"They are brilliant. They told me that within five minutes they can hack the (Indian) defense ministry Web site...," he said.
Crack a server in five minutes. This doesn't sound like brilliance. It sounds like some script kiddies attacking servers deployed with default security settings.
Seriously folks, outside of Hollywood movies, cracking takes a lot of time and effort, except when it's packaged up and distributed to the script kiddies. Learning to use the scripts does take a minimal amount of intelligence, but the main investment is time to hang in the right usenet forum or chat room to search the scripts out. Grokking of networking dynamics or basic algorithms are not required to use the scripts. Once the script parameters have been memorized, using it is trivial; however, the change anything that breaks the script and the kiddies are SOL.
For instance, I have a nephew who considers himself 3733t due to his ability to crack copy protection on CD games using scripts he's found on the net. The dunderhead can't even count in binary and is totally baffled when presented with hex. I ask you, where is the brilliance? He doesn't create or understand anything. He just blindly copies what someone else has told him to do.
Even people that understand aspects of networking and the vulnerabilities of various OS' are not necessarily smart. Knowledge does not equal intelligence, though there is a strong correlation. I'm not saying these kids are dumb. I'm saying that 'brilliant' should be reserved for someone who can analyze a system and design an effective attack. The sort of analysis that take hours, days or weeks. The term does not apply to someone who can run a script, which is what the kids are relying on if they can be so cavalier in their claims.
Noting that, the Indian authorities still appear to be smarter than their American counterparts. Even if these kids are dumb as bricks, they have knowledge that is beneficial for law enforcement. Recruiting their help is very wise.
Could someone please correct me if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that you cannot make or use a patented invention for monetary gain. That is, you can't make or use a patented item to make money, but I can make and use it for my personal use.
I'm not sure what implications this has for open source that is distributed freely, but would FreeType be able to slide through such a loophole?
Anyone ever notice how grade school teachers tend to treat everyone like gradeschoolers? The ask lots of redundant questions and speak in very simple language. It as if they spend half their waking hours to be simple minded, to be on the gradeschooler's level, and then they can't pull themselves back out when they're around adults.
I've seen it before, and I think this is something different except that the teacher is being immersed in a high-schooler's world instead. What other's think tends to be important to high schooler's. Personal pride and presentation mean a lot to them. As people get older^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H grow up they begin to learn that what Joe Blow across the room thinks doesn't make a bit of difference on thier weekly paycheck. The need to appear elite to peers dimishes greatly.
This teacher seems to be suffering from a need to appear elite to students. Immature? Yes, but consider where the teacher spends half his waking hours. Is there counseling to help these people immersed in such unnatural environments to cope with the tendency to mimmick the social structures around them? Is there something to remind them that they are adults and should act on a different plane than the adolescents they are nurturing?
I switch to Linux from OS/2 a couple of years ago, and I can still remember the pain. I see it as coming from two problems. Lack of minimum standards and lack of responsibility.
First: In windows, I can always count on notepad being there. Linux distributions haven't decided on a default text editor, and suggesting that they do is akin to declaring war. The problem comes when you try to read documentation. Five documents will give 5 different ways of doing the same task, with each way requiring a different set of utilities. Example, research the number of ways to implement automount on a linux system.
Second: What's worse, the distributions haven't accepted there roles as mediators and advisors. Someone has to pull all the projects out there together. They can do this by dumping everything onto a CD, or they can carefully pick and choose best-of-breed. Most distibutions I've seen choose to do the former. This is fine if the distributions would mark packages as 'recommended' or install a basic system and then allow user to choose to add more, but the usual method is to dump everything to hard disk and let the user sort it out. Distributions don't even go so far as to rank the packages as useful, necessary, narrow hack, used by three people in the world.
I believe the second problem could mostly be cleared up by the first. An the first problem could be cleared up if the Linux Standards Base would get off their duff and release a real standard, deliminating a minimalist system.
Please, Redhat/Mandrake/Suse/Somebody, release a minimalist system. Just a kernal, windowing system, text editor, and the bare bones that would be needed to make the system run and advertise the hell out of it. There'll be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and you'll have to go back and refine. But it will be a start. Everyone will have a reference platform that they can build onto. All the distros will install the basic system, and then go through their own fancy additional installation process. But we will have a definition of what Linux is that everyone can grasp.
The more detailed article that someone else posted talked about the problem of not being able to belch in space. The bubble don't rise in the beer and so get transferred directly to the stomach. The bubbles don't seperate in the stomach either, so the body can't expel the gas while retaining the liquid.
I could see this providing for a completely new artform and justifying the whole space program. Musicians would travel to space where they would go on a 2week binge. Then they would travel back to earth where they would be put in a decompression chamber. The gas would swell, and now being under gravitational influence, seperate, allowing the musicians sufficient time to compose musical lyrics from the escaping gas.
Heh, it couldn't be much worse than what they broadcast on the radio.
