Really? I've had two Email addresses in the last, erm, six years or so since I first got online and during that time I've moved house about 10 times. I think it probably depends on things like whether you buy or rent and if you're prepared to switch cities for the sake of a job. I haven't lived anywhere longer than 2 years since I left my folks house and most places I've only stayed at for six months.
not going to stop getting snailmail because of nonpayment to an ISP
Whereas if you stop paying your rent they don't throw you out?
well how about that, the boneheads won't let you turn off mail formatting. Slick guys,
Actually it can be done.
Hummm, unless I'm mistaken that turns off the formatting for OUTGOING mail, which may be a polite thing to do but really isn't any kind of security fix on your machine. What Babbage wants to do is stop Outlook ever displaying HTML formatting which quite different. I think it is possible to stop it executing any java/activex/javascript code though but only by playing with the "security" settings which are global and effect IE and the web too. It doesn't seem to be possible to say "I want to run scripting and applets in web pages but not in Email." At least not easily.
When you share you're not even breaking a law, much less stealing anything. When you copy you may be infringing on a copyright, but even that is not theft. It simply isn't, it doesn't even have the same sentences as theft. Legally speaking they're different crimes.
Ethicly speaking, my mother always told me it was good to share and I've always respected her opinion over the opinion of a greedy corporation myself. She seemed to have the best interests of me and the society I live in at heart more often than, for example, Sony who just seemed to want to make money.
...rudimentary 3D glasses that are out there, and some sort of 'glove' interface. I would simply LOVE to be able to just 'grab' a netscape window and move it somewhere in VR space, grab another window, make it full screen...
Make a window on a goggle set full screen? Lordy, what could that mean? It fills the whole of 3d space as seen through the goggles?
The main reason I write CGI in perl is that, as far as performance is concerned, execution speed isn't the bottleneck to getting a good delivery time. Yes, perl is slower than C but the network tends to be slower than either. It doesn't matter that much if you can get the results quickly and efficently if you just have to wait while those results go over a 33kbps connection to a modem somewhere anyway.
If the CGI is going to be hit really hard, lots of concurrent users, then the extra load on the server might become important. Just remember that half your processes are just going to be waiting around for TCP packets half the time anyway
Perl's string handling is second to none as well of course. Any of the languages with good string handling are going to reduce problems with buffer overflows etc. You'll have to be a lot more careful using C.
You could try looking at some of the FastCGI plugins or even just find a perl compiler (I assume there is one?) both of which make perl quite a bit more efficent and still let you develop quickly and have all those lovely regexps.
I find myself in almost constant awe at what the internet in general and the web in particlar has done. This is such good news (even though the site is already slashdotted and I can't see it yet) I can't begin to express it properly.
I'll try anyway, I'm sure you knew I would.
fifteen years ago my parents didn't buy an encyclopedia for me, they brought me a Spectrum instead and I don't know if they realise what a favour that did me. Information on paper is nice, but expensive. Information on a bitstream hasn't yet found the perfect presentation but it's evolving so quickly that God himself has to be impressed. Who in their right mind would have imagined, when I was playing Manic Miner and giving my uncle nightmares about jumping little white men that we'd have the whole of the encyclopedia available FOR FREE to anyone who was interested enough to read it IN YOUR OWN HOME for the cost of a local telephone call (Plus some overhead which isn't much more than the cost of that Spectrum)?
Nobody. Only the insane.
I find myself lost for words when I'm trying to explain to someone who's never done anything but look at corporate websites over a slow connection just what potential this medium of ours has. We really can change everything. We can give low cost education to anyone who wants it. We can supply documentation on anything people need documentation on. We can elucidate on any proplems anyone has understanding and IT ALL COSTS ALMOST NOTHING.
The distributed model works so well it scrambles my brain. One intelegent person can now reach thousands without even trying. And those thousands will listen becasue they're not as dumb as the traditional media (and myself at times) gives them credit for and even if they are a proper distributed moderation system sorts out the bullshit from the opinion from the truth more easily than any editor.
People have also mentioned Everything and I guess H2G2 will get there if they give up on human editors soon enough. How long will it be before I can type "Nutritional chicken feed" into google and practically immediately learn how to nurse my sick hen into health, probably getting a joke or two thrown in?
You want info? - It's free.
You want Music? - It's free.
You want Software? - It's Free!
You want Movies - Give it a year, tops.
The only problem people have that gives me any cause for concern at all is how all this stuff will get made when it's free for distribution.
