Perhaps "libertarianism" is the comfortable version of "activist" for cautious, conservative-leaning-well-not-really techs?
Yet another example of the _other_/. effect: wanting to make a change, but being afraid to get caught by the stigma associated with actually doing something useful. Or at least meaningful.
Katz stood up to the knee-jerk, groundless, and yes, a bit repressive policies of the theater, and I applaud him, but I don't think it changes things for him to try and choose the/.-friendly catchword to describe his actions.
I think we should all encourage ourselves, myself included, to do things like Katz did, a bit more often. Posting on/. doesnt make quite the right stir, even though quite a lot of readers like to pretend that world leaders make policy decision based on our threads, and even if we DO shut down the occasional website for a day.
Threaten your average tech firm, whether it be an ISP, development house, or whatever, and if it has less than 100,000 users, and/or hasn't yet made an IPO, it will promptly roll over, beg, and chase tennis balls.
It's not too surprising -- lots of techies/hackers/etc., at least those I've met, dont think that law / government actually affects them from day to day, and their ignorance spills over into their business sense and causes holes for themselves later down the road.
For example, when I say Zippo, what comes to mind? (*Sound effect*: falling bomb)
It's also not unheard of for ISPs to play the Dept of Misinformation role and try to hide things like their whole server being blacklisted or blocked by CyberPa-troll. I'm sure a few have decided to make the wrong thing a secret, and got badly burnt for it.
And people wonder why tech startups are so fragile. Just look out the window at the tech lawsuits falling like bombs, driven by ignorance. Often on both sides. Better get an umbrella on retainer.
Point is, your ISP not only should be making the fact that CyberPatrol is screwing them known to their users, they should be making it known to as many people as possible... AND promptly suing CP. But techs aren't prepared for legal hassles. Most of us are sitting ducks -- and all we do is cry on/. about it, instead of actually doing something useful. [irony noted, thanks.]
Can anyone remember why so many of us were called names in grade school? I thought so.
FYI, the R rating recommends parents accompany children UNDER 17, not 18. www.mpaa.org. (This has been true since the creation of the R rating. It's been OK for both theaters and for Blockbuster till now.)
I'm sorry you had a deprived childhood.
As for the story of the mother, you object to the fact that she went to the movie with her child. But at the beginning, I thought you were objecting about parents NOT accompanying their children to such movies. Was I wrong?
Now, seeing as how the child was, as you say, "barely sitting still", "making noise", and "distracting the rest of the theater", how much of the movie do you estimate he actually SAW?
PS: you meant "movies", "their kids", and "psyches". HTH.
PPS: "Carrie" was R rated. It was pretty disturbing (bathing in a bathtub of blood, that sort of pleasant thing.) Anyone who saw it as a child care to attest to the state of their 'phichies'?
I can't help thinking of those little square robots on TNG that fly into the danger areas to mine the salt or whatever, and Data saves them because they become self-aware.
Which makes me envision dozens of little tennis balls whizzing around... trying to kill me. (Or am I having a Phantasm flashback?)
So, if these things really become smart, will we then be able to have tennis balls chasing after dogs?
Most of these online recruiters claim they cant handle HTML, either, and that's not proprietary.
They don't care if you actually fit the description of the job being filled, even if they do know what it is. One recruiter interviewed me for a "development" position, and when I discussed my programming skills, I was told "this isn't a programming job, it's a development job." My dumfounded reaction probably lost me points, too.
Personally, I think the whole job recruitment market is entirely upside down. I'm a recent college graduate trying desperately to find a decent job (i.e. something more educational than "Unix Schmuck," which is what a lot of available sysadm jobs ought to be called), and having a hard time.
The way recruitment works now is that these middlemen approach companies who have openings and then wrench a placement commission from the company when they fill the position. Which makes no sense to me. With the way my search is going, I'd be entirely willing to PAY a recruiter MYSELF to find just the type of job I want. If it were really the right job, I'd give them a percentage of my paycheck for my whole term of employment and then some. Why jerk around with companies that won't even call you back after an interview and recruiters, quite a lot of whom are freelance only trying to make a buck for themselves with no interest in actually making the employee OR the employer happy -- when I'm willing to hire someone myself to find a great job that really fits me?
