The United States was founded by people who believed in the public good. They set up commissions for public libraries and promotion of the arts, while at the same time granting inventors and authors the ability to profit from their works until they faded into the public domain. Our most hallowed documents, our most cherished music, even our national anthem come from the re-use of work written by authors and musicians a generation before.
Yet, the MPAA and the RIAA want to tell *me* that this is Unamerican. That my role in society is not as a citizen, or a voter, or a patriot -- but solely one as a consumer. Had this been the prevailing attitude in the late eighteenth century, there would be no Congress, no Senate, no President, no freedom; we would all be loyal subjects of the King, and Benjamin Franklin would be remembered as an eccentric intellectual imprisoned and executed for copyright violations.
I am not a consumer, or a "content provider", or a market statistic; I am a *citizen*. Please treat me like one.
Re:The guy sounds like a world-class sleazeball.
on
Hacking Web Services
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Hey, moron, had you *read* the article, you would have noticed the following:
1. He said that he knows "security through obscurity" isn't the answer, but that his methods are so weak that he *knows* they won't stand under scrutiny; they just happen to be the best he's got at the moment. That's called good judgement.
2. You have no sense of humor.
3. His concerns are legitamite; Yahoo! is trying to provide services on the web, and people are *stealing* them. Yahoo! isn't screwing artists out of money, or exploiting third-world children, or screwing their customers; they just want people to engage in reputable transactions. That's how businesses make their money, and why you can spew crap from your personal computer.
Sheesh.
Re:You know, I laughed at first...
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Personally, if I had to wait more than fifteen minutes on the phone, I'd fire a letter to Corporate headquarters, notifying them of my intent to cancel, sending it via registered mail, and have it authenticated by a notary public. If they bill me a second time, I'll do the same, and I'd ask the credit card company to mark the charges as fraudulent. Third time, I'd take them to court -- just for the sheer joy of it. After all, you've got three signed, dated, and authenticated letters, stretching over three months, showing good faith on your part, plus reciepts indicating proof-of-delivery. They'd likely settle out-of-court for a reasonable sum, and enough of these lawsuits might prompt the idiots to actually set up a reasonable cancellation method.
I used to work for EarthLink, so I can attest to the number of very frustrated customers who could never talk to the magical cancellation man...
You're a tool; how'd you like it if the following took place whilst filling up your car:
"Sure! C'mon, if you put our gas in your car, it's absolutely trivial to drain the fuel system and use non-protected gasoline; you'll just have to get that from...uh...er...somewhere else.
"As for interaction, yes, certainly I interact with God, through prayer, through His direction in my life..."
The rest of that paragraph talks about how your god interacted with *you*; not how he influenced the rest of the world. The word "me" shows up quite a number of times in that paragraph; yet, in one slightly below it, you state:
"It is a grave error to hold a me-centric world view, as if everything in life, and your belief, revolve around you."
This is an obvious contradiction.
Secondly, your final response is the typical Fundie line when they lose an argument, that "all will be decided by God in the end," which is both a concession that I have won the debate (thanks), and an appeal to authority, all wrapped into one.
Your first point is a straw man, and as such, I won't bother arguing against it, as it's completely outside the realm of this discussion.
As to your second point, I believe I used the word "interact", not "observe", and you most certainly can interact with the wind. You feel it, because it moves the hairs on your skin, and because it can upset your balance if there's enough of it. That's why I used the word "interact", not "observe" -- because in order to "observe" something, you are really interacting with it -- whether it's the wind on your skin, or photons bouncing off of it into your eyeballs.
As per Xianity, from what I've seen, it's pretty much a "self-help-whatever-i-want-to-believe-i-can-believ e religion", actually. Most Christians pray to their sky pixie because they want something of value, either material or emotional. They only act the way they do about their sky pixie because they fear an imaginary hell, and long to go to an imaginary heaven. It's a classic punishment-reward system, except the reward comes *after* you die...and since nobody has come back to tell us about this great reward, I'd likely say it's just bollocks.
I mean, come on -- if your boss promised to pay you a billion dollars after you left the company if you agreed to work until you died, would you accept?
I think you are mistaking "imagination" for "perception"; your usage of the word indicates this. I can "imagine" all I want that an onrushing car isn't going to hit me, but up until the point of impact, my senses are going to be telling me what's going on -- if I stand there and "imagine" that I won't be harmed, then I'm just ignoring what I perceive -- grossly different from not perceiving it.
