And I can safely assume that it doesn't because I trust that no hackers have entered my home (except myself, of course) and altered the hardware to such an extent that paranoia regarding the hardware is necessary.
I think that every time stories like this appear in the mainstream press, that hackers in general become more and more externalized from society. You start to change things such that you end up being your own 'Little Brother' with your prying eyes everywhere and soon enough you will have people suspicious of your every move.
Hacking is cool when it serves some greater purpose but when the "greater purpose" seems to be nothing more than sophomoric pranks that were perfected 20 years ago and displayed in Porky's and Revenge of the Nerds, the outcome can only be detrimental to the geek community.
I'm not going to tell you to stop it. But please think about how your juvenile actions reflect on the hacker community (present and accounted for!) at large.
If Apache refuses to accept this technology, then it is dead in the water. There aren't enough IIS servers to make a signficant dent in spam even with this technology.
Personally, I'd love it if technology were judged on the content of its character rather than the character of its creator, but this is not a perfect world and fanatics on both sides of the aisle pass up good ideas that come from the "wrong" side all the time.
You want to put Debian on the systems because of the vast array of software available for it.
They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.
The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.
Debian is a fine distribution. But no company in their right mind would go through a migration just so you can install the latest and greatest software via apt-get. You see, they've already got the software they need running on the system.
So I'm sitting around my house thinking of who to call for some afternoon fun, and I decide that probably the best way is to look up the pictures in the dating service via my cellphone. You see, now they can download those pictures directly to the internal memory after I fill out a quick subscription form on their W-HTML page.
So I scroll through the list of escorts and finally find a girl that I like. With the additional memory that the hard disk offers me, I don't have to go scrounging around for her phone number, it is stored along with her hi-res picture. I dial and she says she will be over in 2 hours.
I hang up and press the menu button to save the last call in memory. That way I can use it as a form of recorded verbal contract in case she is a no-show.
With a couple hours on my hands, I decide to take a shower and primp myself for her arrival. Let me tell you, washing "everywhere" is tough when you've got a belly like a bowl full of jelly. On second thought, I probably don't have to tell you.
So I get all the crumbs and dried up stuff rinsed off my body and I lay down on the couch with my cellphone firmly in hand. The phone has downloaded more free TGP for me using the script I wrote especially for it in Perl. This kind of thing never would have been possible without a serious filesystem.
So I sit down with my cellphone porn and just pleasure myself.
The doorbell rings and "Bubbles" is at the door. I let her in and she proceeds to quickly and clinically take her clothes off and then my clothes off. Though this seemed a little cold and distant, I can't say that I wasn't aroused.
She hopped up on top of me and slid my member into her with no trouble at all. That's when I realized that she had just come from another john. I did my business and promptly kicked her out. So that's why she "needs two hours." Bitch.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I had the cellphone camera running the whole time recording the whole episode. Without the large hard drive, I never would have been able to save the encounter for future playback. All 49 seconds of the glory.
It seems like this is a good deal for everyone all around except that in the end VoIP is still another manifestation of the infinitely malleable POTS system. All those bits are travelling over the same wires as those expensive long distance calls are. The only difference is in who is paying for that bandwidth.
With normal long distance calling, the burden is borne by the person making the call or the receiver in the case of a collect call. In VoIP, the burden is already being paid for by the backbone ISPs who provide overseas network connections over their fat pipes.
Guess who owns those fat pipes. If you said the phone company, you would be correct.
Once revenues start dropping from standard phone charges as more and more people switch over to VoIP, the phone companies will start looking for ways to gain more revenue via their most active systems, i.e. the long distance channels upon which the ISP backbones are structured.
A general rise in prices charged to ISPs will find their way down to the end subscriber and all those pennies saved using VoIP vanish in a puff of logic. Add to this that once consumer groups figure out that the burden of *your* high VoIP usage is borne by *all* subscribers, they will start demanding tiered service and your delightfully cheap long distance calls will suddenly be just as expensive as they were on the old POTS program.
This comment is crude and offensive to women. Though subtle, the joke preys on our collective willingness to believe that women are worse drivers because of their habitual cell-phone jabbering, brood nurturing, and general gussying.
I will not abide such reinforcement of stereotypes. Women are fully capable of driving as well as a man, despite those habits listed above.
Just because we're a community of mostly males, it doesn't mean we can't exercise some common decency to the opposite sex.