I know at least one group that recently registered domains, and in the interim between registering and redirecting the DNS, the "We recently reistered through register.com" screen was in its place. This was before register.com supposedly went "online" in the registering biz.
They also registered all of nacurh.com, nacurh.net, and nacurh.org, even though they're really just and.org. I haven't been able to convince anyone that that was a stupid thing to do. (Not much chance of someone else wanting nacurh.com, either, is there?)
But it does appear that NSI grabbed at least one domain that people had been banging down the doors for and that they had refused to give out, about two weeks before register.com went official.
As for domain registrars registering queried names, well, I wouldn't be surprised if most domainmongers do that if the name looks useful to them.
Could register.com legally charge a higher price for one domain than their posted rate for registration?
What ever happened to just being able to buy a dish, and a receiver, and scanning the skies for birds until you find something interesting? Or tracking down transponder lists and position data and all that to find what you want.
Isn't that the way most of us would prefer to do it... have to do our own research to find the gems, instead of being spoon-fed the standard fare?
Did all these subscription companies pretty much make the old style of satellite TV viewing unavailable?
So someone explain to me what the Big Change is. I've been seeing new domains with the register.com dummy screen on them for weeks now. Seems to me they've been happily registering domains for at least a month.
So what's the difference? They even call themselves "the first domain registrar to register domain names." Huh? Isn't that a redundancy? Doubletalk even?
Don't expect this to help any of those nagging NS censorship issues... since we should probably assume that NS bought all the leftover dirty ones themselves recently. Goodness, what if register.com had allowed someone to buy the mother(~.com'er)-of-all-domains?
I think lots of people here underestimate that there are politically motivated people who actually have concerns about personal liberties, privacy, and etc. The ones that we, even us "clever" computer enthuisasts, insist on giving all the attention to, are the mainstream politicians whose decisions come right from election polls and corporate pockets. Are these the ones that really deserve our attention?
What surprises me is that after years of being Pete Wilson's stronghold, California now has a liberal governor who actually seems to give a damn about the people in his state.
And on the other hand, I think lots of people here overestimate Slashdot. Suddenly every privacy matter is somehow a technology matter? And suddenly we're the only group of people that cares? And suddenly anyone listens to a bunch of computer people, especially when talking about something that really has nothing to do with computers?
If you are on/. and are the salve of one particular brand name, you are doomed to [lose]. If you are so weak as to let other people force you to use softs and apps not of your liking, and let yourself be trapped in a closed system hell, then you are doomed to [lose].
How does that affect this issue? I mean, if you're a big "Winamp fan", then perhaps you're happy about this latest development, cause now Nullsoft will have expanded funding, maybe hire more people, and improve the program beyond what it is.
Sure, I use Winamp, and for the same reason I use Netscape 3. I find both programs superior to what I've been able to find in terms of viable competitors.
But how does one's dislike of a small "independent" startup going AOLwards on you have anything to do with this mythical church of the "pseudo-geek", of having to own all the kewl 0DAY 4PPZ?
When winamp came up it was heralded as the great saviour of the music distro sceen, and it was. It had its glory and is now moving to another phase.
That's right... had. But which happened first -- the end of the glory, or the beginning of the acquisition?
The Nullsofties and folks like them deserve to take their creations and do what they want with them.
Sure thing. (And whenever someone points that out, the inference is "...so don't complain." Why not?)
If you want me to believe that Nullsoft's only viable option at this point, and I'm not just talking about the company, but the four people who operate it, was to be bought by AOL, I simply won't believe it.
Perhaps they feel they "owe" it to their users to keep the project alive. Perhaps they feel that they's put too much effort into it and they don't feel they've gotten the full ride for their quarter. I don't know, but I don't think this was a do-or-die situation. And I don't know why we're not entitled to criticise them for it.
I don't agree with the "boycott winamp" cry, but I should be able to work my way toward encouraging companies to release products and take opportunities that meet my own values. Not everyone tries to make their money by prettying themselves to look good for AOL, and those people get more of my respect than those that don't.
I chuckled, not gaped when I heard this news. It may be that nothing shocks me anymore.
