Well, if you are running a very stable system and there are no problems, then don't. But if you want to upgrade to a virtual machine in the future, why not? When you do upgrade, old DOS may not run on the new hardware. FreeDOS will.
My opinion would be that if things are fine now, then don't worry at the moment. But when it comes time to upgrade, running with a Free, modern and supported DOS is more sense than continuing with an ancient one.
I get your point. But I'm pretty sure that the people who are worried about the "OMG UN" are not worried because the ITU members don't like VoIP, but more because they just are a bit, well, paranoid (and in all the wrong ways).
NREN's, such as JANET, AARNet and many others existed. The Internet could easily have formed without the US portion. Yes much of the tech and standards came from the USA, but it is easily replaceable.
OK, some people are merely arguing that the US is doing a better job than the UN could do. It doesn't detract from my point that the US is a doing an awful job (from the point of view of a person who actually cares about communication between people, but doesn't care about the rights of corporations or governments) and that a decentralized system would be far better.
They did build and do maintain their own infrastructure. The majority of the physical Internet infrastructure is outside the USA. Funny that, seeing as how the majority of the world is not the USA.
And it doesn't work. The USA government seizes domains for no other reason than the website operators are accused of "pirating" copyrighted material. (And simply having links to the material is good enough apparently.)
It is broken. It does need fixing. And even if it wasn't broken, I wouldn't trust the USA as far as I could throw it. I also don't trust the UN, but I trust them slightly more.
You know, there are a lot of idiots (and otherwise smart people) going on about how the ITU is terrible and the UN will ruin everything, and such. You know, like how the ITU really ruined international phone calls, and the UPU (IPU) has totally fucked up handling of international mail. And some of them will say something stupid about the UN building their own Internet (considering the US built the Internet etc. etc.) or how the US is doing such a good job of things.
Well, here's my take: The USA may have initially funded and the initial technology behind the Internet may have come from the USA, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. It's like saying that just because some random Chinese person made fireworks that China should have control over fireworks for the rest of eternity. It doesn't work like that. Moreover, the rest of the world has built the Internet. Without the rest of the world it would just be a USA based network, and frankly that would be pretty boring. (And many countries had their own internal networks that were joined to the Internet, that could have been joined together perfectly well without the USA based portion.)
And the USA isn't doing a good job of managing the domain name system anyway. Not only are domain names being seized left right and center, ICANN (a subdivision of the US Department of Commerce) is creating an insane system where any big corporation can create whatever top level domain they want.
And, even if the ITU did take over control of the domain name system, they require unanimity (according to same random/. post I saw) to actually make decisions. And surely the USA wouldn't agree on censorship! (Oh wait, they actually would.)
So, my proposal: fuck hierarchy in the domain name system. A simple peer-to-peer system, each system recognizes friends and if enough friends say that this domain name points at this IP address, then that's what happens. If you want a domain name, you just have to convince people to recognize you have the domain name. It makes it harder for businesses (because there is no enforced hierarchy), but, you know, fuck 'em. Maybe.com and.biz and.scammer could all be in a hierarchy, and the rest of us could go our own way with a bit of anarchy. OK, my distributed domain name system is probably not workable. But I know there are a lot of smart people who could easily come up with a workable system. And the major problem as I see it? Well, corporations and government. You know, the people wanting to keep control over the Internet and everything.
If corporations jumped on board, a distributed DNS could be up and running in days. Push some OS updates out and Bob's fucking your uncle (you didn't know your uncle was gay? the way he pays so much attention to the football didn't tip you off?)
I wouldn't go so far as to execute people merely standing for political positions, just those who actually obtain office. And I sort of stole the idea from Douglas Adams:
"`You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?' `Really?' said Arthur. `No I didn't. For what offence?' Trillian frowned. `What do you mean, offence?' `I see.'"
Also, the summary is a bit over the top. This isn't about dogs being used on private property without a warrant; this is about a dog being outside, on public property, indicating that it can smell drugs inside, and then a warrant being obtained based on that "evidence". Which the article is (rightly in my humble opinion) linking to using thermal-imaging devices form outside a house without a warrant. What if fancy particle detectors could be used in the same way? So, no dog, just more technology? Can the police legally use a "smell-o-meter" to detect if there are drugs in a house, even if they don't have a warrant?
Personally I'm always in favor of less power for the police, and more power for the people. (I'm also strongly in favor of capital punishment for politicians.)
Seriously, and cops come onto your property with a dog, and don't have a warrant, what are you going to do? If you shoot them, they'll shoot you. If you sue them, you'll lose. If you put up with it it, well, that's what you'll have to do.
