While waiting for your cracked copy of Eminem to finish burning, how many of you have done anything to alert your representatives about the madness of a unilateral attack by the US on Iraq?
What people can't complain both about both? Indeed most of the world has made it clear exactly what they think of Bush... The US (and UK) havn't stopped attacking Iraq since 1991. There are also reports that Israel has sent commandos into Iraq recently.
Actually I find the government's conspiracy theories to be much more interesting than this moon landing crap, at least they research them and give the whole thing a bit of depth.
Depends on the conspiracy theory in question. The "moon hoax" one is quite weak. Then so is "Afgan Caveman", in some ways even weaker then the competing conspiracy theories of "Senario 12D" and "Lavon version 2". Governments no longer have a monopoly when it comes to research and being able to point to past and present happenings which support their claims. Even where governments have access to information not in the public domain it can only become "evidence" by being placed into the public domain.
Granted this guy is in a shady business, but still it's perfectly legal. You get spam mail be ordinary mail too and you pay for the delivery too (your tax money makes the USPS go!). So why don't you complain about it, too?
If someone sends stuff through the post they have to pay for the paper, envelopes, printing and postage (possibly two lots of postage if they include a reply paid envelope). They have some financial incentive to only send the stuff to people who want and who can make use of the offer. Email spammers cost the recipients money and frequently misuse other people's computers in order to send the stuff in the first place. Since there is little cost to the sender they don't much care about who the send it to. Including sending stuff to people who couldn't buy their product even if they wanted to, assuming them can even read the language used.
First, conspiracy theorists are motivated by a profound mistrust of the government.
Governments are quite capable of spinning their own conspiracy theories, even ones which make less sense than those of the so called "nuts".
If proper measures are taken to root out and eliminate the social causes of conspiracy nuttiness, we will see far fewer people blindly accepting the crackpot theories of the "no-moon-landing" crowd.
But you'd also have people less willing to swallow the claims of politicans.
Recently it was announced in the UK that singles sales had halved since 1988, why
1988? IIRC 1988 was the year that CD sales started to make an impact on vinyl sales. I
alse remeber noticing that a CD single cost £2.99 in 1998 but a vinyl single cost £1.99.
The same trend applies to CD albums they are more expensive than their vinyl ancestors.
What actually happened was that first the price of vinyl started creeping up, then quality of vinyl started going down. The idea of the record companies was to kill off vinyl. Which didn't quite work with 12" singles...
The speakers will have the decoding chip, the signal sent to the speakers will be encoded
using whatever standardized encryption they decide upon that is a quality encryption
algorithm. Thus, the DRM has to be at the end source, at wher the final product is
released(ie. the speakers, the TV screen, etc.) What kind of speaker will produce sounds which the human ear can hear perfectly, but no microphone can pick up? What kind of TV screen can display a picture which the human eye can see, but no camera can see?
Now, the analogue output is naturally of lower quality then the digital output, so I think
that the RIAA and MPAA are just trying to prevent the copying of the "digital masters" so
to speak.
The kind of mp3s you will find on P2P networks are nothing like the original masters. Similarly the movies and TV progrmmes being traded are not of broadcast quality video tape, let alone film quality. But they are making a fuss now...
If these companies that are building DRM get their heads on straight, and think about
how to build it correctly (using really cryptography and not just security through obscurity),
then yes... DRM may be possible.
No it is fundermentally imposible. Since in order for the system to be of any use the content in question must appear as something suitable for human sense organs. Either ears or eyes.
With a large enough key, it would be theoretically impossible for the it be discovered, and
since the decoding happens on one part of the chip in a "black box" style. There would be
no way for the end user to get the key.
Since the point of the black box is to output the plaintext the user does not need the key in the first place. All such a black box can do is allow the sender to choose when the plaintext is output. Once the user has the plaintext they can do whatever they like with it. Which includes recording it or sending to other parties (including sending in an encrypted form)
Librarians are already making decisions about what books to place on
the shelves.
Books cost money, take up physical space and require organising so that they are in the right places (especially if they are for lending). With the internet you have to expend resources to block material.
