Seriously? Lot of ear-wax fetishists out there, to the point they need a rule banning its depiction?
"Crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing"
Because, y'know, a completely flattened dead cat ("Deep flesh wounds are ok to show") couldn't possibly offend anyone, while showing a packet of chicken livers at the grocery store borders on mass-murderer territory?
"Maps of Kurdistan (Turkey)"
Just - What? And this counts as an "escalated" offense? Hell, the entire "IP Blocks" section pretty much reads like the antithesis of Facebook's sole positive contribution to society - Its ability to help organize people against their governments.
I think I need to go make a facebook page full of flattened dead cats - All named Ataturk, whatever the hell that means.
There is a huge problem with file sizes (so both hard drive space and download bandwidth) with lossless files, so no, it's not entirely without problems.
I own (legally, even) somewhere on the order of 2500 CDs.
I have ripped all of them to FLAC (lossless).
Total size, under 600GB. I could easily fit my entire collection on a single HDD five years ago. Today, they don't even count as the biggest single directory on my home file server (hell, not even third place - Though in fairness, I do collect historically-significant Linux distro ISOs).
FWIW, even ripped raw rather than compressed as FLAC, they would still fit on a single 2TB drive. Audio really doesn't present all that much of a problem these days.
So your advice is instead of some technological solution or a second machine be it tablet or laptop, to instead have the OP resign.
Actually, I just meant I would more-or-less politely decline to take advantage of the "opportunity" to do work on my own time with company-provided hardware. If that means resigning... I work to live, I don't live to work. If my employer has a problem with that, you can already consider me a short-timer with that company.
I'm sure you'd be the first one to resign if your company's machine use policy suddenly turns draconian.
Nope, but I will stand at the front of the line to demand an on-file exemption from stupid rules. From a past employer's joke-of-a-noncompete (that tried to regulate the totally un-work-related behavior of my relatives), to a current prohibition against salaried employees working on the side (gee, you want me to take an effective 30% pay cut, plan to make up for it?), I don't bother sneaking around when it comes to major policies I dislike. Now, for minor nuisances (like the corporate firewall classifying O'Reilly Media as porn), sure, I'll just circumvent it rather than raise a fuss. But for "terms of employment" level of issues, never, ever accept anything you don't plan to put up with for the long haul, because those terms won't get better over time.
Don't like having to work under company policies? Work for yourself. That's what everybody who's not interested in the corporate culture does. You lose the job security and stability, but you get your freedom in return. If that's not for you either, then you better hope you're real lucky.
I would point out that I live in a "right to work" state - So my employers can get rid of me at the drop of a hat anyway, without cause or warning. Although that tends to give companies a lot more leeway in abusing their staff, it also means that two-inch thick employee handbook doesn't mean squat, when "I don't like the weather today, pack your things and GTFO" carries as much weight as getting caught for the 3th time drunk in a placarded company vehicle.
Yes, we all had slower connections back then. I don't claim nothing has improved - But bandwidth had steadily increased from the days of 300 baud modems, and has nothing to do with the commercialization of the internet (except insofar as the sheer volume of ads on any major site today, even a text-dominant site like Slashdot, make loading them without adblock virtually unbearable at dialup speeds).
You couldn't find good maps. (Ha! I used to have a city map.) I still had a phone book. Yahoo was one of the best sites available.
I'll grant you Google Maps as one of the greatest things ever. Yahoo, not so much - It reflects exactly the problem I describe, the dependance on "portal" sites rather than a decentralized array of self-hosted content. And phone books? You have more than a decade ago in mind if you don't recall them in 2002. Perhaps 20 years ago, but I can remember looking up numbers online in college (late '90s).
I use... none of those (okay, I can't seem to avoid YouTube, but I rarely if ever go there directly, and actually have it blocked for inline content on 3rd party pages). And "Podcasts" most certainly did exist, we simply didn't give them a cutesy iName to mark them as somehow the idea of Apple. We simply called them the more accurate "prerecorded content in MP3 format".
Neither did most blogs. I don't recall whether or not you could even leave comments a decade ago, but probably not.
I already ranted about narcissists wasting bandwidth (aka "blogs"), so I won't repeat myself. As for user commentary on aggregator sites (like Slashdot), yes, they most certainly existed a decade ago - They actually far predate HTTP as the dominant protocol on the wire.
Wikipedia was launched only 11 years ago (I'm sure it was crappy with virtually no articles only a year after startup).
And before that, we had E2. But yes, Wiki has also made a valuable contribution to the world.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate everything about the modern internet - I don't mean this as a "get off my lawn, ya damned kids" rant. We've seen a lot of really great new ideas appear over time; it goes faster, as you point out; it has become almost ubiquitously available. Content-wise, however, almost without exception, all the greatest sites around started as free (and ad-free) labors-of-love. Even Google, YouTube, Slashdot. A bunch of geeks in a dorm room come up with a good idea, implement it just because... And then eventually sell out.
Buy your own laptop to fuck around with you cheap bastard. The laptop is the property of your employer and if you don't agree to the terms they set then don't work for them.
This is an entirely fair point of view.
To which I would respond, if my employer presented it as an argument, by leaving said laptop at the office 24/7/365. I might take it to (on-site) meetings so I could actually get some work done in the back of the room while the 3rd assistant VP of Buzzword Optimization drones on with a variety of incorrectly-used physics metaphors.