It's rigged against you. Everything is. In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force. But in most other places (including the USA and Australia), cops also literally get away with murder.
And you think that a little bit of searching without a warrant is going to bother them? Even if the case against a suspect is thrown out because the evidence was collected illegally, the filth involved will not have any sanctions against them. Think about that. They can bust down your door, shoot your dog, and plant drugs, with no repercussions.
And no use for recreational drugs? So no alcohol? You don't smoke a ciggie every now and again? Or a pipe or a cigar? (Personally I don't use illegal drugs, but that's only 'cause I'm too lazy to seek them out. If they were on sale down at the local bottlo along with the whisky, brandy and fine liqueurs I'd buy some.)
Except this is for the inlaws. Personally I would just rig lots of Ethernet to every room (two or three points in different walls) plus plenty pull lines to every room, make sure that every room has heaps of power points (any three or four metre square room needs at least eight points, two in each corner), and insulate the hell out of the place.
With power and connections everything else can come later if needed.
If your ereader can't read HTML it sucks and you need a new one. EPUB is just a bastardised standard based on HTML, CSS and other open standards wrapped up in a non-exactly, but basically ZIP file. Basically, any web browser can easily be converted to read epub it's that similar to real HTML etc.
OK, slightly over simplified (EPUB also contains an index file, and the content could be Daisy XML instead of XHTML, and some other things) But basically EPUB is pointless 'cause HTML can do everything and more that EPUB can do. The areas where (X)HTML has problems, could be fixed by participating in the HTML 5 process.
It's not the porn. It's the fucked up porn that I said would be better off steering the kid away from. I had free Internet porn on tap, and I've turned out alright I think.
Except that malware could conceivably bypass the rules. That's why I suggested an external firewall (probably on the router). A good router will have an adjustable firewall built in which could be used. I don't know much about MS Windows security, and while I understand it has gotten better, I still wouldn't trust it.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't pay, or get paid, for sex. It's not so much against my principles, as I don't see the point. OK, that's not quite true. I don't see the point in paying for sex, but offer me enough money and I might have sex with you. But not on camera.
There is a lot of tame porn out there, mainly just naked people on their own. And if a 12 year old wants to see porn, that's all that's needed (hell, probably doesn't even need to be naked). No point in exposing kids to bizarre stuff and giving them all sorts of fucked up ideas about sexuality and sex that early.
"Any snooping should be in the open and agreed upon beforehand." Exactly. Any it doesn't matter if the child looks at porn. That's what teenagers do. Even better, find some sites with some non-extreme porn (no violence, and even no insults at the women) so that the child doesn't think that fucked up things are normal. It's not normal to insult and hit a women (unless she wants you to). Hell, maybe even just some naked pictures, no need to show sex at all.
I like 1 and 3, but have another suggestion instead of 2. Install a firewall between the computer and the Internet, and block all inbound and outbound connections except on the ports used by the games required. No web browsing, no email, no chat (except in game) on the MS Windows machine at all.
Disclaimer, I've been using GNU/Linux myself almost exclusively since 2003 or something, and so my knowledge of MS Windows is also dated. But, if the worms can't access the machine they can't hurt it. If the child can't access the web, they can't have some ad network serve drive-by-download malware. Etc.
I also like the idea of letting the child learn about computer security themselves and do it all themselves. But that may cause more heartbreak in the end than my suggestion.
That wasn't the point. The point was they are more interested in making money than in publishing good papers, and so will publish anything. Not all open access journals charge a fee to publish. See my reply to the post above yours for more info.
No. Open access means open access. Free access without having to pay for access. Nothing more. I suggest the Wikipedia article for more info.
Some journals charge authors a fee to help cover publishing costs. Others (First Monday for example, one of the first and longest running open access journals) don't charge a fee at any stage of the game. Academic institutions will often cover the cost of publishing for an author, but probably only if the journal is a reputable one.
You are correct that being open access tells you nothing about the quality of the journal. First Monday is an excellent journal. But that wasn't my point. The point is that this journal is more interested in making money than being reputable, and hence charges a fee and publishes anything. Other journals both want to be reputable and make money, and so will charge a fee to publish and will only publish good papers. This fee will probably be covered by the authors institution.
