let's face it, they're no more engineers than 1920s Ford factory workers) will be displaced. This happened the last time an Asian country figured largely in our economy. But most of the posts here rely on 1. The fallacy that economics is a zero-sum game, and 2. The assumption that we've got absolutely nothing to offer because China can manufacture many products more cheaply. Personally, I suspect that a glut will occur on some of these items (just how many curtain rods do you need, anyway?), and the laws of supply and demand will assert themselves.
The Japanese weren't magicians. They hadn't beaten supply and demand any more than anyone else. They make some great products, dominate in several fields, but they aren't going to make a world empire. I think, in time, history will show that the Chinese aren't any better magicians than the rest of us.
Unless you're using the list as a reason to convince suits to switch to Linux, the distros that aren't on the list are the only ones to take seriously.
Things the list has in common: MS-style software bloat? Check. Support for the hideously ugly RPM standard? Check. Dumbed-down interfaces that make it difficult to use standard configuration files? Check.
The ones on that list are great if you're in an Enterprise Environment (I use SuSE in mine) with a requirement for a CYA license -- minus the SCO Linux, which I wouldn't even want to think about too hard in case they somehow pick up on it and try to sue me. They and their free user-level counterparts also are good for the first-timer. But if you don't like the disgusting feeling of software BLOAT, don't use any of them. Break out a copy of Slackware or Gentoo, select only the packages you actually are going to use, and enjoy your new lean, mean Linux machine.
As for me, I don't have a problem announcing who I vote for. After all, it is the one thing that I do that affects the country the most, why would I want to hide when I do it? Who should I be afraid of?
The crime boss who's quietly told you that he's going to "rub ya out" if you don't vote for Mr. Funnymoney, his favorite candidate.
Secret voting was first implemented in New Zealand or Australia, depending on who you talk to (in the modern world; Athens had secret ballots in ancient times), and it was considered a good enough idea that we adopted it. Studies in Civics, an 1897 civics textbook found on Project Gutenberg, has a mention of this practice; it hadn't been implemented in many places in the US at that time, but the author was an enthusiastic proponent of the idea. The main value of this is that votes cannot be bought or extorted, because there's no guarantee that the voter did what you asked.
The disadvantage of secrecy is that multiple votes by the same individual are possible; steps must be taken to prevent that.
Before answering, I should mention that "spam" is the unsolicited crap that comes into your inbox. SPAM is the Hormel meat product. Back to your complaints, which I completely disagree with.
The original idea of cable TV was to be commerical free. We pay for cable TV just like we do for our internet connection. I consider TV commericals SPAM. I did not ask for it, but likewise they advertisers always go, "We have to make profit."
The cable companies changed the rules; to no one's surprise, they will do anything to make a buck. However, it's on their terms; you have to pay them, and see ads, if you want to see their shows. If not, you can go elsewhere. Usually, there is a money trail and you can sue a falsely advertising company if necessary.
By contrast, if a spammer sends you an ad, chances are high that he stole 1. His own connection to the Internet by sending through someone's proxy, and 2. Bandwidth and CPU time on your ISP and intervening hosts.
Spam is here to stay. It is NEVER going away.
On the contrary, I can tell you exactly when spam is going away. Spam will go away when the risk of spamming exceed the profits. Risks will go up as more spammers get prosecuted (some do at present, more will join them), and profits will go down as users become more educated (doubtful) and sender authentication, blacklists, and spam classifiers become more advanced, protecting stupid Internet users from themselves (more likely).
The day SPAM can be completed eliminated from the net, well, I certainly wouldn't be on it, cuz it must not be a free net.
Not necessarily. It might just be a net with an improved email setup. Or a world that says "no" to spam.
One of the pain of freedom is that those you do not like are also free to do the things you do not like for them to do.
Again on the contrary: There are a lot of unpleasant things that people are not allowed to do in society, or on the Internet. We call them "crimes". Spam is not free speech; it's harassment, in the same way that airing your views in a public place is OK (in my country at least), but walking uninvited into someone's house and airing your views will get you arrested (or shot; again in my country).