Companies provide people with laptops in the hope that those people will do "free" extra work for the company. In some cases, the use of a laptop for whatever-the-hell-I-want while stuck in a hotel room for four days between conference sessions makes up for that extra work they might occasionally get out of me. If I can't use it for anything but work, I view it as nothing but an albatross to lug around, feed, and check through security. And if it actively tracks me while on my own time - thankyouverymuchbutfuckrightoffnow, 'kay?
Compared to how much content there is now it can hardly be said to have thrived during that time except by the most disingenuous of arguers.
"Fatter" does not mean "healthier".
Even a decade ago, I could find just about anything I wanted online - Key word there, "wanted". Source code snippets? Porn? Music? Movies (albeit of lower quality due to bandwidth constraints)? Slashdot? Magazine scans? How-Tos on anything from home repair to bomb making? Game guides and reviews by players rather than publisher shills? Check, check, checkitty-check.
Today, I can find terabytes worth of narcissists finding ever more bandwidth-hungry ways to tell me about their awesomeness. I can find all the Major Media talking heads doing the exact same thing that led a generation to completely ignore them in the first place, back when they did their thing for free over-the-air. I can find a million people who want to either sell me something, or just plain sell me. And the stuff I actually want? Well, technically still there, but the signal-to-noise ratio goes down with every passing year.
So yes, call me disingenuous if you must, but the internet today does not strike me as "thriving", despite its girth; quite the opposite, we have to constantly fight both corporations and governments to keep it in a form at least vaguely useful to us and prevent it from degenerating into just one more old-school push-media advertising/propaganda vehicle. The internet has degenerated into a 300Lbs middle-aged white guy huffing and puffing after climbing a flight of stairs.
But hey, I could always start a vlog to complain about it, right?
Darknet is the opposite of the main commercial function of Internet - advertisement.
I will presume you don't mean that as a troll, and simply don't remember the internet back before "marketing" turned into a four-letter word.
The internet arose and thrived before the corporate world learned how to make money with it. Primarily universities, but also a steadily growing number of people who realized they couldn't live without it after graduation from uni, paid for a network connection so they could participate in this wonderful global sharing of ideas. And before that, people paid for access to very very crude (by comparison) dialup BBSs that gave them just the smallest taste of what an online global network had to offer.
The problem we have with the internet today, and I would say broadcast-vs-cable TV has the same problem - Companies simply got greedy. Once, they sold us cable as a great new way to get static-free TV with no ads. Now people pay over a hundred bucks a month for the same thing they used to get over the air (admittedly with more channels), and have to pay even more for premium channels that really don't have ads - Except, even those have started pushing the definition of "no ads". The internet did just fine back when it functioned as nothing but a pipe to your door, and everyone could attach whatever services to their end of the pipe they wanted.
Personally, I think the big shift really happened when ISPs started to ban "servers", basically reducing the network back to nothing more than one more way to reach consumers. As long as everyone and their brother could host whatever the hell they wanted, advertisers really had to bust their balls to reach more than a handful of people online; once people started accepting the internet as a set of places you go to get content, rather than a (albeit "Wild-West"-like) community in which you participate, the internet became nothing more than another 50k TV channels, complete with ads.
So I, for one, welcome the growth of darknets. It means We The People, rather than our corporate overlords, can once again decide what we allow on our network. If Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and even the government, doesn't like that - No problem, they can consider themselves not invited to my party.
Do you suppose the wealthiest Canadians needing a bypass put their name on the list and wait patiently... Or fly to Cleveland?
Do you suppose wealthy (elderly) Canadians in need of an organ transplant resign themselves to age-based rationing and just die quietly... Or pull a Steve Jobs and fly to Tennessee for a no-fuss, no-muss, no-waiting-list liver?
Or on the flip side of the equation, as a brilliant young surgeon, would you stay in Canada with its government-capped doctor's salaries... Or "defect" to your neighbor to the South where you can make 10x as much without the hassle of having to treat the masses of unwashed poor as a form of government-imposed forced charity?
You really aughtn't act so defensive about this - As I said, I do think you have the better public health care system, overall. At the upper end, though, of-the-wealthy, by-the-wealthy, and for-the-wealthy, sorry, the US has that market cornered. And I don't say that as a positive!
Really... How would regulating this be any different than banning steroids in professional sports?
Welcome to Slashdot, where a considerable portion of the population support legalizing all drugs.
The reason curbing anorexia is a big deal is that it has "the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder"
So it corrects itself out of the gene pool. We don't seem to have a problem here.
We have an incredibly sick attitude in our society toward purely self-destructive behaviors - Allow them to run their course, and they go away. Or as George Carlin put it, "See, somehow, I can't feel sorry for an anorexic, you know? Rich cunt, don't want to eat? Fuck her. Fuck her. Don't eat! I give a shit. Like I'm supposed to be concerned about this. I DON'T WANNA EAT! Go fuck yourself."
The funny part of it all is that Americans are coming to Canada for health care for some issues. With the population difference that should in no way happen.
Americans go to Canada for cheap routine healthcare and drugs, true. And Canadians come to America when they "really" break and want to live.