These people who always want to come in and rip out a fundamental pillar of society always talk about society's 'fear of change' as if it is some irrational psychiatric condition. It is not. In fact, it is not really fear in the sense that I don't fear that a hot stove will burn my hand...I KNOW the stove will burn my hand and I don't want to suffer the pain. Ripping out and replacing a fundamental part of any society, especially ones as ingrained as common measurements, is disruptive, confusing and painful. Sometimes 'good-enough' beats the pain of change, especially when everyone has become so comfortable working around the staus quo that they don't even realize that they are doing it.
So, now it is fine to try to sell anything on/. as long as the seller is female and will dress up in something trashy? Why does this deserve to be moded up to 4? Has it anything whatsoever to do with anime?
BTW, show some pride, Ceren. If you're going to parade around in something that accentuates every roll you might want to consider hitting the treadmill for a little while.
Let me preface this with the statement that I believe in the right of free speech, but not in the right to MAKE others listen. Now, for my rant...
In practice, this means that network content is tailored more toward what will please the advertiser than what will please the viewer--networks want to please viewers, of course, but only because that increases their ratings, and thus increases the money they can command for advertisements. The problem here is that there is nothing inherent in the system which supports broadcasts which are not deemed commercial.
So a broadcaster that chooses to broadcast what no one wishes to see/hear can not find advertisers to support its business. How is this not a controlling input, albeit indirect? I don't get out and move the front wheels of my car when I want to turn a corner, I turn the steering wheel. I've not directly moved the front tires, but I am in still in control.
This doesn't mean "unpopular": it can simply mean controversial.
And who gets to decide what is unpopular and what is controversial. The problem with NPR is that the public has less control. To turn your argument back on itself,...[i]n practice this means that [NPR] content is tailored more toward what will please the [political supporters] than what will please the [public at large]...
The way around that is to have the audience support the broadcast directly. Virtually all industrialized countries have some mechanism by which government money is given to a broadcasting institution, ideally with a "firewall" of some sort to prevent government interference (a critical piece that American public broadcasting lacks).
First of all, NPR isn't a text book case of the audience supporting the network directly. Yes, you can make a donation, but a large portion of their support comes from advertisers (oh, I'm sorry, corporate supporters who asked to be recognized during commercials, oops, I mean intermissions). Another large portion is extorted from the taxpayers using the force of the US government. NPR is a long way from being audience supported.
Second, you forget the first rule of society, and that is that someone has to rule. If you remove government interference, who gets to decide the content. Why should I trust a set of unknown administrators above someone who has been exposed to the harsh light of a political campaign? I don't know how the firewall works in other countries, but the idea of shovelling money into a broadcast system with no public control mechanism at all is a scary thought to me.
The audience controls the content in the donation and advertiser models by the degree to which they tune in/out, regardless of whether the money comes directly from the audience or from advertisers. If the content sucks, everyone tunes out, donations/advertisement dollars dry up, and the station is replaced with one that broadcast content that people prefer. The problem with NPR and systems that receive government money without direct government control, and the reason we can't [set] aside the specifics of NPR, is that they have taken the audience further out of the control loop than the other methods by inserting government into the loop. Providing NPR with government funds while removing all government input would completely remove audience control and would be blasphemous in my mind. Whoever got control of the NPR administration would have to power to broadcast whatever they pleased, the audience be damned. Furthermore, even if I completely disagreed with them and abhorred everything they stood for, there would be no way to change the content. The fact that I tuned out would have no effect on their bottom line.
So, I think we can agree on some points. True public supported broadcasting is a good thing as long as it isn't corrupted into chasing dollars by doing an end-run around the audience. NPR, however, has been corrupted and is now just another lobbying group, afraid of competition and trying to protect their own turf. But I think we disagree on government supported 'public radio'. I don't find it to be 'public controlled', only publicly funded. I put my faith more in market forces than faceless administrators...but that's just me.
Not suprising. NPR is no different from LPFM except that LPFM is more honest. NPR is a buch of liberal trying to disquise their message as 'unbiased' while trying to hide behind a veil of 'independance' because they haven't been 'bought' by 'big business advertising'. Instead, they have 'supporters' who recieve 'recognition'.
I supported, and still support, cutting any government support for public broadcasting. If they can't find enough people willing to pay directly to support their views, then obviously no one wants to hear them. The government doesn't need to unnecessarily second guess the wishes of the population.
Port scanning a system is directly analogous to trying the locks on someones home.
It is not free speech, it's a violation of property rights.
You do not have the right to use anyone elses computer hardware for any purpose without permission.
Yes, but you do have the right to walk down the street and peer into windows. You have the right to walk up to their door and even try the lock. You can even carry a crowbar while doing it if you wish. The police don't have anything against you until you enter the premises and leave with something. If you just enter and leave, they still don't have anything on you unless there were no tresspassing signs up. There are 'breaking and entering violations', but no 'entering' violations that I know of.
If a policeman notices you acting suspiciously and want to catch you (as opposed to just stopping you), he will watch you and catch you with the good after you left the premises. Notice, that store security doesn't stop shoplifters until after they've left the store. Until they cross the threshold, they are not shoplifting. They may have the intent, but they haven't yet committed the crime.
Servers on the public network are like window displays. You can't set up a server for everyone to see and then sue people for looking at it, just like you can't sue people for crossing your yard and looking in the window.