The problem is, your point is moot. Why? Because we are limited to dealing with what we can observe. If we can't interact with something in any way, shape, or form, then it effectively doesn't exist. Whether or not that something *really* exists is completely irrelevant, because there isn't any way to interact with it.
This makes your point moot, because the only "faith" would be that the universe is as we observe it, and it doesn't matter either way whether it is, or isn't, because from our point of view, it is.
You can argue about the existence of supernatural deities all you'd like, but until you can provide some type of evidence that they do, in fact, exist, then it is simply more logically to assume that they don't. Unless you want to argue that the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Boogie Man all exist as well, because there's just as much evidence to support them as there is to support God.
Do we know everything? No. Science still has much to discover, and there are many cases where we have to admit that we don't know. But just because there's a hole in our knowledge doesn't prove that there is some type of supernatural power; it just means that we don't know -- yet.
Similarly stated that a hole big enough for God is as much proof for his existence as a hole big enough for the Loch Ness Monster is proof for its existence (An anonymous source in alt.atheism).
Ah, yes, the Paley argument, defeated over a century ago; refuted thusly:
"Who created the creator, then?"
You see, if you want to state that every complex system has a creator, you must understand that that creator is, in and of itself, a compex system. Buildings are built by builders, which are incredibly complex organic machines. Therefore, by the same logic, the creator of the builder must be an even more complex system, which is itself built by a complex system, and so on ad absurdium.
It's much more plausable to simply assume that the Universe started as a point event (because that's what we can see), than to assume that some sky pixie designed everything (which we have *zero* real, as in non-anecdotal, evidence of).
Actually, I'm an atheist, so deities and such are about as "real" to me as Santa.
ObHubor: When I'm told that "God is Watching", I try to put on a good show, and since I figure that all the Christians are showing Him how pious they are, I prefer to liven things up with a striptease...
I think one of the biggest barriers to getting Linux installed at schools is the lack of software targeted at secondary-school teachers and students. I'm working on writing an open-source, Java-based gradebook application (still in initial stages, so there's no project homepage yet), and I'd really like to see people writing things like gradebooks, educational games, and the like.
In our district we have God control over our machines and dictate all hardware and network decisions, but even then have had to give some leeway on software installs for political issues.
I prefer to take a more hands-on approach and use "root", rather than a third-party administration product of dubious reliability, scalability, and quality.;)
This looks to be an interesting challenge; I believe the entire idea is analyizing the binary (which is a program) without actually running the thing; then, designing methods to check for network activity and such that this particular binary would generate. In addition, you get bonus points for correctly quantifying the skill level of the coder who produced said binary.
It's much the same way as anaylizing a captured worm/virii; you need to figure out what it does, how to detect it, how to block/eradicate it, and also try and establish a profile of the originator of the worm/virii.
There is no need for DRM legislation; here's an analogy.
Jawalking is a crime, already punishable by a small fine, but thanks to a new type of nuclear-powered running shoes, it is a crime that has become more prevalent. Jaywalking hurts the companies that make the little pedestrian signals, and so they lobby to have a law put in place that will attach an explosive collar to the neck of anybody who uses sidewalks, such that only *legal* pedestrian crossings are used.
It's the same thing with the RIAA. They see their cash cow threatened (because MP3s and streaming radio give much more power to the musicians and the listeners than they do to the recording industry), and will lobby until the end of the earth to protect their business model. Sorry, but there is no "right to profitability", and if your customers are deserting you for an alternative, even a lower-quality one, you really should re-think your business model; not try and get the better one banned.
There's something incredibly cozy about having a cup of hot coffee or tea to sip on throughout the day, a sort of tangibility that you won't get from popping a pill. It's kind of like the difference between muzak(tm) and Pink Floyd...sure, both are music, but only one is music.
Politics are a necessary evil for *any* group of people; after all, the political process is simply a means for resolving differences. In most technical organizations, the political structure is that of a theocracy (all worship Lord Ballmer, ohm...ohm...ohm...), an oligarchy (most companies, where the decisions are made by a select few at the top of the food chain), or a monarchy (where there is one chief who calls all the shots).
Politics really are everywhere, even if you don't want to recognize them as such.
I'm relieved to see that Debian is embracing a majoritarian democratic model, where the developers choose their leadership, instead of vice-versa, because it keeps Debian moving in the same direction as the community it serves. Furthermore, from what I've seen of the Debian political process, it really is quite civil compared to corporate infighting. After all, if you disagree with Debian, you're free to resign from the project; if you tick off your boss, you get to re-discover the joys of a college diet...