We should battle SPAM the right way, not by banning it or attempting to. Suing the company for wrong advertisment (if they did.)
That's assuming you can find them. Most of the groups that spam are pretty shady.
Ordering from the company then returning the product.
You're kidding, right? You can give those guys your credit card numbers if you want. As for me, I don't even want them thinking about my credit card number, let alone actually seeing it. Furthermore, IIRC, credit card companies take a dim view of repeated chargebacks on the part of a customer (a few are OK).
Slashdot Mirror
Paranoid admins who like to practice "information denial techniques" on their systems, making them essentially unfixable. The thinking is, "We don't want a hacker to have any information about our network. We don't want him to even know what kind of system he's on if he ever does get in. So we've got to hide as much system stuff as possible."
We've got quite a few of those here, most of who have had "security at ANY COST" drilled into them by the higherups. Here are a few gems:
I'm sure there's another super-paranoid person on this topic who may flame me for this and say I'm a rotten admin for keeping any debugging tools on a system. But a lot of people forget that 50% of security is keeping the bad guys out, and the other 50% is allowing the good guys to do their job without a huge hassle. Sure, having people logging in via telnet, or allowing "password" as a password sucks. But timely patching, keeping an eye on your system services, EDUCATING YOUR USERS, and having a good firewall policy will keep far more trouble out than instituting the Fourth Reich on a production system.
I had one of those (the original Kaypro). No hard disk...but who needs a hard disk when you have two 360K disk drives? And no DOS...but who needs DOS when you've got good ol' CP/M?
Like (IIRC) the Osborne, it was portable under the military definition; a team of two soldiers would have been able to lug it through a battlefield without a problem. A 12-year-old who hadn't hit his growth spurt yet was SOL, however.
With a built-in 6" green TTY monitor, internal 300 baud modem (which I never managed to get working), a collection of the most frustrating pac-man clones ever made, and WordStar, which is probably one of the best word processors in existence to this day, the Kaypro was a force to be feared.
I got a look at some of these units for sale on eBay a couple weeks back. Ah, memory lane. Looking at this behemoth-sized luggable from my childhood, I felt like a guy who, now happily married, sees at a bus stop the girl he had a huge crush on back when he was a kid. For a second I thought of bidding...
Then I realized what an ugly bitch the Kaypro was now, came to my senses, and used an emulator instead.
I wasn't complaining about the fact that everyone pays for the school system; I was merely mentioning that there was precedent for paying for a city-wide service that not everyone (homeschoolers or those taught at private schools, for instance), but at least a clear majority, uses. The goods or evils of the public school system will perhaps be the subject of a different post.
I know I'm going to get some flames for this because quite a lot of Slashdotters seem to believe that everything should be free, but I'm not absolutely comfortable with free city-sponsored wireless.
Telecom companies rank just below HMOs on the vileness scale, but having Chicago put up wireless APs everywhere is not going to result in a socialist Internet dream where the city pays for your pr0n downloads. What it does result in is some lucky corporation's dream, where everyone in Chicago pays the city (some more indirectly than others) to pay a single contracted telecom to give them wireless Internet.
Not everyone is going to use this service. That's OK, not everyone uses the school system, but we all pay for it...but in this case, I'm not even sure that a clear majority in Chicago use the Internet. And even if they do, some use it much less than others. Most Slashdotters probably would have a hard time going back from their broadband accounts to $10/mo dialup, but the average person who checks their AOL email once a day is probably under no pressure to switch anytime soon.
Furthermore, due to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which I firmly believe in, I expect the city would end up having to do (or contract out) major security work to handle people with too much time on their hands. The issue of censorship comes up as well -- the city now acts as the ISP for a host of activities that may include breaking Illinois state law. This can probably be ironed out, but why deal with it at all?
As much as I love getting stuff free, I have to say that this screams "boondoggle". The potential waste and corruption (this is the Chicago city government we're talking about) of a deal like this, as well as the small number of potential beneficiaries, makes me very dubious.