I know everyone is trying to make these as small and unobtrusive as possible, but this little guy is a little too small and too oddly-shaped (a square???) to be comfortably used.
What would be nice would be a set of bluetooth headphones so that a wire from my pocket to my ear wasn't necessary.
You are right, of course. However, you fail to see how the use of these words by any person reduces the esteem of the person speaking them (you don't fail to see that, I'm sure, but I'm generalizing). In that same vein, it behooves each person to make an effort not to use those words. This includes not only words that have racist connotation (nigger, spic, wop, etc.), but also words that are simply recognized as vulgar (fuck, shit, cunt, etc.).
It is a matter of self-regulation that ought to be practiced by civilized members of society. It, as you seem to imply, ought not be regulated at the governmental level because the government shouldn't be involved in regulating speech at all anyway, obscene or not.
When government starts making regulations like the one in question, it makes no sense to lay the blame at the feet of political correctness. That is not where it came from. Rather, it came from the general concept that one ought to avoid using obscene or derogatory or hurtful words at all. That is not political correctness, but rather a function of socialization. That the government simply takes such an idea too far is a function of a bad and overly powerful government, and that is where the blame lies.
There has been a serious dilution of the meaning of the term "politically correct". It originally meant being on the "politically correct" side of an issue, which meant that the PC person would take up on the side that most people would find palatable. Essentially, this meant taking positions that were popular. Positions such as "Speech ought to be Free" or "I'm a Christian" were typical examples of political correctness.
Then the conservatives on the radio (starting with Rush, but then fanning out across the gamut) decided that being PC meant being a liberal, after all, liberals are well known for pandering to the masses. So a PC person was one who would take liberal positions. Suddenly controversial issues for which there was no PC side had a PC side: "Abortion should be legal", "Social programs should be fully funded by government". At the same time, conservatives positioned themselves as rebels against this 'rising tide' and said they were anti-PC. They would speak their mind as they saw fit, damn those PC-freaks who just want to shut free-thinkers up.
From this distortion came the concept that any offensive speech is inherently un-PC and that any attempt to stifle such speech was inherently PC. The upshot of this is that people now wonder out loud why they can't use derogatory terms for members of other groups and blame political correctness for stifling the language. This is a fallacy.
It is not a facet of political correctness to believe that some words ought not be used in public or even private. It is simply an acknowledgement that such words can hurt and/or incite others and it is best to lay those terms to rest rather than continue their usage. It is not the target of the words that is lowered by their usage, it is the speaker who shows his true societal maturation when using them.
If it were any other company and your little device completely shut down after a few months and you were told by the company to shut up and pay up another $250 bucks, would you be so easy going?
Batteries die, yes. However, how much does a company have to hate its own customers to make it ridiculously hard to replace the battery?
What is it that makes people want to use terms like 'master/slave' in the first place? It is clearly offensive to anyone who has any sense of history and even more so to those who have had ancestors enslaved.
Disk drives are ordered, they are not enslaved.
It really shows geekdom's sophomoric roots when you encounter arbitrary naming schemes like this.
Recent events over on the Hurd development team regarding the GFDL have proven that RMS is more concerned with his own power than with the concept of Software Freedom.
As an armchair champion of Free Software, I have to disagree with the GFDL. However, such disagreement is apparently enough to get one kicked off the GNU project.
One cannot be a proponent of Free Software without also being a proponent of Free Speech. The former stems from the latter. Since RMS does not support the latter as evidenced by his actions, he cannot truthfully be a proponent of the former.
I think it is important to move away from the current reliance on fossil fuels as quickly as possible and move towards nuclear power generation as the only realistic sustainable alternative power generation scheme.
Many of the world's problems exist because of the small patch of oil-soaked land out in the Middle East and the lack of trustworthy stewards of those fields. With Gulf War II over and those oil fields finally in the hands of Western democracies we may see some improvement in global stability vis a vis the opening of OPEC to its main customers. However, because we continue to rely on oil as our primary power source we will likely continue to have problems as the oil fields run drier and drier.
It is good to see Africa (of all nations!) take the lead in this new system of nuclear power generation. Older systems like the ones in Canada and France are fine, however it would be a stretch to say that they are perfect. There is plenty of room for improvement in those power plants. This usage of uranium pebbles is one such improvement, but there are more.
