I'll throw my US$0.02, what the hell. Maybe my story is worth something to somebody:
Obviously with online (or more anonymous) dating you have access to so many more potential mates, which improves selection and makes things somewhat easier, but all the anonymity and deception makes me wonder whether if this whole trend is actually a good thing or not.
In my personal experience, it's just like globalization and open markets: real scary if you are engaged in deception, and absolutely fantastic if you want lots of choice.
A few years ago, in my early thirties, I decided it was finally time to find a wife. I was (finally) ready to commit. My parents urged me to "shop around". So I did, using means an admittedly very shy geek can do: online sites (ie, match.com) and personal-intro services (ie, Table For Six).
To make a long story short, I met a lot more women in a few months than I had in the previous 10 years, despite my introverted nature. After dating a few of them, I wound up marrying a very nice woman. And -- please forgive me, I cannot resist saying this -- she's a stunning blonde, tall, gorgeous, busty, and has a degree in mathematics. Ca-Ching!
Probably I shouldn't post this and probably most people will assume I'm an ad-bot, but the 2 or 3 people who know me that read slashdot know I'm on the level.
Anyway, I'm all for improving selection and making things easier. Go for it. If you're introverted like myself, it could be the difference between passing along your genes or not! Hell, we desperately need smart people to procreate...
"Kill Flash" is the most sexy, beautiful button ever made. Thank you, PrefBar guys. You rock.
For those who don't know: this little button removes the last annoying traces of advertising from the web, and IMHO is a necessary addition to the wonderful standard Mozilla capabilities "Block unrequested pop-ups" and "Block Images from this server"
Sirius Cybernetics == Microsoft? That would have been some foresight
You're right, Mr. Adams would indeed have to have had lots of foresight to see how Big and how Ugly Micro$soft would become.
As it turns out, Douglas Adams did have that much foresight; see his anti-MS rants
here, here, here, and... oh, shit, just Google for "Douglas Adams + Miscrosoft" and you'll see:-)
(Disclaimer: I love everything about Douglas Adams, and work for a company famous for opposing Microsoft.)
I get a connection that's rock solid, responsive tech support, and no bandwidth hassles [...]
it's a small company
Sounds like one hell of a good company (or at least more enlightened that the clueless marketroid ISPs many people have to deal with!)
As such, could you please post this company's name and/or URL?
For that matter, will anyone with really positive feedback about their ISP please post it, so we can all "vote with our feet"?
After all, one of the great beauties of the free market system is that companies that provide what lots of people really want, can become richly rewarded and grow... while making many customers happy at the same time...
Re:Oddly, Jesus asks you to experiment as well.
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Blockquoth John Harrison:
Check out John 7:17. Seems to me to be suggesting that you do an experiment.
John 7:17:
If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.
WTF?
How on earth does that relate to the statement:
train yourself to truly believe only that for which you have experimental evidence (and you're always willing to drop those beliefs in the face of new, contradictory evidence)
I respectfully (how nice to see that word in a slashdot discussion!!) disagree with both your points:
Dr. Kevorkian is doing some jail time because this is *not* legal
It's illegal because euthenasia is (as of recently) one of the "Things You Can't Talk About", not because it's logically imperative. Euthenasia is a victimless crime, in the same moral camp as prohibition laws.
Abortion - is not recognized as murder, or even death of an individual.
That's exactly what I'm railing about. It is scientifically proven as murder (defined as willful ending of another's life). I'm saying I'm OK with that. And that sentiment of mine is one of those "Things You Can't Talk About" (in the sense of the original article)
Try being a teacher that preaches there is such a thing as absolute truth. How about, abortion is murder- can't preach that to kids.
That bring up one of my favorite ways to resolve an apparent paradox, which also happens to shock the hell out of people (placing it firmly into the category of "Things You Can't Say"), namely:
Of
course abortion is murder! That merely shows that, in some cases, murder is acceptable. For example:
Euthanasia, where the patient clearly expresses the desire to die
Death as a penalty, when, in the case of certain violent repeat offenders, the crime is not contested, and there is every indication that further violence is unavoidable as long as the person lives
Abortion, in which the parent assumes responsibility for the moral/ethical/spiritual ramifications
Blind faith [is bad], definitely. [but]... what is demonstrably bad about believing in some kind of higher power?
I'm tempted to take the Socratic method and ask: "what's so bad about blind faith?"
