Sorry, but this kind of dirty dealing in local governments happens all the time despite what the residents want. You often don't have a real choice in democratic systems because you don't know whether or not the person you elect is going to be corrupted until it's already too late. Don't forget also that many corrupt politicians get into office by claiming that they'll sweep out the current corruption in the system. Local and state governments are rife with this kind of moneygrubbing.
Heck, though this isn't the same issue, look at this year's presidential election. I wanted it to come down to ANYONE other than Bush and Gore. Now I'm stuck with no choice but to vote for one or to not vote. I can't even vote for Ralph Nader as an alternative because the Greens don't have enough signatures in my state to get on the ballot. Real democracy right there, huh? I guess it's all my fault, huh?
To get back on topic, this all comes down to tax revenue. Compare how much tax revenue the local and state governments got out of Silicon Valley before it became Silicon Valley to now. Just the property taxes alone are staggering. I mean 3 acres valued at several million dollars? That's just too much to avoid the temptation, it seems.
I understand that you too have problems with having to live in what Silicon Valley has become, but don't put the blame on the residents. As the previous poster pointed out, there wasn't a damn thing that could've been done. There are a variety of ways local governments can get out of Illegal Seizure of Property. The area I grew up in has a problem with the city annexing valuable county property left and right to gain the tax revenue. Landowners have tried to bring suit against the city, often because they are forced to pay taxes for the city schools when their kids go to the county schools (and now have to pay tuition as non-residents). It's completely bogus, and there's nothing that we can do about it.
Re:Anime is cartoon child porn
on
Tenchi Muyou 3?
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· Score: 2
Sigh.
Anime is not a genre purely intended for children. Anime is just another way of making films and TV shows in Japan. The genre ranges from kids shows to.. um.. definitely not for kids shows. While there are a number of rather sick movies that no one in Japan would think are appropriate for children, they are, by far, not the majority of what is on TV and in the rental stores.
It's also worth noting that the Japanese read comics, known as manga, well into adulthood. It's just another media to them, like TV and novels. I think you should do well to remember that the earliest cartoons in America weren't targetted to children at all. The creators of Bugs Bunny were targetting adults when they were making their cartoons, not kids.
However, the Japanese portrayals of violence are starkly different from American ones, and I believe this is related to the radically lower levels of violent crime in Japan. Violence in anime is often shown with the full context of its consequences. Murder is not censored as it is in America, because the Japanese choose to show what happens afterwards. It establishes just how far the villians are willing to go, and it shows the wreckage and ruinage that violence leaves in its path.
Maybe the Japanese can deal with this kind of disturbing imagery, but for us in the West this is nothing more than a primer for violence and rape [...]
Its funny you mention that since the rates of violent crime, rape, child molestation, and teen pregnancy in Japan are far, far lower than in America and even than in large parts of Europe. It seems that we're the ones doing things wrong, doesn't it?
You do realize what FUD actually mean, don't you? It means "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" and refers to the practice of a business attempting to cast Doubt on the viability of competitor's products by instilling Uncertainty that it can compete with theirs and Fear of making the mistake of switching to a probably doomed product.
This wasn't marketing nonsense. This was pointing out several deficient features in X11. Have you ever tried to program for X11 or looked through code that does? It is a HIDEOUS beast. X11 is nothing but hack upon hack upon hack upon what once was a neat minimalist 2nd generation graphics and user event handling system with network exportability.
X is a lot like DOS in a way. It's a very minimalist system designed to meet certain limited needs on limited hardware with little or no planning for future expansion. It was really a neat little solution in its day, but it has proven to be extremely inadequate in modern environments. Creating a X11 program is all about working around the system, not working with it. It's a lot like writing code for Windows -- working around DOS via the Win32 API, not with it.
Who says Apple Legal actually did anything. Ryan has pulled publicity stunts like this in the past where Apple supposedly requested information about future products be pulled down and no such product actually ever materializes. I think this is just another MOSR publicity stunt to attempt to give them veracity.
I used to read MOSR all the time, but I loose more and more respect for them everytime I hear about another one of Ryan's stunts. Mac rumors sites haven't had anything substantial since Jobs took the helm and clamped down on security. Since then, they've either shut down or started spewing nonsense. There are whole websites dedicated to debunking MOSR crap. They seem to have become inactive as the owners have gotten tired of pointing out the nonsense.
My favorite is still the live, secret streaming video feed they supposedly got from deep inside Apple's R&D labs. Riiiight.
It's funny you use the example of drug dealers when talking about trusted businesses. The only kinds of businesses which need to hide themselves from their customers and conduct business secretly are those that have something to hide, whether that be tax evasion or some other illegal dealings. Companies like Amazon.com and eBay will never have to use Fling. When you build a network dedicated to shady dealings, you're not going to have much in the way of people to trust.