Slippery slope; it doesn't follow that the top-level name servers will just start "losing" undesirable domains. After all, look at the wealth of crap that just seems to keep existing in the ".com" namespace...
The technology to prevent you from having to reboot your computer daily can be found here and here. It's been around since the early 90's, and was invented by a grad student...
Last time I checked, weren't we more worried about chemicals like carbon *monoxide*, heavy metals, and other compounds that can't easily be dealt with by good 'ole-fashioned carbon-based lifeforms all too well?
And "enough fossil fuels"...right. This article reeks of propaganda.
Right, and I'm a murderer because I own thousands of/potential/ murder weapons. I'm also a thief, because I own tools that could/potentially/ be used to steal something.
Everything can be used for some illegal purpose. Everything. The problem lies not in the tool, but in the tool-user. Repeat that mantra until you figure it out.
In Google's case, all they are doing is making copies of content that has already been delivered into a public media; in this case, the Internet. It's the same as if I set up a camera to photograph one of the kiosks at my college that has all kinds of student-posted advertisements; if somebody asked me to remove one of them from my archive because they disagreed with it, I'd inform them of their rights to firearm-assisted self-sodomy, because I am merly making available information which is already public. Doubly so if I give the authors of the various ads and such credit for their work.
Google does give credit, and provides direct links to the pages-in-question in their cache; at no time do they claim the work as their own.
The onus for handling copyrighted information should be on the purveyor, not the consumer.
Re:what about the human side
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 2
They aren't using robots like TOBOR to replace nurses; human beings will likely always be involved in the medical process, up until the point where you can just throw yourself in a regeneration chamber for a few hours that'll cure anything from broken bones to colds to cancer and severed limbs (not too likely in the near future).
Robots like TOBOR do the busywork that every nurse hates to do; things like having to run down to the pharmacy to get something-or-other for patient X, while other, more important things (like being a nurse rather than a gopher) get to wait.
It's the same thing as having a DLT tape jukebox; sure, you could track those hundred-or-so DLT tapes by hand and swap them manually at 3am, but it's quite a bit easier to just let a robot arm do the work while you do more Quake^Wwork.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I know, most of the California state IT needs are filled by Windows machines, including this data center.
Just my $0.02.
I'll make this short, but sweet.
The United States was founded by people who believed in the public good. They set up commissions for public libraries and promotion of the arts, while at the same time granting inventors and authors the ability to profit from their works until they faded into the public domain. Our most hallowed documents, our most cherished music, even our national anthem come from the re-use of work written by authors and musicians a generation before.
Yet, the MPAA and the RIAA want to tell *me* that this is Unamerican. That my role in society is not as a citizen, or a voter, or a patriot -- but solely one as a consumer. Had this been the prevailing attitude in the late eighteenth century, there would be no Congress, no Senate, no President, no freedom; we would all be loyal subjects of the King, and Benjamin Franklin would be remembered as an eccentric intellectual imprisoned and executed for copyright violations.
I am not a consumer, or a "content provider", or a market statistic; I am a *citizen*. Please treat me like one.
Hey, moron, had you *read* the article, you would have noticed the following:
1. He said that he knows "security through obscurity" isn't the answer, but that his methods are so weak that he *knows* they won't stand under scrutiny; they just happen to be the best he's got at the moment. That's called good judgement.
2. You have no sense of humor.
3. His concerns are legitamite; Yahoo! is trying to provide services on the web, and people are *stealing* them. Yahoo! isn't screwing artists out of money, or exploiting third-world children, or screwing their customers; they just want people to engage in reputable transactions. That's how businesses make their money, and why you can spew crap from your personal computer.
Sheesh.
Personally, if I had to wait more than fifteen minutes on the phone, I'd fire a letter to Corporate headquarters, notifying them of my intent to cancel, sending it via registered mail, and have it authenticated by a notary public. If they bill me a second time, I'll do the same, and I'd ask the credit card company to mark the charges as fraudulent. Third time, I'd take them to court -- just for the sheer joy of it. After all, you've got three signed, dated, and authenticated letters, stretching over three months, showing good faith on your part, plus reciepts indicating proof-of-delivery. They'd likely settle out-of-court for a reasonable sum, and enough of these lawsuits might prompt the idiots to actually set up a reasonable cancellation method.
I used to work for EarthLink, so I can attest to the number of very frustrated customers who could never talk to the magical cancellation man...
You're a tool; how'd you like it if the following took place whilst filling up your car:
"Sure! C'mon, if you put our gas in your car, it's absolutely trivial to drain the fuel system and use non-protected gasoline; you'll just have to get that from...uh...er...somewhere else.