Who will make it when they can't make any money from it?
they say. That does worry me a little, especially with Movies which are EXPENSIVE to say the least, but I look at the software scene which people said the same things about and I look at MP3.COM and I look at news like this (It used to cost over a thousand and now it's FREE) and just figure that most talented people are vain enough that they don't need the money and that society wants to reward these people enough that they will get rewarded. And contributing to a properly distributed system so so inexpensive that people DO do it on their own time for nothing more than the desire to make things better.
The whole idea of information wanting to be free and people helping it to do so for no better reason than whim and a desire to enrich people with what they know: To TEACH gives me pause with my pessmism. It's about the only thing that does.
Katz, you've gone mad. It sounds like you want a more advanced version of Net-Nanny to me. Not content to simply not buy some crazy chemical toilet you don't even want to know they exist. You seem to be praising the values of ignorance.
We need Websites that really understand us, protect us and go to bat for us.
And then sell that data to the marketdroids no doubt. The company I work for has a similar policy, they want to make it easier to surf the net by getting these software agents to get to know you. I'm constantly on the look out for abuses, and have staved a couple off already, much to the distaste of the marketting dept. I don't even win all the time.
I'd call my personal version Clotho,
Cloth-eared more like. Sorry, that was pointless. You want to block it out so it's like I never said it? You want to block out the replies to that, and the whole tree of information that could develop below it? What if Chemical analysing toilets notice a trend in those who do buy them which indicates, when combined with data from that magic fridge, that eating beef that's too fresh gives you migranes or whatever. You want that blocked too? You'd have to learn about the toilets to understand it Katz.
[The Greeks]Their poets and playwrights wrote all the time about humanity's tragic inclination to fiddle with the world and screw it up at the same time.
AND THAT CAME TRUE! We're ALL DEAD NOW! Jesus. It was four thousand years ago for god's sake, surely it says more about the constant of human paranoia than any factual destructive drive?
computers will be making rational, human-like decisions in a few years. We could put them to work for us.
Obvious nit picking here but since when have human-like decisions been rational? Humans are the ones who keep trying to ban good stuff like INFORMATION and even BEER. I imagine these computers, which will one day be built I fear, will be very good at keeping people isolated, far away from the terror of desenting opinion. As long as they want it I guess I have no problem with people trying to drag their childhood out to last their whole life but putting your cloth-eared program in place of their parents. People like cotton-wool. I'm not sure I'd call it wise or rational to stay wrapped up in it though.
I just want Clotho to leave me the dignity of autonomy,
Do you really not see the inconsistancy here? You want an autonomous agent to take care of decisions for you so you can take care of them for yourself?
When I read part one I wondered if your TV had an off switch or not, I wondered if you were contractually obliged not to throw it out of the window. Apparently you are. I can only assume you signed up to six years worth of adverts so you could get a free WebTV or something.
I'd just as soon retain the right to decide when and if I go to the doctor to have my bodily fluids chemically analyzed.
And your method to do this is to buy an analytical toilet anyway, presumably because you don't know how to not respond to an advert, then let ClothEared turn it off for you to save you some embarasement? Don't buy one Katz
But we need help.
Well, you sure seem to. Sorry. That was pointless and childish. Still, Clotho can always filter it for you.
Clotho.org could stand between us and Ubiquitous Computing, growling back the Microsofts, governments, media - hypemongers and arrogant hordes of programmers, gadgetmakers and marketers.
You know what I use to stand between me and "Ubiquitious Computing"? I walk away from the machine every lunchtime and go read a book in the pub for an hour. Then of an evening I don't watch TV (Threw the thing out a few months ago. It's just rubbish these days, I can tell that for myself see, I don't need ClothEars to do it for me.) I play around with lego or read some more or TALK TO MY FRIENDS or whatever. You remind me of people who say things like "I wouldn't like being on the dole coz I'd be bored" which just makes me stare at them blankly. You need a Boss to tell you what to do to stop being bored? There's a whole world out there to explore. Just the local library would take a lifetime.
Clotho wouldn't present us with fewer choices, but making
(sic) tough choices for us.
How does some machine making some choices for you manage NOT to reduce the choices you have? Oh, I see, it might take away the choice between, say, Mac and Windows, but it adds a choice of which colour to get the Windows box in?
occupying the space between humans and the new technologies scaring the hell out of them.
Erm, I'm begining to think Katz is just trolling us you know. Is there going to be a part three saying "See, I've described the nighmare dystopia that censorship could bring, isn't that more scary than technology?" - it scares me a lot more.