From there, I'd ask what the difference is between "faith in some kind of higher power" and "blind faith".
The latter question is a strawman argument, of course: there (presumably) being no evidence for a higher power, one believes in such only by virtue of "blind faith".
The stronger answer, though, is that the great miracles of the modern world -- technology, sciences (including economics, the study of which can allow people to interact peacefully even if they have widely conflicting beliefs) -- all depend on the Scientific Method, as put together by William of Ockham, Fracis Bacon, and elucidated more precisely by Karl Popper.
Basically, if you train yourself to truly believe only that for which you have experimental evidence (and you're always willing to drop those beliefs in the face of new, contradictory evidence), then you have a shot at really understanding How the World Works, and I assert that humanity's best chance for survival is by really understanding How the World Works. Richard Feynman is quite eloquent in describing this in his various books and lectures.
Faith in any kind of supra-natural "stuff" -- pixies, god(s), you name it -- foils that wonderful, scientific-method, mental training. And it's not that a good scientist can't have any kind of blind faith; just that, like driving a car with the parking brake on, the latter impedes the former, which succeeds only to the degree that it overpowers the dampening effect.
The only "acceptable" choice right now seems to be to be an agnostic...
It's worse than that. The only way to avoid getting people all worked up is to be tepidly agnostic.
Myself, I am convinced that blind faith and religion are significantly, demonstrably Bad Things. Not appropriate for young children, and worth proselytizing against.
I think Douglas Adams summed up my sentiments quite well with the term "Radical Atheist".
From the interview:
Some people will say, "Don't you mean 'Agnostic'?"
I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist.
I rather like what Richard Dawkins and friends are doing to remove this particular taboo. Hopefully soon teenagers all over the world will be unashamed to say: "Mom and Dad, I'm a Bright!"
Imho the ability to reply at my convenience, rather than the sender's, underlies much of the usefulness of e-mail. If you treat mail the same as a phone call, frequent mail will kill your productivity in exactly the same way as do frequent calls.
Agreed! As bad as email is, it's WAY better than voicemails.
I HATE voicemail! It is so slow, so linear, so drawn-out.
The bitch of voicemails is, you have to actually listen, sometimes for 15 or 20 seconds, before you know whether youcan delete it or not.
Maybe that seems like whining, but compare to less than one second to make a similar decision for an email.
There. You have it. The anti-spam bill is a pro-spam bill.
Most slashdotters understand intuitively the fact that laws just don't fix the problem, in such cases. Unfortunately, many are probably not aware of the detailed reasons why this is so.
Milton Friedman (a Nobel laureate) covers the details in his book Free to Choose, for which he and his wife (and co-author) received a Pulitzer Prize.
It's worth a read. You'll understand a lot more about how, and why, the world works.
I'm just worried that the situation will move from one form of infringement to the next.
I mean, what if GPL isn't respected? Will the Vietnamese government act? If they couldn't control the piracy in the first place, doesn't that raise any doubt with their ability to uphold the GPL?
I can't believe people aren't concerned about this. "Not enforcing the GPL" means companies ripping GPLed code into their own for-profit software, to be re-sold wherever they can get away with it.
There's a word for that: "stealing". And in this case, it's the work of generous GPL contributors that would be stolen.
Of course, they'll think that it's a company or something, maybe even think that it's a new MS logo or something, but then you clarify... "And get this, it's all free and open!"
Damn. I cannot believe I am about to do this...
Ahemm... well, I guess I'll be the first Logo-nazi (think "grammar-nazi"). The term "Hacker" is defined in the Jargon File in such a way that it has nothing to do with open-source, GNU, or for that matter software at all. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait.
When I first read the article, I agreed out of hand. I thought, "That damnable attention-seeker ESR! After proclaiming he was worth a gazillion dollars back in the bubble days, you'd think he'd learn to just shaddap!"
Then I actually read (well, skimmed) the webpage.
Quoth ESR:
Why from you?
Because I maintain the How To Become A Hacker document, A Brief History of Hackerdom, the Jargon File, and am more or less the hackers' resident historian. It's my job to think of these things.
Well, damn. That almost seems reasonable.
Okay, buddy (I get to call you "buddy" cause you've made yourself a public figure). In this case, damn you, you seem to have a good idea and a reasonable reason why you should be proclaiming it thusly.
Therefore... count me in! When do the Life-Hacker iconized coffee mugs appear in ThinkGeek?