1) In cases of fraud, you have no proof. After all, if the company is hiding the fact that it's conducting business to commit tax evasion, it's not going to be easy to find evidence that they cheated you.
2) SPAM. How can you stop, filter, or track down SPAM if you don't know where it's coming from?
Also, as you point out, hiding the actual internet transactions themselves isn't going to magically make the IRS not know you're in business. Your physical distribution channels, employee benefits paperwork, and building rent should give you away. I completely disagree with the anti-tax rhetoric he's spewing, but the protocol is dangerous to its own users in ways that he obviously can't see through his extremist world-view. His stance on hard-core pornography and children shows that he also actively refuses to acknowledge some of these problems. I'd love to see what his takes on SPAM and fraud are.
Maybe you should read this guy's horror story about Gnutella before you cheer the idea of Gnutella doing this. If you couldn't trace and track who was doing what, you couldn't retaliate against people blatantly breaking the law. Fling could be a spammer's heaven if it does what it seems to be saying it does -- protecting servers and clients from each other. If you can't know who's screwing with you, you can't know how to stop them.
Actually, I just hopped onto Gnutella for the first time tonight and ran into the problem with your name popping up everywhere. I thought you were just an annoying marketer since I don't get the kiddie porn bit as a result. Searching for "nonsense" gets me back " e-mail matt@steinhoff.net for nonsense" instead of a result for kiddie porn. Seems like you'd be getting even more e-mail harrasment if this is pointing at you for everything.
On a related note, you might want to contact the makers of ShareZilla. They claim to be selling software that intercepts Gnutella requests and responds with ads related to the search requests. Any search result I get back includes the above URL for their website. This product seems vile and frighteningly abusive enough in its own right, but it may be the tool that the scum ruining your name may be using. You may wish to inquire with them about that.
To be honest, though, I think Gnutella needs to be reworked or replaced if something like this or what happened to you can go on there. It sickens me to see this being done.
Have you considered trying to nail the bastitch under stalking or harrasment laws? How about libel or defamation if people searching for illicit materials are pointed your way? This jerk has to breaking several laws doing this. Forget civil litigation -- file criminal charges.
Part of the IEEE single-precision floating point standard. SIGFPE is the signal for a floating point execption. 0x7ff????? is either infinity if all the ?s are zeroes or not-a-number (NaN) if they are not. If forget what NaN is actually used for, but if any kind of calculation involves it as input, you'll get an exception. I believe a divide-by-zero operation will spit one out.
It's probably a Prisoner joke at any rate. "I am not a number, I am a human being!"
Not always. I still say "Serial Experiments Lain" is one of the finest DVD encodings, period. It all depends on how much effort a company is willing to put into it, and LD is more fool-proof in not having compression as an option, but I don't think it's worth the price in terms of the decay of the media. "Laser rot" is significantly less of a problem in the smaller, less flexible DVDs. The larger size of LDs just makes storage of them impractical for many people compared to DVDs.
I'll take the first LD of Evangelion over the first DVD of it any day, though. Gah. Whatta crappy, hacked-up transfer. DVD can be done right. It's just a matter of whether a company will do it or not.
Dubs sell more. Far more. Most of the US based anime companies revenue comes from dubbed vhs tapes that people buy on a whim.
This is why not all companies are completely abandoning VHS for dubs but are abandoning subtitles VHS. Bandai would be a good example. The Gundam Wing series is coming out on VHS only as dubs, but the subtitles are available on the DVDs (unlike Pokemon and Disney's half-baked, "we-wish-DiVX-had-won" attempts at making DVDs).
I just wish the standards for DVD had been settled first. Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis? The DVD-Video standard has been agreed on for years. The whole problem with the Matrix DVD is that it pushes the standard to the edge, and many players didn't implement all the features. It's kind of like bemoaning that web standards haven't been settled. The standards have been settled, it's just up to the vendors to stick up with them. By the way, don't get hopeful about the Matrix on a Mac. It's already established that Apple's DVD software won't handle it. I'm not very happy with Apple's DVD player as it has terrible problems with menus and selection of items is hideous sometimes. I've also seen it screw up where the mouse is supposed to be to select the buttons. (See the Trigun DVDs' picture galleries for an example.) The other concern I have, has to do with the japanese language. Don't worry. DVDs by actual anime houses (read not by Disney) actually have Japanese audio tracks. Some don't have English audio, but most do. Some also have Spanish, French, and other audio. It's funny to watch movies dubbed in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. Companies seem less inclined to lie with their subtitles (aka dubtitling) to match the dub when in Spanish.