Course, I did hear of one case where a man looks through a window from the street and sees a woman dressing. She sues him for being a peeping tom, and he countered sued her for public exposure. They both won...
The contractor was in the wrong and deserved to be fired. If he had recieved permission to scan the network, it would have been another matter entirely, but acting on his own was wrong and should have been illegal.
The man was installing a network component. Are security tests not to be included as part of a system test? If the network was later successfully attacked and it was disclosed that the installation contractor hadn't done the barest minimum security checks, wouln't he be held liable for negligence? In my view, not only were his actions ethical, they were prudent.
Don't worry about pushing them in any particular direction... in fact pushing at all is the worst thing you can do (that includes pushing them into sports, or other stuff)
I can say, with a great sigh of relief, that this statement is bullshit. Kids, just like the rest of us and all of nature, tends to take the path of least resistance.
My oldest son is smart, but would just as soon sit in front of Cartoon Network or read a book as breath. He has a tendancy toward laziness. At school on the playground he was a pushover. He was beginning to avoid sports altogether.
I forced him to wrestle. I wrestled when in high school, and it changed my life entirely...confidence, determination, competivness, focus were all characteristics that were brought out by the sport. I don't want to be the father who drags his kids around trying to make them something he never was, but I also want a child with a strong mind, body and spirit. They are all important. So I forced him to wrestle. And I mean FORCED as in get your shoes on we're going.
I thought for a while that it wasn't working out. But, then we travelled home to visit family. They all wanted to know what had happened to him. "He's energetic," they said. "He wants to play, and talk, and he goes on and on about wrestling."
That was when the huge sigh of relief came. Next year, I don't care if he wrestles or not. I'd like to see him continue, but I won't force him. I'll ask and do what he wants. The lesson is complete. But the lesson would not have been learned if I hadn't forced him to go through the test. Unfortunately, most of lifes best lessons require us to do something that we don't want to do. The child will not do it unless forced to.
So, I can say from experience that 'pushing at all is the worst thing you can do' is complete bullshit. Push. Push very hard. But push very carefully, and only for the right reasons.
Younger Americans are used to being denounced as ignorant, violent, obsessive, even uncivilized. Increasingly, they don't care; they've stopped paying attention. Involvement in gaming can be seen as both manifestation and cause this schism, a profoundly significant force in culture and society.
If kids ever cared, they stopped when Elvis went on TV and started twisting his hips. Remember, it was rock'n'roll that destroyed our youth. No, it was comic books...Wait, no it was...
The point being...'gaming' is just GAMES!!! Doom is only mildly seperated from 'cowboys'n'indians' with your finger as a gun, which is only mildly seperated from 'kill the sabertooth tiger' with pretend spears. About the only difference being that Doom doesn't allow for actual physical exercise.
Gaming has affected almost everyone who grew up with it -- which is to say, just about half of the country.
So has cottage cheese. When can we expect to see an expose on the dramatic influence that cottage cheese has on young people.
Adults may quake at the transformation, but kids are completely at home with the joystick, the key to a new kind of civilization.
Damn!! I waisted my time in college when all I had to do was learn the JOYSTICK!! Damn! Damn! Triple DAMN!!
We know something about gamers. They're quick decision-makers, sometimes to the point of impulsiveness. Since their virtual lives depend on
fast reactions, their real-life decision making processes become visceral, instinctive.
,and since they rarely give themselves time to truly consider the consequences of their actions, the real-life decisions are wrong.
Wishy-washy gamers are unsuccessful gamers, so gamers make a lot of quick decisions and feel confident about them.
no matter how completely duffle-headed those decisions may be.
Gamers are story-tellers. They inhabit increasingly imaginative virtual environments; they spent a substantial portion of their formative years interacting with stories, graphics and representations on screens that nearly become part of their neural systems. They are always telling tales, to one another and to themselves.
From what I've seen of my nephews who 'game' constantly, gamers like to be told tales. These guys spend very little time creating or adding to content. It's all about buying a game that someone else created. What time I've tried to spend with them explaining how a computer works is totally ignored. Any book that I've given them on how computers work have gone unread. Of course, they want to know about any neat hack I can tell them about, as long as I can give step by step instructions. They don't want to spend a second trying to grok the internals, they just want to know the sequence of up-down-left-right-etc. One even asked me to teach him to be a hacker; of course, he only had about 15 minutes to spend on the lesson, and he didn't want to waste time learning to count in binary. I don't think we're going to see these types replacing the intelligentsia any time soon.
Kids of this generation will be different from any that has preceded them.
Only in the same way that every generation has been different from every preceding generation, which is to say, "Bullshit, John. Take your head out of your rectum long enough to get a perception of things past your bedroom door." People are always the same. Most are lazy and want to be entertained and coddled. Games are just the latest incarnation of the circus. As for fixing political problems, the only thing most gamers will do is vote for someone that will guarantee them bread.
Considering the number of such elliptical planets, chances are much lower than one should expect...
As your looking at nature of the planets being discovered, you need to consider the methods used to discover them. From previous stories, I believe the most popular technique is to analyze the 'wobble' that the planet's orbit creates in the host star. Would circular orbits create as much of a wobble as a highly elliptical one? If there is a difference, then a skew result in findings is to be expected.