This has nothing to do with open access, and more to do with lack of proper review. Besides, as noted in the post, this particular journal charges a fee for publishing. Being a "low-tier" journal, they don't really have a reputation, and are probably more concerned with making money. Hell, I could start up my own journal, give it a title, Generalities and accept anything at all to be published. It doesn't mean what is published is meaningful or useful. (Just because something is in a book doesn't make it true either. This journal sounds like it is about equivalent to "self published" books, where you pay the publisher to print your book. But they don't actually do any editing or similar. Not to say that reputable journals are the same as the non-self publishing world.)
Journals have reputations for a reason. One reason is because the good ones tend to do a bit more checking of the papers submitted. I doubt it this paper would have been accepted by a journal that actually reviewed papers properly, regardless of whether it was open access or not.
> Many of the things we know today, and even take for granted, would be seen as pure magic to a person from the 19th century. And to people today. > The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person. Yes, most people today have no idea about such things. > Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. People might understand GPS (I do), but I'venever heard of baking noodles in relation to fiberoptic communication. > Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven. I've only got the faintest idea of how a cell phone works (it's a computer with a radio?), and most people wouldn't understand how a microwave worked. Though they may understand if you explained it.
> Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares. Bullshit.
> Others that would floor people from the 19th century, would be ENGINEERING microbes. They often felt that complete eradication of germs was desirable. (Just read the last part of "the time machine") As such, the very idea of creating new ones would be cognitatively jarring. Using engineered viruses for gene therapy and the like would seem backward and regressive to their views. But an educated person from that time could have it explained, and understand why it was a good thing. Even if at first 'glance' it sounds like a bad thing.
You give too much credit to people today, and not enough to people from the past. An educated intelligent person from either era could understand most of what you mentioned with some basic explanations. Yes, some of it would be incomprehensible to the 19th C person, but some of it is incomprehensible to people today. (Why are 'civilised' countries still fighting wars of aggression, the leaders still lying and manipulating people, etc.? Why is sex still a taboo subject, and violence considered normal?)
According to Wikipedia, Red Bull is Austrian, but that one of the owners is Thai. And I probably didn't need to respond to the troll. But I did anyway. Life goes on.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you are running a very stable system and there are no problems, then don't. But if you want to upgrade to a virtual machine in the future, why not? When you do upgrade, old DOS may not run on the new hardware. FreeDOS will.
My opinion would be that if things are fine now, then don't worry at the moment. But when it comes time to upgrade, running with a Free, modern and supported DOS is more sense than continuing with an ancient one.
I get your point. But I'm pretty sure that the people who are worried about the "OMG UN" are not worried because the ITU members don't like VoIP, but more because they just are a bit, well, paranoid (and in all the wrong ways).
Do you know about FreeDOS? If you don't check it out, it's a great MS DOS or other similar vintage DOS replacement. It is stable, updated and has heaps of features that you won't have if you are running an ancient DOS.
Also, it runs perfectly happily in a VM such as DOSEmu. Check it out.
NREN's, such as JANET, AARNet and many others existed. The Internet could easily have formed without the US portion. Yes much of the tech and standards came from the USA, but it is easily replaceable.
OK, some people are merely arguing that the US is doing a better job than the UN could do. It doesn't detract from my point that the US is a doing an awful job (from the point of view of a person who actually cares about communication between people, but doesn't care about the rights of corporations or governments) and that a decentralized system would be far better.
They did build and do maintain their own infrastructure. The majority of the physical Internet infrastructure is outside the USA. Funny that, seeing as how the majority of the world is not the USA.
And it doesn't work. The USA government seizes domains for no other reason than the website operators are accused of "pirating" copyrighted material. (And simply having links to the material is good enough apparently.)
It is broken. It does need fixing. And even if it wasn't broken, I wouldn't trust the USA as far as I could throw it. I also don't trust the UN, but I trust them slightly more.
You know, there are a lot of idiots (and otherwise smart people) going on about how the ITU is terrible and the UN will ruin everything, and such. You know, like how the ITU really ruined international phone calls, and the UPU (IPU) has totally fucked up handling of international mail. And some of them will say something stupid about the UN building their own Internet (considering the US built the Internet etc. etc.) or how the US is doing such a good job of things.
Well, here's my take:
The USA may have initially funded and the initial technology behind the Internet may have come from the USA, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. It's like saying that just because some random Chinese person made fireworks that China should have control over fireworks for the rest of eternity. It doesn't work like that. Moreover, the rest of the world has built the Internet. Without the rest of the world it would just be a USA based network, and frankly that would be pretty boring. (And many countries had their own internal networks that were joined to the Internet, that could have been joined together perfectly well without the USA based portion.)