On the internet, the situation is the exact opposite. Carrying everything is the default, and
it takes extra resources to block things. Thus any blocking has to be justified as somehow
increasing the overall amount of information. Of course this is impossible since blocking
information by definition decreases this amount. Hence no filtering is acceptable to the
library's mission.
Not quite, but you might be more looking at having an option to block things like banner ads, popups, sites which use oversized images, etc.
Ok, you recognize Mein Kampf has historical value. How about a tougher one next, some
worthless trash...
would you censor these idiots? [stormfront.org] Don't miss their lovely kids page!
[stormfront.org]
How do you know what might and might not be a historically important document in the future?
If you think you the right to say some material is offensive and not within the mission of a
library then you better damn well expect ME to have the same right. I'd start with the
Bible, it's filled with sex, violence, even incest!
You missed out rape and genocide...
After that I'd ban all the other religion's holy books too. (It wouldn't be very fair to
discriminate against just one religion.)
As all that lot is in Genesis you wouldn't be targeting Christianity any way...
www.gambleboards.com - Blocked for gambling, however I have followed over a dozen
links describing it as the manufacurer of sound boards founded by Jim Gamble.
In reality block lists are compiled by some fairly stupid software, The only real difference between the lists from something like SquidGuard and the proprietary lists is that SquidGuard is honest. The typical human input is from users saying "you should/should not have blocked this or that website"
constitute some sort of business tort, like disclosing trade secrets? I'm not trying to give MS lawyers any ideas (like they need them) but I've certainly seen Apple goes nuts over this sort of thing.
The only place MS can send their lawyers is after the employee or contractor who made the information available.
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance.
One problem, IME, with MS support. Is that the tend to have people who specialise in a specific piece of software. Even though MS frequently produces "sphagetti code" where it isn't always obvious which is OS and which is application.
I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
Just hope it didn't break anything else.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
Because some of the code might well have originally been written for 95 (or even earlier) and the "monkeys" do the majority of their development work logged in as administrator. Another problem is where an app refuses to even open a file it can't write to
Many companies offer huge educational discounts on software.
Thus changing from extremely expensive to very expensive. Remember that schools do not typically buy software for one computer they buy for a large number.
I'm at a private university. If I want to buy a single copy of LabVIEW for a computer in my research lab, it will cost me roughly 50% of the retail price.
most educational software sucks. period. it does absolutely nothing for students. it is designed to be sold to teachers too f***in lazy to be worried about whether their kids can read, write, or think. they just say, "golly, look at them on the computers, isn't it wonderful". adminstration grew up without computers so aren't tech savvy, and "we're using technology" sounds great and makes great PR in the school newsletter.
It probably isn't sold to just teachers for this kind of reason. Which is also applicable to administrator and advisors. Who can also say "look at all the great educational software in this school".
i teach seventh grade history. what do i do? well, i have had the kids do lots of work, from creating editorial newspapers, researching curent events and doing analysis, creating web pages, and using powerpoint (i know, i know) but not the bells, whistles, and chrome crap, no the two text boxes, compare and contrast, pro and con stuff (so it would show up on tv in class to present). as well as internet research. i also had them get three different web sites on a single topic, evaluate them on content, clarity, and validity. try that with some ed. software.
All of this involves commodity software, where the computers are being used as tools.
What is need is a flexable understing of What a spread sheet or word processor can do. Finding what menu Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or Corel put the feature on this year doesn't matter.
Especially where the menus can be customised anyway...
Maybe they should also list what VERSION of Microsoft Office they use as well; after all, Office 11 won't run on 98 or ME. Maybe that means that a user can't claim to be able to use Windows because they haven't yet used XP.
This is ridiculous. Assuming that users aren't this flexible isn't facing reality.
In other areas where specific skills are required employers don't ask in that specific way. If an employer wants a driver they don't ask what kind of car (or truck or bus) a candidate passed their test in.
And 90% of those companies either don't use computers with MS software or only use MS windows to run a special client they built to emulate a terminal to interface with their servers and databases.
Not sure if it's 90%. But it does appear to be not uncommon to see Windows machines running a maximised terminal window (or some kind of text based application) including cases where whoever set them up didn't know about the "hide taskbar" option.