What do I like better? Portland's Personal Telco Project. It's not sponsored by (read: under control of) the city government. It's done by private contributors who choose their own ISP, allowing a wider range of solutions to be chosen, are responsible for the cells of their own network, and -- apparently -- make group decisions by consensus as opposed to mandate (as the city would be the primary controller of a municipal network, I'm guessing most decisions would be by mandate of some controlling committee). There is also less potential for fuckwad-related damage, since the people who put these up generally are nerds or assisted by nerds who know what they're doing. In short, it's much more decentralized and, IMHO, essentially more free.
Of course, it's not as easy to get city-wide municipal Internet the Personal Telco way as it is to simply tell all your fellow citizens to pay for a luxury that you want.
So it stands to reason that all you fuckwits who elected an administration who believes that a corporation has the same civil and legal rights as a person woyuld also champion laws that turn civil or contract disputes into criminal laws.
As explained ad nauseum above, this is in regard to Chinese counterfeiting operations that are winked at by the PRC and are hurting US businesses. This isn't about those Britney Spears tracks you just downloaded, or the neighbor's WoW CD you copied; this is about major operations which are strictly designed to copy someone else's product en masse to make money for the group doing it. This is exactly the sort of group that the government should be prosecuting (as opposed to P2Pers, etc). The difference between file sharers and these groups is like the difference between someone going over the speed limit and a scam artist who intentionally has accidents to fraudulently collect the insurance money.
It really IS time to overthrow the state.
No. It isn't time. If it was, you'd be organizing people or joining an organization to overthrow the state (such organizations do exist). Instead, you are bitching on Slashdot like the rest of us. This is a clear sign to me that you don't really think it's time to overthrow the state; rather, you're just saying it because you're frustrated and it sounds like a nice thing to say.
We tried on a pair of goggles that gave the person wearing them a virtual cinema, projecting what appeared to be a 80" screen for TV, movies, and computer systems (!) in front of the user, complete with stereo sound. The cost? About $400.
They sell these in the US on eBay. And in my personal experience, they are truly horrible.
I bought a pair for about $400. They're basically two small LCD TVs with a headband around them. You can watch a movie with a halfway-decent picture on them, but keep in mind that they're TV resolution and using them for anything with text (games, etc) is pretty much impossible. I realized that I had wasted $400, but as long as I marketed them on eBay as "VR Goggles L@@k!@!1!" I knew I could get some sucker to buy them for the same price I had bought them for. Which one did. I wonder just how many hands those goggles went through before they reached me; how many people tried them, realized how impractical they were, and put 'em back up on eBay?
I know the goggles were probably cool in Akihabara, but I assure you that once you've got them into the States, their coolness factor immediately plummets. They're neat gadgets, but any extended use will reveal their miserable shortcomings.
Really, this just underscores the article. The Japanese love the whiz-bang factor of a new gadget. Americans are more conservative in their gadget-buying, and much more likely to take the extended-use factor into account.
This extends across Asian cultures; the Chinese are (again from personal experience) also much more likely to buy a gadget based on its coolness, without caring much about how useful it will be in the long term.
I mean, DDR? Perfect example.
On the contrary, that's one of the worst examples you could possibly think of. Go into a Fry's Electronics or some other store with a DDR display, and you will almost always see some teenager dancing on it. And there's no one as fashion-conscious or worried about being "uncool" as a teenager.
I'm not even sure tech in general is dorky anymore here (now take this with a grain of salt, this is a Slashdotter talking about tech). Even building one's computer from parts, once a pastime strictly confined to nerds, is now a Vin-Diesel-esque affair of snapping together neon-colored parts that reminds one more of ricing out a Honda than building a computer. Video games now boast celebrity appearances, product placements, and midnight openings.
Let's face it. The guys who stuffed us in lockers and stole our lunch money back in the 80s came back, and this time they stole our nerdy hobbies. What was once geeky is now cool. Even here in the US.