Re:The EULA defending paper
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EULA In Games
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· Score: 2
I like how they use the word "teach" where they mean "bluff". Copyright law prevents unauthorized redistribution. Copying something onto many computers that you own, is not redistribution. You're still the only one who has it.
So, if I owned Joe's Software House and bought one copy of CompilerMagic 2.0 for 50 seats, am I within my rights since I own all of the computers? This becomes questionable, and I would really like to see someone with the legal backing purposely cross a EULA in order that we might get some legal rulings behind us.
My firm conviction is that they are bull... as has been stated here often enough, but I don't have the pocket book (or 50 computer) to test it out in court.
(though, I would be willing to contribute to anyone who would give it a shot.)
The problem with this thing, as everyone has pointed out, it that it doesn't have anything to push against. But space isn't empty. It's full of all kinds of stuff floating around, stuff that can easily be ionized. A magnet switching at the right frequency could pull the ionized material toward it, and then repell it. A spacecraft could suck ionized material in the front end, accelerate it down the middle and then expell it out the rear.
I've thought about this for a while, even named it the 'Squid' drive in my own head. Move the magnetic fields to the outside, and they would provide protection from other hostile things in space. Unfortunately, I'm not rocket scientist or physicist, have no ties to NASA, and have not idea how to even begin to explore the idea any further.
When cable first came out in the '80's it was ad free, but the cost was prohibitive to most of us. Over time, the monthly rate had dropped, but now it seems that even the premium channels have as much commercialization as broadcast TV did in the '80's. Watching broadcast TV is a waste of time in the US now, unless you like to watch commercials.
I see a pattern, and I see that pattern affecting software. Advertisers will pay to have software developed, and people will be more than happy to use the software for 'free'.
All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.
No, a very large portion of us, those of us who have not been coddled into believing some myth about elections in the US being fair, would take this as business as usual and go about our way without losing a beat.
Democrats are always on the up-n-up? Never use thug tactics or underhanded means to 'get the vote out'? Never look for ways to stop the counting when the first pass is in their favor?
Man, I want some of what you're smokin'!!
As for the human rights violations charges...
One man's 'human rights violation' is another man's 'justice'.
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along.
I used to feel this way, but it seems that the older I get the less I know, and the smarter my father becomes. The young always think they know better. You can only know what you've experienced or learned from others, with the former definitely being of higher priority. Age is a limiting factor on how much you can have of either. The young have a relatively limited perspective, by definition, and therefore problems often appear simple and answers obvious. It's not till you get older that you realize that you're a dolt.
(Note to teenage flamethrowers: Yes, I know. You're smarter/more experienced/more mature/etc than everyone else. You don't need to remind us all. Thank you.)
No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.
Maybe they're declining because they're boring or being replaced by something more obtainable. Maybe they're only being replaced as entertainment for some. Video games are not a culture. They are entertainment.
In years past very few people ever had the opportunity to see an opera. The best that most people could get would be the county fair. Now everyone in the Western world is able to afford to hear music from their favorite artist, be it through CDs or radios. Concerts and TV have replace operas. Rock has replace classical music as the most popular, because now the populace chooses what's popular as opposed to the select elite rich.
Nothing has changed here, except that now more people have the money to buy their own choice of entertainment. Bother yourself to pull up a chart of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs and you will see that this is as it should be. Except for some extreme cases, the Western world has conquered homelessness, hunger, and all the other lower order needs. With nothing left to conquer, men (and boys) turn to destractions.
BTW, so some boys from one generation remember a secret code to a popular game? Do they know what the name of an oversized marble is? Gee, it seems that all the boys from the previous generation knew that. Did the marbles culture die?
- Our line-of-business in-house apps aren't signed and won't run on this new OS.
ie, for most large companies, the most important apps are those that are designed in-house to meet specific business needs. These apps are usually the ones that run the company.
So, most companies use VBA, why can't MS just have VBA runtime signed and then all VBA apps will work. Well, then the whole system is useless, (see LOVE virus).
This move would do nothing but tighten MS' hold on the SOHO market, the one that Whistler is aimed at and the one that MS fears losing to Linux. The feature is not aimed at Enterprise class organizations. Win200 is reserved for that. Expect to see this implemented, and expect to see open-source take a punch in the nose because of it.
The author hinted early in the article why this software will be successful. Our multiple personality government has created a situation where companies are responsible for things they have no control over, what gets sent from one employee to another through email. This sort of software give them cover, even if it's bullsh... and doesn't work. "But, your honor, we bought and installed blocking software. We've done everything in our power to block these activities."
Remember, it's not how you treat people that controls your success. It's how people think that they've been treated.
Slashdot Mirror
"They are brilliant. They told me that within five minutes they can hack the (Indian) defense ministry Web site...," he said.
Crack a server in five minutes. This doesn't sound like brilliance. It sounds like some script kiddies attacking servers deployed with default security settings.