It is a problem that people would be willing to block the development of Africa because they object to the usage of these newer power systems. Especially so because for the most part the same protesters unwittingly reap the benefits of their own country's nuclear power generation systems.
While you can still find them around, many keyboards have been fitted such that they don't make the clickety-clack sound of typing. I guess this is so you don't disturb the guy in the next booth.
Why are there no silent clicking mice? I think I could really improve my productivity if I was able to use a mouse that didn't let on to anyone that I was feverishly playing Minesweeper all day.
Actually, the latest game I'm playing is Hexic. It's a simple puzzle game and it's a lot of fun, but with everyone able to hear how much I'm clicking, I have to keep my playtime (and thus my productivity) to a minimum.
What kind of protection do normal music CDs have to avoid this kind of rapid degradation? Is there any?
I haven't personally had any CD-Rs go bad on me, but I know a few people who have old CD-Rs that are unreadable in current devices. We chalked that up to a difference in formats, but it may have been this problem.
Let's say you buy a swimming pool for your house. You attach the hose to the faucet and start to fill that sucker up. But with what? What a dumb question! Water, of course. While it may be pretty cool to you to have a brand new swimming pool, the fact that it is filled with water is not news. That's just the natural thing to fill it with.
Same with small devices like cameras and phones. It's not news when they are loaded with Tron. That's what Tron was designed to be useful for and it's small, well-supported, and works really well at what it does. Maybe the news that you've got a new product to sell makes the news, but the fact that it runs Tron is just par for the course. It's the natural thing.
If you were to fill your swimming pool with gelatin or Mountain Dew, that might be news. But water? That's not news.
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And I can safely assume that it doesn't because I trust that no hackers have entered my home (except myself, of course) and altered the hardware to such an extent that paranoia regarding the hardware is necessary.
I think that every time stories like this appear in the mainstream press, that hackers in general become more and more externalized from society. You start to change things such that you end up being your own 'Little Brother' with your prying eyes everywhere and soon enough you will have people suspicious of your every move.
Hacking is cool when it serves some greater purpose but when the "greater purpose" seems to be nothing more than sophomoric pranks that were perfected 20 years ago and displayed in Porky's and Revenge of the Nerds, the outcome can only be detrimental to the geek community.
I'm not going to tell you to stop it. But please think about how your juvenile actions reflect on the hacker community (present and accounted for!) at large.
What with the massively popular iPod and the newly-birthed Portable Media Center, I fail to see the target market of this device is.
Pointing your camera at the ground and pressing the shutter does not a piece of art make.
Sure you get a bunch of photos, but can you really say that you, the photographer, were the one taking the random, haphazard pictures?
I hate when people demean art by claiming that their homespun crap is on par with the work of true artists. I'm looking right at you, Thomas Kinkade!
If Apache refuses to accept this technology, then it is dead in the water. There aren't enough IIS servers to make a signficant dent in spam even with this technology.
Personally, I'd love it if technology were judged on the content of its character rather than the character of its creator, but this is not a perfect world and fanatics on both sides of the aisle pass up good ideas that come from the "wrong" side all the time.
You want to put Debian on the systems because of the vast array of software available for it.
They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.
The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.
Debian is a fine distribution. But no company in their right mind would go through a migration just so you can install the latest and greatest software via apt-get. You see, they've already got the software they need running on the system.
So I'm sitting around my house thinking of who to call for some afternoon fun, and I decide that probably the best way is to look up the pictures in the dating service via my cellphone. You see, now they can download those pictures directly to the internal memory after I fill out a quick subscription form on their W-HTML page.
So I scroll through the list of escorts and finally find a girl that I like. With the additional memory that the hard disk offers me, I don't have to go scrounging around for her phone number, it is stored along with her hi-res picture. I dial and she says she will be over in 2 hours.
I hang up and press the menu button to save the last call in memory. That way I can use it as a form of recorded verbal contract in case she is a no-show.
With a couple hours on my hands, I decide to take a shower and primp myself for her arrival. Let me tell you, washing "everywhere" is tough when you've got a belly like a bowl full of jelly. On second thought, I probably don't have to tell you.
So I get all the crumbs and dried up stuff rinsed off my body and I lay down on the couch with my cellphone firmly in hand. The phone has downloaded more free TGP for me using the script I wrote especially for it in Perl. This kind of thing never would have been possible without a serious filesystem.
So I sit down with my cellphone porn and just pleasure myself.