There's more too it than that...in many non-Western (especially Islamic) countries, the left hand is used for only one thing. I don't know if "cack-handed" comes from this...use...of the hand, but if so, it's certainly an amazing coincidence.
(For those who still haven't caught on to why you never eat or shake hands with the left hand in most Islamic countries, think about how you'd answer the call of nature in a hot country where water pressure is a luxury and everything starts to smell in the heat.)
Drawing a parallel between religion's animosity toward the left wing and medieval persecution of left handed people is rather weird considering that much of the left wing used to be religious (the Progressives of the early last century, who pushed the Constitutional ban on liquor, had their roots in the Christian Temperance movement). The religious right is hostile towards the left because of its belief (rightful or not is a subject for a flamewar) that the left is composed of people who spit on, and want to eventually abolish, the Christian religion. Not because of the side of the room they sat on a hundred years ago.
Yeah, and it used to be the case that to make a purchase you had to leave your house. ... I'm bored of people who say that it's only revolution if people bleed, it's only activism if you spend a night in jail, it's only significant if it's significant in the particular way prescribed by the self-appointed arbiter of meaningfulness.
The original poster's first statement gives away the "blogosphere" mentality. Blogging to information is like dot-coms were to business. Like online companies, blogs are a great new tool that can have quicker turnaround than their brick-and-mortar, dead-tree counterparts. Some blogs, like some dot-coms, are quite good. Millions have sucked and will continue to suck.
The other thing that the two phenomenons have in common is the thousands of self-important pundits that come out of the woodwork claiming that their Pretty Good pet project is, in fact, Great. If anyone disagrees, the immediate response implies that the one disagreeing is disturbingly primitive and behind the times, and after all, who is he to judge their masterpiece anyway? If one can't give an intelligent counterexample, it always helps to introduce relativism into the argument.
By now, we are jaded by bizzare ideas like this. But most chinese are still relatively naive about such things, and so they get caught up in the frenzy.
China had groups that got into these "bizarre ideas" long before Western cynicism. A recent example (by Chinese standards) that Westerners might remember was the Boxer Rebellion, very similar to the Falun Gong, which occured about a hundred years ago.
I wouldn't write the Falun Gongs off as unsophisticated rubes just yet. There's a reason why the Beijing government wants to get rid of them, and it's not because they care how superstitous their people are; China is filled with superstitions. It's because when lots of people in China (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, other countries) start joining a religious society, it's generally because they're tired of their political society. Those guys may sound like they're talking daft superstition, but what they're really talking about is a change in the government, and I'm quite sure that Beijing knows this.
The undead Thatcher moves again, strinking out
And just how does she "strink"? Is that like "striking" and "slinking" at the same time?
with lines of great opportunities for corruption and hate.
You didn't happen to write the dialogue for Zero Wing, did you?
After a quick read of the patent, it seems to say that it is a test to see if two "variables" are actually the same entity, i.e. at the same address.
If that is in fact the operator in question, Common LISP did it as early as '83, IIRC. Check the equality operator section in the Steele book.
/learning LISP...and didn't read the article, of course
Things like, call centers, could easily be distributed. VPN (or Internet)-based helpdesk app for support, paid per call handled. While you're "logged in", calls to the company PBX line for helpdesk are forwarded to a random selection of your phone numbers.
Won't work, for two reasons.
1. Corporations don't trust the call center worker much farther than they can throw Mt. Everest, and therefore are afraid that (s)he might be screwing around at home instead of being busy. My place of work (not a call center) won't allow anyone but managers to work from home. My wife's call center did not allow employees to do anything when calls were not coming in. You couldn't read a magazine in slack hours, etc; you could only read the "official guidelines" (i.e. boring rules written in legalese). They're also randomly monitored -- "this call may be recorded for quality assurance".
2. The home is often a noisy, unprofessional place. The dogs barking or birds squawking in the background, screaming kids, the dishwasher...the list goes on and on. In addition, most call center people are not "IT professionals". They're assembly-line workers -- they are trained to do a very specific job from a script, and if anything deviates from this pattern, they call a supervisor. This doesn't work too well if the worker is at home.
