Sure, if you factor in the cost of having Microsoft send you all the product update CDs... I'd rather slam my head repeatedly with a toilet seat that wait for Internet Explorer's latest 17MB update to download, and I bet you would, too.
Of course, you are free to ignore that sort of thing if you don't mind getting Nimda/I love you/melissa/loveletter/kournikova etc.
The bottom line, of course, is that slower speeds are OK if you never do the fancy stuff, no one EVER e-mails you "funny" 1.5MB videos,and you really believe that you'll never need to download software or upgrades or patches ever again.
On the other hand, most of us who really USE the internet - instead of dabbling in it while pretending to be consultants - already know that if you use it all the time, you need an extra phone line, making DSL and cable modems more economical - you get much more for the same price.
Actually, Microsoft walked into the area opened up by the antitrust suit and that created a balance in the market, not the market itself, which failed Failed FAILED, as markets periodically do absent oversight. In much the same way sporting contests without referees tend to fall apart now and then; when was the last time you saw a referee-less sporting event where money changed hands? No one has yet moved into a space opened up by antitrust suits against Microsoft; nor are they likely to, since Microsoft's leadership clearly believe they are above the law and can ignore any judgement against them.
Bush's belief in aristocracy before capitalism and money before values and power before technology will ensure that the next generation of change - be it a multi-media WWW or whatever - will be held back for another 20 years while an abusive monopoly tries to get the markets to pay in advance for every niggardly improvement, unless, of course, crushing yet another hopelessly optimistic would-be competitor happens to make some innovation appear to be worth stealing.
Yup, and it's not too bad compared to the JVMs I've used. mod_perl is the fastest complex web programming environment I've used, and it's memory requirements are comparable to a servlet engine. Too bad that you can trash the server with it, and that object-oriented programming in current perl is ugly shit. I'm actually excited about trying out Apache 2 with mod_perl6. It might just be enough to make me forget about using anything else.
Nor is it about God. It's about winning the war. To paraphrase Patton, war is not about dying for your country; war is about making more of the other bastards die for theirs.
But it's characteristic of the insane mindset of many sorry bastards out there that little has been said about how many muslims have waged war during ramadan, and very much about how evil the US is for doing so, even though we haven't done it yet. Muslims killing during ramadan, OK, US killing during ramadan, infidels! Just like how the US defense of muslims in the balkans is conveniently ignored.
>There were 0 (count em) Afghanis involved on Sept 11.
There were zero on the plane, and zero (apparently) involved in the overseas contingent. But the "controlling factions of Afghanistan" means "The Taliban". Given that no one seems to be able to draw a clear line where the Taliban ends and the murderous Arabs in Afghanistan begin (unless it involves support from Pakistan that's every bit as fickle as any we've given anyone), it's pretty ludicrous to maintain that there were zero involved. I just didn't see them roasted alive with thousands of innocents from my apartment window.
> Unfortunately the bombs have strengthened their grip on the country. Foreign aggression always has that effect.
Right, which is why Hitler and Hirohito are still running the show. Dead people are notorious for having poor grips on power. You might as well just mouth words you've heard, like "violence never solves anything". Bullshit. It solves a hell of a lot when its use is required, its scope limited, its force conclusive, and its aims just. It is a dangerous game, but its not exactly safe waiting around hoping the bad guys come to their senses before they nuke a city.
> Unfortunately there are c. 1,000,000,000 muslims in the world, most of them do not live in Afghanistan
Right. About 15% live in countries that EACH have more than a billion people, the rest of whom are not muslim, and the goverments of which have few if any scruples about hanging terrorists from the nearest tree at any time.
I like universal brotherhood, too, but not when medieval theocracy has anything to do with the game plan.
> It is very likely that 100000-1000000 innocent people will starve as a result of the US action
It is very likely that they would have starved anyway. I don't know if you heard, but the Afghans have been waging a civil war for a decade, there's a horrible drought, and even their sympathetic Muslim neighbors in Pakistan don't want any more of them coming in until they get their shit together and stop behaving like medival thugs.
And who has delivered the most food aid to Afghanistan? Their "good Mulsim" oil sheik brothers in Saudi Arabia? No, they're too busy drinking jack daniels and cavorting with eastern european whores while they cry about the corrupt west and fund terrorists by leaving money in paper bags at the service entrance. The United States has been sending the most food aid to Afghanistan.