We might program her to screen out anything under a 4. We'd never get the chance to buy it, or maybe even know it was out there.
I still don't see how denying yourself even the information that a product exists helps you unless you're too stupid to realise for yourself that you don't need one.
If she'd been around, most of us might blessedly never have learned the names of William Bennett, Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr, or Linda Tripp.
Leaving only those who care about these things to discuss them? Where's the agrument going to come from? If the only people who learned about these pointless things were the moralists, wouldn't the moralists be more likely to have gotten their way? If I never learn of a threat to my safety am I really safer? If I'm told not to be scared of technology by ClothDoll should I just relax knowing she's right?
As far as I'm concerned, Clotho could screen out virtually every debate on every Washington talk show and the country's civic life would be improved a thousand times overnight.
I doubt it would do political debate much good, I doubt it would improve the way you're governed. It wouldn't actually make you safer, it would make you less safe because you'd be comfortable in your own ignorance.
Clotho.org would also fend off much of the techno-news streaming toward us from C/Net and Wired News, and sift for technology information that we actually wanted to know.
You saw it here first folks! Turkeys actually arguing in favour of Xmas.
tens of millions of people forced to buy things they don't want or things they can't use
Where the hell are all these people? Name a product you've been forced to buy which you can't use or didn't want? Tell us exactly how "they" forced you. Yeah, I've failed to properly research stuff and bought, for instance, the wrong digital camera. How restricting the information available to me would have make that better I can't imagine.
perhaps we can simply turn our coffeemakers on when we wake up instead of programming them.
You can't do that already? I thought the flashing 12:00 problem pretty much forced most people into that anyway. Never had a coffee maker so I dunno.
She'd put a quick, merciful end to health-checking toilets.
You're obsessed with these things. I bet you buy one. Really. I bet you end up with two in your house. You clearly can't stop thinking about them.
I feel as though I've responded to a troll. I really do. I can't believe anyone here would agree with a word you've said. I feel like I've just responded to a "ABORTION IS MURDER" post in a pro-choice usenet group. The only people who might need any of this ClothMinded crap are people so suggestable and dumb they'd feel lonely using JunkBuster coz they'd miss that monkey fellow. I'm not sure people that easily convinced to buy rubbish wouldn't actually set that Bagpuss or Old Cloth Cat or whatever to fetch more ads for them anyway. Just because the crap is technocrap doesn't make it harder to refuse, doesn't make it harder to throw away and makes it a hell of a lot easier to let the batteries run out or turn it off.
2. a dummy-fied RPM/DEB/any other kind of package installer/viewer/uninstaller that can be used cross-distribution and cross-version with similar functionality to the dreaded "add/remove programs" control panel.
Yeah, I always wondered why rpm doesn't ever prompt for the root password when I need to SU to install something.
Rather than having to type "SU" then the password then type the RPM stuff again, then exit back to my user account, why can't the RPM app just collect my password then do an SU before it installs then exits back to the user account when it's done?
If GUI installers don't alredy do this then they really need to. Actually I've never used one, do they?
It seems to me that television is desperate for any internet content it can get these days. Well. Okay, it only seems like that to me TODAY.
A few months ago, on a particually slow afternoon at work, I threw together a website to take the piss out of all the loosers that want to be mayor of london basically.
I still get the odd Email about it, even though it's rubbish and I can't be bothered to maintain it in any way at all. This morning I got an Email from Planet24 saying they want me to talk about it on The Big Breakfast.
Odd.
Okay, they're talking about a two minute slot most likely not a while show devoted to my community or whatever. I don't like TV or Getting Up In The Mornings enough to bother with it even if I really wanted Frank Butcher to be mayor anyway frankly.
Still, it's feeling to me right now as though Internet Shows are the new Docusoaps. Cheep cheep cheep. They'll soon be everywhere.
Just to rant a bit about TV licencing while I'm here. The licence man came around to my house yesterday wanting to know why I haven't got a TV Licence. I haven't got a TV I said. They don't broadcast anything good enough to bother with it for a start but I'm also protesting, in my small way, the unfairness of the licence itself. If you wanna tax TV go tax people who make rubbish cheep programs, maybe they'll finally make something worth watching.
2. Because of this, it will be sorted out by civil servants. If the relevant UK minister (not sure who that would be -- prob Jack Straw?) ever sees it, it will be just to tick up the civil servants' decision to keep stalling. Unless it becomes a cause celebre, in which case his mind will be on damage limitation.
