Two murderers are in prison, and you chalk this up to persecution of Christians?
I suggest you actually start studying Christianity as it was preached by Jesus, as opposed to the hate-filled legacy we have today. A good starting place would be John 8( Here is a copy online so you don't have to dig your Bible out from under the "Focus on the Family" propoganda sheets.)
Sometimes I am ashamed to call myself a Christian. Never afraid of persecution, just ashamed of the image many "Christians" have earned.
Democracy and dictatorship are simply different types of tyranny. Tyranny is nothing more than the rule of a Tyrant (somebody who rose to power through "illegitimate" means). Neither democracy nor dictatorship implies tyranny. Unfortunately, none of tyhese forms of government can be reasonobly assumed to be more benevolent than any other. What the hell do they teach in schools these days, anyhow? They teach "good citizenship" - US is wonderful, everything else is evil. Native Americans were "somewhat mistreated" in the nineteenth century, but the God-like Founding Fathers were not cruel to them (no mention is made of Native Americans in the 20th Century). It is your duty to vote. If your parents don't vote, tell them that it is their duty. Your behavior will be monitored, but it is for your own good. We are a free country. The ULTIMATE free country. All other countries should be more like the U.S.A. You must have school spirit! You should be proud of your heritage! You are only valuable as a member of a group! Fit in or suffer.
There are already people out there that don't leave there house if there really don't need to. And do you think this is going to make things better? People need social contact, sun light, etc. and they aren't going to get it sitting infront of a computer all day.
People may need these thing's, butn that should be their choice. I don't see why electronic signatures/notifications should be hindered on the excues that "people should get out more."
Besides that, what do think is protecting those signatures? Probably the most popular is going to be PGP for the layman. Is this enough? Don't think so with a max of a 40-bit key for a layman with a buddy that thinks he knows what he is doing.
There are good systemas and bad systems. The buggest limitation of key-based cryptography today is the simple fact that use is not widespread. This kind of legislation would encourage more widespread use of strong encryption in modern business. This will happen eventually, at some pace. There will be msitakes, and systems will be broken. Overall, however,digital signatures will be effective and convenient.
I believe the best thing about digital signatures is that they are easy to check! While I'm sure a professional could compare handwritten signatures and (with reasonable accuracy) detect a forgery, I'm pretty certain that this has NEVER happened with my signature! I have been able to take a paycheck made out to "Shawn Blakeley" to the bank, sign my nearly illegible "Sean Blakey" on the back, and deposit it into my account!
Digital signatures, in sharp contrast, are EASY to check. Any operation set up to handle digital signatures could take the time and effort to verify EVERY signature they encounter. If this legislation passes, I wouldn't be suprised if, a few years down the road, we see a push for digital signatures accompanying EVERY online transaction, just because it is a cheap, effective verification measure.
Also, using indentation to control block termination is a BAD idea. Out of curiosity, as a not-quite-rabid Pythoner, why do you believe this? I'm not looking for a holy war, I just would like more info on your point of view.
Actually, TK on windows doesn't look half bad. The TK widgets end up looking like windows native controls. My boss is not yet aware that my last two apps (for internal use only) were entirely done in Python. All he knows is that they were developed quickly, they have a nice interface, and they do ungodly amounts of complicated data manipulation behind the scenes (most of my devel time was playing with the algorithms). The biggest problem with using Tkinter is that the Tk event loop varies so much from the standard windows event loops. You can create Python COM objects, but embedding any Python Tkinter objects into another GUI (say in Delphi) is a real problem (that's where Pythonwin comes in). Despite this, I still tend to do a lot of work with Tkinter, for one good reason - I can work on my Linux box at home and bill my hours!
Zona research hasn't posted this study on their site yet (the latest press release/study set is an Oct. 5 report on Application Service providers. I was curious about the other replies by survey respondents. 35% VB + 20% C/c++ + 9% Java means 36% other. What is the distribution in "other". Are people using Delphi, Python, Perl, or what? It would be interesting to see how the top eight (or so) languages fluctuate in relative dominance from year to year. I will be watching zonaresearch.com intently for that report.
User friendly - the flamethrower. Unfortunately, they probably can't get Yogurt to do the merchandising. I'll probably have to settle for an official User Friendly smurf gun.
