That's not quite so. Swedish passports do not contain fingerprints, and Sweden is supposedly excluded, though some newspapers have reported that citizens from excluded countries are also randomly having their rights violated in this way.
For a government to verify identity by means of passport examination is one thing. To keep personal, biometric data on file, however, is entirely different and something that most governments should not consider doing to their own citizens. Should other countries really accept that the U.S. government has more data on their citizens than those other countries themselves?
No invasion of privacy? Bull! If you really think so, please go down to your local precinct and volunteer to have your fingerprint taken so that you may be examined as a potential suspect in criminal investigations.
Making sure people who are on the planes are who they say they are -- bull! Against what database will this be verified? It's trying to please the public by making sure they can see the government keeps tabs on "those damn foreigners".
If it weren't for the credibility issues of such campaigns, I could see a lot of pop-up ads for Mozilla: "If you were using Mozilla, this window wouldn't be here to annoy you."
You are absolutely correct, and this was the reasoning behind the explicit exclusion of protection for CSS (as an example) in the Swedish statute intended to comply with the EUCD. Sadly, that was about the only reasonably thing in that dreadful document (and yes, I pretty much read it all).
What you appear to be missing is that, unlike voluntary assumption of risk (of which this case is not an example), contributory negligence, at least by Australian standards (and most likely U.S. standards too, since both are Common Law countries), is not an absolute and complete defence.
Now, I do not have all the facts of this case, but the common procedure would be to award damages for the tort of negligence and then assessing the claimant's degree of contributory negligence to establish an appropriate apportionment.
While the alleged facts you put forth are certainly likely to have contributed to the damages sustained by the plaintiff, those damages would not have been as severe but for the breach of duty of care that the defendant committed.
To strike the down the case, you must prove, on the balance of probabilities, that there was no duty of care owed (i.e. the coffee could have been literally boiling or contain acid); or that that duty of care was not breached (i.e. a sensible person would not reasonably foresee the plausibility of someone getting burned by near-boiling coffee under any circumstances); or that the plaintiff voluntarily waived her rights to complaint upon purchase of the coffee (something that courts are reluctant to take into account even with proper waiver-forms at hand).
There is more to it, but you should get the point by now. If not, take an introductory law course. They are usually surprisingly interesting!
Fair enough. I was only going by the word of Andrew Tanenbaum, but I may have been misled. The Wikipedia article you point to does state that while developed in the '40s, it was not published until 1972, which would indicate to me that his influence was more retroactive than evolutionary, and many would say his design was vastly different from anything used today, but you appear to be not only persistent about his relevance but also rather well read, so I'll leave it at that.
I realise after reading your initial post that you were not trying to belittle von Neumann's efforts, which I for some reason inferred and which was the reason for my reply. I can't help but thinking, though, that pissing contests of who thought of what first are rather futile, and we would all have to recognise that all inventions are products of zeitgeist and prior works, which is why there are always multiple claimants surfacing for the various Nobel prize categories, for example. In the end, they were all geniuses and pioneers and have my utmost respect, and ranking their importance seems a silly task. This just happened to be the birthday of von Neumann and not one of the others (as far as I know).
You will notice I did not include Zuse in the list of originators whose architectures required altering of the hardware, but his works are historically irrelevant for other reasons.
As for Turing, mea culpa for including him in the list, although he was primarily concerned with computing theory rather than the specific architectural designs required to perform such computation, as other posts have stated. Also, a large portion of his work was kept from influencing the evolution of computing by the secrecy surrounding the COLOSSUS and other British government and military projects, which is not to say that he had no influence at all.
Perhaps one could say that while Turing was the father of modern computing (as he conceived the idea), von Neumann was (forgive me!) the mother, giving birth to the actual physical structure, to a great extent influenced by Turing's work.
And with that, Slashdot metaphors have reached a new low.
It appears you overlooked the modern modifier. While Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Atanasoff, Turing, Aiken, Eckert, and Mauchley (to drop just a few names) were all pioneers in their own right, their programs were strictly hardware-implemented. To alter the program sequence, the machine had to be modified. The von Neumann machine was the first stored-program computer to use the memory-control unit-ALU with accumulator design still used today (Wilkes created the first stored-program computer with the EDSAC three years earlier), and thus revolutionized computing, turning it into what it is today, hence father of modern computing.
Zuse's work was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin conducted by the Allies in 1944, so while certainly a pioneer, he cannot, unfortunately, be regarded in any way the father of computing as we know it today.