Well, I'm sure I don't know who the relevent minister would be either, the trouble with the EU has always been that it's simply not accountable. However, according to an unrelated story on BBC Online we have recently had a new appointment for "Web-czar" (Not a very encouraging title, granted).
His name is Alex Allan and I would think that if anyone can do anything about the whole mess it would be him. We just need to convince him that censoring the net would hurt business because, let's face it, he's not there to protect OUR freedom, he's there to protect the UK's economic interest in what all these suits seem to see as a new global trading system.
Oh, HA, I've just noticed that they call him a "Former High Commissioner to Australia". Lets hope he's not planning on following the Australian lead there then.
It cannot/will not be integrated into mozilla, simply because it can no longer be exported if this is done...
So what's stopping me downloading the mozilla source, adding in some hooks for GPG, puting the new version on my UK based web server and letting anyone who wants it downloading it?
I'm allowed to import to the US aren't I? If the hooks can be made into a fairly simple patch then immediately the current version of the code is released I can apply the patch and have a GngPG Mozilla online within hours.
My flatmate started talking about this hotmail crack last night. Obviously I corrected him pointing out that it was merely a huge hole, no real cracking involved. Someone else in the room immediately started on about how she was going to get a hotmail accout soon and how exectly do you go about doing that?
WHAT?
Were you not listening to what we were talking about? Hotmail sucks, it's got a crap HTML interface that's slow and full of adverts and it's not secure and full of spam. What on earth would you want a Hotmail account for?
You get to choose your own username and you can access from anywhere, not just from college. It would have been useful when I was in America last month.
Um, yeah, or you could just get a proper pop/imap box from somewhere other than your school and learn how to access it from another computer. It's not hard.
Didn't work of course. She's still planning to get a hotmail account. Nothing I could say would convince her otherwise coz all her friends are using hotmail and they all think it's great coz you can access from ANYWHERE.
Bah. I'd sooner telnet to a pop3 port than face the nasty Hotmail interface.
Okay, the US likes to call itself the land of the free and we all know that there are plenty of places in the world where people are worse off - less free - than they are in the US. It seems to me though that, at an increasingly rapid rate, those freedoms are being taken away, mostly in the name of the children and the war on drugs of course.
What I want to know is if there is any body, any organisation, any international group (maybe the red cross or the WHO or someone like that) who actually tries to measure HOW free the countries of the world are.
Okay, choosing ways to measure is going to be hard. Do high tax rates count as an infringement on freedom? Does a high incidence of crime count against a country? Do export restrictions really hurt people within the country, or do they just infringe the liberty of people outside the country?
I honestly have no idea if such a measure exists, nor whether the US would top the poll or not. I just wonder. If you could point the media at such a poll and get them to tell the population "These things are stopping us from calling ourselves the most free nation on earth" would it be easier to get them to do something about it (IE stop voting for it).
Hummm. I bet all the nationalists start shouting at each other now, that won't be helpful. For what it's worth I live in the UK and I don't think the UK would top that poll anyway. My money would probably be on some Scandanavian country.
Anyone else ever actually try to build something and let it evolve? About six years ago I wrote a little DOS program (I can Email it to anyone who asks in a few days but i'm offline at home right now so I'd have to fetch it on a disk and it's the weekend in a couple of hours) to try and evolve the behaviour of some little sprites wondering all over the screen.
It used a decision tree to decide what to do given inputs like what's standing in front and what's to the sides and what have you. They could decide to move forward or turn or attack the square in front. Their 'energy' level was tracked and attacking each other or the 'grass' that grew around randomly replenished it. When they were all dead the last few to die got to spawn the next generation. I was interested to see how hard it would be to evolve some better AI for games.
They did, quite quickly, evolve what looked like the same algo as the tree I built by hand to test the code (move forward unless theres a wall in front in which case turn left - oh and if there's food in front then eat it) but the tree was a mess. Couln't tell what was going on inside the code. They never really got any farther though.
What I found interesting was that trying to evolve from my test tree was impossible. My delicately constructed tree was completely screwed as soon as you changed one byte of it - the poor critters just died. The algo that evolved though was WAY more robust, upping the mutation rate to crazy levels still left the critters doing something better than standing still in confusion.
I did start work on a new version that would let the inputs evolve as well. Rather than just seeing to the sides and two squares in front the viewable square's locations themselves could evolve. I got distracted and moved onto something else before I ever finished it though. Story of my life
Yet in the past journalists have gone to jail to protect their sources. I guess all that's going to change now?
Heh.
Pre........