You missed one very good supporting argument - Trinity! This has been a geek trend for a LONG time. Read some older scifi (Heinlein will do nicely - just avoid the movie versions like the plague. Friday was my favorite.). Brillian amazonian types definitely dominate.
If you want to allow your child to play these games you just have to go to the store and buy them yourself.
Who do you think you are telling me what I "just have to" do. If I trust a twelve year old to go to the local CompUSA (or more likely, Wizards of the Coast) and buy a game, that should be only between me and my child. What I allow my child to buy is none of your business.
I presume that you're not of the opinion that a child should be allowed to purchase cigarettes or pornography with the justification that it's the parent's responsibility to confiscate them after the fact if they don't agree.
Yes, actually, I am of exactly that opinion. It is the parent's responsibility to not only confiscate forbidden material, but to also teach the children WHY some things are forbidden. For example: Most "science museums" have a display of lung slices, showing "normal", "smoker's", and "cancerous". Show this to the children, being shure to say things like "this is what Uncle Bill's lungs look like. Yes, you're right, Uncle Bill does smell funny. That's because he smokes." Introduce them to somebody who has had a tracheotomy, and must talk by placing one of thouse vibraters against their neck. Teaching children about "the evils of porn" is much more difficult, because most people who are against porn don't think about WHY they are against porn. Based on what upsets these people, I can only guess that there internal logic is along the lines of:
"Porn is sex. Sex is dirty and evil (Not the sex I have, of course. Everybody else is dirty and evil). Children must be protected from evil. Therefore, children must be protected from sex. Therefore, children must be protected from porn."
Teaching children about porn is difficult because first you must be able to talk with children about sex - beyond just explaining the mechanics. You must be able to explain to the children (we're talking about 10-12 years old here) the difference between good (consensual, loving) sex and bad (using, abusive) sex. Once children accept that, I have NO problem with sexually explicit materiel, as long as it depicts "good sex" and not "bad sex". One BIG job for parents.
Games containing mature content are the same thing.
(I'm just thinking online here. I don't even know many spoken languages, but many of my Asian friends have spent long hours telling me how terrible English is.) I'm not sure English is the proper starting point for this type of a machine-read hyper-language. English is primarily a spoken language, with all the fuzziness that implies. What may be more appropriatte would be to start with written Chinese. From what I undserstand, "Chinese" is already something of a hyper-language, with one written language expressing several spoken languages. Modify the set of ideagrams to include some phonetic symbols (to properly represent the many names that are best represented as sounds). Ideally the syntax would allow for defining custom linguistic symbols, much like XML's ability to define custom tags. Tweak the hell out of this until you have a machine readable language (do less than 2^16 standard "words" seem adequate? Should this blow unicode out of te water and use 32-bit "words"?)
From the "Tools" menu select "Internet Options". Click to the "Security" Tab. With "Internet" selected, click on "Custom Level". Scroll down to "Scripting" and disable everything. You may want to dsable a lot of other stuff (like ActiveX) while you are in there.
There are special left-handed and right-handed dvorak keymaps. Sometimes I have played with setting my keyboard to left-handed dvorak and keeping my right hand on the mouse (good for extensive cut-and-paste style editing). Works pretty good for me in Xemacs (IMHO the best point-and-click code editor), but when I am going to just enter long amounts of text (like a python program I want to enter all at once), I am happier switching back to in plain old QWERTY and running vim with both hands (vi commands make more sense in qwerty).
Notepad does have a feature! F5 places a timestamp where the cursor is. Very useful for a quick and dirty log. When I have to work in windows, I sometimes use Notepad to maintain a rough draft of my biling information - click the file, whack F5, type a few words, enter, Alt-F4.
Read The Time Machine again. The apathetic beings to whom the technology may as well have been magic were the Eloi, just one of the two descendents of humanity. The other heirs of humanity were the morlocks, the people who understood and used the techology. These pale, intelligent beings lurked underground and considered the Eloi to be only cattle. The Time Machine was a cautionary tale that has been largely unheeded by our society. Wells saw the world dividing into too groups, the elitists who were useless to society, but adored, and the workers whose contribution was essential, but shunned.