3. Wages are already low enough. Call center workers are making absolute minimum wage, or maybe a couple dollars more than that, which invalidates any cost savings argument.
It would be nice to have VPN play a greater part in work, but I doubt the call center mentality (the two I used in my examples are Livebridge and ACS, formerly CyberRep -- both in Portland, OR) is geared to handle this. Livebridge, in particular, is little different from a slave camp, and should be avoided at all costs.
Because the same kind of people as you laughed at the idea of a PC operating system ever growing into something that could compete with Solaris workstations. Or that a gameboy could ever be as powerful as a Super Nintendo. Incidentally, a couple of generations of gameboys from now, a gameboy might actually be comparable with a PS2.
The Linux desktop might not be ready yet, but that does not imply that it will never be a Windows killer.
You can write good code in VB, but that's a non-statement; you can write good code in any reasonable computer language. VB is at the border of "reasonable", so why use it when you can use a cleaner, faster, or more flexible language?
The easier it is to write, the easier it is to maintain, and the easier it is to use good code form and techniques.
On the contrary. VB's dubious advantage is that you don't have to know much about programming, or even computers, to write a program. COBOL was the VB of its day: Constricting, dumbed down, and used by business managers worldwide. The result? Crappy code.
Imagine if Microsoft made a Unix distribution, but the commands were actually just a predetermined set of aliases that called relatively complex commands. Users would generally run the aliases; more experienced users would use the aliases until they needed to do something more complicated, and then would maybe call a special wrapper that would allow them to run the complicated ones.
In the same way, VB provides a lot of components with properties to do most things a beginning programmer would want. Want anything more? Start using hex values and special library calls -- exactly as if you were programming in MSVC++, except without the faster execution time whenever you aren't making a direct API call. This isn't a big deal if you're writing some little database frontend, but if you try anything ambitious you'll start running into real trouble.
VB is a design language, nothing more. It's great if you want to deliver a demo to the Big Boss, but if you want that demo to run in a production environment, you'd bloody well write it in a better language than VB. Especially since you might not have time to port it -- oh wait, did I say "port"? I meant "rewrite", because VB isn't portable.
Incidentally (to show I'm not an elitist moron), I first learned to program in BASIC (managed to shed all of its bad habits, I think), and I maintain VB code on a regular basis. The code's well-written, but it's just not a powerful enough language to be used in production, as compared to C, Java, or Perl. VB's OK for demos, assuming you're running Windows, but it's a bad servant and an awful teacher.
Campaign finance reform is worked on by the people who have the most to lose from it, so it's best to be wary, but to interpret a law that merely says campaigns, which are already regulated on the radio and TV, should be regulated on the Internet as well, as a law regulating free speech on the Internet, is overreaction.
Your answer, from Google. I don't know if this is the specific instance you quoted, but as shown below, the laws have been decided in favor of free speech, at least in this case.
Citizens for Property Rights did not violate state election law when it ran a series of newspaper advertisements critical of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, according to a July 10 decision by special prosecutor D. Scott Bailey.
"While it is true that many of these advertisements did target specific office holders, each was still tied to the overarching stated purpose of Citizens for Property Rights, that being land use issues in Loudoun County," Bailey wrote in his decision.
"This was an unmitigated victory for CPR, for its members, for the taxpayers," said CPR director Patricia Shockey. "It was a good thing for everyone in Loudoun that we won this fight for the first Amendment, for free speech. If people cannot criticize the government, there's a real problem."
Allegations that CPR violated state election laws by not registering as a political action committee were filed in Feb. 2002 by the PAC Voters to Stop Sprawl. VSS alleged that CPR ran a political campaign through a series of newspaper advertisements, and should have registered itself as a PAC. VSS claimed that CPR was funded by developers, and was keeping its membership out of the public eye by not registering as a PAC. Members of CPR said the group is a registered private non-stock corporation and as such is not required to register as a PAC.