Is this consistent with common carrier status?
on
ISP Sues Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Can anybody think of a good phone company analogy?
Nope, but does the snail mail count as a common carrier? If I send some nasty chemical through the mail and it melts a sorting office machine then I'm sure the post office would want to take some action over it. This guy sent mail that effected the companies machines in a similar way. That the kind of thing you're looking for?
beegle wrote: If taxpayer money is used by the DOD to make nuclear missles, shouldn't taxpayers get access to the blueprints?
To be honest, I think quite possibly, yes. I doubt there is anything that would be so bad should "the enemy" find out which wouldn't be well over compensated for by the value gained for the people in knowing everything the government does and being able to evolve goverment tchnology.
There are others out there who are even worse
There are indeed, but how many of those people do you think are actually prevented from making a nuke becasue they don't know how? Out of those that could understand the blue-prints I mean. Heck, if I really wanted to get a nuke my best bet would probably be to buy it from whoever got those old Russian ones that have disapeared.
If the real boogie men haven't got nukes it's not becasue the blue-prints were'nt leaked. We're back to security through obscurity which, as has been shown time and time again, simply doesn't work. Espscially if there's power or money to be make by breaking that secret.
Priestess.......
(Who's about to go home so if anyone wants to continue this discussion with me you'll have to take it to Email, it's WAY off topic anyway)
sphealey wrote: both MIT and the AI Lab have received massive subsidies from the US Government over the years, particularly the DoD. So, much of that "free" (as in "free beer") software really was paid for by the US taxpayer.
Isn't that all the more reason why the software, once it's written, should be freely distributed - at the very least within the US?
If taxpayers money is used by the DOD to make some ultra-safe encryption algo or whatever then shouldn't the tax-payers get access to that code? Reguardless of whether or not the money should have been used in the first place surely everyone would agree that it's better to use the stuff once it's payed for than lock it up where nobody can get at it.
A private company or indeed an individual has every right to make propriatory code, but does a government have the right to lock the fruits of taxpayers contributions away from the taxpayers themselves? I wonder if governments should be allowed to write ANY non-free, secret software at all, let alone impose restrictions on other people's code (EG exporting it).
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I've had two Email addresses in the last, erm, six years or so since I first got online and during that time I've moved house about 10 times. I think it probably depends on things like whether you buy or rent and if you're prepared to switch cities for the sake of a job. I haven't lived anywhere longer than 2 years since I left my folks house and most places I've only stayed at for six months.
Whereas if you stop paying your rent they don't throw you out?
When you share you're not even breaking a law, much less stealing anything. When you copy you may be infringing on a copyright, but even that is not theft. It simply isn't, it doesn't even have the same sentences as theft. Legally speaking they're different crimes.
Ethicly speaking, my mother always told me it was good to share and I've always respected her opinion over the opinion of a greedy corporation myself. She seemed to have the best interests of me and the society I live in at heart more often than, for example, Sony who just seemed to want to make money.
Make a window on a goggle set full screen? Lordy, what could that mean? It fills the whole of 3d space as seen through the goggles?
If the CGI is going to be hit really hard, lots of concurrent users, then the extra load on the server might become important. Just remember that half your processes are just going to be waiting around for TCP packets half the time anyway
Perl's string handling is second to none as well of course. Any of the languages with good string handling are going to reduce problems with buffer overflows etc. You'll have to be a lot more careful using C.
You could try looking at some of the FastCGI plugins or even just find a perl compiler (I assume there is one?) both of which make perl quite a bit more efficent and still let you develop quickly and have all those lovely regexps.
I'll try anyway, I'm sure you knew I would.
fifteen years ago my parents didn't buy an encyclopedia for me, they brought me a Spectrum instead and I don't know if they realise what a favour that did me. Information on paper is nice, but expensive. Information on a bitstream hasn't yet found the perfect presentation but it's evolving so quickly that God himself has to be impressed. Who in their right mind would have imagined, when I was playing Manic Miner and giving my uncle nightmares about jumping little white men that we'd have the whole of the encyclopedia available FOR FREE to anyone who was interested enough to read it IN YOUR OWN HOME for the cost of a local telephone call (Plus some overhead which isn't much more than the cost of that Spectrum)?
Nobody. Only the insane.
I find myself lost for words when I'm trying to explain to someone who's never done anything but look at corporate websites over a slow connection just what potential this medium of ours has. We really can change everything. We can give low cost education to anyone who wants it. We can supply documentation on anything people need documentation on. We can elucidate on any proplems anyone has understanding and IT ALL COSTS ALMOST NOTHING.