Unfortunately, there is currently debate about how many 'Current Microsoft Employees' exist. It seems M$ has been screwing their own temps just as bad as they have been screwing the end-users. Micros~1 is the prime example of what happens when all else is sacrificed on the alter of 'market dominance.'
The mp3 format is hardly the limiting factor of my music enjoyment. Consider: 1) I only have the cheap harmon/kardon speakers that came with this machine. 2) I Never just listen to music. Music just plays in the background of the rest of my life. 3) I don't care enough about music to invest tons of money. I don't know what sound card I have, only that it came with this machine and it works under linux. When I buy a cd, it's usually from some used cd store here in town.
Music is just pleasent noise to listen to as you do something else.
taxing all digital media at $0.49 per 15 minutes.. HMM- mp3 encodes at about 1MB/minute $1(Canadian) per 30 Megs Hard Drive space. That means the tax on my 13.6GB Hard Drive would have a "levy" of $453 dollars. OUCH
This looks to me like a standard Vigenere(sp) cipher - "rotating" each letter of the plaintext by the numerical equivalent of the corresponding letter of the keyphrase, looping over the keyphrase when necessarry.
Unfortunately, long Vigenere ciphertext with the same keyphrase is succeptible to the same kind of lexical attack as normal rotation encryption.
IIRC, the difficulty of breaking the ciphertext increases linearly with the length of the key. Perhaps if we used a really *LONG* key (like an entire iso9660 disk image parsed as ascii) it might be usable for a special-purpose crypto system, but it would be unweildy for genereal use.
A scheme like the one I described was used in Cryptonomicon, where two of the characters had identical copies of the same "white noise" records which were used to encrypt/decrypt a telephone conversation.
1)Learn a different language. Respect for basic here can only be expressed in negative numbers. 2)Want to get rid of that "mushed onto one line" look? You can either change your mode to something other than "HTML Formatted" (If you log in you can even change your default) or you can add <BR> at the end of your lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Two murderers are in prison, and you chalk this up to persecution of Christians?
I suggest you actually start studying Christianity as it was preached by Jesus, as opposed to the hate-filled legacy we have today. A good starting place would be John 8( Here is a copy online so you don't have to dig your Bible out from under the "Focus on the Family" propoganda sheets.)
Sometimes I am ashamed to call myself a Christian. Never afraid of persecution, just ashamed of the image many "Christians" have earned.
Democracy and dictatorship are simply different types of tyranny.
Tyranny is nothing more than the rule of a Tyrant (somebody who rose to power through "illegitimate" means). Neither democracy nor dictatorship implies tyranny. Unfortunately, none of tyhese forms of government can be reasonobly assumed to be more benevolent than any other.
What the hell do they teach in schools these days, anyhow?
They teach "good citizenship" - US is wonderful, everything else is evil.
Native Americans were "somewhat mistreated" in the nineteenth century, but the God-like Founding Fathers were not cruel to them (no mention is made of Native Americans in the 20th Century).
It is your duty to vote. If your parents don't vote, tell them that it is their duty.
Your behavior will be monitored, but it is for your own good.
We are a free country. The ULTIMATE free country. All other countries should be more like the U.S.A.
You must have school spirit! You should be proud of your heritage! You are only valuable as a member of a group!
Fit in or suffer.
Okay, nuke it!
There are already people out there that don't leave there house if there really don't need to. And do you think this is going to make things better? People need social contact, sun light, etc. and they aren't going to get it sitting infront of a computer all day.
People may need these thing's, butn that should be their choice. I don't see why electronic signatures/notifications should be hindered on the excues that "people should get out more."
Besides that, what do think is protecting those signatures? Probably the most popular is going to be PGP for the layman. Is this enough? Don't think so with a max of a 40-bit key for a layman with a buddy that thinks he knows what he is doing.
There are good systemas and bad systems. The buggest limitation of key-based cryptography today is the simple fact that use is not widespread. This kind of legislation would encourage more widespread use of strong encryption in modern business. This will happen eventually, at some pace. There will be msitakes, and systems will be broken. Overall, however,digital signatures will be effective and convenient.