Have you noticed that none of the major Nullsoft developments over the past month or two have been announced over at Nullsoft or Winamp, not even via press release? Recently, it's been looking like Nullsoft has been _grooming_ themselves for just this kind of buyout. They are trying to maintain the underground mp3 community, but are acting like media whores, and pretending that anything bad (or distasteful) that goes on with them has never happened. (Remember the lawsuit last month? Oh yeah, that.)
Well, we can only expect that AT&T will encourage AOL to promote AAC, and help deprecate MP3, the same way that AOL owns Netscape but distributes IE. Then eventually, Nullsoft will fire themselves:), having no viable product, and turn winamp.com into a second-rate mp3.com (and free music portal site!!!11!).
As the Nullsoft homepage says:
Nullsoft is a small, innovative software company based in Sedona, AZ. Phear us.
Yah rite, d00d!
PS: Wonder if this means Winamp will become GPL someday soon.:)
Why are we so interested in colonizing Mars already? Sure, I think it will happen, and will be fun for whoever gets to do it, but there's just one thing. We haven't even begun colonizing the Moon yet. Can't we concentrate on getting there first before we fly off to the planet of the God of War? If nothing else, it would be good practice...
Consider how frustrated we become when the Cable goes out. How we scramble around, looking for something to do, when the power goes out.
That's extremely short term. Sure, we get frustrated when the cable goes out, but after a few hours we just get by with it turned off. Maybe we read a book, maybe we play Civ, maybe we go out somewhere. TV is something most people only crave when they know they can get it.
If Information Warfare ever came to the U.S. of A, it would have a very demoralizing effect on the general population. It would undermine the popul[ace]'s faith in it's government.
Well, yes... so would [and does] any other form of attack. That is, essentially, the point of civilian-directed warfare. Already people are demoralized and crying foul over China's unauthorized tape-trading of our nuclear secrets.
Hitting people with rocks seems more inherent to our species than the higher-level sneakiness involved in spying.
Perhaps, depending on what counts as spying. But rocks weren't really invented by us, were they? They were just handy aids -- like say our fists. I was thinking stone knives and arrowheads...
When ever in the history of combat has information not been the key? I dare say spying was invented before weaponry. And the same for propaganda. Why is the use of electronic means for espionage, propaganda, and sabotage such a shock to the computing community -- one which is so rarely shocked by the developments of our age?
As for the usefulness of electronic warfare against the Serbs (proud [now former] makers of the esteemed Yugo), I think you may be slightly underestimating the technology available to and in use by the Serb government and their media machine that rivals MSNBC in jingoism.... though I agree its usefulness will be about the same as anything else we have done over there so far, which is to say not useful at all.
But as for American vulnerability to cyber attacks, do you really think Americans wouldn't patiently dive into a dark period without technology? Seems to me that Europeans are generally less afraid of technology than Americans are. I think most Americans would see a major cyber-warfare hit as a pleasant "vacation from all this B.S....."
Is this the same Russian money machine that can't afford to keep up its end of the ISS, and wasn't sure at one point if it would be able to get its Mir personnel home?
Certainly ideal advances in technology could bring about a "more equal distribution" of the world's wealth, and that doesnt just include monetary wealth. Whether it be solar panels, the Internet, hydrogen-fueled cars, whatever.
But I wonder what Slashdottians really think of the idea of the distribution of wealth. Considering many of the professionals (and especially executives -- dont forget them) in the tech industry are in the field for the above-average financial return, how does this "community" really feel about Dyson's vision?
I realize that many./ians are all for government contributions to OSS, but I highly doubt we're in favor of an Internet bringing about social destratification (socialism, for those at home) -- whether that's monetary equality or intellectual equality.
This happy little cgi existed for years and was even fairly well known (i thought). Chances are it's been sitting there without the admins even remembering it was there.
Nothing is safe from the wrath of Taco's Fun Link Club!
If thats the same site I'm thinking of, I used to play with it constantly... though it's not really any more informative than going to the place's web site and clicking on "Contact".
So back to aiming ICBMs, who can tell me how to get the L/L of my favorite cell phone user... like, the guy in the car in front of me?
Regards,
"i said, 'why? i already have a computer.' "
on
InterNIC Redesign
·
· Score: 1
I think its impossible not to agree with the feelings most in here seem to be having, which extends quite far beyond NS, and that's that the Internet is going to hell, due to overcommercialization and/or trivialization of every significant protocol beside the Web.