And the USA isn't doing a good job of managing the domain name system anyway. Not only are domain names being seized left right and center, ICANN (a subdivision of the US Department of Commerce) is creating an insane system where any big corporation can create whatever top level domain they want.
And, even if the ITU did take over control of the domain name system, they require unanimity (according to same random /. post I saw) to actually make decisions. And surely the USA wouldn't agree on censorship! (Oh wait, they actually would.)
So, my proposal: fuck hierarchy in the domain name system. A simple peer-to-peer system, each system recognizes friends and if enough friends say that this domain name points at this IP address, then that's what happens. If you want a domain name, you just have to convince people to recognize you have the domain name. It makes it harder for businesses (because there is no enforced hierarchy), but, you know, fuck 'em. Maybe .com and .biz and .scammer could all be in a hierarchy, and the rest of us could go our own way with a bit of anarchy. OK, my distributed domain name system is probably not workable. But I know there are a lot of smart people who could easily come up with a workable system. And the major problem as I see it? Well, corporations and government. You know, the people wanting to keep control over the Internet and everything.
If corporations jumped on board, a distributed DNS could be up and running in days. Push some OS updates out and Bob's fucking your uncle (you didn't know your uncle was gay? the way he pays so much attention to the football didn't tip you off?)
I wouldn't go so far as to execute people merely standing for political positions, just those who actually obtain office. And I sort of stole the idea from Douglas Adams:
Also, the summary is a bit over the top. This isn't about dogs being used on private property without a warrant; this is about a dog being outside, on public property, indicating that it can smell drugs inside, and then a warrant being obtained based on that "evidence". Which the article is (rightly in my humble opinion) linking to using thermal-imaging devices form outside a house without a warrant. What if fancy particle detectors could be used in the same way? So, no dog, just more technology? Can the police legally use a "smell-o-meter" to detect if there are drugs in a house, even if they don't have a warrant?
Personally I'm always in favor of less power for the police, and more power for the people. (I'm also strongly in favor of capital punishment for politicians.)
Seriously, and cops come onto your property with a dog, and don't have a warrant, what are you going to do? If you shoot them, they'll shoot you. If you sue them, you'll lose. If you put up with it it, well, that's what you'll have to do.
It's rigged against you. Everything is. In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force. But in most other places (including the USA and Australia), cops also literally get away with murder.
And you think that a little bit of searching without a warrant is going to bother them? Even if the case against a suspect is thrown out because the evidence was collected illegally, the filth involved will not have any sanctions against them. Think about that. They can bust down your door, shoot your dog, and plant drugs, with no repercussions.
And no use for recreational drugs? So no alcohol? You don't smoke a ciggie every now and again? Or a pipe or a cigar? (Personally I don't use illegal drugs, but that's only 'cause I'm too lazy to seek them out. If they were on sale down at the local bottlo along with the whisky, brandy and fine liqueurs I'd buy some.)
Yeah, this.
Except that you don't need phone cables, 'cause the ethernet can deal with it. Oh, and lots of pull lines. Like heaps.
And solar on the roof. And insulation. Wait I already said that. I should have read the thread before commenting...
Except this is for the inlaws. Personally I would just rig lots of Ethernet to every room (two or three points in different walls) plus plenty pull lines to every room, make sure that every room has heaps of power points (any three or four metre square room needs at least eight points, two in each corner), and insulate the hell out of the place.
With power and connections everything else can come later if needed.
Also, solar on the roof.
If your ereader can't read HTML it sucks and you need a new one. EPUB is just a bastardised standard based on HTML, CSS and other open standards wrapped up in a non-exactly, but basically ZIP file. Basically, any web browser can easily be converted to read epub it's that similar to real HTML etc.
OK, slightly over simplified (EPUB also contains an index file, and the content could be Daisy XML instead of XHTML, and some other things) But basically EPUB is pointless 'cause HTML can do everything and more that EPUB can do. The areas where (X)HTML has problems, could be fixed by participating in the HTML 5 process.
It's not the porn. It's the fucked up porn that I said would be better off steering the kid away from. I had free Internet porn on tap, and I've turned out alright I think.
I don't have a problem with fetishes. I have a problem with "normal" porn degrading women. Safe and consensual fetishes are fine and dandy in my book.
Except that malware could conceivably bypass the rules. That's why I suggested an external firewall (probably on the router). A good router will have an adjustable firewall built in which could be used. I don't know much about MS Windows security, and while I understand it has gotten better, I still wouldn't trust it.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't pay, or get paid, for sex. It's not so much against my principles, as I don't see the point. OK, that's not quite true. I don't see the point in paying for sex, but offer me enough money and I might have sex with you. But not on camera.