I believe the best thing about digital signatures is that they are easy to check! While I'm sure a professional could compare handwritten signatures and (with reasonable accuracy) detect a forgery, I'm pretty certain that this has NEVER happened with my signature! I have been able to take a paycheck made out to "Shawn Blakeley" to the bank, sign my nearly illegible "Sean Blakey" on the back, and deposit it into my account!
Digital signatures, in sharp contrast, are EASY to check. Any operation set up to handle digital signatures could take the time and effort to verify EVERY signature they encounter. If this legislation passes, I wouldn't be suprised if, a few years down the road, we see a push for digital signatures accompanying EVERY online transaction, just because it is a cheap, effective verification measure.
Also, using indentation to control block termination is a BAD idea. Out of curiosity, as a not-quite-rabid Pythoner, why do you believe this?
I'm not looking for a holy war, I just would like more info on your point of view.
Actually, TK on windows doesn't look half bad. The TK widgets end up looking like windows native controls. My boss is not yet aware that my last two apps (for internal use only) were entirely done in Python. All he knows is that they were developed quickly, they have a nice interface, and they do ungodly amounts of complicated data manipulation behind the scenes (most of my devel time was playing with the algorithms).
The biggest problem with using Tkinter is that the Tk event loop varies so much from the standard windows event loops. You can create Python COM objects, but embedding any Python Tkinter objects into another GUI (say in Delphi) is a real problem (that's where Pythonwin comes in).
Despite this, I still tend to do a lot of work with Tkinter, for one good reason - I can work on my Linux box at home and bill my hours!
Zona research hasn't posted this study on their site yet (the latest press release/study set is an Oct. 5 report on Application Service providers.
I was curious about the other replies by survey respondents. 35% VB + 20% C/c++ + 9% Java means 36% other.
What is the distribution in "other". Are people using Delphi, Python, Perl, or what?
It would be interesting to see how the top eight (or so) languages fluctuate in relative dominance from year to year.
I will be watching zonaresearch.com intently for that report.
User friendly - the flamethrower.
Unfortunately, they probably can't get Yogurt to do the merchandising. I'll probably have to settle for an official User Friendly smurf gun.
You missed one very good supporting argument - Trinity!
This has been a geek trend for a LONG time. Read some older scifi (Heinlein will do nicely - just avoid the movie versions like the plague. Friday was my favorite.). Brillian amazonian types definitely dominate.
I see a lot of Zope discussion on comp.lang.python - perhaps it might be worthwile to look there?
If you want to allow your child to play these games you just have to go to the store and buy them yourself.
Who do you think you are telling me what I "just have to" do. If I trust a twelve year old to go to the local CompUSA (or more likely, Wizards of the Coast) and buy a game, that should be only between me and my child. What I allow my child to buy is none of your business.
I presume that you're not of the opinion that a child should be allowed to purchase cigarettes or pornography with the justification that it's the parent's responsibility to confiscate them after the fact if they don't agree.
Yes, actually, I am of exactly that opinion. It is the parent's responsibility to not only confiscate forbidden material, but to also teach the children WHY some things are forbidden.
For example:
Most "science museums" have a display of lung slices, showing "normal", "smoker's", and "cancerous". Show this to the children, being shure to say things like "this is what Uncle Bill's lungs look like. Yes, you're right, Uncle Bill does smell funny. That's because he smokes."
Introduce them to somebody who has had a tracheotomy, and must talk by placing one of thouse vibraters against their neck.
Teaching children about "the evils of porn" is much more difficult, because most people who are against porn don't think about WHY they are against porn. Based on what upsets these people, I can only guess that there internal logic is along the lines of:
"Porn is sex. Sex is dirty and evil (Not the sex I have, of course. Everybody else is dirty and evil). Children must be protected from evil. Therefore, children must be protected from sex. Therefore, children must be protected from porn."
Teaching children about porn is difficult because first you must be able to talk with children about sex - beyond just explaining the mechanics. You must be able to explain to the children (we're talking about 10-12 years old here) the difference between good (consensual, loving) sex and bad (using, abusive) sex. Once children accept that, I have NO problem with sexually explicit materiel, as long as it depicts "good sex" and not "bad sex". One BIG job for parents.
Games containing mature content are the same thing.
My point exactly
(I'm just thinking online here. I don't even know many spoken languages, but many of my Asian friends have spent long hours telling me how terrible English is.)