The distributed model works so well it scrambles my brain. One intelegent person can now reach thousands without even trying. And those thousands will listen becasue they're not as dumb as the traditional media (and myself at times) gives them credit for and even if they are a proper distributed moderation system sorts out the bullshit from the opinion from the truth more easily than any editor.
People have also mentioned Everything and I guess H2G2 will get there if they give up on human editors soon enough. How long will it be before I can type "Nutritional chicken feed" into google and practically immediately learn how to nurse my sick hen into health, probably getting a joke or two thrown in?
- You want info? - It's free.
- You want Music? - It's free.
- You want Software? - It's Free!
- You want Movies - Give it a year, tops.
The only problem people have that gives me any cause for concern at all is how all this stuff will get made when it's free for distribution.they say. That does worry me a little, especially with Movies which are EXPENSIVE to say the least, but I look at the software scene which people said the same things about and I look at MP3.COM and I look at news like this (It used to cost over a thousand and now it's FREE) and just figure that most talented people are vain enough that they don't need the money and that society wants to reward these people enough that they will get rewarded. And contributing to a properly distributed system so so inexpensive that people DO do it on their own time for nothing more than the desire to make things better.
The whole idea of information wanting to be free and people helping it to do so for no better reason than whim and a desire to enrich people with what they know: To TEACH gives me pause with my pessmism. It's about the only thing that does.
And then sell that data to the marketdroids no doubt. The company I work for has a similar policy, they want to make it easier to surf the net by getting these software agents to get to know you. I'm constantly on the look out for abuses, and have staved a couple off already, much to the distaste of the marketting dept. I don't even win all the time.
Cloth-eared more like. Sorry, that was pointless. You want to block it out so it's like I never said it? You want to block out the replies to that, and the whole tree of information that could develop below it? What if Chemical analysing toilets notice a trend in those who do buy them which indicates, when combined with data from that magic fridge, that eating beef that's too fresh gives you migranes or whatever. You want that blocked too? You'd have to learn about the toilets to understand it Katz.
AND THAT CAME TRUE! We're ALL DEAD NOW! Jesus. It was four thousand years ago for god's sake, surely it says more about the constant of human paranoia than any factual destructive drive?
Obvious nit picking here but since when have human-like decisions been rational? Humans are the ones who keep trying to ban good stuff like INFORMATION and even BEER. I imagine these computers, which will one day be built I fear, will be very good at keeping people isolated, far away from the terror of desenting opinion. As long as they want it I guess I have no problem with people trying to drag their childhood out to last their whole life but putting your cloth-eared program in place of their parents. People like cotton-wool. I'm not sure I'd call it wise or rational to stay wrapped up in it though.
Do you really not see the inconsistancy here? You want an autonomous agent to take care of decisions for you so you can take care of them for yourself?
When I read part one I wondered if your TV had an off switch or not, I wondered if you were contractually obliged not to throw it out of the window. Apparently you are. I can only assume you signed up to six years worth of adverts so you could get a free WebTV or something.
And your method to do this is to buy an analytical toilet anyway, presumably because you don't know how to not respond to an advert, then let ClothEared turn it off for you to save you some embarasement? Don't buy one Katz
Well, you sure seem to. Sorry. That was pointless and childish. Still, Clotho can always filter it for you.
You know what I use to stand between me and "Ubiquitious Computing"? I walk away from the machine every lunchtime and go read a book in the pub for an hour. Then of an evening I don't watch TV (Threw the thing out a few months ago. It's just rubbish these days, I can tell that for myself see, I don't need ClothEars to do it for me.) I play around with lego or read some more or TALK TO MY FRIENDS or whatever. You remind me of people who say things like "I wouldn't like being on the dole coz I'd be bored" which just makes me stare at them blankly. You need a Boss to tell you what to do to stop being bored? There's a whole world out there to explore. Just the local library would take a lifetime.
How does some machine making some choices for you manage NOT to reduce the choices you have? Oh, I see, it might take away the choice between, say, Mac and Windows, but it adds a choice of which colour to get the Windows box in?
Erm, I'm begining to think Katz is just trolling us you know. Is there going to be a part three saying "See, I've described the nighmare dystopia that censorship could bring, isn't that more scary than technology?" - it scares me a lot more.
I still don't see how denying yourself even the information that a product exists helps you unless you're too stupid to realise for yourself that you don't need one.