Seriously folks, outside of Hollywood movies, cracking takes a lot of time and effort, except when it's packaged up and distributed to the script kiddies. Learning to use the scripts does take a minimal amount of intelligence, but the main investment is time to hang in the right usenet forum or chat room to search the scripts out. Grokking of networking dynamics or basic algorithms are not required to use the scripts. Once the script parameters have been memorized, using it is trivial; however, the change anything that breaks the script and the kiddies are SOL.
For instance, I have a nephew who considers himself 3733t due to his ability to crack copy protection on CD games using scripts he's found on the net. The dunderhead can't even count in binary and is totally baffled when presented with hex. I ask you, where is the brilliance? He doesn't create or understand anything. He just blindly copies what someone else has told him to do.
Even people that understand aspects of networking and the vulnerabilities of various OS' are not necessarily smart. Knowledge does not equal intelligence, though there is a strong correlation. I'm not saying these kids are dumb. I'm saying that 'brilliant' should be reserved for someone who can analyze a system and design an effective attack. The sort of analysis that take hours, days or weeks. The term does not apply to someone who can run a script, which is what the kids are relying on if they can be so cavalier in their claims.
Noting that, the Indian authorities still appear to be smarter than their American counterparts. Even if these kids are dumb as bricks, they have knowledge that is beneficial for law enforcement. Recruiting their help is very wise.
All this talk about AMDs offering being cheaper, but from the best I can tell the cheapest/only way to a multi-processor system is through Intel.
Could someone please correct me if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that you cannot make or use a patented invention for monetary gain. That is, you can't make or use a patented item to make money, but I can make and use it for my personal use.
I'm not sure what implications this has for open source that is distributed freely, but would FreeType be able to slide through such a loophole?
Anyone ever notice how grade school teachers tend to treat everyone like gradeschoolers? The ask lots of redundant questions and speak in very simple language. It as if they spend half their waking hours to be simple minded, to be on the gradeschooler's level, and then they can't pull themselves back out when they're around adults.
I've seen it before, and I think this is something different except that the teacher is being immersed in a high-schooler's world instead. What other's think tends to be important to high schooler's. Personal pride and presentation mean a lot to them. As people get older^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H grow up they begin to learn that what Joe Blow across the room thinks doesn't make a bit of difference on thier weekly paycheck. The need to appear elite to peers dimishes greatly.
This teacher seems to be suffering from a need to appear elite to students. Immature? Yes, but consider where the teacher spends half his waking hours. Is there counseling to help these people immersed in such unnatural environments to cope with the tendency to mimmick the social structures around them? Is there something to remind them that they are adults and should act on a different plane than the adolescents they are nurturing?
I switch to Linux from OS/2 a couple of years ago, and I can still remember the pain. I see it as coming from two problems. Lack of minimum standards and lack of responsibility.
First: In windows, I can always count on notepad being there. Linux distributions haven't decided on a default text editor, and suggesting that they do is akin to declaring war. The problem comes when you try to read documentation. Five documents will give 5 different ways of doing the same task, with each way requiring a different set of utilities. Example, research the number of ways to implement automount on a linux system.
Second: What's worse, the distributions haven't accepted there roles as mediators and advisors. Someone has to pull all the projects out there together. They can do this by dumping everything onto a CD, or they can carefully pick and choose best-of-breed. Most distibutions I've seen choose to do the former. This is fine if the distributions would mark packages as 'recommended' or install a basic system and then allow user to choose to add more, but the usual method is to dump everything to hard disk and let the user sort it out. Distributions don't even go so far as to rank the packages as useful, necessary, narrow hack, used by three people in the world.
I believe the second problem could mostly be cleared up by the first. An the first problem could be cleared up if the Linux Standards Base would get off their duff and release a real standard, deliminating a minimalist system.
Please, Redhat/Mandrake/Suse/Somebody, release a minimalist system. Just a kernal, windowing system, text editor, and the bare bones that would be needed to make the system run and advertise the hell out of it. There'll be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and you'll have to go back and refine. But it will be a start. Everyone will have a reference platform that they can build onto. All the distros will install the basic system, and then go through their own fancy additional installation process. But we will have a definition of what Linux is that everyone can grasp.
The more detailed article that someone else posted talked about the problem of not being able to belch in space. The bubble don't rise in the beer and so get transferred directly to the stomach. The bubbles don't seperate in the stomach either, so the body can't expel the gas while retaining the liquid.
I could see this providing for a completely new artform and justifying the whole space program. Musicians would travel to space where they would go on a 2week binge. Then they would travel back to earth where they would be put in a decompression chamber. The gas would swell, and now being under gravitational influence, seperate, allowing the musicians sufficient time to compose musical lyrics from the escaping gas.
Heh, it couldn't be much worse than what they broadcast on the radio.
These people who always want to come in and rip out a fundamental pillar of society always talk about society's 'fear of change' as if it is some irrational psychiatric condition. It is not. In fact, it is not really fear in the sense that I don't fear that a hot stove will burn my hand...I KNOW the stove will burn my hand and I don't want to suffer the pain. Ripping out and replacing a fundamental part of any society, especially ones as ingrained as common measurements, is disruptive, confusing and painful. Sometimes 'good-enough' beats the pain of change, especially when everyone has become so comfortable working around the staus quo that they don't even realize that they are doing it.