I'm not sure English is the proper starting point for this type of a machine-read hyper-language. English is primarily a spoken language, with all the fuzziness that implies.
What may be more appropriatte would be to start with written Chinese. From what I undserstand, "Chinese" is already something of a hyper-language, with one written language expressing several spoken languages. Modify the set of ideagrams to include some phonetic symbols (to properly represent the many names that are best represented as sounds). Ideally the syntax would allow for defining custom linguistic symbols, much like XML's ability to define custom tags. Tweak the hell out of this until you have a machine readable language (do less than 2^16 standard "words" seem adequate? Should this blow unicode out of te water and use 32-bit "words"?)
From the "Tools" menu select "Internet Options". Click to the "Security" Tab. With "Internet" selected, click on "Custom Level". Scroll down to "Scripting" and disable everything. You may want to dsable a lot of other stuff (like ActiveX) while you are in there.
There are special left-handed and right-handed dvorak keymaps. Sometimes I have played with setting my keyboard to left-handed dvorak and keeping my right hand on the mouse (good for extensive cut-and-paste style editing).
Works pretty good for me in Xemacs (IMHO the best point-and-click code editor), but when I am going to just enter long amounts of text (like a python program I want to enter all at once), I am happier switching back to in plain old QWERTY and running vim with both hands (vi commands make more sense in qwerty).
Notepad does have a feature! F5 places a timestamp where the cursor is. Very useful for a quick and dirty log.
When I have to work in windows, I sometimes use Notepad to maintain a rough draft of my biling information - click the file, whack F5, type a few words, enter, Alt-F4.
Read The Time Machine again. The apathetic beings to whom the technology may as well have been magic were the Eloi, just one of the two descendents of humanity.
The other heirs of humanity were the morlocks, the people who understood and used the techology. These pale, intelligent beings lurked underground and considered the Eloi to be only cattle.
The Time Machine was a cautionary tale that has been largely unheeded by our society. Wells saw the world dividing into too groups, the elitists who were useless to society, but adored, and the workers whose contribution was essential, but shunned.
Unfortunately, there is currently debate about how many 'Current Microsoft Employees' exist. It seems M$ has been screwing their own temps just as bad as they have been screwing the end-users.
Micros~1 is the prime example of what happens when all else is sacrificed on the alter of 'market dominance.'
This info is buried in the "about the gimp" section of the gimp website. Gimp32 is at http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/.
The mp3 format is hardly the limiting factor of my music enjoyment. Consider:
1) I only have the cheap harmon/kardon speakers that came with this machine.
2) I Never just listen to music. Music just plays in the background of the rest of my life.
3) I don't care enough about music to invest tons of money. I don't know what sound card I have, only that it came with this machine and it works under linux. When I buy a cd, it's usually from some used cd store here in town.
Music is just pleasent noise to listen to as you do something else.
I think I'll go read the docs on this API - might be fun.
taxing all digital media at $0.49 per 15 minutes..
HMM- mp3 encodes at about 1MB/minute $1(Canadian) per 30 Megs Hard Drive space. That means the tax on my 13.6GB Hard Drive would have a "levy" of $453 dollars.
OUCH
This looks to me like a standard Vigenere(sp) cipher - "rotating" each letter of the plaintext by the numerical equivalent of the corresponding letter of the keyphrase, looping over the keyphrase when necessarry.
Unfortunately, long Vigenere ciphertext with the same keyphrase is succeptible to the same kind of lexical attack as normal rotation encryption.
IIRC, the difficulty of breaking the ciphertext increases linearly with the length of the key. Perhaps if we used a really *LONG* key (like an entire iso9660 disk image parsed as ascii) it might be usable for a special-purpose crypto system, but it would be unweildy for genereal use.
A scheme like the one I described was used in Cryptonomicon, where two of the characters had identical copies of the same "white noise" records which were used to encrypt/decrypt a telephone conversation.
No "first post" crap! Today must be friday the 13 or something (or /. is totally messed up).
1)Learn a different language. Respect for basic here can only be expressed in negative numbers.
2)Want to get rid of that "mushed onto one line" look? You can either change your mode to something other than "HTML Formatted" (If you log in you can even change your default) or you can add <BR> at the end of your lines.