What you need is clear rules dividing proper and improper uses of personal location information, and realistic penalties invokable by someone whose information has been used improperly. Then watch forever to make sure the rules aren't changed in an unacceptable manner. Really it's pretty much like any other aspect of being a member of a society.
Exactly the opposite of individual ID. The Mark of the Beast is the same for everyone, and doesn't identify anyone. Using that system, you could tell that somebody was in the school, but not who, because there no longer *is* any "who".
Re:Some things I don't get about open source
on
Netscape Reborn?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's exactly right, and people to whom that happens generally chose their license knowing it could happen and are okay with it. There's a great deal of value in having the freedom to make what you think is needed, without having to joust with Marketing and Finance and hamstring your own product to meet nontechnical goals, then have some big outfit promote it for you for free. As long as the big boys play by the stated rules, that should be good enough. Some kinds of riches can't be spent at the grocery store.
Or an "AOL Firefox plugin"? That way the more clueful AOL users (I do believe they exist) could just disable it if they choose. AOL fans could even have that AOL look-and-feel at work just by plugging it into vanilla Firefox.
I can see the campaign now. "AOL Firefox Plugin: Give Us Back the Web."
Gotta be precise here. Netscape the company went foom, but Netscape the browser just got a new name and a new set of priorities, and IMHO became much better as FOSS.
I really don't see the point of another "Netscape" release, for the customer. It'll probably be just like the previous one: the current best from Mozilla with a bucketload of advertising gunk poured over it. Who needs it? Some of my favorite changes as NS Communicator became Mozilla were the things they took out.
I certainly do see the attraction for AOL, though: they can sell areas of the UI like billboard space.
Fraudulent or coercive behavior also voids the agreement, plus you can then go after the miscreant for fraud or racketeering. Just imagine someone standing before a judge to state, "I am John Doe and I made threats against that 8-year-old over there in order to force her to accept the running of illegal software on her computer. I am seeking $100 million in damages from the 8-year-old who, I shall prove, used Task Manager to abort my virus instead of answering the dialog."
So some jerk goes to jail for a few months, and then takes Symantec for one...billion...dollars. I imagine there are a lot of people who would take that job.
"Besides it is a tough sell to most people that decimal time will turn the world into a Utopia, or that it will cure any underlying problem at all."
Really? How do you explain the people (in high places, alas!) who are convinced that adopting Daylight Savings Time will magically make Indianapolis businessmen smart enough to figure out what time it is in Chicago and Cincinnati, when they supposedly can't handle it now? No matter how silly an idea, someone is ready to buy.
Yup, they invented ten new months to replace the twelve traditional ones, and made other adjustments. There was a Simpsons episode (featuring the Springfield MENSA chapter or something like it) which gives some of the flavor of those times. Personally I think no metric year is going to work without adjusting the year-length/day-length ratio, and astroengineering is just a little too vigorous a tool for calendar reform if you ask me.
Meanwhile, intraday measures have also been metricated. According to some robot, "the Solarian day consists of ten decads, each of which is divided into one hundred centads." (Isaac Asimov, _The Naked Sun_) How that squares with the length of the second, which is involved in all kinds of fundamental relationships in physics, was not explained.
I don't have it. I'm still waiting for a believable explanation of why I would trade reliable circuit-switched voice service for unreliable packet-switched voice service.
(My long-distance bill for the last three months was a whopping seventy cents, so maybe I'm atypical.)
Concentrating CO2 from the environment produces coal and limestone, which we use. Concentrating lead, arsenic, PCBs, etc. from the environment produces, from our point of view, poisonous foods. Nothing concentrates fluorocarbons; they just disturb the ozone that reduces our exposure to ultraviolet light, which damages us.
I think I'd rather emit CO2 than any of that other stuff. (Good thing, since respiration is not optional!) If there is an Arsenic Cycle, it doesn't seem to be a vitally important part of the biosphere.
Yeah, exactly how much skill does it take to toss a computer in the trash and buy a biggerbetterfaster one? Like I said, I *enjoy* squeezing out the last bit of performance, especially when people say, "oh, that's too old to be useful."