> After all, it's the only language we seem to understand.
We also understand rebuilding nations we didn't destroy, letting people practice and preach whatever religion they choose, and allowing individuals to participate in the political process. Fuck you, twit.
Right on. Naive, gullible, simple, credulous, green, unsophisticated, and an easy mark.
I'm constantly amazed at how many people can't craft a basic business letter. Once upon a time, people prided themselves on being educated, and even though most of them were self-educated, they were more literate than their counterparts today.
It sounds trite, but it's the only form a solution can take: get politically active at the most local level you can. Unless a significant number of people do this (and more do than most college students and big city residents tend to think), it doesn't work. If you believe in democracy, practice it.
No, they were terrorists long before they pulled out the boxcutters. Planning murder is an action in itself. If you don't believe me, announce your intention to kill the President and see what happens.
Actually, "hyper people on TV who report anything immediately" is pretty close to what Katz means by "hypermedia". It is, after all, people who make this, not little robots inside televisions or space aliens radiating stuff into your brain.
But that's exactly the issue; sure, people once got "official" news from "official" sources, but there was also a lot of gossip and water-cooler reporting to keep them filled up on details in between. The difference now is that the size of the professional media has grown to include that information in its pool, just to have enough. To put it another way, the water-cooler reporters have gone professional. And somewhere there is a water cooler or break room made much more pleasant by the simple fact that Matt Drudge isn't there bothering the other employees.
For now, at least, the professional gossips and armchair journalists are maintaining the pretense of objectivity (usually) and accuracy (usually). When that pretence falls, some weird Verhovian nightmare of latent fascism will come crawling into daylight until the great broom of justice chases it back to a dark place.... Come to think of it, the rumor gibbering about the Middle East these days is that Israel was behind the Sep 11 attacks; this gets publicized and televised as literal fact, despite not one shred of evidence. When you consider how far the Western (and Eastern) media have fall to reach that point, it seems premature (even churlish) to play at being a canary in a coalmine, as Katz is doing in this article.
I won't bother pointing out how sadly stupid it sounds when Katz, a writer, complains about too much media. What's next, cops complaining about too little crime?
I used to do it by "loaning my friend a pen", in which the note was wrapped up. Efficiency, my friend, is key; more efficient note-passing means more time paying attention!
You are making the faulty assumption that "quirky" stands for "less productive". The Internet itself was made - and made useful - by folks that could be considered "quirky". They were there first. The types who focused more on their outward appearance came later. The "cooling of the economy", or to put it more accurately, "total failure of the bullshit hype machine", reflects rather poorly on their contributions, while there are many who are quirky, knowledgable, and productive who still remain, and will be there when know-nothings like you come crawling back.
I've noticed many Outlook versions try APOP before trying plaintext passwords, so I don't see why they couldn't use that.
I can't say that it gives me great confidence in their network if they are worried about snoopers sitting on it, though!
And as a Linux/FreeBSD user, I'd have to give them the finger for this. As a state A.G., I'd have to think about starting a whole new anti-trust suit. But if I were a user getting shafted by this, I'd be wondering which would come first, fetchmail supporting SPA, or me figuring out how to destroy Qwest with a backhoe.
Am I the only one who can't tell if the./ article is just hype and Qwest is merely *offering* a mysterious and unverifiable "anti-spam" service to see if they can sucker you into using LookOut, with no plans at all to abort other users?
This is not insightful, it's redundant and also deceptive, since, yes, you have always had the right to copy. Fair use limitations were not carved out of a wall of non-permission, but shaded out of the glaring assault of government-granted monopoly.
Furthermore, the very fact that there are laws inventing copyright is supposed to have something to do with the ability to copy something. If that ability is eliminated through technological tricks, the moral basis for copyright is wholly undermined.
These kind of measures should be recognized for what they are; a raw, naked, fuck-the-consumer power play by businesses who don't give a shit about anything once they've got got your money. This is about as defensible as spitting in your food.