I hate to break it to you, but most people out there don't get paid to type up word documents, or generate excel spreadsheets.
Even if they do they need to conform to the "house style" and use the corporate standard configuration of office. Which need not be either the default configuration or the kind of configuration someone would want in a school.
For every 1 you do find working for a small company doing something like that you find fifty in the middle of Kansas (nice low wages) working at a call center with a custom designed application.
Which might just as well use dumb terminals or LTSP type X-terms.
I know that sounds crazy to some geeks, but if you're doing hiring based soley on whether Jane knows Outlook, Notes, Pine or just Hotmail then your company is in deeper trouble than any commercial software package can fix. Your post also ignores the fact that most office software can be learned in an afternoon and the user can be brought up to the level of intermediate user if not expert in a couple weeks of real use.
Possibly just as important as learning the software is learning the specific way it is setup within the organisation in question. Who do you think might learn faster? Jane who's been told blindly what buttons to press in MS Word at school or Jayne who was taught at school what kind of tool a word processor is and had a choice of Open Office, Abiword, etc.
Secondly, being exposed to a typical office app or a browser regardless of brand is more than enough to teach someone "computers." If you can use Moz you can use IE. If you can use Open Office you can use any office software.
This sort of attitude dosn't get applied to other skills. An employer who said "we use Ford trucks we can only employ someone who has driven a Ford truck before" or "we have a Nortel telephone system in our offices, only people who have used Nortel before can be considred" would be looked upon as foolish.
There are priorities in education and teaching the latest and greatest and most expensive is simply unrealistic.
If anything it makes sense to have software with as few "bells and whistles" for educational use.
Slashdot Mirror
While waiting for your cracked copy of Eminem to finish burning, how many of you have done anything to alert your representatives about the madness of a unilateral attack by the US on Iraq?
What people can't complain both about both? Indeed most of the world has made it clear exactly what they think of Bush...
The US (and UK) havn't stopped attacking Iraq since 1991. There are also reports that Israel has sent commandos into Iraq recently.
Actually I find the government's conspiracy theories to be much more interesting than this moon landing crap, at least they research them and give the whole thing a bit of depth.
Depends on the conspiracy theory in question. The "moon hoax" one is quite weak. Then so is "Afgan Caveman", in some ways even weaker then the competing conspiracy theories of "Senario 12D" and "Lavon version 2".
Governments no longer have a monopoly when it comes to research and being able to point to past and present happenings which support their claims. Even where governments have access to information not in the public domain it can only become "evidence" by being placed into the public domain.
if spammers were treated by the law in the same way as breakers of the DMCA.
Or anyone the US government dosn't like.
Sure he would be shut down PDQ if GW was convinced that spam is the way terrorists keep in touch.
Nice house. I'd like to throw him a housewarming party.
How warm?
Granted this guy is in a shady business, but still it's perfectly legal. You get spam mail be ordinary mail too and you pay for the delivery too (your tax money makes the USPS go!). So why don't you complain about it, too?
If someone sends stuff through the post they have to pay for the paper, envelopes, printing and postage (possibly two lots of postage if they include a reply paid envelope). They have some financial incentive to only send the stuff to people who want and who can make use of the offer.
Email spammers cost the recipients money and frequently misuse other people's computers in order to send the stuff in the first place. Since there is little cost to the sender they don't much care about who the send it to. Including sending stuff to people who couldn't buy their product even if they wanted to, assuming them can even read the language used.
First, conspiracy theorists are motivated by a profound mistrust of the government.
Governments are quite capable of spinning their own conspiracy theories, even ones which make less sense than those of the so called "nuts".
If proper measures are taken to root out and eliminate the social causes of conspiracy nuttiness, we will see far fewer people blindly accepting the crackpot theories of the "no-moon-landing" crowd.
But you'd also have people less willing to swallow the claims of politicans.
Recently it was announced in the UK that singles sales had halved since 1988, why 1988? IIRC 1988 was the year that CD sales started to make an impact on vinyl sales. I alse remeber noticing that a CD single cost £2.99 in 1998 but a vinyl single cost £1.99. The same trend applies to CD albums they are more expensive than their vinyl ancestors.