So, now it is fine to try to sell anything on /. as long as the seller is female and will dress up in something trashy? Why does this deserve to be moded up to 4? Has it anything whatsoever to do with anime?
BTW, show some pride, Ceren. If you're going to parade around in something that accentuates every roll you might want to consider hitting the treadmill for a little while.
Let me preface this with the statement that I believe in the right of free speech, but not in the right to MAKE others listen. Now, for my rant...
...[i]n practice this means that [NPR] content is tailored more toward what will please the [political supporters] than what will please the [public at large]...
In practice, this means that network content is tailored more toward what will please the advertiser than what will please the viewer--networks want to please viewers, of course, but only because that increases their ratings, and thus increases the money they can command for advertisements. The problem here is that there is nothing inherent in the system which supports broadcasts which are not deemed commercial.
So a broadcaster that chooses to broadcast what no one wishes to see/hear can not find advertisers to support its business. How is this not a controlling input, albeit indirect? I don't get out and move the front wheels of my car when I want to turn a corner, I turn the steering wheel. I've not directly moved the front tires, but I am in still in control.
This doesn't mean "unpopular": it can simply mean controversial.
And who gets to decide what is unpopular and what is controversial. The problem with NPR is that the public has less control. To turn your argument back on itself,
The way around that is to have the audience support the broadcast directly. Virtually all industrialized countries have some mechanism by which government money is given to a broadcasting institution, ideally with a "firewall" of some sort to prevent government interference (a critical piece that American public broadcasting lacks).
First of all, NPR isn't a text book case of the audience supporting the network directly. Yes, you can make a donation, but a large portion of their support comes from advertisers (oh, I'm sorry, corporate supporters who asked to be recognized during commercials, oops, I mean intermissions). Another large portion is extorted from the taxpayers using the force of the US government. NPR is a long way from being audience supported.
Second, you forget the first rule of society, and that is that someone has to rule. If you remove government interference, who gets to decide the content. Why should I trust a set of unknown administrators above someone who has been exposed to the harsh light of a political campaign? I don't know how the firewall works in other countries, but the idea of shovelling money into a broadcast system with no public control mechanism at all is a scary thought to me.
The audience controls the content in the donation and advertiser models by the degree to which they tune in/out, regardless of whether the money comes directly from the audience or from advertisers. If the content sucks, everyone tunes out, donations/advertisement dollars dry up, and the station is replaced with one that broadcast content that people prefer. The problem with NPR and systems that receive government money without direct government control, and the reason we can't [set] aside the specifics of NPR, is that they have taken the audience further out of the control loop than the other methods by inserting government into the loop. Providing NPR with government funds while removing all government input would completely remove audience control and would be blasphemous in my mind. Whoever got control of the NPR administration would have to power to broadcast whatever they pleased, the audience be damned. Furthermore, even if I completely disagreed with them and abhorred everything they stood for, there would be no way to change the content. The fact that I tuned out would have no effect on their bottom line.
So, I think we can agree on some points. True public supported broadcasting is a good thing as long as it isn't corrupted into chasing dollars by doing an end-run around the audience. NPR, however, has been corrupted and is now just another lobbying group, afraid of competition and trying to protect their own turf. But I think we disagree on government supported 'public radio'. I don't find it to be 'public controlled', only publicly funded. I put my faith more in market forces than faceless administrators...but that's just me.
This thing is $299. You have to buy the Visor PDA seperately, another $150 to $250.
$500 plus somewhere around $30/month for the service to be able to talk on the PHONE?!! Isn't the price/benefit ratio lacking just a little here?
It seems that there are a LOT of people with more dollars than cents out there.
Not suprising. NPR is no different from LPFM except that LPFM is more honest. NPR is a buch of liberal trying to disquise their message as 'unbiased' while trying to hide behind a veil of 'independance' because they haven't been 'bought' by 'big business advertising'. Instead, they have 'supporters' who recieve 'recognition'.
I supported, and still support, cutting any government support for public broadcasting. If they can't find enough people willing to pay directly to support their views, then obviously no one wants to hear them. The government doesn't need to unnecessarily second guess the wishes of the population.
Port scanning a system is directly analogous to trying the locks on someones home.
It is not free speech, it's a violation of property rights.
You do not have the right to use anyone elses computer hardware for any purpose without permission.
Yes, but you do have the right to walk down the street and peer into windows. You have the right to walk up to their door and even try the lock. You can even carry a crowbar while doing it if you wish. The police don't have anything against you until you enter the premises and leave with something. If you just enter and leave, they still don't have anything on you unless there were no tresspassing signs up. There are 'breaking and entering violations', but no 'entering' violations that I know of.
If a policeman notices you acting suspiciously and want to catch you (as opposed to just stopping you), he will watch you and catch you with the good after you left the premises. Notice, that store security doesn't stop shoplifters until after they've left the store. Until they cross the threshold, they are not shoplifting. They may have the intent, but they haven't yet committed the crime.
Servers on the public network are like window displays. You can't set up a server for everyone to see and then sue people for looking at it, just like you can't sue people for crossing your yard and looking in the window.