Leaving only those who care about these things to discuss them? Where's the agrument going to come from? If the only people who learned about these pointless things were the moralists, wouldn't the moralists be more likely to have gotten their way? If I never learn of a threat to my safety am I really safer? If I'm told not to be scared of technology by ClothDoll should I just relax knowing she's right?
I doubt it would do political debate much good, I doubt it would improve the way you're governed. It wouldn't actually make you safer, it would make you less safe because you'd be comfortable in your own ignorance.
You saw it here first folks! Turkeys actually arguing in favour of Xmas.
Where the hell are all these people? Name a product you've been forced to buy which you can't use or didn't want? Tell us exactly how "they" forced you. Yeah, I've failed to properly research stuff and bought, for instance, the wrong digital camera. How restricting the information available to me would have make that better I can't imagine.
You can't do that already? I thought the flashing 12:00 problem pretty much forced most people into that anyway. Never had a coffee maker so I dunno.
You're obsessed with these things. I bet you buy one. Really. I bet you end up with two in your house. You clearly can't stop thinking about them.
I feel as though I've responded to a troll. I really do. I can't believe anyone here would agree with a word you've said. I feel like I've just responded to a "ABORTION IS MURDER" post in a pro-choice usenet group. The only people who might need any of this ClothMinded crap are people so suggestable and dumb they'd feel lonely using JunkBuster coz they'd miss that monkey fellow. I'm not sure people that easily convinced to buy rubbish wouldn't actually set that Bagpuss or Old Cloth Cat or whatever to fetch more ads for them anyway. Just because the crap is technocrap doesn't make it harder to refuse, doesn't make it harder to throw away and makes it a hell of a lot easier to let the batteries run out or turn it off.
Yeah, I always wondered why rpm doesn't ever prompt for the root password when I need to SU to install something.
Rather than having to type "SU" then the password then type the RPM stuff again, then exit back to my user account, why can't the RPM app just collect my password then do an SU before it installs then exits back to the user account when it's done?
If GUI installers don't alredy do this then they really need to. Actually I've never used one, do they?
A few months ago, on a particually slow afternoon at work, I threw together a website to take the piss out of all the loosers that want to be mayor of london basically.
I still get the odd Email about it, even though it's rubbish and I can't be bothered to maintain it in any way at all. This morning I got an Email from Planet24 saying they want me to talk about it on The Big Breakfast.
Odd.
Okay, they're talking about a two minute slot most likely not a while show devoted to my community or whatever. I don't like TV or Getting Up In The Mornings enough to bother with it even if I really wanted Frank Butcher to be mayor anyway frankly.
Still, it's feeling to me right now as though Internet Shows are the new Docusoaps. Cheep cheep cheep. They'll soon be everywhere.
Just to rant a bit about TV licencing while I'm here. The licence man came around to my house yesterday wanting to know why I haven't got a TV Licence. I haven't got a TV I said. They don't broadcast anything good enough to bother with it for a start but I'm also protesting, in my small way, the unfairness of the licence itself. If you wanna tax TV go tax people who make rubbish cheep programs, maybe they'll finally make something worth watching.
His name is Alex Allan and I would think that if anyone can do anything about the whole mess it would be him. We just need to convince him that censoring the net would hurt business because, let's face it, he's not there to protect OUR freedom, he's there to protect the UK's economic interest in what all these suits seem to see as a new global trading system.
Oh, HA, I've just noticed that they call him a "Former High Commissioner to Australia". Lets hope he's not planning on following the Australian lead there then.
I've depressed myself with that now.
So what's stopping me downloading the mozilla source, adding in some hooks for GPG, puting the new version on my UK based web server and letting anyone who wants it downloading it?
I'm allowed to import to the US aren't I? If the hooks can be made into a fairly simple patch then immediately the current version of the code is released I can apply the patch and have a GngPG Mozilla online within hours.
WHAT?
Were you not listening to what we were talking about? Hotmail sucks, it's got a crap HTML interface that's slow and full of adverts and it's not secure and full of spam. What on earth would you want a Hotmail account for?
You get to choose your own username and you can access from anywhere, not just from college. It would have been useful when I was in America last month.
Um, yeah, or you could just get a proper pop/imap box from somewhere other than your school and learn how to access it from another computer. It's not hard.
Didn't work of course. She's still planning to get a hotmail account. Nothing I could say would convince her otherwise coz all her friends are using hotmail and they all think it's great coz you can access from ANYWHERE.
Bah. I'd sooner telnet to a pop3 port than face the nasty Hotmail interface.
What I want to know is if there is any body, any organisation, any international group (maybe the red cross or the WHO or someone like that) who actually tries to measure HOW free the countries of the world are.