(Or maybe you think the problem is opportunistic chodes running fly-by-night ISPs who dont know what they're doing. Whichever, its the same cause and effect.)
But I just want to be a pain and point out that all of this is relatively recent. I started using the net around only 7.9 Msec Unix time, and its now something like 9.2. When I started using the Internet, colleges were still using their gopherspaces and budding webspaces solely for academic research and what not, and TV commercials had not yet started containing URLs. I even remember from my BBS days an old FidoNet primer for Internet messages that stated that no form of commercialism -- even *.forsale stuff, was verboten.
While more and more seasoned users (assuming I'm a seasoned user, which is likely scary to some) start crying foul over the growing mess we now have to deal with, we -- ALL of us -- pretty much sat by and watched it happen, either thinking that the perennial Net forces like NS would soon get it all back under control, or wondering how much money we could make off of it.
I like the ideas that some have had that ISPs and other net sites could rebel and destroy this monstrosity through mob brute force a la RBL and UDP. But unfortunately, I'd say it's quite too late.
It does look like NS is worried about the legendary day which the rest of us are waiting for -- the appearance of a Messiah to bring the DNS system to some sort of sensibility.
Why else would they be diversifying their range of worthless product lines so much? Consultancy? Auto search-engine adding? Um, T Shirts???
And email hosting? This is great -- if you're too cheap to get your own leased line to host your domain, and too cheap to have someone else host it for you, you can have NS host your email. Then you can pretend you are on the Net while competition (er, in theory) can actually maintain their own updated site.
Admittedly, it's not NS's fault that "Dot Com" have become the holy words of every net-ophyte that's come along in the past 2-3 years, but I guess some of us hoped that the veteran net orgs (like them) could have kept things a little better under control....
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another example of the _other_
Katz stood up to the knee-jerk, groundless, and yes, a bit repressive policies of the theater, and I applaud him, but I don't think it changes things for him to try and choose the
I think we should all encourage ourselves, myself included, to do things like Katz did, a bit more often. Posting on
Regards,
It's not too surprising -- lots of techies/hackers/etc., at least those I've met, dont think that law / government actually affects them from day to day, and their ignorance spills over into their business sense and causes holes for themselves later down the road.
For example, when I say Zippo, what comes to mind?
(*Sound effect*: falling bomb)
It's also not unheard of for ISPs to play the Dept of Misinformation role and try to hide things like their whole server being blacklisted or blocked by CyberPa-troll. I'm sure a few have decided to make the wrong thing a secret, and got badly burnt for it.
And people wonder why tech startups are so fragile. Just look out the window at the tech lawsuits falling like bombs, driven by ignorance. Often on both sides. Better get an umbrella on retainer.
Point is, your ISP not only should be making the fact that CyberPatrol is screwing them known to their users, they should be making it known to as many people as possible... AND promptly suing CP. But techs aren't prepared for legal hassles. Most of us are sitting ducks -- and all we do is cry on
Can anyone remember why so many of us were called names in grade school? I thought so.
Regards,
(This has been true since the creation of the R rating. It's been OK for both theaters and for Blockbuster till now.)
I'm sorry you had a deprived childhood.
As for the story of the mother, you object to the fact that she went to the movie with her child. But at the beginning, I thought you were objecting about parents NOT accompanying their children to such movies. Was I wrong?
Now, seeing as how the child was, as you say, "barely sitting still", "making noise", and "distracting the rest of the theater", how much of the movie do you estimate he actually SAW?
PS: you meant "movies", "their kids", and "psyches". HTH.
PPS: "Carrie" was R rated. It was pretty disturbing (bathing in a bathtub of blood, that sort of pleasant thing.) Anyone who saw it as a child care to attest to the state of their 'phichies'?
Regards,
Which makes me envision dozens of little tennis balls whizzing around... trying to kill me.
(Or am I having a Phantasm flashback?)
So, if these things really become smart, will we then be able to have tennis balls chasing after dogs?
Regards,
They don't care if you actually fit the description of the job being filled, even if they do know what it is. One recruiter interviewed me for a "development" position, and when I discussed my programming skills, I was told "this isn't a programming job, it's a development job." My dumfounded reaction probably lost me points, too.