I understand your overall point, and generally agree, but you seem to imply that "people in congress" are obliged to answer "no comment" to any reporter asking anything whatsoever. I sincerely hope this is not what you intended to say, because it is dangerous militaristic motherfucking horseshit and it is my patriotic duty to kick the living crap out of anyone who intends to reflexively castrate the democratically elected representatives of the people in favor of some relatively dubious "top secret" rubber stamping.
I appreciate the need for secrecy under certain circumstances, but honestly, you know as well as I do that sensitive information is shared with a small number of members of certain committees. Which means that folks on the information-having side of the equation generally know damn well who the blabbermouth is. So go public with that, or keep silent and dare them to make you tell who can't keep their mouths shut, but Bush has little cause to be a crybaby about the inability of the executive and military areas of government to keep confidential information confidential while engaging in appropriate disclosure.
And a little appreciation of history shows that, of course, military networks don't need undisciplined civvies digging holes in dykes; there are plenty already.
Re:The reach of the internet ... How this started
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 2
Why would that happen? How on earth would an AP photog do that? Why would an AP graphics person do that? I know a couple; they wouldn't. Aside from the fact that you have to suppose some kind of elaborate conspiracy or career-ending prank for no fruitful end, doctored photos are relatively easy to catch if you blow up the pixels a bit (strange as it seems, you haven't been examining your celebrity porn closely enough). No one has been able to convincingly detect such doctoring.
Occam's razor finds two much better (simpler) explanations:
Retarded fake-ass-"Muslim" poster-maker doctors his poster after learning that his creation includes a gay muppet.
AP temporarily panics, fearing bogisity, and erases Bert, assuming it "must be some kind of mistake".
Get used to it. This is the New New Media. And, to be fair, the Lindquist site contains both above Occam-compliant explanations.
I agree with you. I went from Gnome to KDE to Windowmaker to Gnome to Windowaker inside Gnome to Windowmaker.
KDE just has way too many undocumented features that are hard to tweak - I use this stuff because I *like* to tweak things. Gnome *was* much sloppier than KDE, but has really caught up. When I finally realized I hate the desktop metaphor - windomaker doesn't need it, and I don't either - I switched back. It was around that time that I realized that I think the Gnome apps are way ahead. I've been using Gnumeric and I actually find it far easier to use than, say, Excel.
In the long run, it would be nice if their consitutent apps could run smoothly without loading the whole framework, if the background stuff (various little daemons) got loaded only when they are needed (KDE is moving away from this, Gnome towards), if someday they could settle on one sound daemon (I'm currently pitching for esound); personally, the cut-n-paste from X is about all I can see needing real soon...
Real music fans like their music because it's great, not because some multinational can do the bean counting. Those fans also tend to buy music because they are proud to own stuff from that band, not so they can listen to the music (that's probably true of most of the Spice Girls fans, most of the time, as well).
So the choice you represent in number 2 is bullshit. If you really think that's true, don't be a musician. One of the most commercially successful bands of all time was the Grateful Dead, and they encouraged taping of their shows and made little of their money from album sales. Fugazi has carried on the Dischord Records tradition of cheap records and cheap shows, but they don't fall to either the Scylla or Charybdis that you bemoan. The Melvins, Kurt Cobain's fave, worked outside of the major labels, built a fan base, got a major label contract, and ended up getting away from the majors, and doing a song that has a bunch of answering machine messages from label scum, showing in detail the complete assfucking that a major label deal is (sure, the messages are probably fake, but they *could* be real).
You, sir, are full of it. Your lack of imagination is no defense for your arguments.
I think, to a large degree, the wider web community has already resisted attempts to "proprietize" it, by actually writing code that works on all browsers. Sure, there are far too many sites that assume everyone uses IE on PC, but for the most part, developers and site owners recognize that giving 40% of your customers the finger isn't a viable business strategy.
So while I think the W3C is showing a remarkable degree of contempt for the web by encouraging the adoption of standards that destroy the web, what I can't fathom is how these companies think it is in any way in their best interests to make the web less inclusive. Sure, they'd LOVE to squeeze out the competition on the production side, but these moves really just balkanize the end user. Agree to disagree and divvy up the spoils?
The web, unlike TV, which always was a BROADCAST medium, is a genie that scares the hell out of the big culture companies. They would love to put it back in the bottle, but the adoption of standards won't help if the public ignores the end results.