The Drug Policy Alliance has a good, well-researched website: http://drugpolicy.org
Their email alerts are quite informative and insightful.
I'm opposed to the waste of money and loss of Freedom that has been the hopeless "War on Drugs". If you are too, have a look at the above website.
In my opinon, a political lobbying group like the Drug Policy Alliance are more likely to actually fix the broken Drug prohibtion laws than any other mechanism (hey -- it is the USA, after all, and Lobbyist organizations really do set the rules, kids!)
You forgot one:
6. The Oracle Approach. Produce a value-added software and services bundle. Sell it on all platforms for which there is a reasonably-sized market of willing buyers. Hype up the Linux platform's strengths, as a way of expanding your own serivces & sales into new niches.
Some people will attack 'Strategy #6' as being "capitalist", "corporate", or "insufficiently GNU"; other people (myself included) think that's just fine:-)
"why does it have to happen on my home machine? Why can't it seamlessly run those tasks on the dozen or so machines I have access to that are just sitting there?"
Looks like Microsoft is trying to get on the "Grid Computing" bandwagon, which has been gathering steam ever since the economist ran an article about it.
Oracle and IBM both have major Grid Computing initiatives, and Microsoft wants to pretend they can play with the Big Dogs in the Server Room.
Imagine once the Microsofties dumb the concept down to the Windows level... the 'My Grid' and 'Grids Close To Me' icons on an ostensibly well-trained admin's desktop... aaaaarrrggghh!
To suggest that they are not entitled to the same rights as anyone else is downright unamerican.
According to the U.S. Constitution, Rights are granted by the Creator. They are very different from benefits, entitlements, or social services.
The courts have (unfortunately, IMO) ruled that when in public one has no reasonable expectation of privacy. As such, if you're not on privately-owned property, your location, conversations, and actions are public domain.
I'm not saying I like it. But it is at least logically self-consistent.
Any who knew what they were doing wouldn't get caught.
Doesn't matter. Once there are enough horror stories on "A Current Affair" and other pop-news outlets, about people who "went for a quick buck on the Internet... and had their life ruined!", nobody in their right mind will get tempted to make a quick buck this way.
I've had SPAM-vertisers try to sign up the company I work for as a client, and I've had them try to convince me that it's OK to advertise that way.
You should have invited them to a meeting, and the kicked the crap out of them when they showed up.
Seriously, I have an idea. Maybe a social fix is the best solution for this problem. Please take this for the honest proposal that it is.
Anyone in a responsible position at, say, a bank, drugstore, or any business that would be attractive to an "email marketer" as a client, could help put LOTS of spammers out of business.
Just arrange a meeting to talk about the advertising services they could provide for you. Thank them, take their contact information, and post it to a relevant newsgroup.
This would not be immoral or even rude. You'd publish only the public information on their business cards -- nothing confidential.
Let the mobbed masses do to lots more of them what they did to the spammer that's the subject of the article.
seemed weird was that if this had been a 'quiet' worm that spread, there would have been a lot more machines that were infected on dday. ms being hit by a large number of zombies and having to *beg* people to clean up their systems
I thought this was wierd too.
Two Questions:
Why make the PC reboot & go all unstable, thereby alerting people that their PC has the virus? Wouldn't it make more sense to just wait quietly until "D-Day"??
Why such a long delay between infection and "D-Day"? If the DOS attack had been set for 2 days earlier, the Windows Update DOS would've happened just when the infection was rampant. That was surely the intent, right??
I conclude that whatever bastard released this was not really bright, or not really trying.
Quoth the poster: if Oracle... finds something in Linux that they'd really like to have improved, they have plenty of resources to improve it
Actually, that's not an "if". In fact it's already happened. To support Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), they had to implement a Clustered File System for Linux. That was done, and released under the GPL:
Slashdot Mirror
You mean Kayser Sose, don't you?
In my personal experience, it's just like globalization and open markets: real scary if you are engaged in deception, and absolutely fantastic if you want lots of choice.
A few years ago, in my early thirties, I decided it was finally time to find a wife. I was (finally) ready to commit. My parents urged me to "shop around". So I did, using means an admittedly very shy geek can do: online sites (ie, match.com) and personal-intro services (ie, Table For Six).
To make a long story short, I met a lot more women in a few months than I had in the previous 10 years, despite my introverted nature. After dating a few of them, I wound up marrying a very nice woman. And -- please forgive me, I cannot resist saying this -- she's a stunning blonde, tall, gorgeous, busty, and has a degree in mathematics. Ca-Ching!