Well, of course it's not perfect. In the news story itself, they mention that sites can block the archive entirely by blocking 'bots. Also, I doubt everytime it hits MP3.com it downloads every single song. However, the attempt is being made, and from the sound of the size of their archives, they're doing a darned good job of it. Also, these snapshots obviously can't be done in just a week or less. I'm guess each snapshot takes months. Bandwidth plus the time in writing to tape archive limits how fast they can do it. They probably miss all the little dynamic IP sites too. Oh well, at least an attempt is being made. As I pointed out in another post, hopefully they've managed to capture a bit of the Y2K histeria before all the sites were pulled down in embarrassment.
Well, what else is it going to be used for? Your suggestion that it be used as a reference on "the growth of communications techology" is rediculous - the growth of hate material and pornography on the web has no correlation with the growth of communications technology at all. This project is not getting a snapshot of web technology, it is getting a snapshot of web content, something entirely different.
Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology. Not to mention, the radical growth of the internet, in terms of number of sites and content on sites help document that. Plus, your view of what the content of the web actually is is rather stilted. Even if it wasn't, the vast amount of negative material is worth studying in it's own right.
Please demonstrate how believing in God and decent Christian morality is "factually wrong". I doubt you can.
<offtopicrant> Please show how your condenscending and arrogant attitude reflects a life led by Christ. It's jerks like you who give the rest of us a bad name. Did he anywhere indicate that he was talking about Christiantiy? Anywhere? Or was he just responding to your blanket assertion that you were persecuted for your views, which in no place specified Christianity.
Instead, you assumed he did, or were attempting to sidetrack the issue to make yourself look like the oppressed religious minority. This kind of behavior is what disgusts others. When people look at me, they see someone like you -- an arrogant, bigoted ass who sees the entire world as filled with evil sinners out to get them. It makes me sick. </offtopicrant>
My point is, if you read my post, that this is not a good thing given the exlusive access to the net by a certain portion of society. Would you consider how a society lived through records of its nobility?
Um.. Let me think. YES!! That's how historians have had to do it for ages. Should we ignore early American politics because it too was primarly run by white, middle-aged landowners? You must attempt to look at all elements of a society to see how the framework fits together. If the web is a rich WASP playground, like you assert, then it's worth studying why exactly this is. Just because one particular class was behind a major force of societal change doesn't make it not worth studying. This kind of PC "1984" style of thought would have us ignore all of our history for the goals of delluding ourselves into thinking we're perfect. Well, we're not. Get over it, and start trying to figure out why. Just because America was led by white landowners early on doesn't mean we should've ignored history to know where we are now. Similarly, we should not ignore the current Internet so that future generations will know how they got to where they will be.
P.S. Sort your HTML tags out.
Finally, the prima facie evidence of a troll. Someone you picks at the formatting rather than the content of the person they disagree with. The guy obviously accidentally selected the "Extrans" option, which I too have accidentally done before in the past thinking that it would do the opposite. Besides, you should really preview and check your spelling before being so harsh. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Well I suppose that the sheer amount of perversion and degredation available on the net at this point in history will provide a lot of interest to future historians, so in that context sure it'll be "historically interesting"!
You just don't get it, do you? Should historians gloss over the Holocaust, the Reconstruction, and the Dark Ages simply because they were "icky?" Sometimes the darker elements of society are the most worth examining in a historical context. The whole point of the saying about those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it isn't that you should study only the good points and avoid them.
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture.
Do you think it's not just as frustrating to shuffle through archives of old 19th century newspapers to find ads and articles about the medicine of the day? The point that the man speaking for the Internet Archive was making is that this is not a study of only the famous. With these archives at hand, you can study the transition from the early days of research papers to the rise of pornography and personal websites to the current days of e-commerce to whatever major social trend the web next holds. An archive of the web shows how society has adapted to the format. You can see what issues were hot enough to spur crops of websites only to fade away in the span of a year or two.
Face the music that the majority of humanity isn't putting out "insightful" commentary. Ignoring the common man is a mistake that many historians simply can't ignore because there's nothing available about them. All the "mindless" Geocities sites give an insight into the kind of people that use them.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
Sounds like you're the one with the hardly balanced view of society if you honestly think that is what the majority of the web is. The fact is that the majority of the web currently is commercial sites and those "mindless" Geocities sites you like to talk down about. Though there are some bad elements on the web, it's also worth historical note that the web led to the coming out of many of these fringe groups. The very anarchy and rebellion of the web is of major historical interest, and the web is becoming one of the more important socio-economic influences of the turn of the century, at least in America.
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Ah, but it will be. Say in 30 years you want to do some research on the Y2K histeria of the turn of the century. While there will be plenty of books to read through, a major factor in spreading the word about Y2K was the Web. However, these web sites are already mostly gone from the Web today. Fortunately, the Internet Archive may have already preserved them for future study.