I would argue the Canadians have the better system in that regard, since it keeps the most people healthy for the least money. But as the most sublime irony here, the Canadian system only works because they (who can afford it) can come to the US for treatment by the best-of-the-best when their "single payer" says "no".
At $1000 per machine, that would be 4,500 PCs in their budget. One machine for every 4 students.
You missed a zero. Try 45,000PCs for 16000 students. Though as others have pointed out, only about half of that will go to PCs - So a "mere" 22,500 PCs for 16000 students.
And the other half will go to some form of nebulous "infrastructure" upgrades - The only part of this scam that sounds even vaguely legit (still on the high side, but at least in the right ballpark).
My take on this - Someone's brother-in-law will make a fortune from this.
You better never drive on a prescription because you just put a jinx on yourself dude. DUI here you come.
1) You bring up a great point, in that I consider Soccer Moms on Xanax only slightly less of a threat to my life than the "last round commute"; That said, much like with alcohol, I don't drive on painkillers/sedatives, either - I can't control someone else taking me out because they had one too many, but I can damned well not worsen the odds for myself.
2) A breathalyzer won't detect that Mrs. Smith couldn't handle the brats today and popped a little something extra. Yet another nail in the coffin of a stupid law.
Everything said so far still leaves me solidly in the camp of "why bother?" This law looks like nothing but a boon to the pocket-breathalyzer industry. At best, you could possibly spin it as "merely" such massively misguided government nannyism as to make you wonder if they even considered how this would work or just liked the sound of it - "I pushed to have a Breathalyzer in every car!"... Aaand that does what, exactly? Will this get the French not to drink at lunch? No. Will people just not go back to work after lunch if they have one too many? Not unless this law also makes "I drank too much" a valid reason to ditch work (as opposed to, y'know, a reason to bring a box with you to pack up your desk when you do return).
And there are people who never get a flat tire (I'm one - haven't had one since I was in high school a very long time ago) but that doesn't mean I shouldn't carry a spare tire.
Not a good analogy, for one reason - I can personally, absolutely control whether or not I drive after drinking. I cannot control whether or not I get a flat tire.
With regard to passing the breath test, if people pass the breathalyzer test then they're they're at a level of alcohol in their blood that won't cause a problem driving [...] On the other hand, people who think that they can drink three glasses of wine and still be legally able to drive will find out otherwise.
We use BAC merely as a stand-in metric because it makes an easy-to-measure, objective analysis that you can present to a court and say "over" or "under". In reality, a regular heavy drinker can function far better at 0.2 than a teetotaler can at 0.05; additionally, some people naturally experience more or less effect from a given amount of alcohol in their blood.
Using myself as an example, I would not feel comfortable driving immediately after a single beer, despite legally having the ability to down at least two before I get even close to the limit.
shell out two Euros, not more, as they never drink they never use up the two one Euro products we're discussing.
The monetary component of this really doesn't much matter so much as the BS factor. Having a breathalyzer in the trunk will at best have no effect, and as I already mentioned, will potentially lead more people to drive based on a number rather than playing it safe.
simply that if someone is drinking and goes to drive, if they have such a thing in the car they're more likely to use it to check if they should drive or not then if they don't have something to check with them.
And this matters why, for all of those who simply don't drink... Or like myself, never ever drive after doing so?
I will not ever get an OUI, period. Having a breathalyzer on hand won't change that in the least. This amounts to a pure cash-grab, plain and simple.
I can, however, think of at least one obvious unintended consequence of this law... For people like myself who always err far on the side of caution in deciding our level of intoxication before driving, how many will (instead of waiting another hour) opt to use their breathalyzer, pass, and decide to drive in a worse state than they would have otherwise?
The correct work around for this is to move the hell out of the universities sheltered halls of residence
As quite a few others have already pointed out, many unis require you to live on-campus. "Move the hell out" simply doesn't exist as an option, short of dropping out. But hey, the university of Phoenix looks just as good on a resume as Harvard, right?
Your approach may very well get you expelled [snip] No other university or employer is going to touch you [snip] you may even get a criminal record and will screw your life over utterly.
Wow... So, Drama major, right?
Running an SSH tunnel to a proxy won't get you expelled, arrested, and branded an untouchable by the corporate world. If anyone cares, you'll get told off by NetOps; In the worst case and as a repeat-offender, they might disconnect your dorm room's network access.
Not every stupid rule in this world comes down from On High, punishable by an eternity of having your liver eaten by a giant eagle every day. Most rules amount to little more than CYA (with the present restrictions solidly in that category), and if you can get around them, good for you; the school can still claim they officially don't allow it, wink wink nudge nudge.
If you don't need anything beyond web access to get that education, they are keeping costs down for the university.
Which completely ignores the reality of college as the entirety of students' lives for four years. When you live on campus, the "university life" equals your life. You eat cafeteria food (and thank Zeus for the rare occasions when you get to experience "real" food), you attend uni sporting events (even if you don't like sports - Just something to do), you listen to local garage bands, and, you absolutely depend on what utilities and services the university provides for your living arrangements. Including internet access.
they are keeping costs down for the university.
BS. Telling someone they can't look at porn at 10pm on a Saturday evening amounts to nothing but blatant moralizing; telling someone they can't visit music download sites treats everyone as an a priori criminal.