Course, I did hear of one case where a man looks through a window from the street and sees a woman dressing. She sues him for being a peeping tom, and he countered sued her for public exposure. They both won...
The contractor was in the wrong and deserved to be fired. If he had recieved permission to scan the network, it would have been another matter entirely, but acting on his own was wrong and should have been illegal.
The man was installing a network component. Are security tests not to be included as part of a system test? If the network was later successfully attacked and it was disclosed that the installation contractor hadn't done the barest minimum security checks, wouln't he be held liable for negligence? In my view, not only were his actions ethical, they were prudent.
Don't worry about pushing them in any particular direction... in fact pushing at all is the worst thing you can do (that includes pushing them into sports, or other stuff)
...confidence, determination, competivness, focus were all characteristics that were brought out by the sport. I don't want to be the father who drags his kids around trying to make them something he never was, but I also want a child with a strong mind, body and spirit. They are all important. So I forced him to wrestle. And I mean FORCED as in get your shoes on we're going.
I can say, with a great sigh of relief, that this statement is bullshit. Kids, just like the rest of us and all of nature, tends to take the path of least resistance.
My oldest son is smart, but would just as soon sit in front of Cartoon Network or read a book as breath. He has a tendancy toward laziness. At school on the playground he was a pushover. He was beginning to avoid sports altogether.
I forced him to wrestle. I wrestled when in high school, and it changed my life entirely
I thought for a while that it wasn't working out. But, then we travelled home to visit family. They all wanted to know what had happened to him. "He's energetic," they said. "He wants to play, and talk, and he goes on and on about wrestling."
That was when the huge sigh of relief came. Next year, I don't care if he wrestles or not. I'd like to see him continue, but I won't force him. I'll ask and do what he wants. The lesson is complete. But the lesson would not have been learned if I hadn't forced him to go through the test. Unfortunately, most of lifes best lessons require us to do something that we don't want to do. The child will not do it unless forced to.
So, I can say from experience that 'pushing at all is the worst thing you can do' is complete bullshit. Push. Push very hard. But push very carefully, and only for the right reasons.
Younger Americans are used to being denounced as ignorant, violent, obsessive, even uncivilized. Increasingly, they don't care; they've stopped paying attention. Involvement in gaming can be seen as both manifestation and cause this schism, a profoundly significant force in culture and society.
If kids ever cared, they stopped when Elvis went on TV and started twisting his hips. Remember, it was rock'n'roll that destroyed our youth. No, it was comic books...Wait, no it was...
The point being...'gaming' is just GAMES!!! Doom is only mildly seperated from 'cowboys'n'indians' with your finger as a gun, which is only mildly seperated from 'kill the sabertooth tiger' with pretend spears. About the only difference being that Doom doesn't allow for actual physical exercise.
Gaming has affected almost everyone who grew up with it -- which is to say, just about half of the country.
So has cottage cheese. When can we expect to see an expose on the dramatic influence that cottage cheese has on young people.
Adults may quake at the transformation, but kids are completely at home with the joystick, the key to a new kind of civilization.
Damn!! I waisted my time in college when all I had to do was learn the JOYSTICK!! Damn! Damn! Triple DAMN!!
We know something about gamers. They're quick decision-makers, sometimes to the point of impulsiveness. Since their virtual lives depend on
fast reactions, their real-life decision making processes become visceral, instinctive.
,and since they rarely give themselves time to truly consider the consequences of their actions, the real-life decisions are wrong.
Wishy-washy gamers are unsuccessful gamers, so gamers make a lot of quick decisions and feel confident about them.
no matter how completely duffle-headed those decisions may be.
Gamers are story-tellers. They inhabit increasingly imaginative virtual environments; they spent a substantial portion of their formative years interacting with stories, graphics and representations on screens that nearly become part of their neural systems. They are always telling tales, to one another and to themselves.
From what I've seen of my nephews who 'game' constantly, gamers like to be told tales. These guys spend very little time creating or adding to content. It's all about buying a game that someone else created. What time I've tried to spend with them explaining how a computer works is totally ignored. Any book that I've given them on how computers work have gone unread. Of course, they want to know about any neat hack I can tell them about, as long as I can give step by step instructions. They don't want to spend a second trying to grok the internals, they just want to know the sequence of up-down-left-right-etc. One even asked me to teach him to be a hacker; of course, he only had about 15 minutes to spend on the lesson, and he didn't want to waste time learning to count in binary. I don't think we're going to see these types replacing the intelligentsia any time soon.
Kids of this generation will be different from any that has preceded them.
Only in the same way that every generation has been different from every preceding generation, which is to say, "Bullshit, John. Take your head out of your rectum long enough to get a perception of things past your bedroom door." People are always the same. Most are lazy and want to be entertained and coddled. Games are just the latest incarnation of the circus. As for fixing political problems, the only thing most gamers will do is vote for someone that will guarantee them bread.
Considering the number of such elliptical planets, chances are much lower than one should expect...
As your looking at nature of the planets being discovered, you need to consider the methods used to discover them. From previous stories, I believe the most popular technique is to analyze the 'wobble' that the planet's orbit creates in the host star. Would circular orbits create as much of a wobble as a highly elliptical one? If there is a difference, then a skew result in findings is to be expected.