Automatic filtering and even surveillance is not about taking responsibility; it's about enforcement of rules. Law enforcement already takes care of that part. Those of us who say parents need to take more responsibility don't want another layer of enforcement. We want parents to do what only parents can do.
It is precisely the negligent tactic of caring about your own duties under the law before caring about your child's well-being that is the cause of so many problems.
If you have an open discussion with trust, integrity, and mutual respect, then your child will come to you crying or asking for advice the first time they encounter something that may frighten or confuse them. If you filter and forbid, they will keep it to themselves for fear of being accused of having broken the rules. Take your pick.
Firstly, you better be ready to look your daughter straight in the eyes and tell her that your main reason for not allowing her a computer with Internet access is that you do not trust her not to commit a crime. Alternatively, if you decide that your primary reason is that you do not owe it to her, eliminate all provisions but the bare minimum required by law, and do not confuse excuses with reasons. Respect demands honesty.
Secondly, in the name of fairness and consistency, I hope that you have considered all other contexts in which she could commit a crime, and that you have similarly eliminated any such avenues of action on her behalf until she has reached an arbitrary age of your choosing (rather than having displayed an appropriate level of maturity), if that's the way you want to go. Respect demands consistency.
Thirdly, a computer does not have to be connected to the internet. I had a 286 without Internet access when i was 8. At that time, that was enough to put me ahead. Today, any kid that does not get to use a computer daily and freely until they are a teenager will be hopelessly behind their peers. Respect demands sensibility.
Fourthly, realise that if you teach your daughter that she is not trustworthy, she will not care about becoming trustworthy. Respect demands respect.
hopefully by the time the fear of getting caught is no longer present, they will have grown up enough to realize why the rules were there in the first place
Do you honestly believe that growing up will just magically occur? Your job as a parent is not to temporarily instill fear in your children until they have lived for 6575 days, at which point they will have by law become mature. Your job is to guide, aid and support them in learning that maturity.
You have taken the first step by realising that your need to control is a coping mechanism for your own insecurities. Do your kids a favour and realise that they will mold into what you teach them, not what you tell them. If you are insecure, you will teach insecurity. Let go, take some risks, and gain confidence as you see you can really trust them, and they will gain confidence in knowing they can trust themselves. Isn't that what you really want?
Re:Oh don't kid yourself. There's tons of MS zealo
on
Security FUD On Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yes, there are plenty of those, but not expressed as a fraction of the MS user base, and rather than promoting Windows, they are defending it. That alone should speak volumes.
I had a feeling that was the case, but just as you observed, some people sincerely hold the opinion that you voiced ironically, which is why I (somewhat humourlessly) decided to kill the party with the reasons such statements are absurd.
People favour the things they favour. That should hardly be surprising.
The interesting question is why, given its relative user base, is Linux favoured so strongly by so many?
I hear very little subjective promotion of Microsoft (except where subjective == for profit), especially given its large user base (I hear a lot of complaints from their users, though). Isn't the relative intensity of voluntary, subjective lauding of software an assessment as objective as any at the end of the day?
While I agree there are moral implications beyond the law (law != morality is one of the first things you learn in legal units), you analogy is somewhat flawed in that buying drugs is an offence (depending on substance and jurisdiction) mainly because of the harm it causes to the user. I've yet to hear of anyone suffering chronic psychosis from listening to illicitly copied MP3s (though I could probably see it happening with some of today's more popular artists)...
So set up a system whereby companies running nuclear power plants have to deposit a decommissioning bond, or something similar. I'm pretty sure it would still be lucrative enough to be commercially interesting.
Throwing your hands up because some companies abuse a poorly designed system is reason to criticise the laws, not the technologies. At least with nuclear power, pollution can be contained, whereas dirty fossil fuel burning ruins the air for the whole world.
With proper technologies and policies, nuclear power is pretty darn safe. Contrast this with fossil fuel energy, where we the worst-case scenario is the default scenario.
You're not way off. You're not spot-on either. Fact is, you make your own choices, and that's a good thing. Personally, I prefer KDE, but I probably know as many, if not more, people who use the Gnome. (This could be because most geeks I know, I know through Uni, which insists on the Gnome, though switching to KDE is a matter of issuing a single command.
My reasons for KDE are first and foremost its configurability. I can set shortcut keys in any native KDE application and for the system as a whole to do what I want it to do. I find that the integration is slightly better for the things that I use, but that all depends on what you do use and what your priorities are.