What actually happened was that first the price of vinyl started creeping up, then quality of vinyl started going down. The idea of the record companies was to kill off vinyl. Which didn't quite work with 12" singles...
The bottom line is, there aren't many artists starving. Mariah Carey, for instance, got $28 million for failing to sell enough records.
If the artists are starving it's just as likely to be due to the strange accounting practices of the industry.
The speakers will have the decoding chip, the signal sent to the speakers will be encoded using whatever standardized encryption they decide upon that is a quality encryption algorithm. Thus, the DRM has to be at the end source, at wher the final product is released(ie. the speakers, the TV screen, etc.)
What kind of speaker will produce sounds which the human ear can hear perfectly, but no microphone can pick up? What kind of TV screen can display a picture which the human eye can see, but no camera can see?
Now, the analogue output is naturally of lower quality then the digital output, so I think that the RIAA and MPAA are just trying to prevent the copying of the "digital masters" so to speak.
The kind of mp3s you will find on P2P networks are nothing like the original masters. Similarly the movies and TV progrmmes being traded are not of broadcast quality video tape, let alone film quality. But they are making a fuss now...
If these companies that are building DRM get their heads on straight, and think about how to build it correctly (using really cryptography and not just security through obscurity), then yes... DRM may be possible.
No it is fundermentally imposible. Since in order for the system to be of any use the content in question must appear as something suitable for human sense organs. Either ears or eyes.
With a large enough key, it would be theoretically impossible for the it be discovered, and since the decoding happens on one part of the chip in a "black box" style. There would be no way for the end user to get the key.
Since the point of the black box is to output the plaintext the user does not need the key in the first place. All such a black box can do is allow the sender to choose when the plaintext is output. Once the user has the plaintext they can do whatever they like with it. Which includes recording it or sending to other parties (including sending in an encrypted form)
Librarians are already making decisions about what books to place on the shelves.
Books cost money, take up physical space and require organising so that they are in the right places (especially if they are for lending).
With the internet you have to expend resources to block material.
On the internet, the situation is the exact opposite. Carrying everything is the default, and it takes extra resources to block things. Thus any blocking has to be justified as somehow increasing the overall amount of information. Of course this is impossible since blocking information by definition decreases this amount. Hence no filtering is acceptable to the library's mission.
Not quite, but you might be more looking at having an option to block things like banner ads, popups, sites which use oversized images, etc.
Ok, you recognize Mein Kampf has historical value. How about a tougher one next, some worthless trash...
would you censor these idiots? [stormfront.org] Don't miss their lovely kids page! [stormfront.org]
How do you know what might and might not be a historically important document in the future?
If you think you the right to say some material is offensive and not within the mission of a library then you better damn well expect ME to have the same right. I'd start with the Bible, it's filled with sex, violence, even incest!
You missed out rape and genocide...
After that I'd ban all the other religion's holy books too. (It wouldn't be very fair to discriminate against just one religion.)
As all that lot is in Genesis you wouldn't be targeting Christianity any way...
www.gambleboards.com - Blocked for gambling, however I have followed over a dozen links describing it as the manufacurer of sound boards founded by Jim Gamble.
In reality block lists are compiled by some fairly stupid software, The only real difference between the lists from something like SquidGuard and the proprietary lists is that SquidGuard is honest. The typical human input is from users saying "you should/should not have blocked this or that website"
Apparently there was a public FTP server at MS that MS employees were using to store sensitive files, because they weren't aware that it was public.
It's a bit like Microsoft having a leaflet rack. Where some idiot had put confidential information in some of the slots.
The funny thing is that MS was notified, took the server down, cleaned it, put it back up, and the same employees started doing it again.
Did the employees not think to ask why? Were they not told why? Who was in charge of this, Homer Simpson?
constitute some sort of business tort, like disclosing trade secrets? I'm not trying to give MS lawyers any ideas (like they need them) but I've certainly seen Apple goes nuts over this sort of thing.
The only place MS can send their lawyers is after the employee or contractor who made the information available.
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance.
One problem, IME, with MS support. Is that the tend to have people who specialise in a specific piece of software. Even though MS frequently produces "sphagetti code" where it isn't always obvious which is OS and which is application.