Uh, read that again. "...sources outside the carbon cycle, IE...fossil fuels." Where exactly do you think the carbon in the fossil fuels came from? Split open a few big hunks of coal -- see the leaf prints? That's why they call them *fossil* fuels. Those plants took carbon out of the air to build their structures. Today we're releasing it back into the air. Now, class, what is the "carbon cycle"?
The problem is the disparity of rates: the plants spent millennia taking the carbon out and we're putting it all back in less than 200 years. The forests, not to mention the corals and shellfish, aren't keeping up with us, probably because until very recently there was no reason for them to be able to consume so rapidly.
Actually, yes, I do want to use them. Our surplus property folks probably wonder what we do with all of our old servers. They wind up in my lab., that's what. I enjoy making old gear do useful work, and I can always find work for one more.
Just before the new management team vivisected the company, DEC brought out a lot of processes for cleaner manufacturing and recycling computer stuff. I wonder where it all went?
On not wasting so much "waste": yeah, I tell my kids to remember where the landfills are, because their children will want to dig it all out again.
"In most states, it is illegal to dispose of electronics, especially computers, in landfills or other conventional means without first processing them to some degree."
It is? (a) They never told me, or (apparently) anybody I know. (b) Where are the recycling bins? The "Clean City Committee" container stations won't even take *polystyrene*, let alone electronics. If it ain't Type 1, Type 2, steel, aluminum, glass, or clean paper, it goes in the landfill.
Slashdot Mirror
What you need is clear rules dividing proper and improper uses of personal location information, and realistic penalties invokable by someone whose information has been used improperly. Then watch forever to make sure the rules aren't changed in an unacceptable manner. Really it's pretty much like any other aspect of being a member of a society.
[Paraphrase from the Revelation to John]
Exactly the opposite of individual ID. The Mark of the Beast is the same for everyone, and doesn't identify anyone. Using that system, you could tell that somebody was in the school, but not who, because there no longer *is* any "who".
That's exactly right, and people to whom that happens generally chose their license knowing it could happen and are okay with it. There's a great deal of value in having the freedom to make what you think is needed, without having to joust with Marketing and Finance and hamstring your own product to meet nontechnical goals, then have some big outfit promote it for you for free. As long as the big boys play by the stated rules, that should be good enough. Some kinds of riches can't be spent at the grocery store.
Or an "AOL Firefox plugin"? That way the more clueful AOL users (I do believe they exist) could just disable it if they choose. AOL fans could even have that AOL look-and-feel at work just by plugging it into vanilla Firefox.
I can see the campaign now. "AOL Firefox Plugin: Give Us Back the Web."
You mean Spyglass will be sued by the Microsoft who bought their browser from Spyglass after Spyglass made it by spiffing up a copy of Mosaic?
And you thought the Unix family tr^Wdigraph was complicated!
Gotta be precise here. Netscape the company went foom, but Netscape the browser just got a new name and a new set of priorities, and IMHO became much better as FOSS.
I really don't see the point of another "Netscape" release, for the customer. It'll probably be just like the previous one: the current best from Mozilla with a bucketload of advertising gunk poured over it. Who needs it? Some of my favorite changes as NS Communicator became Mozilla were the things they took out.
I certainly do see the attraction for AOL, though: they can sell areas of the UI like billboard space.
Fraudulent or coercive behavior also voids the agreement, plus you can then go after the miscreant for fraud or racketeering. Just imagine someone standing before a judge to state, "I am John Doe and I made threats against that 8-year-old over there in order to force her to accept the running of illegal software on her computer. I am seeking $100 million in damages from the 8-year-old who, I shall prove, used Task Manager to abort my virus instead of answering the dialog."
So some jerk goes to jail for a few months, and then takes Symantec for one...billion...dollars. I imagine there are a lot of people who would take that job.
I'd like that. So, if I click "I do not agree", then I'm not permitted to have my computer infected by the virus and it will exit? Brilliant!