Would you like to study the rise of Linux or of the web itself? Many of the early web pages about the topics could provide priceless research. Hell, even if you really object to the large amount of pornography, the booming porn industry on the web was a major driving factor in advances in e-commerce. It would also be valuable in studying the "warez" counter-culture of today.
Plus, like it or not, it's not for you to say. This is being done by a privately funded group. If you really feel so strongly that the web is worthless and should absolutely not be archived for historical purposes, then go torch the place. While you're at it, go ahead and start burning those libraries that hold material about history you object to. Otherwise, your choices are "shut up" and "like it."
Of course they're just babbling about games. As megalomaniacal as MS can get sometimes, even they know they couldn't really get away with becoming a full-fledged PC vendor too during the DOJ trial. Just wait until X-Box comes out. We'll see keyboard and mouse peripherals and non-game software following in no time.
Hello? McFly? Mac models since the G3s have had video cards in them. My PowerMac G4 has an AGP 2X card doing its video. I think even iMacs have replaceable video cards inside, though I could be wrong. Can anyone else confirm that?
On top of that, it has nothing to do with the length or quality of the song. I listen to video game music a lot. The Final Fantasy Tactics OSV is 81 songs on 2 CDs. Many of them are very short since most video game music loops. Even at ridiculous shipping and import costs on top of the higher costs of Japanese CDs, it wasn't close to $81. On the other hand, the techno remix CD "Seiken Densetsu 2: Secret of Mana+" is one 49 minute track. That's $1 for the entire CD. I'd advocate pricing the songs by file size. That is, song length and encoding quality both factored in. (BTW, I did get all these songs on Napster first, and I did actually buy the CDs afterwards. The only thing that stops me from buying all of my collection is the fact that a good bit of it is out-of-print. So, nyeah. I'm not a hypocrite anymore.)
This is even more annoying when you didn't mean to click on a porn site, and now all your browser auto-completion at work results in the URL of one of the 50 or so sites that were accessed in the process of trying to close all the windows down.
...not that I'm saying this kind of thing happens when goofing off and looking for MP3s. <grin>
This has not been in standard Navigator. You can turn on/off Javascript globally, but not on a permanent per-site basis. If you try out Mozilla, you can see this feature already in use for cookies. Set your browser to ask first about whether to accept a cookie, and you'll get a prompt about whether or not to accept a cookie from a site. There will be a checkbox about whether or not to remember this decision for the future. This determines the behavior for all cookies from that server for the future.
This means you can always accept cookies from Slashdot or your favorite web retailer, but never accept cookies from DoubleClick or the advertising monster of the day. Having the ability to do this with Javascript too would be wonderful. There are a number of add banners that use Java and Javascript that screw with my browser that I'd love to be able to say good-bye to forever.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers.
I think you're missing the point that he's making. Developers aren't the only customers. RMS's little tidbits about how the Mac community has a problem because they focus too much on the end-user is what angered a number of Mac developers for whom the end-user is all important. Coding for developers encourages you to take the lazy mindset, "It was hard for me to code, and it should be hard for you to use."
Lack of competition in Open Source?
Again with the missing of the point. He was saying that OSS doesn't really have live-or-die competition. If you have enough of a devoted niche following, your little program can live forever without a need for usability improvements to attract new users. Your followers are experts from the early days and don't need such "candy-coating." Even if you give it up, they could let it continue. This is a weakness as well as a major strength.
You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers!
I'll just mention that the shell will still be available for Unix diehards. You can use it in the same way you currently seem to be using it, in a big, resource-hogging GUI session. I just hope it doesn't encourage lazy programmers to force normal users to drop down to it like UNIX commonly does.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
Consistency is necessary for quick workflow and ease of learning. When you make someone a newbie everytime they sit down at or new machine or make them waste time fiddling with controls until it becomes useable for them, you have stolen productivity from them. Your emphasis on the chrome of your system shows how much you focus on the style and not the substance of good HCI. Of course, you're a UNIX guy, not a Mac guy.
A good UI should let the user carry their knowledge of one app over to another. This is why consistency is a good and necessary thing. The obsession with "theming" in modern Linux apps shows how little the developers understand about getting the HCI right the first time. Spray painting a rotting chocolate cake brown doesn't make it fresh and edible. If the core functionality is screwed up, no amount of tying bows and ribbons around it is going to make it good.
Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it.
Now we're back at the original author's point. The idea that the Open Source model applies to everything is false. A system founded on principles of good HCI can't really work with a hundred conflicting egos ignoring one another and breaking all consistency. Good HCI requires good centralized software engineering. Since most OSS projects started out as hacks, there has been little recognition of the value of good software engineering in the OSS world. Mac developers recognize it and don't want to be told to give it up.
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Sorry, but this kind of dirty dealing in local governments happens all the time despite what the residents want. You often don't have a real choice in democratic systems because you don't know whether or not the person you elect is going to be corrupted until it's already too late. Don't forget also that many corrupt politicians get into office by claiming that they'll sweep out the current corruption in the system. Local and state governments are rife with this kind of moneygrubbing.