Probably I shouldn't post this and probably most people will assume I'm an ad-bot, but the 2 or 3 people who know me that read slashdot know I'm on the level.
Anyway, I'm all for improving selection and making things easier. Go for it. If you're introverted like myself, it could be the difference between passing along your genes or not! Hell, we desperately need smart people to procreate...
"Kill Flash" is the most sexy, beautiful button ever made. Thank you, PrefBar guys. You rock.
For those who don't know: this little button removes the last annoying traces of advertising from the web, and IMHO is a necessary addition to the wonderful standard Mozilla capabilities "Block unrequested pop-ups" and "Block Images from this server"
You're right, Mr. Adams would indeed have to have had lots of foresight to see how Big and how Ugly Micro$soft would become.
As it turns out, Douglas Adams did have that much foresight; see his anti-MS rants here, here, here, and... oh, shit, just Google for "Douglas Adams + Miscrosoft" and you'll see :-)
(Disclaimer: I love everything about Douglas Adams, and work for a company famous for opposing Microsoft.)
Sounds like one hell of a good company (or at least more enlightened that the clueless marketroid ISPs many people have to deal with!)
As such, could you please post this company's name and/or URL?
For that matter, will anyone with really positive feedback about their ISP please post it, so we can all "vote with our feet"?
After all, one of the great beauties of the free market system is that companies that provide what lots of people really want, can become richly rewarded and grow... while making many customers happy at the same time...
A quick Googling yields:
WTF?
How on earth does that relate to the statement:
It's illegal because euthenasia is (as of recently) one of the "Things You Can't Talk About", not because it's logically imperative. Euthenasia is a victimless crime, in the same moral camp as prohibition laws.
That's exactly what I'm railing about. It is scientifically proven as murder (defined as willful ending of another's life). I'm saying I'm OK with that. And that sentiment of mine is one of those "Things You Can't Talk About" (in the sense of the original article)
That bring up one of my favorite ways to resolve an apparent paradox, which also happens to shock the hell out of people (placing it firmly into the category of "Things You Can't Say"), namely:
I'm tempted to take the Socratic method and ask: "what's so bad about blind faith?"
From there, I'd ask what the difference is between "faith in some kind of higher power" and "blind faith".
The latter question is a strawman argument, of course: there (presumably) being no evidence for a higher power, one believes in such only by virtue of "blind faith".
The stronger answer, though, is that the great miracles of the modern world -- technology, sciences (including economics, the study of which can allow people to interact peacefully even if they have widely conflicting beliefs) -- all depend on the Scientific Method, as put together by William of Ockham, Fracis Bacon, and elucidated more precisely by Karl Popper.
Basically, if you train yourself to truly believe only that for which you have experimental evidence (and you're always willing to drop those beliefs in the face of new, contradictory evidence), then you have a shot at really understanding How the World Works, and I assert that humanity's best chance for survival is by really understanding How the World Works. Richard Feynman is quite eloquent in describing this in his various books and lectures.
Faith in any kind of supra-natural "stuff" -- pixies, god(s), you name it -- foils that wonderful, scientific-method, mental training. And it's not that a good scientist can't have any kind of blind faith; just that, like driving a car with the parking brake on, the latter impedes the former, which succeeds only to the degree that it overpowers the dampening effect.
Myself, I am convinced that blind faith and religion are significantly, demonstrably Bad Things. Not appropriate for young children, and worth proselytizing against.
I think Douglas Adams summed up my sentiments quite well with the term "Radical Atheist".
From the interview:
I rather like what Richard Dawkins and friends are doing to remove this particular taboo. Hopefully soon teenagers all over the world will be unashamed to say:
"Mom and Dad, I'm a Bright!"
Anyway, as I was reading the article, I couldn't help but think of the song Hush from their first album.
They're crude lyrics, but the song does get the point across.
Agreed! As bad as email is, it's WAY better than voicemails. I HATE voicemail! It is so slow, so linear, so drawn-out.
The bitch of voicemails is, you have to actually listen, sometimes for 15 or 20 seconds, before you know whether youcan delete it or not. Maybe that seems like whining, but compare to less than one second to make a similar decision for an email.
That's Extremely Relevant.
Please, somebody mod the parent UP!