You'll hear a lot of people flaming KDE. The thing I hear most often is that it is too Windows-like. My response to this is that you can configure it to act very much like a number of different environments, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing, especially given that Windows have made a few sane user interface design decisions (though they have also made some really poor ones in later years, and the underlying structure is helplessly flawed).
A lot of the bucketings that KDE cops are due to experiences with earlier versions, and indeed they were pretty sad, but some Gnome-users that have seen my setup of KDE have been impressed to the point where they went ahead and downloaded it. It really has come a long way, and I'm amazed to see the rate at which it has been improving just over the last few months.
I sincerely have to wonder what said transparency looks like given GIF's said inability to do any form of anti-aliasing, but perhaps you can enlighten me with a link so I can see for myself? (Reportedly, IE's implementation does actually support most GIF-style single-transparency indexed PNGs.)
If you're worried about download size for dialup users (and good on you for that), please tell me you at least use PNGs rather than GIFs for graphics with continuous areas of single colours!
Finally and admittedly, for photos, JPEG still is king most of the time, but you can achieve good results if you know what you are doing and don't use Photoshop. For optimising PNGs, use ImageReady and/or pngcrush (regardless of the type of image you are saving/converting). Really, though, other than filesize (at least in some cases) and the appeal of having one image format to rule them all (almost, as it only covers static pixel graphics), there is much less reason to phase out JPEGs than there is to phase out GIFs.
While we're on the topic of monitors, did anyone notice the one used in their setup?
Call me picky, but I find it slightly, mildly, completely insane to spend big bucks on the kickassest system you can afford and then hook what looks to me like a plain vanilla monitor (I looked around the article to see if I could find any comments on it, but a horribly slow server and broken up article means I didn't RTwholeFA.) Not to shit on Iiyama (which I believe that is), but there are a few better options, and I'll have to agree with you on the TFT issue. In fact, I love the 15" 1400x1050 screen on my Asus L3800C notebook so much, I don't even find a use for an external monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite so. Swedish passports do not contain fingerprints, and Sweden is supposedly excluded, though some newspapers have reported that citizens from excluded countries are also randomly having their rights violated in this way.
Does anyone recall the little fact that none of the September 11 hijackers traveled under a false identity?
For a government to verify identity by means of passport examination is one thing. To keep personal, biometric data on file, however, is entirely different and something that most governments should not consider doing to their own citizens. Should other countries really accept that the U.S. government has more data on their citizens than those other countries themselves?
No invasion of privacy? Bull! If you really think so, please go down to your local precinct and volunteer to have your fingerprint taken so that you may be examined as a potential suspect in criminal investigations.
Making sure people who are on the planes are who they say they are -- bull! Against what database will this be verified? It's trying to please the public by making sure they can see the government keeps tabs on "those damn foreigners".
If it weren't for the credibility issues of such campaigns, I could see a lot of pop-up ads for Mozilla: "If you were using Mozilla, this window wouldn't be here to annoy you."
You are absolutely correct, and this was the reasoning behind the explicit exclusion of protection for CSS (as an example) in the Swedish statute intended to comply with the EUCD. Sadly, that was about the only reasonably thing in that dreadful document (and yes, I pretty much read it all).
Viggen is Swedish for the tufted duck (Fuligula cristata).
What you appear to be missing is that, unlike voluntary assumption of risk (of which this case is not an example), contributory negligence, at least by Australian standards (and most likely U.S. standards too, since both are Common Law countries), is not an absolute and complete defence.
Now, I do not have all the facts of this case, but the common procedure would be to award damages for the tort of negligence and then assessing the claimant's degree of contributory negligence to establish an appropriate apportionment.
While the alleged facts you put forth are certainly likely to have contributed to the damages sustained by the plaintiff, those damages would not have been as severe but for the breach of duty of care that the defendant committed.
To strike the down the case, you must prove, on the balance of probabilities, that there was no duty of care owed (i.e. the coffee could have been literally boiling or contain acid); or that that duty of care was not breached (i.e. a sensible person would not reasonably foresee the plausibility of someone getting burned by near-boiling coffee under any circumstances); or that the plaintiff voluntarily waived her rights to complaint upon purchase of the coffee (something that courts are reluctant to take into account even with proper waiver-forms at hand).
There is more to it, but you should get the point by now. If not, take an introductory law course. They are usually surprisingly interesting!