Heck, though this isn't the same issue, look at this year's presidential election. I wanted it to come down to ANYONE other than Bush and Gore. Now I'm stuck with no choice but to vote for one or to not vote. I can't even vote for Ralph Nader as an alternative because the Greens don't have enough signatures in my state to get on the ballot. Real democracy right there, huh? I guess it's all my fault, huh?
To get back on topic, this all comes down to tax revenue. Compare how much tax revenue the local and state governments got out of Silicon Valley before it became Silicon Valley to now. Just the property taxes alone are staggering. I mean 3 acres valued at several million dollars? That's just too much to avoid the temptation, it seems.
I understand that you too have problems with having to live in what Silicon Valley has become, but don't put the blame on the residents. As the previous poster pointed out, there wasn't a damn thing that could've been done. There are a variety of ways local governments can get out of Illegal Seizure of Property. The area I grew up in has a problem with the city annexing valuable county property left and right to gain the tax revenue. Landowners have tried to bring suit against the city, often because they are forced to pay taxes for the city schools when their kids go to the county schools (and now have to pay tuition as non-residents). It's completely bogus, and there's nothing that we can do about it.
1) Inheritance Tax 2) Property Tax
Sigh.
Anime is not a genre purely intended for children. Anime is just another way of making films and TV shows in Japan. The genre ranges from kids shows to.. um.. definitely not for kids shows. While there are a number of rather sick movies that no one in Japan would think are appropriate for children, they are, by far, not the majority of what is on TV and in the rental stores.
It's also worth noting that the Japanese read comics, known as manga, well into adulthood. It's just another media to them, like TV and novels. I think you should do well to remember that the earliest cartoons in America weren't targetted to children at all. The creators of Bugs Bunny were targetting adults when they were making their cartoons, not kids.
However, the Japanese portrayals of violence are starkly different from American ones, and I believe this is related to the radically lower levels of violent crime in Japan. Violence in anime is often shown with the full context of its consequences. Murder is not censored as it is in America, because the Japanese choose to show what happens afterwards. It establishes just how far the villians are willing to go, and it shows the wreckage and ruinage that violence leaves in its path.
Maybe the Japanese can deal with this kind of disturbing imagery, but for us in the West this is nothing more than a primer for violence and rape [...]
Its funny you mention that since the rates of violent crime, rape, child molestation, and teen pregnancy in Japan are far, far lower than in America and even than in large parts of Europe. It seems that we're the ones doing things wrong, doesn't it?
You do realize what FUD actually mean, don't you? It means "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" and refers to the practice of a business attempting to cast Doubt on the viability of competitor's products by instilling Uncertainty that it can compete with theirs and Fear of making the mistake of switching to a probably doomed product.
This wasn't marketing nonsense. This was pointing out several deficient features in X11. Have you ever tried to program for X11 or looked through code that does? It is a HIDEOUS beast. X11 is nothing but hack upon hack upon hack upon what once was a neat minimalist 2nd generation graphics and user event handling system with network exportability.
X is a lot like DOS in a way. It's a very minimalist system designed to meet certain limited needs on limited hardware with little or no planning for future expansion. It was really a neat little solution in its day, but it has proven to be extremely inadequate in modern environments. Creating a X11 program is all about working around the system, not working with it. It's a lot like writing code for Windows -- working around DOS via the Win32 API, not with it.
You can already buy half-electric cars [...]
You do realize that they still run on gasoline, right?
Who says Apple Legal actually did anything. Ryan has pulled publicity stunts like this in the past where Apple supposedly requested information about future products be pulled down and no such product actually ever materializes. I think this is just another MOSR publicity stunt to attempt to give them veracity.
I used to read MOSR all the time, but I loose more and more respect for them everytime I hear about another one of Ryan's stunts. Mac rumors sites haven't had anything substantial since Jobs took the helm and clamped down on security. Since then, they've either shut down or started spewing nonsense. There are whole websites dedicated to debunking MOSR crap. They seem to have become inactive as the owners have gotten tired of pointing out the nonsense.
My favorite is still the live, secret streaming video feed they supposedly got from deep inside Apple's R&D labs. Riiiight.
It's funny you use the example of drug dealers when talking about trusted businesses. The only kinds of businesses which need to hide themselves from their customers and conduct business secretly are those that have something to hide, whether that be tax evasion or some other illegal dealings. Companies like Amazon.com and eBay will never have to use Fling. When you build a network dedicated to shady dealings, you're not going to have much in the way of people to trust.
Some more:
1) In cases of fraud, you have no proof. After all, if the company is hiding the fact that it's conducting business to commit tax evasion, it's not going to be easy to find evidence that they cheated you.