Personally, I think the whole job recruitment market is entirely upside down. I'm a recent college graduate trying desperately to find a decent job (i.e. something more educational than "Unix Schmuck," which is what a lot of available sysadm jobs ought to be called), and having a hard time.
The way recruitment works now is that these middlemen approach companies who have openings and then wrench a placement commission from the company when they fill the position. Which makes no sense to me. With the way my search is going, I'd be entirely willing to PAY a recruiter MYSELF to find just the type of job I want. If it were really the right job, I'd give them a percentage of my paycheck for my whole term of employment and then some. Why jerk around with companies that won't even call you back after an interview and recruiters, quite a lot of whom are freelance only trying to make a buck for themselves with no interest in actually making the employee OR the employer happy -- when I'm willing to hire someone myself to find a great job that really fits me?
Regards,
They also registered all of nacurh.com, nacurh.net, and nacurh.org, even though they're really just and
But it does appear that NSI grabbed at least one domain that people had been banging down the doors for and that they had refused to give out, about two weeks before register.com went official.
As for domain registrars registering queried names, well, I wouldn't be surprised if most domainmongers do that if the name looks useful to them.
Could register.com legally charge a higher price for one domain than their posted rate for registration?
Regards,
Isn't that the way most of us would prefer to do it... have to do our own research to find the gems, instead of being spoon-fed the standard fare?
Did all these subscription companies pretty much make the old style of satellite TV viewing unavailable?
Regards,
So what's the difference? They even call themselves "the first domain registrar to register domain names." Huh? Isn't that a redundancy? Doubletalk even?
Don't expect this to help any of those nagging NS censorship issues... since we should probably assume that NS bought all the leftover dirty ones themselves recently. Goodness, what if register.com had allowed someone to buy the mother(~.com'er)-of-all-domains?
Regards,
What surprises me is that after years of being Pete Wilson's stronghold, California now has a liberal governor who actually seems to give a damn about the people in his state.
And on the other hand, I think lots of people here overestimate Slashdot. Suddenly every privacy matter is somehow a technology matter? And suddenly we're the only group of people that cares? And suddenly anyone listens to a bunch of computer people, especially when talking about something that really has nothing to do with computers?
Regards,
How does that affect this issue? I mean, if you're a big "Winamp fan", then perhaps you're happy about this latest development, cause now Nullsoft will have expanded funding, maybe hire more people, and improve the program beyond what it is.
Sure, I use Winamp, and for the same reason I use Netscape 3. I find both programs superior to what I've been able to find in terms of viable competitors.
But how does one's dislike of a small "independent" startup going AOLwards on you have anything to do with this mythical church of the "pseudo-geek", of having to own all the kewl 0DAY 4PPZ?
When winamp came up it was heralded as the great saviour of the music distro sceen, and it was. It had its glory and is now moving to another phase.
That's right... had. But which happened first -- the end of the glory, or the beginning of the acquisition?
The Nullsofties and folks like them deserve to take their creations and do what they want with them.
Sure thing. (And whenever someone points that out, the inference is "...so don't complain." Why not?)
If you want me to believe that Nullsoft's only viable option at this point, and I'm not just talking about the company, but the four people who operate it, was to be bought by AOL, I simply won't believe it.
Perhaps they feel they "owe" it to their users to keep the project alive. Perhaps they feel that they's put too much effort into it and they don't feel they've gotten the full ride for their quarter. I don't know, but I don't think this was a do-or-die situation. And I don't know why we're not entitled to criticise them for it.
I don't agree with the "boycott winamp" cry, but I should be able to work my way toward encouraging companies to release products and take opportunities that meet my own values. Not everyone tries to make their money by prettying themselves to look good for AOL, and those people get more of my respect than those that don't.
Regards,
Have you noticed that none of the major Nullsoft developments over the past month or two have been announced over at Nullsoft or Winamp, not even via press release? Recently, it's been looking like Nullsoft has been _grooming_ themselves for just this kind of buyout. They are trying to maintain the underground mp3 community, but are acting like media whores, and pretending that anything bad (or distasteful) that goes on with them has never happened. (Remember the lawsuit last month? Oh yeah, that.)
Well, we can only expect that AT&T will encourage AOL to promote AAC, and help deprecate MP3, the same way that AOL owns Netscape but distributes IE. Then eventually, Nullsoft will fire themselves
As the Nullsoft homepage says:
Nullsoft is a small, innovative software company based in Sedona, AZ. Phear us.