But there's no permanent damage or anything..."
You have *completely* ignored the previous post, and failed to offer a rebuttal.
Erm, let's start with a little inconsistancy:
"As for interaction, yes, certainly I interact with God, through prayer, through His direction in my life..."
The rest of that paragraph talks about how your god interacted with *you*; not how he influenced the rest of the world. The word "me" shows up quite a number of times in that paragraph; yet, in one slightly below it, you state:
"It is a grave error to hold a me-centric world view, as if everything in life, and your belief, revolve around you."
This is an obvious contradiction.
Secondly, your final response is the typical Fundie line when they lose an argument, that "all will be decided by God in the end," which is both a concession that I have won the debate (thanks), and an appeal to authority, all wrapped into one.
Your first point is a straw man, and as such, I won't bother arguing against it, as it's completely outside the realm of this discussion.
v e religion", actually. Most Christians pray to their sky pixie because they want something of value, either material or emotional. They only act the way they do about their sky pixie because they fear an imaginary hell, and long to go to an imaginary heaven. It's a classic punishment-reward system, except the reward comes *after* you die...and since nobody has come back to tell us about this great reward, I'd likely say it's just bollocks.
As to your second point, I believe I used the word "interact", not "observe", and you most certainly can interact with the wind. You feel it, because it moves the hairs on your skin, and because it can upset your balance if there's enough of it. That's why I used the word "interact", not "observe" -- because in order to "observe" something, you are really interacting with it -- whether it's the wind on your skin, or photons bouncing off of it into your eyeballs.
As per Xianity, from what I've seen, it's pretty much a "self-help-whatever-i-want-to-believe-i-can-belie
I mean, come on -- if your boss promised to pay you a billion dollars after you left the company if you agreed to work until you died, would you accept?
I think you are mistaking "imagination" for "perception"; your usage of the word indicates this. I can "imagine" all I want that an onrushing car isn't going to hit me, but up until the point of impact, my senses are going to be telling me what's going on -- if I stand there and "imagine" that I won't be harmed, then I'm just ignoring what I perceive -- grossly different from not perceiving it.
The problem is, your point is moot. Why? Because we are limited to dealing with what we can observe. If we can't interact with something in any way, shape, or form, then it effectively doesn't exist. Whether or not that something *really* exists is completely irrelevant, because there isn't any way to interact with it.
This makes your point moot, because the only "faith" would be that the universe is as we observe it, and it doesn't matter either way whether it is, or isn't, because from our point of view, it is.
You can argue about the existence of supernatural deities all you'd like, but until you can provide some type of evidence that they do, in fact, exist, then it is simply more logically to assume that they don't. Unless you want to argue that the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Boogie Man all exist as well, because there's just as much evidence to support them as there is to support God.
Do we know everything? No. Science still has much to discover, and there are many cases where we have to admit that we don't know. But just because there's a hole in our knowledge doesn't prove that there is some type of supernatural power; it just means that we don't know -- yet.
Similarly stated that a hole big enough for God is as much proof for his existence as a hole big enough for the Loch Ness Monster is proof for its existence (An anonymous source in alt.atheism).
Ah, yes, the Paley argument, defeated over a century ago; refuted thusly:
"Who created the creator, then?"
You see, if you want to state that every complex system has a creator, you must understand that that creator is, in and of itself, a compex system. Buildings are built by builders, which are incredibly complex organic machines. Therefore, by the same logic, the creator of the builder must be an even more complex system, which is itself built by a complex system, and so on ad absurdium.
It's much more plausable to simply assume that the Universe started as a point event (because that's what we can see), than to assume that some sky pixie designed everything (which we have *zero* real, as in non-anecdotal, evidence of).
Erm, if you were a school administrator, you could likely spell "tyrant".
Actually, I'm an atheist, so deities and such are about as "real" to me as Santa.
ObHubor: When I'm told that "God is Watching", I try to put on a good show, and since I figure that all the Christians are showing Him how pious they are, I prefer to liven things up with a striptease...
I think one of the biggest barriers to getting Linux installed at schools is the lack of software targeted at secondary-school teachers and students. I'm working on writing an open-source, Java-based gradebook application (still in initial stages, so there's no project homepage yet), and I'd really like to see people writing things like gradebooks, educational games, and the like.
In our district we have God control over our machines and dictate all hardware and network decisions, but even then have had to give some leeway on software installs for political issues.