2) SPAM. How can you stop, filter, or track down SPAM if you don't know where it's coming from?
Also, as you point out, hiding the actual internet transactions themselves isn't going to magically make the IRS not know you're in business. Your physical distribution channels, employee benefits paperwork, and building rent should give you away. I completely disagree with the anti-tax rhetoric he's spewing, but the protocol is dangerous to its own users in ways that he obviously can't see through his extremist world-view. His stance on hard-core pornography and children shows that he also actively refuses to acknowledge some of these problems. I'd love to see what his takes on SPAM and fraud are.
Maybe you should read this guy's horror story about Gnutella before you cheer the idea of Gnutella doing this. If you couldn't trace and track who was doing what, you couldn't retaliate against people blatantly breaking the law. Fling could be a spammer's heaven if it does what it seems to be saying it does -- protecting servers and clients from each other. If you can't know who's screwing with you, you can't know how to stop them.
Actually, I just hopped onto Gnutella for the first time tonight and ran into the problem with your name popping up everywhere. I thought you were just an annoying marketer since I don't get the kiddie porn bit as a result. Searching for "nonsense" gets me back " e-mail matt@steinhoff.net for nonsense" instead of a result for kiddie porn. Seems like you'd be getting even more e-mail harrasment if this is pointing at you for everything.
On a related note, you might want to contact the makers of ShareZilla. They claim to be selling software that intercepts Gnutella requests and responds with ads related to the search requests. Any search result I get back includes the above URL for their website. This product seems vile and frighteningly abusive enough in its own right, but it may be the tool that the scum ruining your name may be using. You may wish to inquire with them about that.
To be honest, though, I think Gnutella needs to be reworked or replaced if something like this or what happened to you can go on there. It sickens me to see this being done.
Have you considered trying to nail the bastitch under stalking or harrasment laws? How about libel or defamation if people searching for illicit materials are pointed your way? This jerk has to breaking several laws doing this. Forget civil litigation -- file criminal charges.
Part of the IEEE single-precision floating point standard. SIGFPE is the signal for a floating point execption. 0x7ff????? is either infinity if all the ?s are zeroes or not-a-number (NaN) if they are not. If forget what NaN is actually used for, but if any kind of calculation involves it as input, you'll get an exception. I believe a divide-by-zero operation will spit one out.
It's probably a Prisoner joke at any rate. "I am not a number, I am a human being!"
Not always. I still say "Serial Experiments Lain" is one of the finest DVD encodings, period. It all depends on how much effort a company is willing to put into it, and LD is more fool-proof in not having compression as an option, but I don't think it's worth the price in terms of the decay of the media. "Laser rot" is significantly less of a problem in the smaller, less flexible DVDs. The larger size of LDs just makes storage of them impractical for many people compared to DVDs.
I'll take the first LD of Evangelion over the first DVD of it any day, though. Gah. Whatta crappy, hacked-up transfer. DVD can be done right. It's just a matter of whether a company will do it or not.
Dubs sell more. Far more. Most of the US based anime companies revenue comes from dubbed vhs tapes that people buy on a whim.
This is why not all companies are completely abandoning VHS for dubs but are abandoning subtitles VHS. Bandai would be a good example. The Gundam Wing series is coming out on VHS only as dubs, but the subtitles are available on the DVDs (unlike Pokemon and Disney's half-baked, "we-wish-DiVX-had-won" attempts at making DVDs).
I just wish the standards for DVD had been settled first. Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis? The DVD-Video standard has been agreed on for years. The whole problem with the Matrix DVD is that it pushes the standard to the edge, and many players didn't implement all the features. It's kind of like bemoaning that web standards haven't been settled. The standards have been settled, it's just up to the vendors to stick up with them. By the way, don't get hopeful about the Matrix on a Mac. It's already established that Apple's DVD software won't handle it. I'm not very happy with Apple's DVD player as it has terrible problems with menus and selection of items is hideous sometimes. I've also seen it screw up where the mouse is supposed to be to select the buttons. (See the Trigun DVDs' picture galleries for an example.) The other concern I have, has to do with the japanese language. Don't worry. DVDs by actual anime houses (read not by Disney) actually have Japanese audio tracks. Some don't have English audio, but most do. Some also have Spanish, French, and other audio. It's funny to watch movies dubbed in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. Companies seem less inclined to lie with their subtitles (aka dubtitling) to match the dub when in Spanish.
That was me. I just forgot that after previewing, you lose your login if you don't have cookies on.