The doorbell rings and "Bubbles" is at the door. I let her in and she proceeds to quickly and clinically take her clothes off and then my clothes off. Though this seemed a little cold and distant, I can't say that I wasn't aroused.
She hopped up on top of me and slid my member into her with no trouble at all. That's when I realized that she had just come from another john. I did my business and promptly kicked her out. So that's why she "needs two hours." Bitch.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I had the cellphone camera running the whole time recording the whole episode. Without the large hard drive, I never would have been able to save the encounter for future playback. All 49 seconds of the glory.
Storage space is good. The more the better.
It seems like this is a good deal for everyone all around except that in the end VoIP is still another manifestation of the infinitely malleable POTS system. All those bits are travelling over the same wires as those expensive long distance calls are. The only difference is in who is paying for that bandwidth.
With normal long distance calling, the burden is borne by the person making the call or the receiver in the case of a collect call. In VoIP, the burden is already being paid for by the backbone ISPs who provide overseas network connections over their fat pipes.
Guess who owns those fat pipes. If you said the phone company, you would be correct.
Once revenues start dropping from standard phone charges as more and more people switch over to VoIP, the phone companies will start looking for ways to gain more revenue via their most active systems, i.e. the long distance channels upon which the ISP backbones are structured.
A general rise in prices charged to ISPs will find their way down to the end subscriber and all those pennies saved using VoIP vanish in a puff of logic. Add to this that once consumer groups figure out that the burden of *your* high VoIP usage is borne by *all* subscribers, they will start demanding tiered service and your delightfully cheap long distance calls will suddenly be just as expensive as they were on the old POTS program.
Be careful what you wish for.
This comment is crude and offensive to women. Though subtle, the joke preys on our collective willingness to believe that women are worse drivers because of their habitual cell-phone jabbering, brood nurturing, and general gussying.
I will not abide such reinforcement of stereotypes. Women are fully capable of driving as well as a man, despite those habits listed above.
Just because we're a community of mostly males, it doesn't mean we can't exercise some common decency to the opposite sex.
If I wasn't constantly reinstalling it.
It's harder this time of year when I'm so busy with last minute details, but come summer, I'm a reinstalling geek all over again.
What is a good, free client-side spam filter for Outlook?
Lots of CG fight scenes
Frodo dies
Lots more CG to fill in where the story lacks
The End
They must be the good guys!
I bet if the Israelis would stop keeping the Palestinians in squalor we would see that those refugees would use Windows. The bastards!
But can't they make it less ugly?
I know everyone is trying to make these as small and unobtrusive as possible, but this little guy is a little too small and too oddly-shaped (a square???) to be comfortably used.
What would be nice would be a set of bluetooth headphones so that a wire from my pocket to my ear wasn't necessary.
You are right, of course. However, you fail to see how the use of these words by any person reduces the esteem of the person speaking them (you don't fail to see that, I'm sure, but I'm generalizing). In that same vein, it behooves each person to make an effort not to use those words. This includes not only words that have racist connotation (nigger, spic, wop, etc.), but also words that are simply recognized as vulgar (fuck, shit, cunt, etc.).
It is a matter of self-regulation that ought to be practiced by civilized members of society. It, as you seem to imply, ought not be regulated at the governmental level because the government shouldn't be involved in regulating speech at all anyway, obscene or not.
When government starts making regulations like the one in question, it makes no sense to lay the blame at the feet of political correctness. That is not where it came from. Rather, it came from the general concept that one ought to avoid using obscene or derogatory or hurtful words at all. That is not political correctness, but rather a function of socialization. That the government simply takes such an idea too far is a function of a bad and overly powerful government, and that is where the blame lies.
There has been a serious dilution of the meaning of the term "politically correct". It originally meant being on the "politically correct" side of an issue, which meant that the PC person would take up on the side that most people would find palatable. Essentially, this meant taking positions that were popular. Positions such as "Speech ought to be Free" or "I'm a Christian" were typical examples of political correctness.
Then the conservatives on the radio (starting with Rush, but then fanning out across the gamut) decided that being PC meant being a liberal, after all, liberals are well known for pandering to the masses. So a PC person was one who would take liberal positions. Suddenly controversial issues for which there was no PC side had a PC side: "Abortion should be legal", "Social programs should be fully funded by government". At the same time, conservatives positioned themselves as rebels against this 'rising tide' and said they were anti-PC. They would speak their mind as they saw fit, damn those PC-freaks who just want to shut free-thinkers up.