Among the targets of the CPR advertisements were individual members of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, special interest groups which have supported the Board's "smart growth" polices, including the Piedmont Environmental Council and Sustainable Loudoun Network, and VSS, the largest contributor to the 1999 campaigns of seven Supervisors.
"Look at what special interest groups are deciding Loudoun's future," said the headline on one full-page advertisement CPR ran in October, 2000. The ads included Supervisors home phone numbers. According to Bailey, CPR's ads stayed within the boundaries of Virginia state election law.
"I would state that several of your client's ads do seem to step right up to the dividing line between an advocacy group and a political action committee," Bailey wrote to CPR lawyer Peter White. "It is possible that future literature in the same vein may in fact step over such a line, bringing your client to the other side. To date, however, such does not appear to be the case."
While Bailey said he was bringing to an end the 17-month investigation, the three-year-old war of words between CPR and VSS officials continued this week.
"Everyone knows that CPR is a front for financial special interests," said VSS founder Joe Maio. "Their hiding their donors identities reinforces everyone's perceptions."
"Joe Maio brought this action in an attempt to discredit CPR," Shockey said. "This was a frivolous lawsuit. It costs us thousands and thousands of dollars because VSS and the PEC wanted us to not have the ability to criticize the Board of Supervisors."
Shockey said members of her organization, who have been quieter than usual since VSS filed its complaint, will once again be making their opinions heard at Board of Supervisors meetings.
"For 17 months we waited to get a decision on this case," Shockey said. "That really did have a chilling effect on CPR and its members. They wanted to shut us up and shut us down, but they ain't seen nothing yet."
In May, Bailey took over the investigation, begun 15 months earlier by former Prince William Commonwealth's Attorney John Notarianni. No
I can't believe that the American people will continue to stand for much more. I know I won't.
Yes, you will -- and the American people will too. The fact that you are bitching on Slashdot rather than doing anything constructive indicates that you will. Mainstream politicians know this, and use it to their advantage. If enough people were outraged, they would vote for a third-party candidate who would do what they wanted, but they won't for two reasons:
What is even more telling is that this article on campaign finance reform was misinterpreted as an attack on free speech. People who cannot understand the difference between regular laws such as this (which merely regulates previously-regulated campaigns, not The Internet), and evil laws (such as the INDUCE Act or the DMCA) are unlikely to mount an effective resistance against any laws, good or bad. And no, I don't count posting a Slashdot comment as "effective resistance".
Already being done, but not for protest; for survival.
My dad incorporated the family business a couple years ago for tax purposes. Apparently, the tax burden (in Oregon at least) is higher for small businesses than it is for corporations.
I'm surprised so many Slashdotters are making such a fuss about law enforcement finding the idea of crowds so unpalatable. Hasn't anyone been in a moshpit before (fun)? Or a riot (not so fun)?
A large, unpredictable crowd of people showing up, possibly for no good reason, in a possibly dangerous area, is something to be concerned about. Not that I'd advocate banning the technology, but I definitely see where the RCMP are coming from. Mobs are weird beasts at the best of times, and a charismatic figure can get them to do abominable things that they would never even think about doing as individuals.As other posters have already mentioned, terrorists could lure bloggers to a predetermined point to maximize casualties in the case of an explosive attack. A quickly-organized protest without any expectation of it by authorities might get the point across to onlookers, but the lack of expectation might also lead to all the problems of a large crowd with none of its solutions -- trash everywhere, smashed windows, snarled traffic....and the possibility of an injurious riot breaking out.
Now for a moment, switch away from my comment and browse at -1. Imagine the Slashdot crowd all yelling the contents of their individual post at the top of their lungs -- or carrying signs summarizing it, or both -- in the middle of downtown New York. This is (IMHO) a good analogy because New York, like Slashdot, is high-traffic, and usually there are only two or three distinct positions taken on an issue, which can be compared to shouting slogans. Some, not many, of these people have extreme ideas and are willing to commit violence to get this across. Some of them have pointy sticks.