Well, of course it's not perfect. In the news story itself, they mention that sites can block the archive entirely by blocking 'bots. Also, I doubt everytime it hits MP3.com it downloads every single song. However, the attempt is being made, and from the sound of the size of their archives, they're doing a darned good job of it. Also, these snapshots obviously can't be done in just a week or less. I'm guess each snapshot takes months. Bandwidth plus the time in writing to tape archive limits how fast they can do it. They probably miss all the little dynamic IP sites too. Oh well, at least an attempt is being made. As I pointed out in another post, hopefully they've managed to capture a bit of the Y2K histeria before all the sites were pulled down in embarrassment.
Well, what else is it going to be used for? Your suggestion that it be used as a reference on "the growth of communications techology" is rediculous - the growth of hate material and pornography on the web has no correlation with the growth of communications technology at all. This project is not getting a snapshot of web technology, it is getting a snapshot of web content, something entirely different.
Much of the content of the web relates to the growth of communications technology. You are limiting yourself severely if you are only thinking of the raw bandwidth connections. The growth of use of non-textual content, multimedia, and scripting languages and applets are all advances in communications technology. Not to mention, the radical growth of the internet, in terms of number of sites and content on sites help document that. Plus, your view of what the content of the web actually is is rather stilted. Even if it wasn't, the vast amount of negative material is worth studying in it's own right.
Please demonstrate how believing in God and decent Christian morality is "factually wrong". I doubt you can.
<offtopicrant>
Please show how your condenscending and arrogant attitude reflects a life led by Christ. It's jerks like you who give the rest of us a bad name. Did he anywhere indicate that he was talking about Christiantiy? Anywhere? Or was he just responding to your blanket assertion that you were persecuted for your views, which in no place specified Christianity.
Instead, you assumed he did, or were attempting to sidetrack the issue to make yourself look like the oppressed religious minority. This kind of behavior is what disgusts others. When people look at me, they see someone like you -- an arrogant, bigoted ass who sees the entire world as filled with evil sinners out to get them. It makes me sick.
</offtopicrant>
My point is, if you read my post, that this is not a good thing given the exlusive access to the net by a certain portion of society. Would you consider how a society lived through records of its nobility?
Um.. Let me think. YES!! That's how historians have had to do it for ages. Should we ignore early American politics because it too was primarly run by white, middle-aged landowners? You must attempt to look at all elements of a society to see how the framework fits together. If the web is a rich WASP playground, like you assert, then it's worth studying why exactly this is. Just because one particular class was behind a major force of societal change doesn't make it not worth studying. This kind of PC "1984" style of thought would have us ignore all of our history for the goals of delluding ourselves into thinking we're perfect. Well, we're not. Get over it, and start trying to figure out why. Just because America was led by white landowners early on doesn't mean we should've ignored history to know where we are now. Similarly, we should not ignore the current Internet so that future generations will know how they got to where they will be.
P.S. Sort your HTML tags out.
Finally, the prima facie evidence of a troll. Someone you picks at the formatting rather than the content of the person they disagree with. The guy obviously accidentally selected the "Extrans" option, which I too have accidentally done before in the past thinking that it would do the opposite. Besides, you should really preview and check your spelling before being so harsh. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Well I suppose that the sheer amount of perversion and degredation available on the net at this point in history will provide a lot of interest to future historians, so in that context sure it'll be "historically interesting"!
You just don't get it, do you? Should historians gloss over the Holocaust, the Reconstruction, and the Dark Ages simply because they were "icky?" Sometimes the darker elements of society are the most worth examining in a historical context. The whole point of the saying about those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it isn't that you should study only the good points and avoid them.
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture.
Do you think it's not just as frustrating to shuffle through archives of old 19th century newspapers to find ads and articles about the medicine of the day? The point that the man speaking for the Internet Archive was making is that this is not a study of only the famous. With these archives at hand, you can study the transition from the early days of research papers to the rise of pornography and personal websites to the current days of e-commerce to whatever major social trend the web next holds. An archive of the web shows how society has adapted to the format. You can see what issues were hot enough to spur crops of websites only to fade away in the span of a year or two.
Face the music that the majority of humanity isn't putting out "insightful" commentary. Ignoring the common man is a mistake that many historians simply can't ignore because there's nothing available about them. All the "mindless" Geocities sites give an insight into the kind of people that use them.
Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
Sounds like you're the one with the hardly balanced view of society if you honestly think that is what the majority of the web is. The fact is that the majority of the web currently is commercial sites and those "mindless" Geocities sites you like to talk down about. Though there are some bad elements on the web, it's also worth historical note that the web led to the coming out of many of these fringe groups. The very anarchy and rebellion of the web is of major historical interest, and the web is becoming one of the more important socio-economic influences of the turn of the century, at least in America.
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Ah, but it will be. Say in 30 years you want to do some research on the Y2K histeria of the turn of the century. While there will be plenty of books to read through, a major factor in spreading the word about Y2K was the Web. However, these web sites are already mostly gone from the Web today. Fortunately, the Internet Archive may have already preserved them for future study.