From this distortion came the concept that any offensive speech is inherently un-PC and that any attempt to stifle such speech was inherently PC. The upshot of this is that people now wonder out loud why they can't use derogatory terms for members of other groups and blame political correctness for stifling the language. This is a fallacy.
It is not a facet of political correctness to believe that some words ought not be used in public or even private. It is simply an acknowledgement that such words can hurt and/or incite others and it is best to lay those terms to rest rather than continue their usage. It is not the target of the words that is lowered by their usage, it is the speaker who shows his true societal maturation when using them.
If it were any other company and your little device completely shut down after a few months and you were told by the company to shut up and pay up another $250 bucks, would you be so easy going?
Batteries die, yes. However, how much does a company have to hate its own customers to make it ridiculously hard to replace the battery?
What is it that makes people want to use terms like 'master/slave' in the first place? It is clearly offensive to anyone who has any sense of history and even more so to those who have had ancestors enslaved.
Disk drives are ordered, they are not enslaved.
It really shows geekdom's sophomoric roots when you encounter arbitrary naming schemes like this.
Recent events over on the Hurd development team regarding the GFDL have proven that RMS is more concerned with his own power than with the concept of Software Freedom.
As an armchair champion of Free Software, I have to disagree with the GFDL. However, such disagreement is apparently enough to get one kicked off the GNU project.
One cannot be a proponent of Free Software without also being a proponent of Free Speech. The former stems from the latter. Since RMS does not support the latter as evidenced by his actions, he cannot truthfully be a proponent of the former.
Sharing files is not against the law.
Distributing copyrighted works is.
Reading some of the comments in this article, I have to wonder when 'Geek' and 'Nerd' transformed into 'Reactionary Luddite'.
I think it is important to move away from the current reliance on fossil fuels as quickly as possible and move towards nuclear power generation as the only realistic sustainable alternative power generation scheme.
Many of the world's problems exist because of the small patch of oil-soaked land out in the Middle East and the lack of trustworthy stewards of those fields. With Gulf War II over and those oil fields finally in the hands of Western democracies we may see some improvement in global stability vis a vis the opening of OPEC to its main customers. However, because we continue to rely on oil as our primary power source we will likely continue to have problems as the oil fields run drier and drier.
It is good to see Africa (of all nations!) take the lead in this new system of nuclear power generation. Older systems like the ones in Canada and France are fine, however it would be a stretch to say that they are perfect. There is plenty of room for improvement in those power plants. This usage of uranium pebbles is one such improvement, but there are more.
It is a problem that people would be willing to block the development of Africa because they object to the usage of these newer power systems. Especially so because for the most part the same protesters unwittingly reap the benefits of their own country's nuclear power generation systems.
While you can still find them around, many keyboards have been fitted such that they don't make the clickety-clack sound of typing. I guess this is so you don't disturb the guy in the next booth.
Why are there no silent clicking mice? I think I could really improve my productivity if I was able to use a mouse that didn't let on to anyone that I was feverishly playing Minesweeper all day.
Actually, the latest game I'm playing is Hexic. It's a simple puzzle game and it's a lot of fun, but with everyone able to hear how much I'm clicking, I have to keep my playtime (and thus my productivity) to a minimum.
What kind of protection do normal music CDs have to avoid this kind of rapid degradation? Is there any?
I haven't personally had any CD-Rs go bad on me, but I know a few people who have old CD-Rs that are unreadable in current devices. We chalked that up to a difference in formats, but it may have been this problem.
What is an acceptable digital archival media?
I think the following sums up the reasoning behind this latest challenge:
She plays fully naked
Let's say you buy a swimming pool for your house. You attach the hose to the faucet and start to fill that sucker up. But with what? What a dumb question! Water, of course. While it may be pretty cool to you to have a brand new swimming pool, the fact that it is filled with water is not news. That's just the natural thing to fill it with.
Same with small devices like cameras and phones. It's not news when they are loaded with Tron. That's what Tron was designed to be useful for and it's small, well-supported, and works really well at what it does. Maybe the news that you've got a new product to sell makes the news, but the fact that it runs Tron is just par for the course. It's the natural thing.
If you were to fill your swimming pool with gelatin or Mountain Dew, that might be news. But water? That's not news.