Or, more functionally, if internet access costs the university so much to provide, why don't they allow students to arrange for their own DSL or cable (and lets not insult each other by trying to pass off $100/mo 2GB/mo 3g as "broadband", a point the FP directly brought up)? Oh, right - Because unis make a fortune charging students an arm and a leg for subpar basic services. Back in my day, basic phone service counted as the big "gotcha" - Cell phones have largely killed that revenue stream, but back when you could get $14.99/mo local-only land lines, the universities charged around $60/mo.
as a means for students to get an education.
Can we all drop the "only there for an education" attitude? No one - And I feel comfortable phrasing that as an unqualified absolute - dedicates themselves to their studies 24/7. Aside from missing out on half (arguably, the more important half) of the "university life", ie the social part, few people need to dedicate that much time to their studies (and those that do won't last long before burning - or flunking - out).
Seriously? So if I walk into your house and you dont provide services I "need" I can freely break rules to get them? Oh wait this is Slashdot: No rules for me and lots of them for others.
If I pay to live in your house...
and you have me locked in to that arrangement for four (or more) years...
and you agree to provide internet access, and you forbid me from having Verizon drop a DSL line right to my bedroom...
in favor of charging some insane "Internet access" line item to my bill for 4x as much...
Then yes, I damned well expect you to provide me with real internet access, and you can fully expect me to actively work around whatever attempts you may make to enforce your morality on my net feed.
This doesn't involve either the FP's parents or his employer - He pays a boatload of money every year for housing AND internet access, and his uni has decided they can selectively skip out on the second half of that deal simply because they have a captive audience. If they tried to pull this crap on any userbase that actually had the money to fight it, you can bet this would end up in the courts.
Except in the Wild West, the townsfolk could form up a posse and ride after those highway robbers and lynch them when they caught them.. Can't really do that so much now, unfortunately.
You may have heard of this group, "Anonymous"?
The governments of the world no longer have any claim on the concept of "justice", having ceded their moral authority to the highest bidders (usually corporations, who can outspend all but the wealthiest individuals). As a result, anarchy has become far more fair than the codified pro-corporate bias we can expect from the courts (regardless of country).
And this is not a fake news
It happened, about 4 decades ago
And do you know what has changed in the past four decades?
Residential refrigerators don't latch. Haven't for 20-30 years, at least. They use a passive magnetic seal that even a kid could push open. Even standalone (residential) freezer units don't self-latch - They require a removable key-like knob to engage the lock, manually, from the outside (and even then, always have a safety release inside).
Children watching the movie might just do what the hero does - hide inside a fridge, - and suffocate, just like that poor child who died 4 decades ago
So really, you just want to advocate for Time Machine safety, rather than ranting against how many cases of the plague we could avoid by simply getting rid of the rats?
Because he confessed to writing a fucking program, not singlehandedly causing the downfall of Islam in a modern, more secular world.
Seriously, I don't know why we put up with crap like this. I have a problem with our usual willingness to violate national sovereignty at the drop of a hat to kill people we don't like, but why the hell don't we just send in a black ops team to fetch this guy, and tell Iran "No, not yours. Get civilized, then maybe we'll let you play Cops & Robbers"?
And yes, I fully realize that I don't really speak from all that morally high-of-a-ground as an American - But if the UN could pull it off, I'd applaud them for taking our death row retards away from us, too.
Security through obscurity? Again? Since it works so well, right?
Particularly in light of the fact that we already know the most important features of their method...
Step 1) Pick your favorite in-the-wild strain of H5N1.
Step 2) Pick an animal known to occasionally catch H5N1, which for the most part shares viral sensitivity with Humans. Such as a ferret or dog or pig.
Step 3) Force-infect your first specimen with your H5N1 sample. It doesn't need to get really sick, just wait long enough for the directly injected viruses to clear the body and suck out a sampling of those that managed to replicate in the host.
Steps 4-9) Use that new "strain" to infect your second specimen. Rinse wash repeat half a dozen times. By then, you probably have a problem with not killing your specimens.
Step 10) Profit! Congrats, you have a strain that will likely also infect humans. If not (or just for good measure), start from step #2 with a different animal that shares viral sensitivity with humans.
Seriously, not rocket science - Genetics, actually, in the form of plain ol' simple evolution. You artificially select for those mutations best able to infect your target, and you end up with a strain that can do exactly that with great efficiency. Censoring this paper truly means nothing more than sticking our collective fingers in our ears and going "nah-NAH-NAH-I-can't-hear-you!"
No standard or defined conditions of rounding will fix that.
No legitimate program that deals with money should ever use floating point math for monetary calculations or storage. You either use fixed point dollars with four (as the standard) decimal places, or you track tenths of a mil as an integer. This not only avoids rounding errors, it precludes rounding entirely, by letting you treat percents (to a resolution of 0.01%) as the multiplication of two integers.
As for what you actually choose to charge the customer for a $1.0427 item, that amounts to merely a matter of store policy. But FP precision has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're posting porn online.. then you don't deserve any privacy to begin with.
Pssst - You can make porn of people other than yourself.
They even have a word for the people who do that on a regular basis - "photographers".
"Urine, feces, vomit, semen, pus, and ear wax "
Seriously? Lot of ear-wax fetishists out there, to the point they need a rule banning its depiction?
"Crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing"
Because, y'know, a completely flattened dead cat ("Deep flesh wounds are ok to show") couldn't possibly offend anyone, while showing a packet of chicken livers at the grocery store borders on mass-murderer territory?
"Maps of Kurdistan (Turkey)"
Just - What? And this counts as an "escalated" offense? Hell, the entire "IP Blocks" section pretty much reads like the antithesis of Facebook's sole positive contribution to society - Its ability to help organize people against their governments.
I think I need to go make a facebook page full of flattened dead cats - All named Ataturk, whatever the hell that means.
There is a huge problem with file sizes (so both hard drive space and download bandwidth) with lossless files, so no, it's not entirely without problems.
I own (legally, even) somewhere on the order of 2500 CDs.
I have ripped all of them to FLAC (lossless).
Total size, under 600GB. I could easily fit my entire collection on a single HDD five years ago. Today, they don't even count as the biggest single directory on my home file server (hell, not even third place - Though in fairness, I do collect historically-significant Linux distro ISOs).
FWIW, even ripped raw rather than compressed as FLAC, they would still fit on a single 2TB drive. Audio really doesn't present all that much of a problem these days.
So your advice is instead of some technological solution or a second machine be it tablet or laptop, to instead have the OP resign.
Actually, I just meant I would more-or-less politely decline to take advantage of the "opportunity" to do work on my own time with company-provided hardware. If that means resigning... I work to live, I don't live to work. If my employer has a problem with that, you can already consider me a short-timer with that company.
I'm sure you'd be the first one to resign if your company's machine use policy suddenly turns draconian.
Nope, but I will stand at the front of the line to demand an on-file exemption from stupid rules. From a past employer's joke-of-a-noncompete (that tried to regulate the totally un-work-related behavior of my relatives), to a current prohibition against salaried employees working on the side (gee, you want me to take an effective 30% pay cut, plan to make up for it?), I don't bother sneaking around when it comes to major policies I dislike. Now, for minor nuisances (like the corporate firewall classifying O'Reilly Media as porn), sure, I'll just circumvent it rather than raise a fuss. But for "terms of employment" level of issues, never, ever accept anything you don't plan to put up with for the long haul, because those terms won't get better over time.
Don't like having to work under company policies? Work for yourself. That's what everybody who's not interested in the corporate culture does. You lose the job security and stability, but you get your freedom in return. If that's not for you either, then you better hope you're real lucky.
I would point out that I live in a "right to work" state - So my employers can get rid of me at the drop of a hat anyway, without cause or warning. Although that tends to give companies a lot more leeway in abusing their staff, it also means that two-inch thick employee handbook doesn't mean squat, when "I don't like the weather today, pack your things and GTFO" carries as much weight as getting caught for the 3th time drunk in a placarded company vehicle.
Sites were slow.
Yes, we all had slower connections back then. I don't claim nothing has improved - But bandwidth had steadily increased from the days of 300 baud modems, and has nothing to do with the commercialization of the internet (except insofar as the sheer volume of ads on any major site today, even a text-dominant site like Slashdot, make loading them without adblock virtually unbearable at dialup speeds).
You couldn't find good maps. (Ha! I used to have a city map.) I still had a phone book. Yahoo was one of the best sites available.
I'll grant you Google Maps as one of the greatest things ever. Yahoo, not so much - It reflects exactly the problem I describe, the dependance on "portal" sites rather than a decentralized array of self-hosted content. And phone books? You have more than a decade ago in mind if you don't recall them in 2002. Perhaps 20 years ago, but I can remember looking up numbers online in college (late '90s).
iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora didn't exist. Podcasts didn't exist.
I use... none of those (okay, I can't seem to avoid YouTube, but I rarely if ever go there directly, and actually have it blocked for inline content on 3rd party pages). And "Podcasts" most certainly did exist, we simply didn't give them a cutesy iName to mark them as somehow the idea of Apple. We simply called them the more accurate "prerecorded content in MP3 format".
Neither did most blogs. I don't recall whether or not you could even leave comments a decade ago, but probably not.
I already ranted about narcissists wasting bandwidth (aka "blogs"), so I won't repeat myself. As for user commentary on aggregator sites (like Slashdot), yes, they most certainly existed a decade ago - They actually far predate HTTP as the dominant protocol on the wire.
Wikipedia was launched only 11 years ago (I'm sure it was crappy with virtually no articles only a year after startup).
And before that, we had E2. But yes, Wiki has also made a valuable contribution to the world.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate everything about the modern internet - I don't mean this as a "get off my lawn, ya damned kids" rant. We've seen a lot of really great new ideas appear over time; it goes faster, as you point out; it has become almost ubiquitously available. Content-wise, however, almost without exception, all the greatest sites around started as free (and ad-free) labors-of-love. Even Google, YouTube, Slashdot. A bunch of geeks in a dorm room come up with a good idea, implement it just because... And then eventually sell out.
Buy your own laptop to fuck around with you cheap bastard. The laptop is the property of your employer and if you don't agree to the terms they set then don't work for them.
This is an entirely fair point of view.
To which I would respond, if my employer presented it as an argument, by leaving said laptop at the office 24/7/365. I might take it to (on-site) meetings so I could actually get some work done in the back of the room while the 3rd assistant VP of Buzzword Optimization drones on with a variety of incorrectly-used physics metaphors.