And I can't say that I really approve. Don't want this to happen? Disable javascript and active scripting (or just type in the right address). Don't want a browser where it's on by default? By your computer from a manufacturer who makes "safe" PCs. Oh, they aren't allowed to alter the settings before selling it to you by the browser maker? Thank stars for the antitrust... oh, never mind, just bomb Florida and string up anyone who thinks "market failure" is when stocks decline.
I actually think this represents the worst sort of judicial overreaching.
If this bill passes, in the future you will have to ask permission to read a book or listen to a song.
But I think it's important to point out that the consquences of this attempt to steal the future are so dire, that it's impossible to actually BE an alarmist about this topic, simply because the coup They are trying to pull with this bill is so completely alarming.
Thanks for finally summing this up correctly by keeping the context of the discussion relevant. We're talking about crypto for communications between terrorists, not for HTTPS. And considering that the encryption is ABSOLUTELY uncrackable, it's awfully cheap.
Here's a real scenario for it's use:
We are planning this around the campfire. Your mission is to go into a foreign country and wait for the message. When you get it, decrypt it with a perl script, a password, and a one-time pad. The one-time pad will be a piece of digital data, something you can get anywhere and carry without suspicion, like a software installation program or ascii copy of, say, a religious text, or even the logo from the FBI's website. The perl script asks you for the password, uses it as a seed for some kind of pseudo-random garbage, Xors that with the digital data pad, and decrypts the message. I will now tell you the URL where you can download the perl script when the time comes, the source of the one-time pad, and the password. Goodbye.
How the fuck is Carnivore or laws for crypto backdoors supposed to stop that? Law enforcement wouldn't even know what to look for. The second you propose techniques for analysing this (we know our pad is going to be a little less than truly random, for instance), I'll propose a slightly different way of doing the whole thing (like varying the way the pseudo-random data from the pass-seed and the pad key work), and your technique won't work. That's the whole point of the one-time pad; you can't crack it next time, because there is no next time (especially in a suicide attack!), and right now you are too late. How exactly can you expect any sort of law enforcement to crack this, or even know what to look for without actually sitting around the campfire with us?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you are free to ignore that sort of thing if you don't mind getting Nimda/I love you/melissa/loveletter/kournikova etc.
The bottom line, of course, is that slower speeds are OK if you never do the fancy stuff, no one EVER e-mails you "funny" 1.5MB videos,and you really believe that you'll never need to download software or upgrades or patches ever again.
On the other hand, most of us who really USE the internet - instead of dabbling in it while pretending to be consultants - already know that if you use it all the time, you need an extra phone line, making DSL and cable modems more economical - you get much more for the same price.
Bush's belief in aristocracy before capitalism and money before values and power before technology will ensure that the next generation of change - be it a multi-media WWW or whatever - will be held back for another 20 years while an abusive monopoly tries to get the markets to pay in advance for every niggardly improvement, unless, of course, crushing yet another hopelessly optimistic would-be competitor happens to make some innovation appear to be worth stealing.
No you can't (there, I didn't bite). Theo is OpenBSD, not FreeBSD (OK, so I did) [scratches armpit, chases tail, extends wings, and flies away].
Yup, and it's not too bad compared to the JVMs I've used. mod_perl is the fastest complex web programming environment I've used, and it's memory requirements are comparable to a servlet engine. Too bad that you can trash the server with it, and that object-oriented programming in current perl is ugly shit. I'm actually excited about trying out Apache 2 with mod_perl6. It might just be enough to make me forget about using anything else.
But it's characteristic of the insane mindset of many sorry bastards out there that little has been said about how many muslims have waged war during ramadan, and very much about how evil the US is for doing so, even though we haven't done it yet. Muslims killing during ramadan, OK, US killing during ramadan, infidels! Just like how the US defense of muslims in the balkans is conveniently ignored.
I like universal brotherhood, too, but not when medieval theocracy has anything to do with the game plan.
It is very likely that they would have starved anyway. I don't know if you heard, but the Afghans have been waging a civil war for a decade, there's a horrible drought, and even their sympathetic Muslim neighbors in Pakistan don't want any more of them coming in until they get their shit together and stop behaving like medival thugs.And who has delivered the most food aid to Afghanistan? Their "good Mulsim" oil sheik brothers in Saudi Arabia? No, they're too busy drinking jack daniels and cavorting with eastern european whores while they cry about the corrupt west and fund terrorists by leaving money in paper bags at the service entrance. The United States has been sending the most food aid to Afghanistan.