Yah rite, d00d!
PS: Wonder if this means Winamp will become GPL someday soon.
Regards,
Sure, I think it will happen, and will be fun for whoever gets to do it, but there's just one thing.
We haven't even begun colonizing the Moon yet. Can't we concentrate on getting there first before we fly off to the planet of the God of War?
If nothing else, it would be good practice...
Regards,
That's extremely short term. Sure, we get frustrated when the cable goes out, but after a few hours we just get by with it turned off. Maybe we read a book, maybe we play Civ, maybe we go out somewhere. TV is something most people only crave when they know they can get it.
If Information Warfare ever came to the U.S. of A, it would have a very demoralizing effect on the general population. It would undermine the popul[ace]'s faith in it's government.
Well, yes... so would [and does] any other form of attack. That is, essentially, the point of civilian-directed warfare. Already people are demoralized and crying foul over China's unauthorized tape-trading of our nuclear secrets.
Hitting people with rocks seems more inherent to our species than the higher-level sneakiness involved in spying.
Perhaps, depending on what counts as spying. But rocks weren't really invented by us, were they? They were just handy aids -- like say our fists. I was thinking stone knives and arrowheads...
Regards,
As for the usefulness of electronic warfare against the Serbs (proud [now former] makers of the esteemed Yugo), I think you may be slightly underestimating the technology available to and in use by the Serb government and their media machine that rivals MSNBC in jingoism....
though I agree its usefulness will be about the same as anything else we have done over there so far, which is to say not useful at all.
But as for American vulnerability to cyber attacks, do you really think Americans wouldn't patiently dive into a dark period without technology? Seems to me that Europeans are generally less afraid of technology than Americans are. I think most Americans would see a major cyber-warfare hit as a pleasant "vacation from all this B.S.
Regards,
Regards,
Regards,
But I wonder what Slashdottians really think of the idea of the distribution of wealth. Considering many of the professionals (and especially executives -- dont forget them) in the tech industry are in the field for the above-average financial return, how does this "community" really feel about Dyson's vision?
I realize that many
Ping? Anyone?
Regards,
it's been sitting there without the admins even remembering it was there.
Will we ever see it again?
Regards,
World not really real, and being controlled by some super-human person, that sort of thing?
Regards,
If thats the same site I'm thinking of, I used to play with it constantly... though it's not really any more informative than going to the place's web site and clicking on "Contact".
So back to aiming ICBMs, who can tell me how to get the L/L of my favorite cell phone user
Regards,
(Or maybe you think the problem is opportunistic chodes running fly-by-night ISPs who dont know what they're doing. Whichever, its the same cause and effect.)
But I just want to be a pain and point out that all of this is relatively recent. I started using the net around only 7.9 Msec Unix time, and its now something like 9.2. When I started using the Internet, colleges were still using their gopherspaces and budding webspaces solely for academic research and what not, and TV commercials had not yet started containing URLs. I even remember from my BBS days an old FidoNet primer for Internet messages that stated that no form of commercialism -- even *.forsale stuff, was verboten.
While more and more seasoned users (assuming I'm a seasoned user, which is likely scary to some) start crying foul over the growing mess we now have to deal with, we -- ALL of us -- pretty much sat by and watched it happen, either thinking that the perennial Net forces like NS would soon get it all back under control, or wondering how much money we could make off of it.
I like the ideas that some have had that ISPs and other net sites could rebel and destroy this monstrosity through mob brute force a la RBL and UDP. But unfortunately, I'd say it's quite too late.
Regards,
Why else would they be diversifying their range of worthless product lines so much? Consultancy? Auto search-engine adding? Um, T Shirts???
And email hosting? This is great -- if you're too cheap to get your own leased line to host your domain, and too cheap to have someone else host it for you, you can have NS host your email. Then you can pretend you are on the Net while competition (er, in theory) can actually maintain their own updated site.
Admittedly, it's not NS's fault that "Dot Com" have become the holy words of every net-ophyte that's come along in the past 2-3 years, but I guess some of us hoped that the veteran net orgs (like them) could have kept things a little better under control....
[Snip extra rant about educating the stupid.]
Regards,