Companies provide people with laptops in the hope that those people will do "free" extra work for the company. In some cases, the use of a laptop for whatever-the-hell-I-want while stuck in a hotel room for four days between conference sessions makes up for that extra work they might occasionally get out of me. If I can't use it for anything but work, I view it as nothing but an albatross to lug around, feed, and check through security. And if it actively tracks me while on my own time - thankyouverymuchbutfuckrightoffnow, 'kay?
Compared to how much content there is now it can hardly be said to have thrived during that time except by the most disingenuous of arguers.
"Fatter" does not mean "healthier".
Even a decade ago, I could find just about anything I wanted online - Key word there, "wanted". Source code snippets? Porn? Music? Movies (albeit of lower quality due to bandwidth constraints)? Slashdot? Magazine scans? How-Tos on anything from home repair to bomb making? Game guides and reviews by players rather than publisher shills? Check, check, checkitty-check.
Today, I can find terabytes worth of narcissists finding ever more bandwidth-hungry ways to tell me about their awesomeness. I can find all the Major Media talking heads doing the exact same thing that led a generation to completely ignore them in the first place, back when they did their thing for free over-the-air. I can find a million people who want to either sell me something, or just plain sell me. And the stuff I actually want? Well, technically still there, but the signal-to-noise ratio goes down with every passing year.
So yes, call me disingenuous if you must, but the internet today does not strike me as "thriving", despite its girth; quite the opposite, we have to constantly fight both corporations and governments to keep it in a form at least vaguely useful to us and prevent it from degenerating into just one more old-school push-media advertising/propaganda vehicle. The internet has degenerated into a 300Lbs middle-aged white guy huffing and puffing after climbing a flight of stairs.
But hey, I could always start a vlog to complain about it, right?
Darknet is the opposite of the main commercial function of Internet - advertisement.
I will presume you don't mean that as a troll, and simply don't remember the internet back before "marketing" turned into a four-letter word.
The internet arose and thrived before the corporate world learned how to make money with it. Primarily universities, but also a steadily growing number of people who realized they couldn't live without it after graduation from uni, paid for a network connection so they could participate in this wonderful global sharing of ideas. And before that, people paid for access to very very crude (by comparison) dialup BBSs that gave them just the smallest taste of what an online global network had to offer.
The problem we have with the internet today, and I would say broadcast-vs-cable TV has the same problem - Companies simply got greedy. Once, they sold us cable as a great new way to get static-free TV with no ads. Now people pay over a hundred bucks a month for the same thing they used to get over the air (admittedly with more channels), and have to pay even more for premium channels that really don't have ads - Except, even those have started pushing the definition of "no ads". The internet did just fine back when it functioned as nothing but a pipe to your door, and everyone could attach whatever services to their end of the pipe they wanted.
Personally, I think the big shift really happened when ISPs started to ban "servers", basically reducing the network back to nothing more than one more way to reach consumers. As long as everyone and their brother could host whatever the hell they wanted, advertisers really had to bust their balls to reach more than a handful of people online; once people started accepting the internet as a set of places you go to get content, rather than a (albeit "Wild-West"-like) community in which you participate, the internet became nothing more than another 50k TV channels, complete with ads.
So I, for one, welcome the growth of darknets. It means We The People, rather than our corporate overlords, can once again decide what we allow on our network. If Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and even the government, doesn't like that - No problem, they can consider themselves not invited to my party.
Like open heart surgeries etc?
Exactly like open heart surgeries.
Do you suppose the wealthiest Canadians needing a bypass put their name on the list and wait patiently... Or fly to Cleveland?
Do you suppose wealthy (elderly) Canadians in need of an organ transplant resign themselves to age-based rationing and just die quietly... Or pull a Steve Jobs and fly to Tennessee for a no-fuss, no-muss, no-waiting-list liver?
Or on the flip side of the equation, as a brilliant young surgeon, would you stay in Canada with its government-capped doctor's salaries... Or "defect" to your neighbor to the South where you can make 10x as much without the hassle of having to treat the masses of unwashed poor as a form of government-imposed forced charity?
You really aughtn't act so defensive about this - As I said, I do think you have the better public health care system, overall. At the upper end, though, of-the-wealthy, by-the-wealthy, and for-the-wealthy, sorry, the US has that market cornered. And I don't say that as a positive!
Really... How would regulating this be any different than banning steroids in professional sports?
Welcome to Slashdot, where a considerable portion of the population support legalizing all drugs.
The reason curbing anorexia is a big deal is that it has "the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder"
So it corrects itself out of the gene pool. We don't seem to have a problem here. We have an incredibly sick attitude in our society toward purely self-destructive behaviors - Allow them to run their course, and they go away. Or as George Carlin put it, "See, somehow, I can't feel sorry for an anorexic, you know? Rich cunt, don't want to eat? Fuck her. Fuck her. Don't eat! I give a shit. Like I'm supposed to be concerned about this. I DON'T WANNA EAT! Go fuck yourself."
The funny part of it all is that Americans are coming to Canada for health care for some issues. With the population difference that should in no way happen.
Americans go to Canada for cheap routine healthcare and drugs, true. And Canadians come to America when they "really" break and want to live.
