One day the world will rise up and say in one voice, "No! Screw you guys! From now on everything we export to your country is in metric. Deal with it."
I think you just quoted the EU, without realising it.
it is awe-inspiring, breath-taking, it is a testament to engineering, technology, science, logistics and human determination. It is the Apollo program of the 21st century.
Then they said, it's too hard, too expensive and takes longer than one election term. Let's keep burning cheap coal and let our great-grandkids be the visionaries.
The State says what you can put into your body (doing no crime to no one else), probably funded by the big medical business
That might be true in a country with no public health care, but if you live somewhere where the taxpayer has to foot the bill for the health effects of excess Marijuana consumption (mental health, lung disease etc), it becomes a government problem.
I'm not concerned about how pretty OSes will be in the future or how clever they'll be at filing away my stuff to make it easier to find again later since the history of OSes shows that they are designed better at these tasks as time goes on.
My OS of the near future will be secure and stable, the likes of which we can only dream about now. It will recover gracefully from hardware errors, it will use high-level APIs to talk to all hardware making drivers a thing of the past, it will put large parts of itself inside read-only flash RAM on the PC where no application program (read: viruses and spyware) can touch it. It will back itself up automatically as well as specifying a level of hardware redundancy as standard.
It will be designed so well that it will rarely need maintenance and re-installing will seem as quaint then as loading a computer program with a stack of punched cards seems to us now.
That would be a nice OS to use. It might also find me looking for a new career path though as sys admins would find it hard to get work:-)
Mostly I remember people INSIDE government agencies leaking this information to the press on purpose, to disclose high shenanigans and malfeasence in the Bush administration.
You know, there was a time when doing that sort of thing was called treason...
Oh great. Yet another browser plugin everyone on the network will insist on having installed, which means yet another way that the browser can crash spectacularly and another way to figure out how to actually deploy it to hundreds of PCs.
While I was just throwing around some ideas about possible ways companies might want to encourage take-up of RFID implants, Get chipped and you don't have to wait in line at the supermarket is an easy one.
Link the unique ID to your bank account details and with RFID tags on groceries, you and your shopping could walk straight through the RFID gate past all the people who have to fumble with cash or cards.
What is possible right now is fairly limited, but if RFID readers become widespread and networked - which is probably a reasonable assumption - it would be easy to track the whereabouts of any tagged person, just datamine the RFID scanner logs.
Even in some kind of alternate universe where compulsory, mandatory implants for all residents of the United States were a rider on ANY bill, no matter WHAT the bill, it would NEVER pass.
Who said it would need an act of Congress? Get yourself chipped and get a decent reduction in insurance premiums in return and people will wait in line to get one.
Get chipped and you don't have to wait in line at the supermarket.
Get your kids chipped and you can tell where they are at all times and protect them from baddies...
Don't need a law to make it compulsory. I reckon the free market will do just nicely.
"According to Procter, the chips can also be used for financial transactions."
Which reminded me of:
Rev 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: Rev 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Easy access for doctors to our medical records or an easy way for someone to control everything we do, go or buy? "Sorry sir, no chip, no entry". hmm.
What does the Electronic Frontiers Foundation say about all this?!
Wouldn't it be worth to also know which businesses hired/paid money to this man's marketing company to carry out such unsoliciated marketing campaign.
As practically anyone with a.au email address knows, this guy was different. Most Business Seminiars Australia spam promoted, wait for it... business seminars.
The irony is that I've heard that his seminars were actually pretty good.
Just too bad they were promoted by floods of spam.
Gak! That was supposed to be a teaching story! There aren't any other references to the character in that sense anywhere else!
Well, ignoring for the moment the countless allegorical references throughout the Old Testament, this one just happens to be one picked out at random from a word search:
Zechariah 3
2 And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?
It's clear from the surrounding context that it's talking about the same person. The angel that rebelled (sinned) against God and intices people to do the same.
Biblical statements can be discussed using reason. I have yet to discover any bible passage that, taken in context, contradicts any other.
It is clear what God thinks about witchcraft, from the bible. He doesn't just mention it once or twice, it's mentioned countless times. (see also Revelation 21:8) Some would argue that biblical witchcraft is different from wicca which is different again from "Harry Potter witchcraft". I would argue that why try to define a grey area?
Western society has very quickly shyed away from making absolute statements about doing right or wrong. "Believe whatever you want to believe, do whatevery you want to, say whatever you feel like", Oh, except if you're inciting racial or religious persecution or extremism. The more free speech we give, the more government will have to step in to stop people "expressing their speech" to the detriment of the rest society.
Harry Potter books intice or increase interest in witchcraft in schoolchildren? That's academically debatable, I believe yes it does. Have Harry Potter books been banned in many primary (grade) schools because children have been seen "casting spells" on classmates? Yes. Is the Harry Potter book debate really about free speech? No.
Thanks to the free trade agreement, Australia is now likely to get DMCA-like laws.
Our copyright law is already strict - we aren't allowed to copy a CD that you own to tape to listen on a walkman or in the car and we have no "fair use" copying for backup purpose. Now add the DMCA.