I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
Just hope it didn't break anything else.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
Because some of the code might well have originally been written for 95 (or even earlier) and the "monkeys" do the majority of their development work logged in as administrator.
Another problem is where an app refuses to even open a file it can't write to
Many companies offer huge educational discounts on software.
Thus changing from extremely expensive to very expensive. Remember that schools do not typically buy software for one computer they buy for a large number.
I'm at a private university. If I want to buy a single copy of LabVIEW for a computer in my research lab, it will cost me roughly 50% of the retail price.
The full price is?
If a child is exposed to the concept of a word processor, then learning the bells and whistles of another word processing program is not hard,
Assuming they need to bother with the bells and whistles at all.
most educational software sucks. period. it does absolutely nothing for students. it is designed to be sold to teachers too f***in lazy to be worried about whether their kids can read, write, or think. they just say, "golly, look at them on the computers, isn't it wonderful". adminstration grew up without computers so aren't tech savvy, and "we're using technology" sounds great and makes great PR in the school newsletter.
It probably isn't sold to just teachers for this kind of reason. Which is also applicable to administrator and advisors. Who can also say "look at all the great educational software in this school".
i teach seventh grade history. what do i do? well, i have had the kids do lots of work, from creating editorial newspapers, researching curent events and doing analysis, creating web pages, and using powerpoint (i know, i know) but not the bells, whistles, and chrome crap, no the two text boxes, compare and contrast, pro and con stuff (so it would show up on tv in class to present). as well as internet research. i also had them get three different web sites on a single topic, evaluate them on content, clarity, and validity. try that with some ed. software.
All of this involves commodity software, where the computers are being used as tools.
What is need is a flexable understing of What a spread sheet or word processor can do. Finding what menu Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or Corel put the feature on this year doesn't matter.
Especially where the menus can be customised anyway...
Maybe they should also list what VERSION of Microsoft Office they use as well; after all, Office 11 won't run on 98 or ME. Maybe that means that a user can't claim to be able to use Windows because they haven't yet used XP.
This is ridiculous. Assuming that users aren't this flexible isn't facing reality.
In other areas where specific skills are required employers don't ask in that specific way. If an employer wants a driver they don't ask what kind of car (or truck or bus) a candidate passed their test in.
And 90% of those companies either don't use computers with MS software or only use MS windows to run a special client they built to emulate a terminal to interface with their servers and databases.
Not sure if it's 90%. But it does appear to be not uncommon to see Windows machines running a maximised terminal window (or some kind of text based application) including cases where whoever set them up didn't know about the "hide taskbar" option.
I hate to break it to you, but most people out there don't get paid to type up word documents, or generate excel spreadsheets.
Even if they do they need to conform to the "house style" and use the corporate standard configuration of office. Which need not be either the default configuration or the kind of configuration someone would want in a school.
For every 1 you do find working for a small company doing something like that you find fifty in the middle of Kansas (nice low wages) working at a call center with a custom designed application.
Which might just as well use dumb terminals or LTSP type X-terms.
I know that sounds crazy to some geeks, but if you're doing hiring based soley on whether Jane knows Outlook, Notes, Pine or just Hotmail then your company is in deeper trouble than any commercial software package can fix. Your post also ignores the fact that most office software can be learned in an afternoon and the user can be brought up to the level of intermediate user if not expert in a couple weeks of real use.
Possibly just as important as learning the software is learning the specific way it is setup within the organisation in question.
Who do you think might learn faster? Jane who's been told blindly what buttons to press in MS Word at school or Jayne who was taught at school what kind of tool a word processor is and had a choice of Open Office, Abiword, etc.
Secondly, being exposed to a typical office app or a browser regardless of brand is more than enough to teach someone "computers." If you can use Moz you can use IE. If you can use Open Office you can use any office software.
This sort of attitude dosn't get applied to other skills. An employer who said "we use Ford trucks we can only employ someone who has driven a Ford truck before" or "we have a Nortel telephone system in our offices, only people who have used Nortel before can be considred" would be looked upon as foolish.
There are priorities in education and teaching the latest and greatest and most expensive is simply unrealistic.
If anything it makes sense to have software with as few "bells and whistles" for educational use.