I like how they use the word "teach" where they mean "bluff". Copyright law prevents unauthorized redistribution. Copying something onto many computers that you own, is not redistribution. You're still the only one who has it.
So, if I owned Joe's Software House and bought one copy of CompilerMagic 2.0 for 50 seats, am I within my rights since I own all of the computers? This becomes questionable, and I would really like to see someone with the legal backing purposely cross a EULA in order that we might get some legal rulings behind us.
My firm conviction is that they are bull... as has been stated here often enough, but I don't have the pocket book (or 50 computer) to test it out in court.
(though, I would be willing to contribute to anyone who would give it a shot.)
The problem with this thing, as everyone has pointed out, it that it doesn't have anything to push against. But space isn't empty. It's full of all kinds of stuff floating around, stuff that can easily be ionized. A magnet switching at the right frequency could pull the ionized material toward it, and then repell it. A spacecraft could suck ionized material in the front end, accelerate it down the middle and then expell it out the rear.
/.
I've thought about this for a while, even named it the 'Squid' drive in my own head. Move the magnetic fields to the outside, and they would provide protection from other hostile things in space. Unfortunately, I'm not rocket scientist or physicist, have no ties to NASA, and have not idea how to even begin to explore the idea any further.
So I just lamely post to
You might want to grab a history book and memorize which party Abraham Lincoln belonged to.
When cable first came out in the '80's it was ad free, but the cost was prohibitive to most of us. Over time, the monthly rate had dropped, but now it seems that even the premium channels have as much commercialization as broadcast TV did in the '80's. Watching broadcast TV is a waste of time in the US now, unless you like to watch commercials.
I see a pattern, and I see that pattern affecting software. Advertisers will pay to have software developed, and people will be more than happy to use the software for 'free'.
All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.
No, a very large portion of us, those of us who have not been coddled into believing some myth about elections in the US being fair, would take this as business as usual and go about our way without losing a beat.
Democrats are always on the up-n-up? Never use thug tactics or underhanded means to 'get the vote out'? Never look for ways to stop the counting when the first pass is in their favor?
Man, I want some of what you're smokin'!!
As for the human rights violations charges...
One man's 'human rights violation' is another man's 'justice'.
The War of Northern Agression Continues...
8*)
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along.
I used to feel this way, but it seems that the older I get the less I know, and the smarter my father becomes. The young always think they know better. You can only know what you've experienced or learned from others, with the former definitely being of higher priority. Age is a limiting factor on how much you can have of either. The young have a relatively limited perspective, by definition, and therefore problems often appear simple and answers obvious. It's not till you get older that you realize that you're a dolt.
(Note to teenage flamethrowers: Yes, I know. You're smarter/more experienced/more mature/etc than everyone else. You don't need to remind us all. Thank you.)
No other form of culture is ascending as rapidly. Compared to gaming, traditional kinds of culture -- some elements of book publishing, opera and classical music, dance, appear declining and endangered.
Maybe they're declining because they're boring or being replaced by something more obtainable. Maybe they're only being replaced as entertainment for some. Video games are not a culture. They are entertainment.
In years past very few people ever had the opportunity to see an opera. The best that most people could get would be the county fair. Now everyone in the Western world is able to afford to hear music from their favorite artist, be it through CDs or radios. Concerts and TV have replace operas. Rock has replace classical music as the most popular, because now the populace chooses what's popular as opposed to the select elite rich.
Nothing has changed here, except that now more people have the money to buy their own choice of entertainment. Bother yourself to pull up a chart of Maslow's Heirarchy of needs and you will see that this is as it should be. Except for some extreme cases, the Western world has conquered homelessness, hunger, and all the other lower order needs. With nothing left to conquer, men (and boys) turn to destractions.
BTW, so some boys from one generation remember a secret code to a popular game? Do they know what the name of an oversized marble is? Gee, it seems that all the boys from the previous generation knew that. Did the marbles culture die?
There's a one point you missed:
- Our line-of-business in-house apps aren't signed and won't run on this new OS.
ie, for most large companies, the most important apps are those that are designed in-house to meet specific business needs. These apps are usually the ones that run the company.
So, most companies use VBA, why can't MS just have VBA runtime signed and then all VBA apps will work. Well, then the whole system is useless, (see LOVE virus).
This move would do nothing but tighten MS' hold on the SOHO market, the one that Whistler is aimed at and the one that MS fears losing to Linux. The feature is not aimed at Enterprise class organizations. Win200 is reserved for that. Expect to see this implemented, and expect to see open-source take a punch in the nose because of it.
Sun's CVS doesn't want to cooperate here at work. Where can I find a tarball?
The author hinted early in the article why this software will be successful. Our multiple personality government has created a situation where companies are responsible for things they have no control over, what gets sent from one employee to another through email. This sort of software give them cover, even if it's bullsh... and doesn't work. "But, your honor, we bought and installed blocking software. We've done everything in our power to block these activities."
Remember, it's not how you treat people that controls your success. It's how people think that they've been treated.