See _Red Thunder_ for the NASCAR/Mars link. :-)
If the speed of sound in vacuum is infinite, explain why, given two noncoincident points A and B separated by vacuum, a sound at A never gets to B.
"The speed of sound in vacuum" is *meaningless*. NaN.
On the gun for a first stage, I think Jules Verne has prior art on that.
Actually my first thought was, "wow, who gets the pilot seat for that flight?"
Belzu, may I present Messrs. Michelson and Morley, who would like to talk with you about this 'aether' jazz.
Darn, I left my Esperanto dictionary at home.
Setting pi=3 is sort of demonstrated in _The Metafontbook_, IIRC. The letter 'oh' comes out hexagonal. I think people would be miffed.
"Besides it is a tough sell to most people that decimal time will turn the world into a Utopia, or that it will cure any underlying problem at all."
Really? How do you explain the people (in high places, alas!) who are convinced that adopting Daylight Savings Time will magically make Indianapolis businessmen smart enough to figure out what time it is in Chicago and Cincinnati, when they supposedly can't handle it now? No matter how silly an idea, someone is ready to buy.
Yup, they invented ten new months to replace the twelve traditional ones, and made other adjustments. There was a Simpsons episode (featuring the Springfield MENSA chapter or something like it) which gives some of the flavor of those times. Personally I think no metric year is going to work without adjusting the year-length/day-length ratio, and astroengineering is just a little too vigorous a tool for calendar reform if you ask me.
Meanwhile, intraday measures have also been metricated. According to some robot, "the Solarian day consists of ten decads, each of which is divided into one hundred centads." (Isaac Asimov, _The Naked Sun_) How that squares with the length of the second, which is involved in all kinds of fundamental relationships in physics, was not explained.
I don't have it. I'm still waiting for a believable explanation of why I would trade reliable circuit-switched voice service for unreliable packet-switched voice service.
(My long-distance bill for the last three months was a whopping seventy cents, so maybe I'm atypical.)
Concentrating CO2 from the environment produces coal and limestone, which we use. Concentrating lead, arsenic, PCBs, etc. from the environment produces, from our point of view, poisonous foods. Nothing concentrates fluorocarbons; they just disturb the ozone that reduces our exposure to ultraviolet light, which damages us.
I think I'd rather emit CO2 than any of that other stuff. (Good thing, since respiration is not optional!) If there is an Arsenic Cycle, it doesn't seem to be a vitally important part of the biosphere.
Yeah, exactly how much skill does it take to toss a computer in the trash and buy a biggerbetterfaster one? Like I said, I *enjoy* squeezing out the last bit of performance, especially when people say, "oh, that's too old to be useful."
Uh, read that again. "...sources outside the carbon cycle, IE...fossil fuels." Where exactly do you think the carbon in the fossil fuels came from? Split open a few big hunks of coal -- see the leaf prints? That's why they call them *fossil* fuels. Those plants took carbon out of the air to build their structures. Today we're releasing it back into the air. Now, class, what is the "carbon cycle"?
The problem is the disparity of rates: the plants spent millennia taking the carbon out and we're putting it all back in less than 200 years. The forests, not to mention the corals and shellfish, aren't keeping up with us, probably because until very recently there was no reason for them to be able to consume so rapidly.
Actually, yes, I do want to use them. Our surplus property folks probably wonder what we do with all of our old servers. They wind up in my lab., that's what. I enjoy making old gear do useful work, and I can always find work for one more.
Just before the new management team vivisected the company, DEC brought out a lot of processes for cleaner manufacturing and recycling computer stuff. I wonder where it all went?
On not wasting so much "waste": yeah, I tell my kids to remember where the landfills are, because their children will want to dig it all out again.
"In most states, it is illegal to dispose of electronics, especially computers, in landfills or other conventional means without first processing them to some degree."
It is? (a) They never told me, or (apparently) anybody I know. (b) Where are the recycling bins? The "Clean City Committee" container stations won't even take *polystyrene*, let alone electronics. If it ain't Type 1, Type 2, steel, aluminum, glass, or clean paper, it goes in the landfill.