We also understand rebuilding nations we didn't destroy, letting people practice and preach whatever religion they choose, and allowing individuals to participate in the political process. Fuck you, twit.Right on. Naive, gullible, simple, credulous, green, unsophisticated, and an easy mark. I'm constantly amazed at how many people can't craft a basic business letter. Once upon a time, people prided themselves on being educated, and even though most of them were self-educated, they were more literate than their counterparts today.
It sounds trite, but it's the only form a solution can take: get politically active at the most local level you can. Unless a significant number of people do this (and more do than most college students and big city residents tend to think), it doesn't work. If you believe in democracy, practice it.
No, they were terrorists long before they pulled out the boxcutters. Planning murder is an action in itself. If you don't believe me, announce your intention to kill the President and see what happens.
But that's exactly the issue; sure, people once got "official" news from "official" sources, but there was also a lot of gossip and water-cooler reporting to keep them filled up on details in between. The difference now is that the size of the professional media has grown to include that information in its pool, just to have enough. To put it another way, the water-cooler reporters have gone professional. And somewhere there is a water cooler or break room made much more pleasant by the simple fact that Matt Drudge isn't there bothering the other employees.
For now, at least, the professional gossips and armchair journalists are maintaining the pretense of objectivity (usually) and accuracy (usually). When that pretence falls, some weird Verhovian nightmare of latent fascism will come crawling into daylight until the great broom of justice chases it back to a dark place.... Come to think of it, the rumor gibbering about the Middle East these days is that Israel was behind the Sep 11 attacks; this gets publicized and televised as literal fact, despite not one shred of evidence. When you consider how far the Western (and Eastern) media have fall to reach that point, it seems premature (even churlish) to play at being a canary in a coalmine, as Katz is doing in this article.
I won't bother pointing out how sadly stupid it sounds when Katz, a writer, complains about too much media. What's next, cops complaining about too little crime?
Is it the kids on IRC? No, Some Adults.
I used to do it by "loaning my friend a pen", in which the note was wrapped up. Efficiency, my friend, is key; more efficient note-passing means more time paying attention!
You are making the faulty assumption that "quirky" stands for "less productive". The Internet itself was made - and made useful - by folks that could be considered "quirky". They were there first. The types who focused more on their outward appearance came later. The "cooling of the economy", or to put it more accurately, "total failure of the bullshit hype machine", reflects rather poorly on their contributions, while there are many who are quirky, knowledgable, and productive who still remain, and will be there when know-nothings like you come crawling back.
I can't say that it gives me great confidence in their network if they are worried about snoopers sitting on it, though!
And as a Linux/FreeBSD user, I'd have to give them the finger for this. As a state A.G., I'd have to think about starting a whole new anti-trust suit. But if I were a user getting shafted by this, I'd be wondering which would come first, fetchmail supporting SPA, or me figuring out how to destroy Qwest with a backhoe.
Am I the only one who can't tell if the ./ article is just hype and Qwest is merely *offering* a mysterious and unverifiable "anti-spam" service to see if they can sucker you into using LookOut, with no plans at all to abort other users?
Furthermore, the very fact that there are laws inventing copyright is supposed to have something to do with the ability to copy something. If that ability is eliminated through technological tricks, the moral basis for copyright is wholly undermined.
These kind of measures should be recognized for what they are; a raw, naked, fuck-the-consumer power play by businesses who don't give a shit about anything once they've got got your money. This is about as defensible as spitting in your food.
I appreciate the need for secrecy under certain circumstances, but honestly, you know as well as I do that sensitive information is shared with a small number of members of certain committees. Which means that folks on the information-having side of the equation generally know damn well who the blabbermouth is. So go public with that, or keep silent and dare them to make you tell who can't keep their mouths shut, but Bush has little cause to be a crybaby about the inability of the executive and military areas of government to keep confidential information confidential while engaging in appropriate disclosure.
And a little appreciation of history shows that, of course, military networks don't need undisciplined civvies digging holes in dykes; there are plenty already.