I would argue the Canadians have the better system in that regard, since it keeps the most people healthy for the least money. But as the most sublime irony here, the Canadian system only works because they (who can afford it) can come to the US for treatment by the best-of-the-best when their "single payer" says "no".
At $1000 per machine, that would be 4,500 PCs in their budget. One machine for every 4 students.
You missed a zero. Try 45,000PCs for 16000 students. Though as others have pointed out, only about half of that will go to PCs - So a "mere" 22,500 PCs for 16000 students.
And the other half will go to some form of nebulous "infrastructure" upgrades - The only part of this scam that sounds even vaguely legit (still on the high side, but at least in the right ballpark).
My take on this - Someone's brother-in-law will make a fortune from this.
You better never drive on a prescription because you just put a jinx on yourself dude. DUI here you come.
1) You bring up a great point, in that I consider Soccer Moms on Xanax only slightly less of a threat to my life than the "last round commute"; That said, much like with alcohol, I don't drive on painkillers/sedatives, either - I can't control someone else taking me out because they had one too many, but I can damned well not worsen the odds for myself.
2) A breathalyzer won't detect that Mrs. Smith couldn't handle the brats today and popped a little something extra. Yet another nail in the coffin of a stupid law.
Everything said so far still leaves me solidly in the camp of "why bother?" This law looks like nothing but a boon to the pocket-breathalyzer industry. At best, you could possibly spin it as "merely" such massively misguided government nannyism as to make you wonder if they even considered how this would work or just liked the sound of it - "I pushed to have a Breathalyzer in every car!"... Aaand that does what, exactly? Will this get the French not to drink at lunch? No. Will people just not go back to work after lunch if they have one too many? Not unless this law also makes "I drank too much" a valid reason to ditch work (as opposed to, y'know, a reason to bring a box with you to pack up your desk when you do return).
And there are people who never get a flat tire (I'm one - haven't had one since I was in high school a very long time ago) but that doesn't mean I shouldn't carry a spare tire.
Not a good analogy, for one reason - I can personally, absolutely control whether or not I drive after drinking. I cannot control whether or not I get a flat tire.
With regard to passing the breath test, if people pass the breathalyzer test then they're they're at a level of alcohol in their blood that won't cause a problem driving [...] On the other hand, people who think that they can drink three glasses of wine and still be legally able to drive will find out otherwise.
We use BAC merely as a stand-in metric because it makes an easy-to-measure, objective analysis that you can present to a court and say "over" or "under". In reality, a regular heavy drinker can function far better at 0.2 than a teetotaler can at 0.05; additionally, some people naturally experience more or less effect from a given amount of alcohol in their blood.
Using myself as an example, I would not feel comfortable driving immediately after a single beer, despite legally having the ability to down at least two before I get even close to the limit.
shell out two Euros, not more, as they never drink they never use up the two one Euro products we're discussing.
The monetary component of this really doesn't much matter so much as the BS factor. Having a breathalyzer in the trunk will at best have no effect, and as I already mentioned, will potentially lead more people to drive based on a number rather than playing it safe.
simply that if someone is drinking and goes to drive, if they have such a thing in the car they're more likely to use it to check if they should drive or not then if they don't have something to check with them.
And this matters why, for all of those who simply don't drink... Or like myself, never ever drive after doing so?
I will not ever get an OUI, period. Having a breathalyzer on hand won't change that in the least. This amounts to a pure cash-grab, plain and simple.
I can, however, think of at least one obvious unintended consequence of this law... For people like myself who always err far on the side of caution in deciding our level of intoxication before driving, how many will (instead of waiting another hour) opt to use their breathalyzer, pass, and decide to drive in a worse state than they would have otherwise?
The correct work around for this is to move the hell out of the universities sheltered halls of residence
As quite a few others have already pointed out, many unis require you to live on-campus. "Move the hell out" simply doesn't exist as an option, short of dropping out. But hey, the university of Phoenix looks just as good on a resume as Harvard, right?
Your approach may very well get you expelled [snip] No other university or employer is going to touch you [snip] you may even get a criminal record and will screw your life over utterly.
Wow... So, Drama major, right?
Running an SSH tunnel to a proxy won't get you expelled, arrested, and branded an untouchable by the corporate world. If anyone cares, you'll get told off by NetOps; In the worst case and as a repeat-offender, they might disconnect your dorm room's network access.
Not every stupid rule in this world comes down from On High, punishable by an eternity of having your liver eaten by a giant eagle every day. Most rules amount to little more than CYA (with the present restrictions solidly in that category), and if you can get around them, good for you; the school can still claim they officially don't allow it, wink wink nudge nudge.
If you don't need anything beyond web access to get that education, they are keeping costs down for the university.
Which completely ignores the reality of college as the entirety of students' lives for four years. When you live on campus, the "university life" equals your life. You eat cafeteria food (and thank Zeus for the rare occasions when you get to experience "real" food), you attend uni sporting events (even if you don't like sports - Just something to do), you listen to local garage bands, and, you absolutely depend on what utilities and services the university provides for your living arrangements. Including internet access.
they are keeping costs down for the university.
BS. Telling someone they can't look at porn at 10pm on a Saturday evening amounts to nothing but blatant moralizing; telling someone they can't visit music download sites treats everyone as an a priori criminal.