The reason why this is contained on Slashdot (for the most part) is that everyone's talking at once, but it never cuts off anyone else since you're only reading one at a time. This means that slogans, etc usually aren't required. Even then, an anti-MS post laden with slogans, even faulty info, can be modded up, showing that even this is not perfect.
You are isolated on Slashdot -- or a blog -- as well. In addition, a certain percentage of Slashdotters (the moderators) are assigned to police the others through (meta-)modding -- this works to a pretty decent extent. The assignment is by fiat and people know who's in charge. A crowd has no such thing.
Even the crappiest, most reviled blog has far better signal-to-noise ratio than a crowd, and the worst that someone can do is troll...or attempt a DOS. In real life, crowds are really something to be concerned about.
This has to be the most insightful post on this article I've seen, and it's a shame people appear to be modding it down.
You may prefer Bush or Kerry as President, but their knowledge of science begins and ends at the poll stand. If enough people believe something, even if it's crackpot, one of these candidates will choose that position to gain a few more votes.
Anything impartial to back your post up? An editorial from "economyincrisis.com", basically an anti-free-trade and anti-foreign-import site from my reading of its solutions, is not a particularly good counterargument. Just sayin'...
Disclaimer: I'm not an economist, and I think economics is boring as hell. Real economists, please correct any of the points I screw up.
For those of us over 20 years old, you might remember another Asian economy that was steamrolling us. Everyone was complaining that the US was really going under this time, and fingers were pointing at all our shortcomings compared to that economy.
They've figured out a way to repeal or circumvent Adam Smith's laws. Our education isn't good enough. We work harder, not smarter. We don't work hard enough. We watch too much useless TV. We don't appreciate the power of multimedia. We aren't an ancient enough culture to appreciate the strategy of business. We're buying too many of the other country's products. We're selling too much of our real estate. We aren't pragmatic enough to give up drugs/religion/sexual habits/hobbies/music that holds us back.
Does anyone remember this attitude? I seem to recall people saying this about Japan when I was a kid. Anyone remember those guys? They're still recovering from an economic slowdown that lasted about 15 years. But they were pretty worrying at the time. They were an economic bogeyman -- Better work harder, or the Japanese will 0wn us. I recall a sarcastic commentator on some of the pushes for diversity education, "Diversity training is essential for the global marketplace. We've got to push for understanding and appreciation of other cultures. So we can beat hell out of the Japs."
I'm mentioning this because I see people in the thread saying all the same stuff we used to say about the Japanese. "There's nothing we can compete against them in. It's because we're conservative (it would be 'liberal' if Slashdot didn't lean to the left). It's because we're lazy." This attitude is not surprising; it's natural to assume that something that seems huge today is going to be even bigger in the future. It's why all William Gibson's futuristic books imagine a world dominated by zaibatsu.
Although I do believe that software patents, draconian laws regarding intellectual property, weird political bans on scientific research, etc are going to hurt us in several ways, I have trouble believing the extent of the gloomy scenarios imagined by Slashdotters here simply because I've lived through at least one of them. Really, all of us have lived through another, opposite one: The dot-com era. Remember how everyone was saying "It's the new economy! Everyone is making millions from web design and advertising! We're all going to keep getting richer, forever!" This, too, is a result of basing tomorrow's predictions on a literal interpretation of today's economic climate.
I'm sure China will end up dominating one or another sections of the market, and I'm sure a lot of blue-collar workers (such as call-center workers; they may have been "support engineers" here in the dot-bomb age, but let's face it, they're no more engineers than 1920s Ford factory workers) will be displaced. This happened the last time an Asian country figured largely in our economy. But most of the posts here rely on 1. The fallacy that economics is a zero-sum game, and 2. The assumption that we've got absolutely nothing to offer because China can manufacture many products more cheaply. Personally, I suspect that a glut will occur on some of these items (just how many curtain rods do you need, anyway?), and the laws of supply and demand will assert themselves.