There is a lot of tame porn out there, mainly just naked people on their own. And if a 12 year old wants to see porn, that's all that's needed (hell, probably doesn't even need to be naked). No point in exposing kids to bizarre stuff and giving them all sorts of fucked up ideas about sexuality and sex that early.
True enough. But it was more a comment about snooping than about Windows.
"Any snooping should be in the open and agreed upon beforehand."
Exactly. Any it doesn't matter if the child looks at porn. That's what teenagers do. Even better, find some sites with some non-extreme porn (no violence, and even no insults at the women) so that the child doesn't think that fucked up things are normal. It's not normal to insult and hit a women (unless she wants you to). Hell, maybe even just some naked pictures, no need to show sex at all.
I like 1 and 3, but have another suggestion instead of 2. Install a firewall between the computer and the Internet, and block all inbound and outbound connections except on the ports used by the games required. No web browsing, no email, no chat (except in game) on the MS Windows machine at all.
Disclaimer, I've been using GNU/Linux myself almost exclusively since 2003 or something, and so my knowledge of MS Windows is also dated. But, if the worms can't access the machine they can't hurt it. If the child can't access the web, they can't have some ad network serve drive-by-download malware. Etc.
I also like the idea of letting the child learn about computer security themselves and do it all themselves. But that may cause more heartbreak in the end than my suggestion.
That wasn't the point. The point was they are more interested in making money than in publishing good papers, and so will publish anything. Not all open access journals charge a fee to publish. See my reply to the post above yours for more info.
No. Open access means open access. Free access without having to pay for access. Nothing more. I suggest the Wikipedia article for more info.
Some journals charge authors a fee to help cover publishing costs. Others (First Monday for example, one of the first and longest running open access journals) don't charge a fee at any stage of the game.
Academic institutions will often cover the cost of publishing for an author, but probably only if the journal is a reputable one.
You are correct that being open access tells you nothing about the quality of the journal. First Monday is an excellent journal. But that wasn't my point. The point is that this journal is more interested in making money than being reputable, and hence charges a fee and publishes anything. Other journals both want to be reputable and make money, and so will charge a fee to publish and will only publish good papers. This fee will probably be covered by the authors institution.
This has nothing to do with open access, and more to do with lack of proper review. Besides, as noted in the post, this particular journal charges a fee for publishing. Being a "low-tier" journal, they don't really have a reputation, and are probably more concerned with making money.
Hell, I could start up my own journal, give it a title, Generalities and accept anything at all to be published. It doesn't mean what is published is meaningful or useful. (Just because something is in a book doesn't make it true either. This journal sounds like it is about equivalent to "self published" books, where you pay the publisher to print your book. But they don't actually do any editing or similar. Not to say that reputable journals are the same as the non-self publishing world.)
Journals have reputations for a reason. One reason is because the good ones tend to do a bit more checking of the papers submitted. I doubt it this paper would have been accepted by a journal that actually reviewed papers properly, regardless of whether it was open access or not.
> Many of the things we know today, and even take for granted, would be seen as pure magic to a person from the 19th century.
And to people today.
> The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Yes, most people today have no idea about such things.
> Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network.
People might understand GPS (I do), but I'venever heard of baking noodles in relation to fiberoptic communication.
> Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven.
I've only got the faintest idea of how a cell phone works (it's a computer with a radio?), and most people wouldn't understand how a microwave worked. Though they may understand if you explained it.
> Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares.
Bullshit.
> Others that would floor people from the 19th century, would be ENGINEERING microbes. They often felt that complete eradication of germs was desirable. (Just read the last part of "the time machine") As such, the very idea of creating new ones would be cognitatively jarring. Using engineered viruses for gene therapy and the like would seem backward and regressive to their views.
But an educated person from that time could have it explained, and understand why it was a good thing. Even if at first 'glance' it sounds like a bad thing.
You give too much credit to people today, and not enough to people from the past. An educated intelligent person from either era could understand most of what you mentioned with some basic explanations. Yes, some of it would be incomprehensible to the 19th C person, but some of it is incomprehensible to people today. (Why are 'civilised' countries still fighting wars of aggression, the leaders still lying and manipulating people, etc.? Why is sex still a taboo subject, and violence considered normal?)
According to Wikipedia, Red Bull is Austrian, but that one of the owners is Thai. And I probably didn't need to respond to the troll. But I did anyway. Life goes on.