Or, more functionally, if internet access costs the university so much to provide, why don't they allow students to arrange for their own DSL or cable (and lets not insult each other by trying to pass off $100/mo 2GB/mo 3g as "broadband", a point the FP directly brought up)? Oh, right - Because unis make a fortune charging students an arm and a leg for subpar basic services. Back in my day, basic phone service counted as the big "gotcha" - Cell phones have largely killed that revenue stream, but back when you could get $14.99/mo local-only land lines, the universities charged around $60/mo.
as a means for students to get an education.
Can we all drop the "only there for an education" attitude? No one - And I feel comfortable phrasing that as an unqualified absolute - dedicates themselves to their studies 24/7. Aside from missing out on half (arguably, the more important half) of the "university life", ie the social part, few people need to dedicate that much time to their studies (and those that do won't last long before burning - or flunking - out).
Seriously? So if I walk into your house and you dont provide services I "need" I can freely break rules to get them? Oh wait this is Slashdot: No rules for me and lots of them for others.
If I pay to live in your house...
and you have me locked in to that arrangement for four (or more) years...
and you agree to provide internet access, and you forbid me from having Verizon drop a DSL line right to my bedroom...
in favor of charging some insane "Internet access" line item to my bill for 4x as much...
Then yes, I damned well expect you to provide me with real internet access, and you can fully expect me to actively work around whatever attempts you may make to enforce your morality on my net feed.
This doesn't involve either the FP's parents or his employer - He pays a boatload of money every year for housing AND internet access, and his uni has decided they can selectively skip out on the second half of that deal simply because they have a captive audience. If they tried to pull this crap on any userbase that actually had the money to fight it, you can bet this would end up in the courts.
Except in the Wild West, the townsfolk could form up a posse and ride after those highway robbers and lynch them when they caught them.. Can't really do that so much now, unfortunately.
You may have heard of this group, "Anonymous"?
The governments of the world no longer have any claim on the concept of "justice", having ceded their moral authority to the highest bidders (usually corporations, who can outspend all but the wealthiest individuals). As a result, anarchy has become far more fair than the codified pro-corporate bias we can expect from the courts (regardless of country).
And this is not a fake news
It happened, about 4 decades ago
And do you know what has changed in the past four decades?
Residential refrigerators don't latch. Haven't for 20-30 years, at least. They use a passive magnetic seal that even a kid could push open. Even standalone (residential) freezer units don't self-latch - They require a removable key-like knob to engage the lock, manually, from the outside (and even then, always have a safety release inside).
Children watching the movie might just do what the hero does - hide inside a fridge, - and suffocate, just like that poor child who died 4 decades ago
So really, you just want to advocate for Time Machine safety, rather than ranting against how many cases of the plague we could avoid by simply getting rid of the rats?
/ Grabs popcorn before the show starts.
// Hopes Darl makes a cameo in this one
Because he confessed to writing a fucking program, not singlehandedly causing the downfall of Islam in a modern, more secular world.
Seriously, I don't know why we put up with crap like this. I have a problem with our usual willingness to violate national sovereignty at the drop of a hat to kill people we don't like, but why the hell don't we just send in a black ops team to fetch this guy, and tell Iran "No, not yours. Get civilized, then maybe we'll let you play Cops & Robbers"?
And yes, I fully realize that I don't really speak from all that morally high-of-a-ground as an American - But if the UN could pull it off, I'd applaud them for taking our death row retards away from us, too.
Security through obscurity? Again? Since it works so well, right?
Particularly in light of the fact that we already know the most important features of their method...
Step 1) Pick your favorite in-the-wild strain of H5N1.
Step 2) Pick an animal known to occasionally catch H5N1, which for the most part shares viral sensitivity with Humans. Such as a ferret or dog or pig.
Step 3) Force-infect your first specimen with your H5N1 sample. It doesn't need to get really sick, just wait long enough for the directly injected viruses to clear the body and suck out a sampling of those that managed to replicate in the host.
Steps 4-9) Use that new "strain" to infect your second specimen. Rinse wash repeat half a dozen times. By then, you probably have a problem with not killing your specimens.
Step 10) Profit! Congrats, you have a strain that will likely also infect humans. If not (or just for good measure), start from step #2 with a different animal that shares viral sensitivity with humans.
Seriously, not rocket science - Genetics, actually, in the form of plain ol' simple evolution. You artificially select for those mutations best able to infect your target, and you end up with a strain that can do exactly that with great efficiency. Censoring this paper truly means nothing more than sticking our collective fingers in our ears and going "nah-NAH-NAH-I-can't-hear-you!"
They have a problem with deforestation.
Burn dried dung instead of wood.
They get sick from the open fires indoors.
Cook outside (or more usefully, build the stove into a wall with the chimney outside and the cook-surface inside).
Carrying that wood through the mountains is hard labor.
Cry me a river - See #1, or... Just move closer to the damned trees.
No standard or defined conditions of rounding will fix that.
No legitimate program that deals with money should ever use floating point math for monetary calculations or storage. You either use fixed point dollars with four (as the standard) decimal places, or you track tenths of a mil as an integer. This not only avoids rounding errors, it precludes rounding entirely, by letting you treat percents (to a resolution of 0.01%) as the multiplication of two integers.
As for what you actually choose to charge the customer for a $1.0427 item, that amounts to merely a matter of store policy. But FP precision has absolutely nothing to do with it.