The Japanese weren't magicians. They hadn't beaten supply and demand any more than anyone else. They make some great products, dominate in several fields, but they aren't going to make a world empire. I think, in time, history will show that the Chinese aren't any better magicians than the rest of us.
Unless you're using the list as a reason to convince suits to switch to Linux, the distros that aren't on the list are the only ones to take seriously.
Things the list has in common: MS-style software bloat? Check. Support for the hideously ugly RPM standard? Check. Dumbed-down interfaces that make it difficult to use standard configuration files? Check.
The ones on that list are great if you're in an Enterprise Environment (I use SuSE in mine) with a requirement for a CYA license -- minus the SCO Linux, which I wouldn't even want to think about too hard in case they somehow pick up on it and try to sue me. They and their free user-level counterparts also are good for the first-timer. But if you don't like the disgusting feeling of software BLOAT, don't use any of them. Break out a copy of Slackware or Gentoo, select only the packages you actually are going to use, and enjoy your new lean, mean Linux machine.
As for me, I don't have a problem announcing who I vote for. After all, it is the one thing that I do that affects the country the most, why would I want to hide when I do it? Who should I be afraid of?
The crime boss who's quietly told you that he's going to "rub ya out" if you don't vote for Mr. Funnymoney, his favorite candidate.
Secret voting was first implemented in New Zealand or Australia, depending on who you talk to (in the modern world; Athens had secret ballots in ancient times), and it was considered a good enough idea that we adopted it. Studies in Civics, an 1897 civics textbook found on Project Gutenberg, has a mention of this practice; it hadn't been implemented in many places in the US at that time, but the author was an enthusiastic proponent of the idea. The main value of this is that votes cannot be bought or extorted, because there's no guarantee that the voter did what you asked.
The disadvantage of secrecy is that multiple votes by the same individual are possible; steps must be taken to prevent that.
Before answering, I should mention that "spam" is the unsolicited crap that comes into your inbox. SPAM is the Hormel meat product. Back to your complaints, which I completely disagree with.
The original idea of cable TV was to be commerical free. We pay for cable TV just like we do for our internet connection. I consider TV commericals SPAM. I did not ask for it, but likewise they advertisers always go, "We have to make profit."
The cable companies changed the rules; to no one's surprise, they will do anything to make a buck. However, it's on their terms; you have to pay them, and see ads, if you want to see their shows. If not, you can go elsewhere. Usually, there is a money trail and you can sue a falsely advertising company if necessary.
By contrast, if a spammer sends you an ad, chances are high that he stole 1. His own connection to the Internet by sending through someone's proxy, and 2. Bandwidth and CPU time on your ISP and intervening hosts.
Spam is here to stay. It is NEVER going away.
On the contrary, I can tell you exactly when spam is going away. Spam will go away when the risk of spamming exceed the profits. Risks will go up as more spammers get prosecuted (some do at present, more will join them), and profits will go down as users become more educated (doubtful) and sender authentication, blacklists, and spam classifiers become more advanced, protecting stupid Internet users from themselves (more likely).
The day SPAM can be completed eliminated from the net, well, I certainly wouldn't be on it, cuz it must not be a free net.
Not necessarily. It might just be a net with an improved email setup. Or a world that says "no" to spam.
One of the pain of freedom is that those you do not like are also free to do the things you do not like for them to do.
Again on the contrary: There are a lot of unpleasant things that people are not allowed to do in society, or on the Internet. We call them "crimes". Spam is not free speech; it's harassment, in the same way that airing your views in a public place is OK (in my country at least), but walking uninvited into someone's house and airing your views will get you arrested (or shot; again in my country).
We should battle SPAM the right way, not by banning it or attempting to. Suing the company for wrong advertisment (if they did.)
That's assuming you can find them. Most of the groups that spam are pretty shady.
Ordering from the company then returning the product.
You're kidding, right? You can give those guys your credit card numbers if you want. As for me, I don't even want them thinking about my credit card number, let alone actually seeing it. Furthermore, IIRC, credit card companies take a dim view of repeated chargebacks on the part of a customer (a few are OK).