Tack on to this the extension to the copyright period for most works approaching 90 years and we have to ask ourselves, was this "free trade" agreement worth trading in our reasonable copyright law in exchange for selling some more sugar, wheat and wool in the US market?
Time waiting for your 'net link to do what you've paid for it to do while your email server chokes on hundreds of incoming virus emails.
Time wasted by tech staff explaining to every user at least once to not click that file (or if the organisation has virus scanning) to ignore the ten dozen "virus has been nuked" warning emails.
Time wasted by staff who have to spend time ignoring this junk, replying to warnings about the thing from their naieve friends and family emailing then CNN URLs and saying, "is this for real?"
Time wasted making sure the company virus protection is up to date on laptop machines that get infected at home on 'raw' Internet connections then get plugged into the pristine corporate network in the morning. Time wasted fixing machine that weren't caught in time.
This is probably common with all huge Telco ISPs the world over but I think that Bigpond themselves could do more to prevent tides of Spam originating from their customers... I think these mega ISPs have a "CPE" attitude that's left over from their Telco division - i.e. If it's beyond the equipment we provide - it's "Customer Premises Equipment" and we therefore, don't care.
Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)
The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.
The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...
Product activation only irritates legitimate buyers of software and all it does to software piracy is encourage hacking or mass duplication of enterprise edition CDs.
When you have legit customers using 'pirate' discs because the product activation features annoy them (or completely prevent them from using the software at all) you've just backed the slowest horse in the customer satisfaction race.
There are still applications useful in the amateur and commercial land/mobile radio world that will simply not run on anything other than an old DOS machine.
I hear you. Software for programming Philips radios (PRM80 series) only works on pure DOS (not DOS-under-Windows).
Other radios have Windows programming software - for Windows 3.1. That's fun to use - the 8.3 filenames bring back such vivid memories!:-)
I have actually heard of people selling these radios because they're frustrated they can't program them anymore and just think that they're broken!
Slashdot Mirror
One day the world will rise up and say in one voice, "No! Screw you guys! From now on everything we export to your country is in metric. Deal with it."
I think you just quoted the EU, without realising it.
it is awe-inspiring, breath-taking, it is a testament to engineering, technology, science, logistics and human determination.
It is the Apollo program of the 21st century.
Then they said, it's too hard, too expensive and takes longer than one election term. Let's keep burning cheap coal and let our great-grandkids be the visionaries.
I was surprised for a while. Oh wait, wait, no it's gone now.
If there was a checkbox someplace that tallied up the download to install ratio like that Firefox would have a bigger market share.
Wait... let's see if I got this straight. You want Firefox to come with a spyware-like function that reports back whenever it's installed?
Yup, that'll go far in convincing the crowd that Firefox is more secure than the Microsoft alternative!
The State says what you can put into your body (doing no crime to no one else), probably funded by the big medical business
That might be true in a country with no public health care, but if you live somewhere where the taxpayer has to foot the bill for the health effects of excess Marijuana consumption (mental health, lung disease etc), it becomes a government problem.
And the people said, "About time!!"
I'm not concerned about how pretty OSes will be in the future or how clever they'll be at filing away my stuff to make it easier to find again later since the history of OSes shows that they are designed better at these tasks as time goes on.
:-)
My OS of the near future will be secure and stable, the likes of which we can only dream about now. It will recover gracefully from hardware errors, it will use high-level APIs to talk to all hardware making drivers a thing of the past, it will put large parts of itself inside read-only flash RAM on the PC where no application program (read: viruses and spyware) can touch it. It will back itself up automatically as well as specifying a level of hardware redundancy as standard.
It will be designed so well that it will rarely need maintenance and re-installing will seem as quaint then as loading a computer program with a stack of punched cards seems to us now.
That would be a nice OS to use. It might also find me looking for a new career path though as sys admins would find it hard to get work
Mostly I remember people INSIDE government agencies leaking this information to the press on purpose, to disclose high shenanigans and malfeasence in the Bush administration.
You know, there was a time when doing that sort of thing was called treason...
US Patent office makes competent ruling! News at 11!
(1) The U.S. has a unified language ...except in those places where they speak Spanish.
Oh great. Yet another browser plugin everyone on the network will insist on having installed, which means yet another way that the browser can crash spectacularly and another way to figure out how to actually deploy it to hundreds of PCs.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it
While I was just throwing around some ideas about possible ways companies might want to encourage take-up of RFID implants, Get chipped and you don't have to wait in line at the supermarket is an easy one.
Link the unique ID to your bank account details and with RFID tags on groceries, you and your shopping could walk straight through the RFID gate past all the people who have to fumble with cash or cards.
What is possible right now is fairly limited, but if RFID readers become widespread and networked - which is probably a reasonable assumption - it would be easy to track the whereabouts of any tagged person, just datamine the RFID scanner logs.
Even in some kind of alternate universe where compulsory, mandatory implants for all residents of the United States were a rider on ANY bill, no matter WHAT the bill, it would NEVER pass.
