When I installed Suse 6.2 on my mother's p60, w/32Mb ram and an 8gig hd, we did the install and did not have to bother with Xwin. Mom went and just bought the cds in an effort to keep her little aging computer useful. I had to dig up the driver for the video card which is about 6 years old, maybe older. I configured it when I had time about a week or so later. It took some extra time and was less intuitive, but it is up and running rather well. Some time even later, I did the PPP configuration using yast, which was remarkably simple. Now what I have to do is get the Netscape version that is on there to load.jpg files correctly. Does any one have any ideas what could be fouling that up?
I know women are often hard to find if you don't do the dance scene or go bar hopping. Not doing either of those things is sometimes an extremely good thing. As one of the female geeks that is always on the lookout for decent girls to introduce to my male friends, i have found Roblimo's, our "pimp of slashdot", comments to actually be resonably accurate. Now, i may take issue with him on the subject of dating geek girls, but he is right in that for a lot of people, geek girls would be a bad match. (My bf who is watching me type this says "Especially if there is only one working computer.) Places to start meeting girls: 1. Classes other people can consider hard, or even better, a good old fashioned literature or fine arts class. 2. Work, I don't usually recommend dating coworkers, but if you can find a cute little secretary or accountant in another department that you don't really relate to, you could have a wonderful time. 3. Gasp, Sports, a lot of women like to go out and play sports. If you join the company softball team, you could meet that quiet pretty little thing from another department or another commpany and just hit it right off. 4. Coffee houses are the new bars in a manner of speaking for a lot of younger people. I don't know how lucky you would get, but at least the coffee is good 5. Church, I know i said an unheard of word as far as some people are concerned, but going to your local house of worship is often a very good place to find funny and entertaining women. There is something to be said for being active in your religion of choice. 6. Actually let one of your friends set you up on a date, you may only allow this once depending on your friend's taste. Lastly, I think just going out and being social in the evening instead of planting yourself in front of a computer monitor helps. Now, I am very guilty of being stuck in front of a computer monitor for large periods of time, so i am not accuseing anyone. As a geeky girl, I hope these sugestions help 'cause these are the places where you will find my non-geeky friends.
Oh, you mean like a large portion of the readers on here? Telos is a masculin word from the Greek language, but it does not make me any less feminin for using it. There are quite a few women that actually do USE linux. Most of us also have these little things called jobs, lives, and kids to prevent us from doing a lot of programming. Just think about your image of women aged 20 to 40. By age 30 most of them have toddlers at least. Kids make taking time out of the day to program really difficult. Then there is actually keeping on top of work and social activities that you all seem to want us to do. There are only so many hours in the day. Any and all women programmers should be lauded for their efforts and their time management to be able to contribute.
Just putting it in perspective here. And, yes, I do know many men are active caregivers for their children, so no offense is intended to anyone.
The answers to your first two questions are no and no. Those photographs do not constitute child pronography because a.) you were not put in a sexually compromissing possition, b.) they were not taken with the intent to distribute for the purposes of sexual arrousal. Now, on the topic of your third question, at no point in time would those pictures be considered pornographic because they were taken for medical reasons. It is analogous to taking a photograph of a naked corpse. No one is goig to get aroused over that unless there is something seriously wrong with them. This case is not about documentation vs. pornography, it is about a person who may or may not be guilty of trying to suduce some one below the age of consent in every state in the Union. For the record, I know girls that were sexually mature at the age of 10. Sexual maturity just means that the girl is menstrating, it has nothing to do with emotional and intelectual maturity. The fine line between pornography and ordinary photography is only difficult to distinguish near the border of art. What is art? What is just meant to get a rise out of the viewer? The reasonable question is: Can you spot a photograph intended to arouse? Most people can. It is a judgement call in court when presented with photographic evidence as to what is and what isn't. The rule of thumb is: if it is questionable and has underage people in it, it is. If the people in it are all above the age of 18, the legal age where you can sign a contract, then there is no case.
Just so you don't accidentally mislead some one: the age of Consent in New Mexico is 16. No one really bothers with this law there, but that is the law and if you are over 18 you sure give it some thought. They might not proscecute you if you are under 18, I don't know, I did not try to find out.
Re:ComEd, Y2k ... It's the End Of The World (not)
on
9/9/99: News? Nein!
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· Score: 1
I am going to make this a quick one. I work for a small bank. We have been y2k ready since last April. Every other bank in the country has as well. The US congress decided to step in and so we have had bout 7 y2k audits, up from 3 that were planned, and have about three more to go.
The bank Atm machines will work so long as there is electrcity. We have done everything humanly possible to test this.
There will be no funny business with your accounts. Everything you can do now with your account you will be able to do on Jan. 01, 2000. We know how to bank without computers. As humans we have only done that for a few thousand years. So, you clearly don't need to clean out your accounts.
The only thing that may not function propperly come y2k with relation to your finances are POS systems. (Point of sale for those of you in the real world.) So do keep some extra cash on hand just in case.
The reason for this is that not every merchant has a real up to date system. That individual card reader for the merchant may fail, but over all, you won't even notice it. I would anticipate any gliches with the POS systems to clear up in a day or two after Jan. 1.
Hey, just so you know, he actually has tried a few different systems. Before I lost internet access at work the system was completely different. I believe it has gone through at least three incarnations since then and that was back in April I think.
and you have my email so bug me there if you want to discuss it Signal11
As a person that often moderates when I am allowed to I can tell you that the restrictions on the moderators are already quite strict. I did not moderate the comments to the specific article that drew up this discussion because I personally could not stomach wasting all of my moderation points on trying to get all of the inflamatory posts marked down. I also could not read the entire thing or deal with what I was seeing. Now, as far as giving moderators the ability to use their combined points to delete a post, I can tell you that it would almost never happen. I get somewhere around five moderation points for fifty comments last I checked, you know I am not going to waste them trying to get some one deleted when I see an comment that actually makes a point. I do look for insightful comments that have been underrated. I also read all of the comments, including the ones that have already received a score or -1 to see if that score is fair or not. Most every one else I know of that has gotten to be a moderator on some occasion does this as well. When the whole moderators thing started, I was one of the people to pester our friend Rob about setting up some guidelines. Since then I got busy and was not able to post or read articles. I have since returned and read the guidelines which are quite well thought out. I think if any one person has tried to use the moderation system in ways not desired by Mr. Malda and his cohorts (as in trying to get people riled up through blatant bias) they would have difficulty doing that. If you read the guidelines they will basically tell you the way the system is set up the actual moderators have very little power, it is only as a group that they have any control over things here. If I wanted to stir up trouble here, I would write up a post, not moderate. Writting wreaks much more havoc than reading and making a simple discerment of value. Also, I think CmrdTaco, Hemos, John Kats, and the rest do know how to set up their email to ignore matters from certain people that would try to mailbomb them for having their comment deleted or otherwise make a pain out of themselves. They have been managing this site for years so I do think they know how to handle themselves with J. Q. Public and Harison Troll. I personally will volenteer right here and now to be the one to delete obviously inflamatory posts. You all know the ones, they read "F*ck Canada", "God Hates Fags", "Die Bill Gates, Die!" and the like. When a post is clearly derogatory toward one person or a group of people without anything otherwise of merit, it is a waste of your time and mine to read. These posts are usually quite rare so I would not mind taking the heat for it. Any one that actually knows me knows that I value actual thought above most anything else around, so I would do the deleting if they would let me. Rather than deleting the post, I would personally put it in the hall of shame. A rubish bin icon that you can click on and read all of the posts that made it there through people that took the time and wasted the moderator points to get it off of the thread. That way the post would be availible, but the writter would have to just deal with it.
Basically, that is what the article said. It seemed to me like a nice little random code in the neural networking of this little toy. What the article actually said was that the "dog" was presented with a ball and chose not to play with it.
According the WSJ article on it this morning, it has no voice recognition software. I has an open archetecture so it is upgradable once the upgrades become availible. It can play with toys, but it does so when it feels like it. It also does tricks, like it waved to the reporters in the unveiling. If you want, i will look up more information on it tonight. What i want to know is when will the source be ported to linux and who wants to write the upgrades?
Bandwidth may be expensive, but you can do a lot more with it then with a tape. At least in my case, MP3s are the only way my music gets recorded. My tape recorder does not work near as well as my computer.;) Maybe one day i will even post my MP3 files on a web site instead of email on demand when i actually have new stuffle.
One of the world's most wonderful poets has died. He wrote many things that meant a lot to many different people. He will be missed.
When I was just starting third grade, I was one of the very few students that could not read. The "see dick run, run dick run" books had not quite worked for me. I just could not grasp the see and say method of reading. I cannot do phonics in the English language to this day. I could woo my teachers into believing in my intelligence through my extensive vocabulary and my musical ability, but I could not read more than three words in a row consistantly. Spelling tests were my nightmare.
Our teachers read to us every day, either a poem or a chapter from a children's novel. I loved to listen to the poems from Where the Sidewalk End's or the delicious tales by Roal Dahl in his novellas. I could not read, but it was not for a lack of wanting. My mother read to me at night. I read the OZ books through the sound of her voice, a chapter a night. I could draw, I could speak, and I could sing well ahead of my peers, but they could read.
One day, I decided that I wanted my mother to read a book by Beverly Cleary to me. It was mid-afternoon. My mother had other things that she need to get done, so she told me no. Being stong-willed, I decided that I was going to try to read it myself even though I knew only a few words on sight. Curled up on the couch in the sunlight, I started to get comfortable so that I could try to read the book.
With painful slowness, I silently played with each typed word untill I knew what it was. If I did not know the word at all, I figured it out from the context. At some point in this ardous endevour, something a little bizzare happened. I stopped seeing the words on the page or even hearing the sounds of the sylables. The meter and the letters, everything on the page was gone. All that was left, all that was really necessary, came forth to me as images in my mind. A complete realm flowed forth from this book. I understood in silence, what it meant to read.
I could not prove that I had discovered the secret to most people. I still could not, and honestly to this day cannot, read aloud without faltering and stuttering through the words on the page. I would skip articles and prepositions when asked to read. I still have to ask someone else how to pronounce a word if it is not familliar to me. I do not know phonics, but I do know meanings.
From that day on, I read everything that I could. I needed to catch up to my peers in school. I discovered just how much fun reading can truely be after I finished that 250 or so page book and took up the book that every single person in my class loved to read out of during our playtime. I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends. I learned meter and time. I also learned the exceptions to the grammatical rules we were taught.
I loved those books more then anything. They were written with little children in mind filled with the good humor of the gross and disgusting stuff. I read from it all of the time. Through those poems, I learned to read and be able to say the words on the pages. It is still very difficult for me, but with out them, I would never have been able to do it at all.
Just think, Microsoft NT crashes and the world gets nuked. Most actually highly classified work gets done on computers with removable hard drives that get locked up in a skiff at night. Can you imagine if one of them went down? Then the aliens would be furious!;)
Actually, I am very clear on what constitues a signature in both the electronic and real worlds. Now, I think you need to remember that any encoding that man can make, man can break. The real idea in theft prevention is not to make the theft impossible but to make it be so time consuming that it is not worth it. It is still possible to defeat any security measure. The best way is known as the inside job. Do you really want to risk it?
I hate to tell you this, but werdna is correct about the modern day legalities of signitures.
First thing in the morning every day at the bank I work for, I check the signitures and account numbers on the dormant account activity checks. This review includes both deposits and withdrawls. It is actually a bit difficult to decern an imposter on one of these tickets. It has been my experience that a good forgery will get by the vast majority of people.
I would ordinarilly include myself in a generalization like that, but in this case that is not true. A friend of mine introduced me to the mishmash that is hand writting analysis. While the accuracy of hand writting analysis in the field of psychology may be bunk (I have yet to decide), it does teach you to look for certain characteristics in the letters. It is little things like "does the letter "o" have a stroke through it?" that make the difference. You really need at least 10 characteristics in the letters to match before you can be comfortable signing off on the ticket. To the trained eye, these traits are very easy to spot.
Now, I have to make sure that my bank is doing what it is supposed to in its work with the federal government on a day to day basis. I can tell you right here and now that our Chief Financial Officer would not accept just a signature as the conclusion of a deal. I like our CFO and I like my job, but common sense is the best asset around in any job. It is like you don't breath in Chlorine gas.
I really don't care for some ecommerce ideas for the simple reason that some things have exorbant shipping costs. This on the other hand, this idea scares me. I like the annonimity of the internet. I can go anywhere under my 4 names and no one can connect that to a face or a business. While people do actually call me telosphilos or telos in the real world out there, they are not the same people that I work with every day. Those people that know me online are not my flesh and blood familly, but they are the best of friends. My boyfriend even calls me by my nickname. Yet, I am very protective of my financial information. I am also very careful to keep any actuall pictures of me off the internet. (There are two out there, but they include facepaint and night Figment hunting (long story).)
I do not have a lot of money, but I work with large sums each day. As part of the customer services, we try to teach people how to protect themselves from con artists and your basic scams. Some are fairly simple like shielding your pin number from view when you use your atm card or not giving out credit card numbers in chat rooms. Some are vastly more complicated, preventing the real code warriors with a financial hole they want to fill from breaking into banking-on-line systems.
The big issue that I can see with this idea is that it can be taken too far and lead to very real finanicial risks involving banks, trusts, credit unions, and brokerage houses. In making the electronic signatures a legal signature, you open the door to a lot of problems like theft of the signature and signature duplication. Say you had $5,000.00 in a money market account, using a good bit of computer know how, another person gets your signature and basic account information (account number, ammount in there, the usual). Bet you dollars to donuts, that computer cluebie can find a way to fool the bank employee on the other side of the terminal into handing over the money.
You see, at some time we have to account for human error. It is also very easy to have human error occur on account of fraud. Most financial types really do not know computers or computer security. Computer people generally have better things to do then learn how to make up little slips of paper tracking where all of the money in the bank is. So, what do you get? You get some one that maybe has figured out that a mouse is a periferal authorizing a con job on an account in his first week at the bank. There, your account just went from $5,000.00 to zero.
Just think about it, it can mess up all sorts of financial deals. Would you like it if your paycheck which more likely then not goes through an automated clearing house was missing about $50.00 in income taxes over the course of six months due to an error on your account and the IRS not only caught it, but chose to audit you and your company? This is the sort of thing that can happen.
It is food for thought. Anyways, it is getting late and I am tired of ranting. Thank you for your time.
It is about time that the internet based comic strip got the recognition of a print deal. Illiad's work has a fresh humor about it that actually engages the sense of humor of informed people and the general populace.
May he sell a hundred thousand copies in the first week. Now, where can I put my order in for one?
Check out the programs at your local junior college. There are certification programs that exisit within the realm of programing. Here, I, an accountant, am half way there for a network administration certification and a third of the way there for a programing certification. Yet, I am still not the person you want to hack code.
Considering that, I don't put much stock in "certified" programers. Oh yeah, and don't for get about the MSCS' out there either.
Actually, you are likely correct. My reading on the company in the Wall Street Jornal and other business realated news type stuffle seems to indicate that you are very much in the right. (irc)
Surprisingly, the WSJ actually treats M$ and Linux fairly in their articles on par. On of the little things in there seems to indicate that the programmers from m$ may actually be looking to bail from the company if they can find another one that is stable and likely to stay solvent. The key there is that m$ is remarkable for it's toeing of the line in the legalities of it's method of competing with other companies. The way m$ competes it by trying to make the tool as simple to use as a hammer, so that the end user thinks that everything is just a nail. An end user that has become accostumed to this then cannot easily transition over to another system. It takes time to learn a system and given the choice, most people want to just know one (and not very well at that) and save their precious time.
Thus, through the use of much simplified user enviroments like win95 and winNT, m$ has a captive audience. It is not too great a stretch then to believe that the company has decided to try to force upgrades onto this audience. This audience really cannot afford a work stoppage. If you were to look in the want adds of any large city newspaper, you would notice that among the secretarial pool and the general office staff the most common need is for some one that is competent in the windows 95/NT user environment and is capable of really manouvering in Office 97.
You sure that they are not trying to make us all use the next variation on NT?
From a financial standpoint they really want to phase out windows as an os altogether because they make more on the NT licencing fees then they do on any Win ** version out there. Therefore, I expect them to try and push for us to all convert over to an NT system. (that and they can get the info and invade privacy even easier on the NT systems)
The ability to sell the information from ppls systems is a temptation, but is unlikely from m$ as I do not believe they want to face that class action law suit. What is much more likely in the end game is: Win95 is so broke it is not economical to fix it. The cost of trying to find all of the bugs in man hours is such that they would have to eat their profits. Show me a company that wants to do that and I will show you one that is going out of business.
as if i was not easy enough to identify as some insane/.er you can say hi to my office too. now won't my boss be happy about the security breach?! this will prevent several banks from doing online banking for a good while once the top brass find out about it. so much for e comerce. stuff like that is what keep a lot of companies off of the internet in the first place. if intel really wanted to sell the idea of the internet and their chips as business sales tools then the really should take a few clues from the financial world and do their damnedest to keep security and privacy specs up to date.
you know, that is just all i need.. as if it was not easy enough to spot a red dress and lapel pin insignia..
if you don't look at the fnords, they won't eat you.
Slashdot Mirror
When I installed Suse 6.2 on my mother's p60, w/32Mb ram and an 8gig hd, we did the install and did not have to bother with Xwin. Mom went and just bought the cds in an effort to keep her little aging computer useful. I had to dig up the driver for the video card which is about 6 years old, maybe older. I configured it when I had time about a week or so later. It took some extra time and was less intuitive, but it is up and running rather well.
Some time even later, I did the PPP configuration using yast, which was remarkably simple. Now what I have to do is get the Netscape version that is on there to load
> Go, little devils, go!
That'd be BSD instead of Linux, right? *snicker*
Just thought I'd quip that with ya.
(Not quite the telkitty, her bf instead)
-Rae
I know women are often hard to find if you don't do the dance scene or go bar hopping. Not doing either of those things is sometimes an extremely good thing. As one of the female geeks that is always on the lookout for decent girls to introduce to my male friends, i have found Roblimo's, our "pimp of slashdot", comments to actually be resonably accurate. Now, i may take issue with him on the subject of dating geek girls, but he is right in that for a lot of people, geek girls would be a bad match. (My bf who is watching me type this says "Especially if there is only one working computer.) Places to start meeting girls: 1. Classes other people can consider hard, or even better, a good old fashioned literature or fine arts class. 2. Work, I don't usually recommend dating coworkers, but if you can find a cute little secretary or accountant in another department that you don't really relate to, you could have a wonderful time. 3. Gasp, Sports, a lot of women like to go out and play sports. If you join the company softball team, you could meet that quiet pretty little thing from another department or another commpany and just hit it right off. 4. Coffee houses are the new bars in a manner of speaking for a lot of younger people. I don't know how lucky you would get, but at least the coffee is good 5. Church, I know i said an unheard of word as far as some people are concerned, but going to your local house of worship is often a very good place to find funny and entertaining women. There is something to be said for being active in your religion of choice. 6. Actually let one of your friends set you up on a date, you may only allow this once depending on your friend's taste. Lastly, I think just going out and being social in the evening instead of planting yourself in front of a computer monitor helps. Now, I am very guilty of being stuck in front of a computer monitor for large periods of time, so i am not accuseing anyone. As a geeky girl, I hope these sugestions help 'cause these are the places where you will find my non-geeky friends.
Oh, you mean like a large portion of the readers on here? Telos is a masculin word from the Greek language, but it does not make me any less feminin for using it.
There are quite a few women that actually do USE linux. Most of us also have these little things called jobs, lives, and kids to prevent us from doing a lot of programming.
Just think about your image of women aged 20 to 40. By age 30 most of them have toddlers at least. Kids make taking time out of the day to program really difficult. Then there is actually keeping on top of work and social activities that you all seem to want us to do.
There are only so many hours in the day. Any and all women programmers should be lauded for their efforts and their time management to be able to contribute.
Just putting it in perspective here. And, yes, I do know many men are active caregivers for their children, so no offense is intended to anyone.
The answers to your first two questions are no and no. Those photographs do not constitute child pronography because a.) you were not put in a sexually compromissing possition, b.) they were not taken with the intent to distribute for the purposes of sexual arrousal.
Now, on the topic of your third question, at no point in time would those pictures be considered pornographic because they were taken for medical reasons. It is analogous to taking a photograph of a naked corpse. No one is goig to get aroused over that unless there is something seriously wrong with them.
This case is not about documentation vs. pornography, it is about a person who may or may not be guilty of trying to suduce some one below the age of consent in every state in the Union. For the record, I know girls that were sexually mature at the age of 10. Sexual maturity just means that the girl is menstrating, it has nothing to do with emotional and intelectual maturity.
The fine line between pornography and ordinary photography is only difficult to distinguish near the border of art. What is art? What is just meant to get a rise out of the viewer? The reasonable question is: Can you spot a photograph intended to arouse? Most people can.
It is a judgement call in court when presented with photographic evidence as to what is and what isn't. The rule of thumb is: if it is questionable and has underage people in it, it is. If the people in it are all above the age of 18, the legal age where you can sign a contract, then there is no case.
Just so you don't accidentally mislead some one: the age of Consent in New Mexico is 16. No one really bothers with this law there, but that is the law and if you are over 18 you sure give it some thought. They might not proscecute you if you are under 18, I don't know, I did not try to find out.
I am going to make this a quick one. I work for a small bank. We have been y2k ready since last April. Every other bank in the country has as well. The US congress decided to step in and so we have had bout 7 y2k audits, up from 3 that were planned, and have about three more to go.
The bank Atm machines will work so long as there is electrcity. We have done everything humanly possible to test this.
There will be no funny business with your accounts. Everything you can do now with your account you will be able to do on Jan. 01, 2000. We know how to bank without computers. As humans we have only done that for a few thousand years. So, you clearly don't need to clean out your accounts.
The only thing that may not function propperly come y2k with relation to your finances are POS systems. (Point of sale for those of you in the real world.) So do keep some extra cash on hand just in case.
The reason for this is that not every merchant has a real up to date system. That individual card reader for the merchant may fail, but over all, you won't even notice it. I would anticipate any gliches with the POS systems to clear up in a day or two after Jan. 1.
Do yourself a favor, PARTY!!!
Y2K is going to be a blast.
Hey, just so you know, he actually has tried a few different systems. Before I lost internet access at work the system was completely different. I believe it has gone through at least three incarnations since then and that was back in April I think.
and you have my email so bug me there if you want to discuss it Signal11
As a person that often moderates when I am allowed to I can tell you that the restrictions on the moderators are already quite strict. I did not moderate the comments to the specific article that drew up this discussion because I personally could not stomach wasting all of my moderation points on trying to get all of the inflamatory posts marked down.
I also could not read the entire thing or deal with what I was seeing.
Now, as far as giving moderators the ability to use their combined points to delete a post, I can tell you that it would almost never happen. I get somewhere around five moderation points for fifty comments last I checked, you know I am not going to waste them trying to get some one deleted when I see an comment that actually makes a point. I do look for insightful comments that have been underrated. I also read all of the comments, including the ones that have already received a score or -1 to see if that score is fair or not. Most every one else I know of that has gotten to be a moderator on some occasion does this as well.
When the whole moderators thing started, I was one of the people to pester our friend Rob about setting up some guidelines. Since then I got busy and was not able to post or read articles. I have since returned and read the guidelines which are quite well thought out. I think if any one person has tried to use the moderation system in ways not desired by Mr. Malda and his cohorts (as in trying to get people riled up through blatant bias) they would have difficulty doing that. If you read the guidelines they will basically tell you the way the system is set up the actual moderators have very little power, it is only as a group that they have any control over things here.
If I wanted to stir up trouble here, I would write up a post, not moderate. Writting wreaks much more havoc than reading and making a simple discerment of value.
Also, I think CmrdTaco, Hemos, John Kats, and the rest do know how to set up their email to ignore matters from certain people that would try to mailbomb them for having their comment deleted or otherwise make a pain out of themselves. They have been managing this site for years so I do think they know how to handle themselves with J. Q. Public and Harison Troll.
I personally will volenteer right here and now to be the one to delete obviously inflamatory posts. You all know the ones, they read "F*ck Canada", "God Hates Fags", "Die Bill Gates, Die!" and the like. When a post is clearly derogatory toward one person or a group of people without anything otherwise of merit, it is a waste of your time and mine to read. These posts are usually quite rare so I would not mind taking the heat for it. Any one that actually knows me knows that I value actual thought above most anything else around, so I would do the deleting if they would let me.
Rather than deleting the post, I would personally put it in the hall of shame. A rubish bin icon that you can click on and read all of the posts that made it there through people that took the time and wasted the moderator points to get it off of the thread. That way the post would be availible, but the writter would have to just deal with it.
--telosphilos, dame among cats
Basically, that is what the article said. It seemed to me like a nice little random code in the neural networking of this little toy. What the article actually said was that the "dog" was presented with a ball and chose not to play with it.
According the WSJ article on it this morning, it has no voice recognition software. I has an open archetecture so it is upgradable once the upgrades become availible. It can play with toys, but it does so when it feels like it. It also does tricks, like it waved to the reporters in the unveiling. If you want, i will look up more information on it tonight. What i want to know is when will the source be ported to linux and who wants to write the upgrades?
Bandwidth may be expensive, but you can do a lot more with it then with a tape. At least in my case, MP3s are the only way my music gets recorded. My tape recorder does not work near as well as my computer. ;) Maybe one day i will even post my MP3 files on a web site instead of email on demand when i actually have new stuffle.
One of the world's most wonderful poets has died. He wrote many things that meant a lot to many different people. He will be missed.
When I was just starting third grade, I was one of the very few students that could not read. The "see dick run, run dick run" books had not quite worked for me. I just could not grasp the see and say method of reading. I cannot do phonics in the English language to this day. I could woo my teachers into believing in my intelligence through my extensive vocabulary and my musical ability, but I could not read more than three words in a row consistantly. Spelling tests were my nightmare.
Our teachers read to us every day, either a poem or a chapter from a children's novel. I loved to listen to the poems from Where the Sidewalk End's or the delicious tales by Roal Dahl in his novellas. I could not read, but it was not for a lack of wanting. My mother read to me at night. I read the OZ books through the sound of her voice, a chapter a night. I could draw, I could speak, and I could sing well ahead of my peers, but they could read.
One day, I decided that I wanted my mother to read a book by Beverly Cleary to me. It was mid-afternoon. My mother had other things that she need to get done, so she told me no. Being stong-willed, I decided that I was going to try to read it myself even though I knew only a few words on sight. Curled up on the couch in the sunlight, I started to get comfortable so that I could try to read the book.
With painful slowness, I silently played with each typed word untill I knew what it was. If I did not know the word at all, I figured it out from the context. At some point in this ardous endevour, something a little bizzare happened. I stopped seeing the words on the page or even hearing the sounds of the sylables. The meter and the letters, everything on the page was gone. All that was left, all that was really necessary, came forth to me as images in my mind. A complete realm flowed forth from this book. I understood in silence, what it meant to read.
I could not prove that I had discovered the secret to most people. I still could not, and honestly to this day cannot, read aloud without faltering and stuttering through the words on the page. I would skip articles and prepositions when asked to read. I still have to ask someone else how to pronounce a word if it is not familliar to me. I do not know phonics, but I do know meanings.
From that day on, I read everything that I could. I needed to catch up to my peers in school. I discovered just how much fun reading can truely be after I finished that 250 or so page book and took up the book that every single person in my class loved to read out of during our playtime. I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends. I learned meter and time. I also learned the exceptions to the grammatical rules we were taught.
I loved those books more then anything. They were written with little children in mind filled with the good humor of the gross and disgusting stuff. I read from it all of the time. Through those poems, I learned to read and be able to say the words on the pages. It is still very difficult for me, but with out them, I would never have been able to do it at all.
--telos
Just think, Microsoft NT crashes and the world gets nuked. Most actually highly classified work gets done on computers with removable hard drives that get locked up in a skiff at night. Can you imagine if one of them went down? Then the aliens would be furious! ;)
Actually, I am very clear on what constitues a signature in both the electronic and real worlds. Now, I think you need to remember that any encoding that man can make, man can break. The real idea in theft prevention is not to make the theft impossible but to make it be so time consuming that it is not worth it. It is still possible to defeat any security measure. The best way is known as the inside job. Do you really want to risk it?
I hate to tell you this, but werdna is correct about the modern day legalities of signitures.
First thing in the morning every day at the bank I work for, I check the signitures and account numbers on the dormant account activity checks. This review includes both deposits and withdrawls. It is actually a bit difficult to decern an imposter on one of these tickets. It has been my experience that a good forgery will get by the vast majority of people.
I would ordinarilly include myself in a generalization like that, but in this case that is not true. A friend of mine introduced me to the mishmash that is hand writting analysis. While the accuracy of hand writting analysis in the field of psychology may be bunk (I have yet to decide), it does teach you to look for certain characteristics in the letters. It is little things like "does the letter "o" have a stroke through it?" that make the difference. You really need at least 10 characteristics in the letters to match before you can be comfortable signing off on the ticket. To the trained eye, these traits are very easy to spot.
Now, I have to make sure that my bank is doing what it is supposed to in its work with the federal government on a day to day basis. I can tell you right here and now that our Chief Financial Officer would not accept just a signature as the conclusion of a deal. I like our CFO and I like my job, but common sense is the best asset around in any job. It is like you don't breath in Chlorine gas.
I really don't care for some ecommerce ideas for the simple reason that some things have exorbant shipping costs. This on the other hand, this idea scares me. I like the annonimity of the internet. I can go anywhere under my 4 names and no one can connect that to a face or a business. While people do actually call me telosphilos or telos in the real world out there, they are not the same people that I work with every day. Those people that know me online are not my flesh and blood familly, but they are the best of friends. My boyfriend even calls me by my nickname. Yet, I am very protective of my financial information. I am also very careful to keep any actuall pictures of me off the internet. (There are two out there, but they include facepaint and night Figment hunting (long story).)
I do not have a lot of money, but I work with large sums each day. As part of the customer services, we try to teach people how to protect themselves from con artists and your basic scams. Some are fairly simple like shielding your pin number from view when you use your atm card or not giving out credit card numbers in chat rooms. Some are vastly more complicated, preventing the real code warriors with a financial hole they want to fill from breaking into banking-on-line systems.
The big issue that I can see with this idea is that it can be taken too far and lead to very real finanicial risks involving banks, trusts, credit unions, and brokerage houses. In making the electronic signatures a legal signature, you open the door to a lot of problems like theft of the signature and signature duplication. Say you had $5,000.00 in a money market account, using a good bit of computer know how, another person gets your signature and basic account information (account number, ammount in there, the usual). Bet you dollars to donuts, that computer cluebie can find a way to fool the bank employee on the other side of the terminal into handing over the money.
You see, at some time we have to account for human error. It is also very easy to have human error occur on account of fraud. Most financial types really do not know computers or computer security. Computer people generally have better things to do then learn how to make up little slips of paper tracking where all of the money in the bank is. So, what do you get? You get some one that maybe has figured out that a mouse is a periferal authorizing a con job on an account in his first week at the bank. There, your account just went from $5,000.00 to zero.
Just think about it, it can mess up all sorts of financial deals. Would you like it if your paycheck which more likely then not goes through an automated clearing house was missing about $50.00 in income taxes over the course of six months due to an error on your account and the IRS not only caught it, but chose to audit you and your company? This is the sort of thing that can happen.
It is food for thought. Anyways, it is getting late and I am tired of ranting. Thank you for your time.
--telos
It is about time that the internet based comic strip got the recognition of a print deal. Illiad's work has a fresh humor about it that actually engages the sense of humor of informed people and the general populace.
May he sell a hundred thousand copies in the first week. Now, where can I put my order in for one?
--da telkitty
Check out the programs at your local junior college. There are certification programs that exisit within the realm of programing. Here, I, an accountant, am half way there for a network administration certification and a third of the way there for a programing certification. Yet, I am still not the person you want to hack code.
Considering that, I don't put much stock in "certified" programers. Oh yeah, and don't for get about the MSCS' out there either.
Ergo, I think the quote is "RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!"
Actually, you are likely correct. My reading on the company in the Wall Street Jornal and other business realated news type stuffle seems to indicate that you are very much in the right. (irc)
Surprisingly, the WSJ actually treats M$ and Linux fairly in their articles on par. On of the little things in there seems to indicate that the programmers from m$ may actually be looking to bail from the company if they can find another one that is stable and likely to stay solvent. The key there is that m$ is remarkable for it's toeing of the line in the legalities of it's method of competing with other companies. The way m$ competes it by trying to make the tool as simple to use as a hammer, so that the end user thinks that everything is just a nail. An end user that has become accostumed to this then cannot easily transition over to another system. It takes time to learn a system and given the choice, most people want to just know one (and not very well at that) and save their precious time.
Thus, through the use of much simplified user enviroments like win95 and winNT, m$ has a captive audience. It is not too great a stretch then to believe that the company has decided to try to force upgrades onto this audience. This audience really cannot afford a work stoppage. If you were to look in the want adds of any large city newspaper, you would notice that among the secretarial pool and the general office staff the most common need is for some one that is competent in the windows 95/NT user environment and is capable of really manouvering in Office 97.
As a result, I think you are quite right.
--da telkitty
You sure that they are not trying to make us all use the next variation on NT?
From a financial standpoint they really want to phase out windows as an os altogether because they make more on the NT licencing fees then they do on any Win ** version out there. Therefore, I expect them to try and push for us to all convert over to an NT system. (that and they can get the info and invade privacy even easier on the NT systems)
The ability to sell the information from ppls systems is a temptation, but is unlikely from m$ as I do not believe they want to face that class action law suit. What is much more likely in the end game is: Win95 is so broke it is not economical to fix it. The cost of trying to find all of the bugs in man hours is such that they would have to eat their profits. Show me a company that wants to do that and I will show you one that is going out of business.
as if i was not easy enough to identify as some insane /.er you can say hi to my office too. now won't my boss be happy about the security breach?! this will prevent several banks from doing online banking for a good while once the top brass find out about it. so much for e comerce. stuff like that is what keep a lot of companies off of the internet in the first place. if intel really wanted to sell the idea of the internet and their chips as business sales tools then the really should take a few clues from the financial world and do their damnedest to keep security and privacy specs up to date.
you know, that is just all i need.. as if it was not easy enough to spot a red dress and lapel pin insignia..
if you don't look at the fnords, they won't eat you.