Fair enough. I was only going by the word of Andrew Tanenbaum, but I may have been misled. The Wikipedia article you point to does state that while developed in the '40s, it was not published until 1972, which would indicate to me that his influence was more retroactive than evolutionary, and many would say his design was vastly different from anything used today, but you appear to be not only persistent about his relevance but also rather well read, so I'll leave it at that.
I realise after reading your initial post that you were not trying to belittle von Neumann's efforts, which I for some reason inferred and which was the reason for my reply. I can't help but thinking, though, that pissing contests of who thought of what first are rather futile, and we would all have to recognise that all inventions are products of zeitgeist and prior works, which is why there are always multiple claimants surfacing for the various Nobel prize categories, for example. In the end, they were all geniuses and pioneers and have my utmost respect, and ranking their importance seems a silly task. This just happened to be the birthday of von Neumann and not one of the others (as far as I know).
You will notice I did not include Zuse in the list of originators whose architectures required altering of the hardware, but his works are historically irrelevant for other reasons.
As for Turing, mea culpa for including him in the list, although he was primarily concerned with computing theory rather than the specific architectural designs required to perform such computation, as other posts have stated. Also, a large portion of his work was kept from influencing the evolution of computing by the secrecy surrounding the COLOSSUS and other British government and military projects, which is not to say that he had no influence at all.
Perhaps one could say that while Turing was the father of modern computing (as he conceived the idea), von Neumann was (forgive me!) the mother, giving birth to the actual physical structure, to a great extent influenced by Turing's work.
And with that, Slashdot metaphors have reached a new low.
It appears you overlooked the modern modifier. While Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Atanasoff, Turing, Aiken, Eckert, and Mauchley (to drop just a few names) were all pioneers in their own right, their programs were strictly hardware-implemented. To alter the program sequence, the machine had to be modified. The von Neumann machine was the first stored-program computer to use the memory-control unit-ALU with accumulator design still used today (Wilkes created the first stored-program computer with the EDSAC three years earlier), and thus revolutionized computing, turning it into what it is today, hence father of modern computing.
Zuse's work was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin conducted by the Allies in 1944, so while certainly a pioneer, he cannot, unfortunately, be regarded in any way the father of computing as we know it today.
CNET is owned by Paul Allen's Vulcan Northwest. Paul Allen has a 5% stake in Microsoft.
Tin foil, get your tin foil!
Could something like this [Google HTML cache of PDF] be what you are looking for?
Automatic filtering and even surveillance is not about taking responsibility; it's about enforcement of rules. Law enforcement already takes care of that part. Those of us who say parents need to take more responsibility don't want another layer of enforcement. We want parents to do what only parents can do.
It is precisely the negligent tactic of caring about your own duties under the law before caring about your child's well-being that is the cause of so many problems.
If you have an open discussion with trust, integrity, and mutual respect, then your child will come to you crying or asking for advice the first time they encounter something that may frighten or confuse them. If you filter and forbid, they will keep it to themselves for fear of being accused of having broken the rules. Take your pick.
Firstly, you better be ready to look your daughter straight in the eyes and tell her that your main reason for not allowing her a computer with Internet access is that you do not trust her not to commit a crime. Alternatively, if you decide that your primary reason is that you do not owe it to her, eliminate all provisions but the bare minimum required by law, and do not confuse excuses with reasons. Respect demands honesty.
Secondly, in the name of fairness and consistency, I hope that you have considered all other contexts in which she could commit a crime, and that you have similarly eliminated any such avenues of action on her behalf until she has reached an arbitrary age of your choosing (rather than having displayed an appropriate level of maturity), if that's the way you want to go. Respect demands consistency.
Thirdly, a computer does not have to be connected to the internet. I had a 286 without Internet access when i was 8. At that time, that was enough to put me ahead. Today, any kid that does not get to use a computer daily and freely until they are a teenager will be hopelessly behind their peers. Respect demands sensibility.
Fourthly, realise that if you teach your daughter that she is not trustworthy, she will not care about becoming trustworthy. Respect demands respect.
Do you honestly believe that growing up will just magically occur? Your job as a parent is not to temporarily instill fear in your children until they have lived for 6575 days, at which point they will have by law become mature. Your job is to guide, aid and support them in learning that maturity.
You have taken the first step by realising that your need to control is a coping mechanism for your own insecurities. Do your kids a favour and realise that they will mold into what you teach them, not what you tell them. If you are insecure, you will teach insecurity. Let go, take some risks, and gain confidence as you see you can really trust them, and they will gain confidence in knowing they can trust themselves. Isn't that what you really want?