Who said it would need an act of Congress? Get yourself chipped and get a decent reduction in insurance premiums in return and people will wait in line to get one.
Get chipped and you don't have to wait in line at the supermarket.
Get your kids chipped and you can tell where they are at all times and protect them from baddies...
Don't need a law to make it compulsory. I reckon the free market will do just nicely.
From the article:
"According to Procter, the chips can also be used for financial transactions."
Which reminded me of:
Rev 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to
receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
Rev 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Easy access for doctors to our medical records or an easy way for someone to control everything we do, go or buy? "Sorry sir, no chip, no entry". hmm.
What does the Electronic Frontiers Foundation say about all this?!
Wouldn't it be worth to also know which businesses hired/paid money to this man's marketing company to carry out such unsoliciated marketing campaign.
.au email address knows, this guy was different. Most Business Seminiars Australia spam promoted, wait for it... business seminars.
As practically anyone with a
The irony is that I've heard that his seminars were actually pretty good.
Just too bad they were promoted by floods of spam.
Well, ignoring for the moment the countless allegorical references throughout the Old Testament, this one just happens to be one picked out at random from a word search:
It's clear from the surrounding context that it's talking about the same person. The angel that rebelled (sinned) against God and intices people to do the same.
Biblical statements can be discussed using reason. I have yet to discover any bible passage that, taken in context, contradicts any other.
It is clear what God thinks about witchcraft, from the bible. He doesn't just mention it once or twice, it's mentioned countless times. (see also Revelation 21:8) Some would argue that biblical witchcraft is different from wicca which is different again from "Harry Potter witchcraft". I would argue that why try to define a grey area?
Western society has very quickly shyed away from making absolute statements about doing right or wrong. "Believe whatever you want to believe, do whatevery you want to, say whatever you feel like", Oh, except if you're inciting racial or religious persecution or extremism. The more free speech we give, the more government will have to step in to stop people "expressing their speech" to the detriment of the rest society.
Harry Potter books intice or increase interest in witchcraft in schoolchildren? That's academically debatable, I believe yes it does. Have Harry Potter books been banned in many primary (grade) schools because children have been seen "casting spells" on classmates? Yes. Is the Harry Potter book debate really about free speech? No.
Thanks to the free trade agreement, Australia is now likely to get DMCA-like laws.
Our copyright law is already strict - we aren't allowed to copy a CD that you own to tape to listen on a walkman or in the car and we have no "fair use" copying for backup purpose. Now add the DMCA.
Tack on to this the extension to the copyright period for most works approaching 90 years and we have to ask ourselves, was this "free trade" agreement worth trading in our reasonable copyright law in exchange for selling some more sugar, wheat and wool in the US market?
I don't know why you'd need to change anything... I get surround sound right now with my ordinary stereo MP3s. It's called Dolby Pro Logic :-)
The biggest cost of these sort of virus is time.
Time waiting for your 'net link to do what you've paid for it to do while your email server chokes on hundreds of incoming virus emails.
Time wasted by tech staff explaining to every user at least once to not click that file (or if the organisation has virus scanning) to ignore the ten dozen "virus has been nuked" warning emails.
Time wasted by staff who have to spend time ignoring this junk, replying to warnings about the thing from their naieve friends and family emailing then CNN URLs and saying, "is this for real?"
Time wasted making sure the company virus protection is up to date on laptop machines that get infected at home on 'raw' Internet connections then get plugged into the pristine corporate network in the morning. Time wasted fixing machine that weren't caught in time.
This sort of cost really adds up...
This is probably common with all huge Telco ISPs the world over but I think that Bigpond themselves could do more to prevent tides of Spam originating from their customers... I think these mega ISPs have a "CPE" attitude that's left over from their Telco division - i.e. If it's beyond the equipment we provide - it's "Customer Premises Equipment" and we therefore, don't care.
Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)
The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.
The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...
You mean they've made the movie even longer?
I hope the new DVD has an extra-special "toilet break" feature!
How many times do we need to see stuff like this?
Product activation only irritates legitimate buyers of software and all it does to software piracy is encourage hacking or mass duplication of enterprise edition CDs.
When you have legit customers using 'pirate' discs because the product activation features annoy them (or completely prevent them from using the software at all) you've just backed the slowest horse in the customer satisfaction race.
There are still applications useful in the amateur and commercial land/mobile radio world that will simply not run on anything other than an old DOS machine.
:-)
I hear you. Software for programming Philips radios (PRM80 series) only works on pure DOS (not DOS-under-Windows).
Other radios have Windows programming software - for Windows 3.1. That's fun to use - the 8.3 filenames bring back such vivid memories!
I have actually heard of people selling these radios because they're frustrated they can't program them anymore and just think that they're broken!
Doesn't anybody know how to use DOS anymore?!
Well. Not exactly PC hardware, but I am still running 4 1983 era 1200 baud radio modems, complete with 32k of RAM and Zilog Z80 CPUs.
They've been going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about 20 years - give or take!
Not bad, eh?