;)
I prefer to take a more hands-on approach and use "root", rather than a third-party administration product of dubious reliability, scalability, and quality.
This looks to be an interesting challenge; I believe the entire idea is analyizing the binary (which is a program) without actually running the thing; then, designing methods to check for network activity and such that this particular binary would generate. In addition, you get bonus points for correctly quantifying the skill level of the coder who produced said binary.
It's much the same way as anaylizing a captured worm/virii; you need to figure out what it does, how to detect it, how to block/eradicate it, and also try and establish a profile of the originator of the worm/virii.
There is no need for DRM legislation; here's an analogy.
Jawalking is a crime, already punishable by a small fine, but thanks to a new type of nuclear-powered running shoes, it is a crime that has become more prevalent. Jaywalking hurts the companies that make the little pedestrian signals, and so they lobby to have a law put in place that will attach an explosive collar to the neck of anybody who uses sidewalks, such that only *legal* pedestrian crossings are used.
It's the same thing with the RIAA. They see their cash cow threatened (because MP3s and streaming radio give much more power to the musicians and the listeners than they do to the recording industry), and will lobby until the end of the earth to protect their business model. Sorry, but there is no "right to profitability", and if your customers are deserting you for an alternative, even a lower-quality one, you really should re-think your business model; not try and get the better one banned.
There's something incredibly cozy about having a cup of hot coffee or tea to sip on throughout the day, a sort of tangibility that you won't get from popping a pill. It's kind of like the difference between muzak(tm) and Pink Floyd...sure, both are music, but only one is music.
Politics are a necessary evil for *any* group of people; after all, the political process is simply a means for resolving differences. In most technical organizations, the political structure is that of a theocracy (all worship Lord Ballmer, ohm...ohm...ohm...), an oligarchy (most companies, where the decisions are made by a select few at the top of the food chain), or a monarchy (where there is one chief who calls all the shots).
Politics really are everywhere, even if you don't want to recognize them as such.
I'm relieved to see that Debian is embracing a majoritarian democratic model, where the developers choose their leadership, instead of vice-versa, because it keeps Debian moving in the same direction as the community it serves. Furthermore, from what I've seen of the Debian political process, it really is quite civil compared to corporate infighting. After all, if you disagree with Debian, you're free to resign from the project; if you tick off your boss, you get to re-discover the joys of a college diet...
Slippery slope; it doesn't follow that the top-level name servers will just start "losing" undesirable domains. After all, look at the wealth of crap that just seems to keep existing in the ".com" namespace...
The technology to prevent you from having to reboot your computer daily can be found here and here. It's been around since the early 90's, and was invented by a grad student...
Last time I checked, weren't we more worried about chemicals like carbon *monoxide*, heavy metals, and other compounds that can't easily be dealt with by good 'ole-fashioned carbon-based lifeforms all too well?
And "enough fossil fuels"...right. This article reeks of propaganda.
Right, and I'm a murderer because I own thousands of /potential/ murder weapons. I'm also a thief, because I own tools that could /potentially/ be used to steal something.
Everything can be used for some illegal purpose. Everything. The problem lies not in the tool, but in the tool-user. Repeat that mantra until you figure it out.
In Google's case, all they are doing is making copies of content that has already been delivered into a public media; in this case, the Internet. It's the same as if I set up a camera to photograph one of the kiosks at my college that has all kinds of student-posted advertisements; if somebody asked me to remove one of them from my archive because they disagreed with it, I'd inform them of their rights to firearm-assisted self-sodomy, because I am merly making available information which is already public. Doubly so if I give the authors of the various ads and such credit for their work.
Google does give credit, and provides direct links to the pages-in-question in their cache; at no time do they claim the work as their own.
The onus for handling copyrighted information should be on the purveyor, not the consumer.
They aren't using robots like TOBOR to replace nurses; human beings will likely always be involved in the medical process, up until the point where you can just throw yourself in a regeneration chamber for a few hours that'll cure anything from broken bones to colds to cancer and severed limbs (not too likely in the near future).
Robots like TOBOR do the busywork that every nurse hates to do; things like having to run down to the pharmacy to get something-or-other for patient X, while other, more important things (like being a nurse rather than a gopher) get to wait.
It's the same thing as having a DLT tape jukebox; sure, you could track those hundred-or-so DLT tapes by hand and swap them manually at 3am, but it's quite a bit easier to just let a robot arm do the work while you do more Quake^Wwork.
More like "Stick it in your Yahoo!", "Take it in the Yahoo!", or "Let's all crowd into your Yahoo!"...