Okay, choosing ways to measure is going to be hard. Do high tax rates count as an infringement on freedom? Does a high incidence of crime count against a country? Do export restrictions really hurt people within the country, or do they just infringe the liberty of people outside the country?
I honestly have no idea if such a measure exists, nor whether the US would top the poll or not. I just wonder. If you could point the media at such a poll and get them to tell the population "These things are stopping us from calling ourselves the most free nation on earth" would it be easier to get them to do something about it (IE stop voting for it).
Hummm. I bet all the nationalists start shouting at each other now, that won't be helpful. For what it's worth I live in the UK and I don't think the UK would top that poll anyway. My money would probably be on some Scandanavian country.
Anyone else ever actually try to build something and let it evolve? About six years ago I wrote a little DOS program (I can Email it to anyone who asks in a few days but i'm offline at home right now so I'd have to fetch it on a disk and it's the weekend in a couple of hours) to try and evolve the behaviour of some little sprites wondering all over the screen.
It used a decision tree to decide what to do given inputs like what's standing in front and what's to the sides and what have you. They could decide to move forward or turn or attack the square in front. Their 'energy' level was tracked and attacking each other or the 'grass' that grew around randomly replenished it. When they were all dead the last few to die got to spawn the next generation. I was interested to see how hard it would be to evolve some better AI for games.
They did, quite quickly, evolve what looked like the same algo as the tree I built by hand to test the code (move forward unless theres a wall in front in which case turn left - oh and if there's food in front then eat it) but the tree was a mess. Couln't tell what was going on inside the code. They never really got any farther though.
What I found interesting was that trying to evolve from my test tree was impossible. My delicately constructed tree was completely screwed as soon as you changed one byte of it - the poor critters just died. The algo that evolved though was WAY more robust, upping the mutation rate to crazy levels still left the critters doing something better than standing still in confusion.
I did start work on a new version that would let the inputs evolve as well. Rather than just seeing to the sides and two squares in front the viewable square's locations themselves could evolve. I got distracted and moved onto something else before I ever finished it though. Story of my life
Pre.......
Yet in the past journalists have gone to jail to protect their sources. I guess all that's going to change now?
Heh.
Pre........
Can anybody think of a good phone company analogy?
Nope, but does the snail mail count as a common carrier? If I send some nasty chemical through the mail and it melts a sorting office machine then I'm sure the post office would want to take some action over it. This guy sent mail that effected the companies machines in a similar way. That the kind of thing you're looking for?
Priestess.......
New Scientist has had something similar for ages. Well, I assume it's similar, I can't see the site in this posting. It's slashdotted already.
Priestess........
beegle wrote:
If taxpayer money is used by the DOD to make nuclear missles, shouldn't taxpayers get access to the blueprints?
To be honest, I think quite possibly, yes. I doubt there is anything that would be so bad should "the enemy" find out which wouldn't be well over compensated for by the value gained for the people in knowing everything the government does and being able to evolve goverment tchnology.
There are others out there who are even worse
There are indeed, but how many of those people do you think are actually prevented from making a nuke becasue they don't know how? Out of those that could understand the blue-prints I mean. Heck, if I really wanted to get a nuke my best bet would probably be to buy it from whoever got those old Russian ones that have disapeared.
If the real boogie men haven't got nukes it's not becasue the blue-prints were'nt leaked. We're back to security through obscurity which, as has been shown time and time again, simply doesn't work. Espscially if there's power or money to be make by breaking that secret.
Priestess.......
(Who's about to go home so if anyone wants to continue this discussion with me you'll have to take it to Email, it's WAY off topic anyway)
sphealey wrote:
both MIT and the AI Lab have received massive subsidies from the US Government over the years, particularly the DoD. So, much of that "free" (as in "free beer") software really was paid for by the US taxpayer.
Isn't that all the more reason why the software, once it's written, should be freely distributed - at the very least within the US?
If taxpayers money is used by the DOD to make some ultra-safe encryption algo or whatever then shouldn't the tax-payers get access to that code? Reguardless of whether or not the money should have been used in the first place surely everyone would agree that it's better to use the stuff once it's payed for than lock it up where nobody can get at it.
A private company or indeed an individual has every right to make propriatory code, but does a government have the right to lock the fruits of taxpayers contributions away from the taxpayers themselves? I wonder if governments should be allowed to write ANY non-free, secret software at all, let alone impose restrictions on other people's code (EG exporting it).
Priestess....