Occam's razor finds two much better (simpler) explanations:
- Retarded fake-ass-"Muslim" poster-maker doctors his poster after learning that his creation includes a gay muppet.
- AP temporarily panics, fearing bogisity, and erases Bert, assuming it "must be some kind of mistake".
Get used to it. This is the New New Media. And, to be fair, the Lindquist site contains both above Occam-compliant explanations.KDE just has way too many undocumented features that are hard to tweak - I use this stuff because I *like* to tweak things. Gnome *was* much sloppier than KDE, but has really caught up. When I finally realized I hate the desktop metaphor - windomaker doesn't need it, and I don't either - I switched back. It was around that time that I realized that I think the Gnome apps are way ahead. I've been using Gnumeric and I actually find it far easier to use than, say, Excel.
In the long run, it would be nice if their consitutent apps could run smoothly without loading the whole framework, if the background stuff (various little daemons) got loaded only when they are needed (KDE is moving away from this, Gnome towards), if someday they could settle on one sound daemon (I'm currently pitching for esound); personally, the cut-n-paste from X is about all I can see needing real soon...
So the choice you represent in number 2 is bullshit. If you really think that's true, don't be a musician. One of the most commercially successful bands of all time was the Grateful Dead, and they encouraged taping of their shows and made little of their money from album sales. Fugazi has carried on the Dischord Records tradition of cheap records and cheap shows, but they don't fall to either the Scylla or Charybdis that you bemoan. The Melvins, Kurt Cobain's fave, worked outside of the major labels, built a fan base, got a major label contract, and ended up getting away from the majors, and doing a song that has a bunch of answering machine messages from label scum, showing in detail the complete assfucking that a major label deal is (sure, the messages are probably fake, but they *could* be real).
You, sir, are full of it. Your lack of imagination is no defense for your arguments.
So while I think the W3C is showing a remarkable degree of contempt for the web by encouraging the adoption of standards that destroy the web, what I can't fathom is how these companies think it is in any way in their best interests to make the web less inclusive. Sure, they'd LOVE to squeeze out the competition on the production side, but these moves really just balkanize the end user. Agree to disagree and divvy up the spoils?
The web, unlike TV, which always was a BROADCAST medium, is a genie that scares the hell out of the big culture companies. They would love to put it back in the bottle, but the adoption of standards won't help if the public ignores the end results.
Or until someone hacks their way in through the installed-by-default IIS, or the latest Outlook worm simply mails your data out.
And I can't say that I really approve. Don't want this to happen? Disable javascript and active scripting (or just type in the right address). Don't want a browser where it's on by default? By your computer from a manufacturer who makes "safe" PCs. Oh, they aren't allowed to alter the settings before selling it to you by the browser maker? Thank stars for the antitrust... oh, never mind, just bomb Florida and string up anyone who thinks "market failure" is when stocks decline.
I actually think this represents the worst sort of judicial overreaching.
Offtopic? Give me a fucking break. Slashdot has always had some bug that causes posts to end up on the wrong article now and then.
Here's a real scenario for it's use:
We are planning this around the campfire. Your mission is to go into a foreign country and wait for the message. When you get it, decrypt it with a perl script, a password, and a one-time pad. The one-time pad will be a piece of digital data, something you can get anywhere and carry without suspicion, like a software installation program or ascii copy of, say, a religious text, or even the logo from the FBI's website. The perl script asks you for the password, uses it as a seed for some kind of pseudo-random garbage, Xors that with the digital data pad, and decrypts the message. I will now tell you the URL where you can download the perl script when the time comes, the source of the one-time pad, and the password. Goodbye.
How the fuck is Carnivore or laws for crypto backdoors supposed to stop that? Law enforcement wouldn't even know what to look for. The second you propose techniques for analysing this (we know our pad is going to be a little less than truly random, for instance), I'll propose a slightly different way of doing the whole thing (like varying the way the pseudo-random data from the pass-seed and the pad key work), and your technique won't work. That's the whole point of the one-time pad; you can't crack it next time, because there is no next time (especially in a suicide attack!), and right now you are too late. How exactly can you expect any sort of law enforcement to crack this, or even know what to look for without actually sitting around the campfire with us?