Yes, there are plenty of those, but not expressed as a fraction of the MS user base, and rather than promoting Windows, they are defending it. That alone should speak volumes.
I had a feeling that was the case, but just as you observed, some people sincerely hold the opinion that you voiced ironically, which is why I (somewhat humourlessly) decided to kill the party with the reasons such statements are absurd.
People favour the things they favour. That should hardly be surprising.
The interesting question is why, given its relative user base, is Linux favoured so strongly by so many?
I hear very little subjective promotion of Microsoft (except where subjective == for profit), especially given its large user base (I hear a lot of complaints from their users, though). Isn't the relative intensity of voluntary, subjective lauding of software an assessment as objective as any at the end of the day?
Well, the phrase having links to terrorist organisations keeps popping up as a vague but severely incriminating description in the media.
Are you speaking normatively here or do you have knowledge of the Australian law applicable in this case?
While I agree there are moral implications beyond the law (law != morality is one of the first things you learn in legal units), you analogy is somewhat flawed in that buying drugs is an offence (depending on substance and jurisdiction) mainly because of the harm it causes to the user. I've yet to hear of anyone suffering chronic psychosis from listening to illicitly copied MP3s (though I could probably see it happening with some of today's more popular artists)...
So set up a system whereby companies running nuclear power plants have to deposit a decommissioning bond, or something similar. I'm pretty sure it would still be lucrative enough to be commercially interesting.
Throwing your hands up because some companies abuse a poorly designed system is reason to criticise the laws, not the technologies. At least with nuclear power, pollution can be contained, whereas dirty fossil fuel burning ruins the air for the whole world.
With proper technologies and policies, nuclear power is pretty darn safe. Contrast this with fossil fuel energy, where we the worst-case scenario is the default scenario.
You're not way off. You're not spot-on either. Fact is, you make your own choices, and that's a good thing. Personally, I prefer KDE, but I probably know as many, if not more, people who use the Gnome. (This could be because most geeks I know, I know through Uni, which insists on the Gnome, though switching to KDE is a matter of issuing a single command.
My reasons for KDE are first and foremost its configurability. I can set shortcut keys in any native KDE application and for the system as a whole to do what I want it to do. I find that the integration is slightly better for the things that I use, but that all depends on what you do use and what your priorities are.
You'll hear a lot of people flaming KDE. The thing I hear most often is that it is too Windows-like. My response to this is that you can configure it to act very much like a number of different environments, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing, especially given that Windows have made a few sane user interface design decisions (though they have also made some really poor ones in later years, and the underlying structure is helplessly flawed).
A lot of the bucketings that KDE cops are due to experiences with earlier versions, and indeed they were pretty sad, but some Gnome-users that have seen my setup of KDE have been impressed to the point where they went ahead and downloaded it. It really has come a long way, and I'm amazed to see the rate at which it has been improving just over the last few months.
So Kongratulations to KDE. Have some Kake.
I sincerely have to wonder what said transparency looks like given GIF's said inability to do any form of anti-aliasing, but perhaps you can enlighten me with a link so I can see for myself? (Reportedly, IE's implementation does actually support most GIF-style single-transparency indexed PNGs.)
If you're worried about download size for dialup users (and good on you for that), please tell me you at least use PNGs rather than GIFs for graphics with continuous areas of single colours!
Finally and admittedly, for photos, JPEG still is king most of the time, but you can achieve good results if you know what you are doing and don't use Photoshop. For optimising PNGs, use ImageReady and/or pngcrush (regardless of the type of image you are saving/converting). Really, though, other than filesize (at least in some cases) and the appeal of having one image format to rule them all (almost, as it only covers static pixel graphics), there is much less reason to phase out JPEGs than there is to phase out GIFs.
While we're on the topic of monitors, did anyone notice the one used in their setup?
Call me picky, but I find it slightly, mildly, completely insane to spend big bucks on the kickassest system you can afford and then hook what looks to me like a plain vanilla monitor (I looked around the article to see if I could find any comments on it, but a horribly slow server and broken up article means I didn't RTwholeFA.) Not to shit on Iiyama (which I believe that is), but there are a few better options, and I'll have to agree with you on the TFT issue. In fact, I love the 15" 1400x1050 screen on my Asus L3800C notebook so much, I don't even find a use for an external monitor.