Most slashdotters understand intuitively the fact that laws just don't fix the problem, in such cases. Unfortunately, many are probably not aware of the detailed reasons why this is so.
Milton Friedman (a Nobel laureate) covers the details in his book Free to Choose, for which he and his wife (and co-author) received a Pulitzer Prize.
It's worth a read. You'll understand a lot more about how, and why, the world works.
Quoth icejai:
I can't believe people aren't concerned about this. "Not enforcing the GPL" means companies ripping GPLed code into their own for-profit software, to be re-sold wherever they can get away with it.There's a word for that: "stealing". And in this case, it's the work of generous GPL contributors that would be stolen.
Of course, they'll think that it's a company or something, maybe even think that it's a new MS logo or something, but then you clarify... "And get this, it's all free and open!"
Damn. I cannot believe I am about to do this...
Ahemm... well, I guess I'll be the first Logo-nazi (think "grammar-nazi"). The term "Hacker" is defined in the Jargon File in such a way that it has nothing to do with open-source, GNU, or for that matter software at all. Go ahead, look it up, I'll wait.
Then I actually read (well, skimmed) the webpage. Quoth ESR:
Well, damn. That almost seems reasonable. Okay, buddy (I get to call you "buddy" cause you've made yourself a public figure). In this case, damn you, you seem to have a good idea and a reasonable reason why you should be proclaiming it thusly.
Therefore... count me in! When do the Life-Hacker iconized coffee mugs appear in ThinkGeek?
http://drugpolicy.org
Their email alerts are quite informative and insightful.
I'm opposed to the waste of money and loss of Freedom that has been the hopeless "War on Drugs". If you are too, have a look at the above website.
In my opinon, a political lobbying group like the Drug Policy Alliance are more likely to actually fix the broken Drug prohibtion laws than any other mechanism (hey -- it is the USA, after all, and Lobbyist organizations really do set the rules, kids!)
6. The Oracle Approach. Produce a value-added software and services bundle. Sell it on all platforms for which there is a reasonably-sized market of willing buyers. Hype up the Linux platform's strengths, as a way of expanding your own serivces & sales into new niches.
Some people will attack 'Strategy #6' as being "capitalist", "corporate", or "insufficiently GNU"; other people (myself included) think that's just fine :-)
Looks like Microsoft is trying to get on the "Grid Computing" bandwagon, which has been gathering steam ever since the economist ran an article about it. Oracle and IBM both have major Grid Computing initiatives, and Microsoft wants to pretend they can play with the Big Dogs in the Server Room.
Imagine once the Microsofties dumb the concept down to the Windows level... the 'My Grid' and 'Grids Close To Me' icons on an ostensibly well-trained admin's desktop... aaaaarrrggghh!
According to the U.S. Constitution, Rights are granted by the Creator. They are very different from benefits, entitlements, or social services.
The courts have (unfortunately, IMO) ruled that when in public one has no reasonable expectation of privacy. As such, if you're not on privately-owned property, your location, conversations, and actions are public domain.
I'm not saying I like it. But it is at least logically self-consistent.
Doesn't matter. Once there are enough horror stories on "A Current Affair" and other pop-news outlets, about people who "went for a quick buck on the Internet... and had their life ruined!", nobody in their right mind will get tempted to make a quick buck this way.
Seriously, I have an idea. Maybe a social fix is the best solution for this problem. Please take this for the honest proposal that it is.
Anyone in a responsible position at, say, a bank, drugstore, or any business that would be attractive to an "email marketer" as a client, could help put LOTS of spammers out of business.
Just arrange a meeting to talk about the advertising services they could provide for you. Thank them, take their contact information, and post it to a relevant newsgroup.
This would not be immoral or even rude. You'd publish only the public information on their business cards -- nothing confidential.
Let the mobbed masses do to lots more of them what they did to the spammer that's the subject of the article.
I thought this was wierd too.
Two Questions:
- Why make the PC reboot & go all unstable, thereby alerting people that their PC has the virus? Wouldn't it make more sense to just wait quietly until "D-Day"??
- Why such a long delay between infection and "D-Day"? If the DOS attack had been set for 2 days earlier, the Windows Update DOS would've happened just when the infection was rampant. That was surely the intent, right??
I conclude that whatever bastard released this was not really bright, or not really trying.if Oracle
Actually, that's not an "if". In fact it's already happened. To support Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), they had to implement a Clustered File System for Linux. That was done, and released under the GPL:
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs/