Yes... and it annoyed me when/. started sending me cookies all the time, instead of only on login. I have Navigator set to ask me whether to accept a cookie, but it's too stupid to ever figure out "Hey, he doesn't want cookies from this site at all!" so its pesters and pesters and you have to be damn patient for manual cookie filtering to be effective with Navigator. That was something nice about kfm, it had practical cookie control.
So, while I had been about to argue/agree that the "setting cookies without consent" argument is legally shaky, perhaps it could be effectively counterargued that between the number of sites that demand cookies before cooperating and the difficulty of selective cookie acceptance with some major browsers (assuming Netscape is still major:p or that M$ hasn't set up some law so that only MSIE is a Major(tm) Browser), that it's an impractical option; particularly, that mistakes are too easily made, and you only have to accept one cookie by accident to let the ad tracing in the door.
I was trying to point out was that it is perfectly reasonable for a company to automatically delete mp3 files from
their servers to avoid potential law suits (however unlikely).
Oh. Well, I'd have to disagree with that. Perhaps (a big perhaps) it's reasonable to delete files with folk like the RIAA going postal all the time, but I think applying this logic generally is more likely to kill your business than save it; you'll lose half of what few customers you'll draw and the other half'll be suing.
I agree it's a bloody nuisance to have to copy 'n' paste. However, a gopher browser could just as well use a good RE to pick out URLs and make them clickable or live or whatever you'd like to call it. For more reliability, they could be wrapped in like one old RFC suggested for plain text.
As to the lack of gopher scheme in Netscape... I've always believed it was bad to load a lot of scheme into the browsers anyway, since they usually fxck up the implementation (FTP is usually wrong "in the corners", for instance; making the compactness of the URL notation useless when you're trying to exchange a file and ICQ doesn't want to work grumble grumble). I'd suggest finding an HTTP proxy that does gopher... does Squid? It'd be a shade easier to add gopher to Squid than to Mozilla, if necessary, I bet, and we could all share in the fruits of the labour. It makes a lot more sense to have a good local cache proxy running, then all your browsers have consistent, upgradeable, correctable, expandable, etc. behaviours in URL and cache.
Yeah, and they want a weak federal gov't too, until they want the hand-counting in FL stopped, then they run sniveling to the Federal Soopreme Court like the ugly little weasel Bush is.
So the only right he has is to go pound sand or to find a new provider.
As I pointed out elsewhere, WAVs are explicitly permitted in the Terms; he should post his music that way and see what happens. (They'd probably chuck it out under some reading of the file download limit... even though the Web is probably mostly file downloads, dynamically-generated content is debatable, no?)
Seems to me like this was a logical thing for a hosting company to do, lots of sysadmins do similar things on their
systems to ensure they don't run out of disk space.
...we can see that it has little to do with disk space. For instance AVIs and WAVs are permitted, I'd suggest reposting the music as WAV >:)
They're just freakin' arbitrary and weird. Look at this rule: "All HTML pages MUST be linked to files (HTML,.jpg,.gif, etc.) stored on Company's server and vice versa" That basically can mean "no links to interesting sites, and nobody can link to you either." Nuts. (And keep in mind "[the] Company shall be the sole and final arbiter as [to] the interpretation of the following.")
However... it's their machinery, and you're free to not be their customer...
This is one of the tenets of socialism: preventing exploitation of the workers by big business. Consequently,
and quite stupidly, the quality of life of the workers suffers (how long does it take to get an MRI in
Canada?)
Yeah, I like the approach of the capitalist Democratic Republic of America: "hurry up and die you sick little uninsured cog, so your family isn't financially ruined and we can roll your pay and what would've been your pension over into hiring three young grunts with fresh training at low-seniority wages."
My mother whittled a little piece out of her finger, as a kid (accidentally). She kinda stuck it back on, and it healed into place slightly rotated. It's easily seen directly, and I imagine you could see it in a print.
Bill Kurtis pointed out the other night that in California, a false witness in a capital trial faces a capital trial of his own. But of course the racist LA prosecutors would never bother to charge a fellow good white racist cop for framing (or at least buffing up the evidence against) an uppity rich nigger, never mind set him up for death.
Kurtis tried to play it as though it made conspiracy unlikely. But conspiracy was not necessary for the evidence tampering. The only conspiracy on the prosecution of the Simpson was
an amalgam of inflated egos.
I was amazed they were so cocksure as to try him for both murders together... they should've kept one in reserve in case they f*cked up like they did. Then they whiningly blame the jury, who they'd approved. But the jury did its job: there was lots of room for reasonable doubt, especially (to me) in the vaunted "scientific" evidence... to drag this back to the topic at hand.
As I understood what was presented... I refused to watch the trial voraciously; all I saw were snips in evening news and the presentation of the verdict, and documentaries... the DNA evidence went something like this: "this sample show this little marker, which occurs in fraction X of humans... and it shows that little marker, which occurs in fraction Y... thus only XY of humans have the combination, and the possibility of there being another person matching this sample is practically nil! You must convict!"
My problem is double: a) how do they know X and Y? When was my DNA sampled, or that of anyone else I know? When were the billion-plus Chinese sampled? (Or are they ignorable for the Simpson trial, which merely begs the question of who isn't ignorable, and were they scientifically sampled?)
And b) how do they know these markers are statistcally independant, that XY is actually their fraction for the population? While I'm willing to grant they may know X and Y well enough, the statistical indepedance (or lack thereof) takes much more analysis to know than than I believe has been done. The prosecution would have to go into serious background to make their "scientific" evidence credulous to me. (And they would have had to handle their case evidence scientifically... a grad student wouldn't get a masters based on labwork of that quality; that anyone's life hung on such bullshit makes a strong argument against capital punishment.)
No... the Simpson jury had ample room for reasonable doubt as far as I can tell, and whining about it is just sour grapes. The prosecution got full of its own importance and deserved to lose the case if that's the best they could do.
Me friends, you realise these censorware thingies are the reincarnation of the Church's infamous Index, an earlier, tenatious, ultimately ousted attempt by authority to squelch enlightenment? Perhaps if they were painted in that comparative light, we'd get... well... snappier spin, ya know?
I think that if I ran one of those translation services, I'd be suing the filter foundry for slander/libel for every miscategorisation of my service. Especially if "Worthless" was one of them!
Geeze, banning backpacks is just plain stoopid. It's unhealthy! It's well-known that it's better for spine to carry a heavy weight like textbooks on a properly-worn backpack then a something held in one hand. Or are studious students who like their books considered too dangerous, too?
(And is anyone else wondering why `studious students' isn't a redundancy??)
Multics could run with Classified, Secret, and
Top-Secret information (and programs) all co-resident, and without a lower-classification program being
able to access higher-classification information. No modern operating system works this way; the set of
systems that replaced the Multics group that I worked on was 3 separate Unix networks, one for each
security classification.
There may be good reason for that... I was wringing Google looking for a place to get real TTYs when I found this thingy about Multics covert channels. It was
in/. in March. Sounds to me like separate machines is a solution, not some kind of OS shortcoming.
I think one of the storage media in this should be paper tape; magnetic media are just too easy to alter or damage. Punch cards are plausible, but it's too easy to replace one handful with another. The one problem is that the votes are recorded in strict order, so one could figure out who voted how by the order they were checked off.
As a Canadian, used to a very simple, accountable, understandable, trustable, forensic, boring ballot system, I have to admit the past couple of days have been a real comic relief. Thanx! =)
"Metallic Hg inert?" Dude! I could never keep the surface of my little stash of it clean, it oxidized or otherwise got ugly pretty damn fast!
I liked jamie's Smart Guy, though... it's only been known since Newton if not longer that you'd get a lovely parabola!:) I'd thought of this idea at about the same age, but the obvious problems of keeping the surface clean, getting a smoooooth drive and bearings, and the fact it could only look up, rather deflated my sails =)
To me, it's not a matter of everyone either giving away their software or charging for it. I don't mind paying for good software, and have done it (Opera); I feel ripped off when I pay for foul software (Director).
<p>To me, it's about allowing the <em>choice</em> in an open market. If one programmer wants to try to charge for his stuff in a reasonably free market in competition with comparable offerings of lesser price, let him try. If he wants to battle the piracy problem inherent in a product of vanishingly small marginal costs, let him try. But he should not go about causing trouble for other programmers who willingly give their stuff away.
<p>BTW even lawyers work pro bono sometimes. (Is that the right expression??)
Now, let's be fair to TeX, here... it's was always meant to be an excellent typesetter, and IMO it remains superior in that capacity to all the SW commonly found on Winduhs today. Although some of them (PageMaker?) are now adopting TeX's algorithms...
TeX was never meant to be a word processor. Except for decent hyphenation (not perfect; it gave me do-geared the other day), which is nearly indispensible for good line breaking, it does nothing about easy editing (arguably it makes editing exceedingly difficult) or spell checking (which is almost impossible to perfect anyway, requiring significant semantic awareness) etc.
While it's very easy to produce mediocre results that are acceptable for day-to-day intraoffice stuff, if you're after high-quality typesetting for serious printed material, it's still very hard to beat TeX for the price. Yes, it can be bloody hell to use, but it pays off in the end.
DeCSS does not prevent illegal copying. Encryption can never prevent copying; in fact encryption only has a purpose when copying is easy. Encryption is just supposed to keep the content hidden from "unauthorised" parties; but that depends on the uniqueness and secrecy of the keys and the quality of the algorithm. DVD keys are obviously not especially unique or secret, or each enduser would have to buy one, and then be careful to buy a disc with his key on it. And it appears the deciphering algorithm was easy to figure out or bypass. So whatever the intent of CSS was, what it accomplishes from a technical standpoint is emphatically not copy protection.
It's an entirely different feature that's tries to prevent copying; a specially-mangled block on the disk, or something.
Trouble is, that's an "ignorant savage" theory that doesn't hold water. Humans all over have long known what causes babies. They even knew ways to play without pay, until a couple centuries ago. We used to know the plants in our backyards well enough to use them to regulate the population. But once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear. And just about the same time, the world's population starts its apparently hyperexponential growth.
(I'm not convinced longer lifespans have much to do with it, because I'm not convinced they've gottn much longer. Psalm 90 speaks of a 70-80 year span (although the same people apparently believed in multicentury lives). I think the true globalisation of the RC Church and its infamously deus providebit attitude is more significant.)
So, IMO, what the world needs, in general, is education... but not about those expensive pills and rubbers that'll disappear when the industrialised countries collapse, but about the sustainable cultivation and processing of contraceptive and abortificant herbs.
Slashdot Mirror
Can the entrepreneurial minds of Founder's Camp find a spellchecker?
So, while I had been about to argue/agree that the "setting cookies without consent" argument is legally shaky, perhaps it could be effectively counterargued that between the number of sites that demand cookies before cooperating and the difficulty of selective cookie acceptance with some major browsers (assuming Netscape is still major :p or that M$ hasn't set up some law so that only MSIE is a Major(tm) Browser), that it's an impractical option; particularly, that mistakes are too easily made, and you only have to accept one cookie by accident to let the ad tracing in the door.
Oh. Well, I'd have to disagree with that. Perhaps (a big perhaps) it's reasonable to delete files with folk like the RIAA going postal all the time, but I think applying this logic generally is more likely to kill your business than save it; you'll lose half of what few customers you'll draw and the other half'll be suing.
As to the lack of gopher scheme in Netscape... I've always believed it was bad to load a lot of scheme into the browsers anyway, since they usually fxck up the implementation (FTP is usually wrong "in the corners", for instance; making the compactness of the URL notation useless when you're trying to exchange a file and ICQ doesn't want to work grumble grumble). I'd suggest finding an HTTP proxy that does gopher... does Squid? It'd be a shade easier to add gopher to Squid than to Mozilla, if necessary, I bet, and we could all share in the fruits of the labour. It makes a lot more sense to have a good local cache proxy running, then all your browsers have consistent, upgradeable, correctable, expandable, etc. behaviours in URL and cache.
Yeah, and they want a weak federal gov't too, until they want the hand-counting in FL stopped, then they run sniveling to the Federal Soopreme Court like the ugly little weasel Bush is.
As I pointed out elsewhere, WAVs are explicitly permitted in the Terms; he should post his music that way and see what happens. (They'd probably chuck it out under some reading of the file download limit... even though the Web is probably mostly file downloads, dynamically-generated content is debatable, no?)
Seems to me like this was a logical thing for a hosting company to do, lots of sysadmins do similar things on their systems to ensure they don't run out of disk space.
...we can see that it has little to do with disk space. For instance AVIs and WAVs are permitted, I'd suggest reposting the music as WAV >:)
They're just freakin' arbitrary and weird. Look at this rule: "All HTML pages MUST be linked to files (HTML, .jpg, .gif, etc.) stored on Company's server and vice versa" That basically can mean "no links to interesting sites, and nobody can link to you either." Nuts. (And keep in mind "[the] Company shall be the sole and final arbiter as [to] the interpretation of the following.")
However... it's their machinery, and you're free to not be their customer...
And it's "eks", not "eggs"! :)
Such as, apparently, Joe Clark :(
Yeah, I like the approach of the capitalist Democratic Republic of America: "hurry up and die you sick little uninsured cog, so your family isn't financially ruined and we can roll your pay and what would've been your pension over into hiring three young grunts with fresh training at low-seniority wages."
My mother whittled a little piece out of her finger, as a kid (accidentally). She kinda stuck it back on, and it healed into place slightly rotated. It's easily seen directly, and I imagine you could see it in a print.
Bill Kurtis pointed out the other night that in California, a false witness in a capital trial faces a capital trial of his own. But of course the racist LA prosecutors would never bother to charge a fellow good white racist cop for framing (or at least buffing up the evidence against) an uppity rich nigger, never mind set him up for death.
Kurtis tried to play it as though it made conspiracy unlikely. But conspiracy was not necessary for the evidence tampering. The only conspiracy on the prosecution of the Simpson was an amalgam of inflated egos.
I was amazed they were so cocksure as to try him for both murders together... they should've kept one in reserve in case they f*cked up like they did. Then they whiningly blame the jury, who they'd approved. But the jury did its job: there was lots of room for reasonable doubt, especially (to me) in the vaunted "scientific" evidence... to drag this back to the topic at hand.
As I understood what was presented... I refused to watch the trial voraciously; all I saw were snips in evening news and the presentation of the verdict, and documentaries... the DNA evidence went something like this: "this sample show this little marker, which occurs in fraction X of humans ... and it shows that little marker, which occurs in fraction Y ... thus only XY of humans have the combination, and the possibility of there being another person matching this sample is practically nil! You must convict!"
My problem is double: a) how do they know X and Y? When was my DNA sampled, or that of anyone else I know? When were the billion-plus Chinese sampled? (Or are they ignorable for the Simpson trial, which merely begs the question of who isn't ignorable, and were they scientifically sampled?)
And b) how do they know these markers are statistcally independant, that XY is actually their fraction for the population? While I'm willing to grant they may know X and Y well enough, the statistical indepedance (or lack thereof) takes much more analysis to know than than I believe has been done. The prosecution would have to go into serious background to make their "scientific" evidence credulous to me. (And they would have had to handle their case evidence scientifically... a grad student wouldn't get a masters based on labwork of that quality; that anyone's life hung on such bullshit makes a strong argument against capital punishment.)
No... the Simpson jury had ample room for reasonable doubt as far as I can tell, and whining about it is just sour grapes. The prosecution got full of its own importance and deserved to lose the case if that's the best they could do.
I think that if I ran one of those translation services, I'd be suing the filter foundry for slander/libel for every miscategorisation of my service. Especially if "Worthless" was one of them!
(And is anyone else wondering why `studious students' isn't a redundancy??)
There may be good reason for that... I was wringing Google looking for a place to get real TTYs when I found this thingy about Multics covert channels. It was in /. in March. Sounds to me like separate machines is a solution, not some kind of OS shortcoming.
As a Canadian, used to a very simple, accountable, understandable, trustable, forensic, boring ballot system, I have to admit the past couple of days have been a real comic relief. Thanx! =)
When Mars can touch the recent fruit production in Ontario (in Canada, not California), I'll move. (lichen and algae, indeed :p)
"Metallic Hg inert?" Dude! I could never keep the surface of my little stash of it clean, it oxidized or otherwise got ugly pretty damn fast!
:) I'd thought of this idea at about the same age, but the obvious problems of keeping the surface clean, getting a smoooooth drive and bearings, and the fact it could only look up, rather deflated my sails =)
I liked jamie's Smart Guy, though... it's only been known since Newton if not longer that you'd get a lovely parabola!
Oh great /., thank you so much; subtly change the defaults on me :p
To me, it's not a matter of everyone either giving away their software or charging for it. I don't mind paying for good software, and have done it (Opera); I feel ripped off when I pay for foul software (Director).
<p>To me, it's about allowing the <em>choice</em> in an open market. If one programmer wants to try to charge for his stuff in a reasonably free market in competition with comparable offerings of lesser price, let him try. If he wants to battle the piracy problem inherent in a product of vanishingly small marginal costs, let him try. But he should not go about causing trouble for other programmers who willingly give their stuff away.
<p>BTW even lawyers work pro bono sometimes. (Is that the right expression??)
TeX was never meant to be a word processor. Except for decent hyphenation (not perfect; it gave me do-geared the other day), which is nearly indispensible for good line breaking, it does nothing about easy editing (arguably it makes editing exceedingly difficult) or spell checking (which is almost impossible to perfect anyway, requiring significant semantic awareness) etc.
While it's very easy to produce mediocre results that are acceptable for day-to-day intraoffice stuff, if you're after high-quality typesetting for serious printed material, it's still very hard to beat TeX for the price. Yes, it can be bloody hell to use, but it pays off in the end.
It's an entirely different feature that's tries to prevent copying; a specially-mangled block on the disk, or something.
Trouble is, that's an "ignorant savage" theory that doesn't hold water. Humans all over have long known what causes babies. They even knew ways to play without pay, until a couple centuries ago. We used to know the plants in our backyards well enough to use them to regulate the population. But once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear. And just about the same time, the world's population starts its apparently hyperexponential growth.
(I'm not convinced longer lifespans have much to do with it, because I'm not convinced they've gottn much longer. Psalm 90 speaks of a 70-80 year span (although the same people apparently believed in multicentury lives). I think the true globalisation of the RC Church and its infamously deus providebit attitude is more significant.)
So, IMO, what the world needs, in general, is education... but not about those expensive pills and rubbers that'll disappear when the industrialised countries collapse, but about the sustainable cultivation and processing of contraceptive and abortificant herbs.
[ref: Eve's Herbs]
You think you've got it bad... try figuring out what the hell we Canucks are allowed to do.
The trouble with the Demoroniser is that anyone informed/enlightened enough to use it, is ditto enough to avoid the problem in the first place.
:-(