Would you like to study the rise of Linux or of the web itself? Many of the early web pages about the topics could provide priceless research. Hell, even if you really object to the large amount of pornography, the booming porn industry on the web was a major driving factor in advances in e-commerce. It would also be valuable in studying the "warez" counter-culture of today.
Plus, like it or not, it's not for you to say. This is being done by a privately funded group. If you really feel so strongly that the web is worthless and should absolutely not be archived for historical purposes, then go torch the place. While you're at it, go ahead and start burning those libraries that hold material about history you object to. Otherwise, your choices are "shut up" and "like it."
Of course they're just babbling about games. As megalomaniacal as MS can get sometimes, even they know they couldn't really get away with becoming a full-fledged PC vendor too during the DOJ trial. Just wait until X-Box comes out. We'll see keyboard and mouse peripherals and non-game software following in no time.
Hello? McFly? Mac models since the G3s have had video cards in them. My PowerMac G4 has an AGP 2X card doing its video. I think even iMacs have replaceable video cards inside, though I could be wrong. Can anyone else confirm that?
Whooooops... Wrong thread.
On top of that, it has nothing to do with the length or quality of the song. I listen to video game music a lot. The Final Fantasy Tactics OSV is 81 songs on 2 CDs. Many of them are very short since most video game music loops. Even at ridiculous shipping and import costs on top of the higher costs of Japanese CDs, it wasn't close to $81. On the other hand, the techno remix CD "Seiken Densetsu 2: Secret of Mana+" is one 49 minute track. That's $1 for the entire CD. I'd advocate pricing the songs by file size. That is, song length and encoding quality both factored in. (BTW, I did get all these songs on Napster first, and I did actually buy the CDs afterwards. The only thing that stops me from buying all of my collection is the fact that a good bit of it is out-of-print. So, nyeah. I'm not a hypocrite anymore.)
This is even more annoying when you didn't mean to click on a porn site, and now all your browser auto-completion at work results in the URL of one of the 50 or so sites that were accessed in the process of trying to close all the windows down.
...not that I'm saying this kind of thing happens when goofing off and looking for MP3s. <grin>
This has not been in standard Navigator. You can turn on/off Javascript globally, but not on a permanent per-site basis. If you try out Mozilla, you can see this feature already in use for cookies. Set your browser to ask first about whether to accept a cookie, and you'll get a prompt about whether or not to accept a cookie from a site. There will be a checkbox about whether or not to remember this decision for the future. This determines the behavior for all cookies from that server for the future.
This means you can always accept cookies from Slashdot or your favorite web retailer, but never accept cookies from DoubleClick or the advertising monster of the day. Having the ability to do this with Javascript too would be wonderful. There are a number of add banners that use Java and Javascript that screw with my browser that I'd love to be able to say good-bye to forever.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers.
I think you're missing the point that he's making. Developers aren't the only customers. RMS's little tidbits about how the Mac community has a problem because they focus too much on the end-user is what angered a number of Mac developers for whom the end-user is all important. Coding for developers encourages you to take the lazy mindset, "It was hard for me to code, and it should be hard for you to use."
Lack of competition in Open Source?
Again with the missing of the point. He was saying that OSS doesn't really have live-or-die competition. If you have enough of a devoted niche following, your little program can live forever without a need for usability improvements to attract new users. Your followers are experts from the early days and don't need such "candy-coating." Even if you give it up, they could let it continue. This is a weakness as well as a major strength.
You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers!
I'll just mention that the shell will still be available for Unix diehards. You can use it in the same way you currently seem to be using it, in a big, resource-hogging GUI session. I just hope it doesn't encourage lazy programmers to force normal users to drop down to it like UNIX commonly does.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
Consistency is necessary for quick workflow and ease of learning. When you make someone a newbie everytime they sit down at or new machine or make them waste time fiddling with controls until it becomes useable for them, you have stolen productivity from them. Your emphasis on the chrome of your system shows how much you focus on the style and not the substance of good HCI. Of course, you're a UNIX guy, not a Mac guy.
A good UI should let the user carry their knowledge of one app over to another. This is why consistency is a good and necessary thing. The obsession with "theming" in modern Linux apps shows how little the developers understand about getting the HCI right the first time. Spray painting a rotting chocolate cake brown doesn't make it fresh and edible. If the core functionality is screwed up, no amount of tying bows and ribbons around it is going to make it good.
Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it.
Now we're back at the original author's point. The idea that the Open Source model applies to everything is false. A system founded on principles of good HCI can't really work with a hundred conflicting egos ignoring one another and breaking all consistency. Good HCI requires good centralized software engineering. Since most OSS projects started out as hacks, there has been little recognition of the value of good software engineering in the OSS world. Mac developers recognize it and don't want to be told to give it up.