Throw it away, regardless of whether it is electronic or paper. In fact, I'm less likely to throw away the electronic stuff; it creates less clutter. So your distinction between email and mail in this respect is false.
But there's a more important point to be made: to a political representative, there is no such thing as unsolicited mail. When they signed up as a candidate for my representation, that was a solicitation of both my vote and my opinion, and they had better not ignore the latter after they've received enough of the former.
When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
By "all the major news sites", I take it you mean cnn.com, msnbc.com, or whatever?
Re:God, i'm tired of this...
on
GOVNET In the Works
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Its composed of people like you and I, not evil robots that try to strip us of everything we own in some gigantic conspiracy to "ruuuule the wooooorld"
A few questions:
How many times, in the last century alone, has a nation killed tens of thousands of it's own people in a consolidation of government power? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The fact that you probably need to research an accurate answer to the first two, and that the answer to #3 is not "zero", should worry you just a little.
Given the above answers, do statements like: "Some civil servants might not care about my privacy as much as they should" really seem that outlandish?
If the government were as truly evil as you think they are, they would have already killed you, or would have prevented you from being born in the first place, let alone let you (gasp) speak openly in public!
Oh, of course! They're not committing genocide yet, so obviously everything is hunky-dory in the binary "perfect good" vs. "infinite evil" world you live in. Sorry if we're confusing you by suggesting the existance of gray...
My family were AOL users for a year or two, long enough ago that we used the DOS-based interface. We didn't stop, either, until after I got a dialup University account and they got a commercial PPP account in 1995.
I've been using Linux since 1997. Perhaps the current crop of AOLers would also require a couple years "transition" period, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.
Operating a computer in your office is much simpler than doing it on a frozen rock with bombs falling nearby and a poor power supply
And H.263 encoding is effortless, whereas MPEG-4 would require the reporter on the scene to recompile the Linux kernel before he could transmit!
Yes, if you can record, encode and transmit in near-real time the quality could be better, but then you're talking about a much more technically complicated setup that a reporter with limited resources has to manage.
There is no such thing as one codec which is more "technically complicated" to the user than another. The underlying math may be harder, but it all boils down to "frames go in here, encoded byte stream comes out here" in the end.
I suspect that changing the codec would require new videophone hardware, and that's the real problem... but the new phone won't be a whit more complicated than the old, and won't require any changes to the data link inbetween.
Even if the answer (in 95/98) is a simple right-click, that's a skill that I bet a high percentage of users don't have or understand
Really, now.
I sympathize with people who think a command line is too hard (although I suspect it won't be for their kids), but RIGHT-CLICKING!?! The second most important button on their thousand dollar device, and you are annoyed that this proposed solution requires people to give up their ignorance of it's existance! How ridiculous is that?
I don't want to "draw a line", I want the lines that have existed for over a century to be enforced!
Spam, for example, comes in three forms:
1) Unsolicited email with no return address, which I can easily block.
2) Unsolicited email with an accurate return address, to which I can send a form letter reply and cost the spammer more than he cost me.
3) Wire fraud.
Is it too much to ask that wire fraud be prosecuted?
How about Microsoft? Am I the only one wondering why the DOJ is basically dropping a case it's already won against decades of clear, repeated violations of antitrust law by a company that was ignoring previous court orders in the process?
How about encryption and free speech? How is it that Adobe is able to fraudulently advertise a broken encryption system, but I am not allowed to honestly describe how it breaks?
And copyright? I'll grant you that the interpretation of "for limited times" has grey areas, but we're well past those grey areas and into the black with current laws.
Is it so damned unreasonable to expect the United States government to just follow it's own laws, especially the rules laid out in the document that legitimizes it's existance?
I'm thinking: A, C, D, I, M, O, and S should all be in the same group.
I'd be able to type "DMCA", "MS", "CIA", "SSSCA", or "Osama" with just my middle finger!
Not a good title
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I've never heard of "The Apocalypse" before, and I'm sure it was a pretty good title for an article a month ago...
But today, when I see "Apocalypse 3" in a link from a previous story... I wasn't sure whether to click to read the story, or get up to check for mushroom clouds outside the window.
You're thinking of hydrogen embrittlement? That's true in general, not true in this case. Fortunately, "nearly everything" doesn't include aluminum - we'd have had a lot more trouble with the space program if it did.
Although I doubt the FBI would arrest a member of the RIAA on a simple rumor of infringement from a small business, like they did with Dmitry, but its about time we started hitting them over the head with the very laws they use to hurt us. Encrypt EVERYTHING and copyright EVERYTHING from now on!
(c) Copyright 2001 by Caleb Mulford. All rights reserved
Ever wonder why cracking is about to be classified as "computer terrorism", yet you couldn't so much as get a cop to unplug one of those Code Red servers spamming you? Because it's not the crime that matters to the FBI, it's the damage. If the damage is billions of theoretical dollars of "lost" publisher revenue, or a scathing Newsweek expose on the rise of internet child pornographers, then you can get some FBI attention. If the crime is that somebody is misusing your little soundbite on Slashdot, you're not going to see squat in the way of enforcement.
I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here
Benchmarks did come out favoring Windows. They were indeed loudly shot down with criticisms of the testing protocol, and with criticisms of the (Microsoft-funded, in this case) bias of the testing agency. And yes, both those criticisms were just as valid: e.g. not very.
The testing protocol, just as in this case, deliberately chose an aspect of performance that didn't have much practical meaning (load balancing between many 100MB NICs rather than using one GB card; using pipes on Windows instead of sockets/COM).
The testing agency, just as in this case, was horribly biased.
So what was the difference? Well, first of all, the biases were a lot more real before. People pointed out hand-tuning that was applied to NT and not Linux, hardware choices that seemed to deliberately use the least supported options, and misconfigurations of the Linux software. Do you have any similar things to point out here, other than "Everybody knows you shouldn't use pipes on Windows"?
The second difference? Even after those biases were taken into account, there was still aspects in which Linux's performance could be improved, and so it was, gradually over the next 18 months, until it now beats Windows in the same configurations. Do you think that the converse will be true, and Windows 2003 will have blazing performance in all forms of IPC? Would you like to bet money?
If you actually thought that there was an ounce of deceit in IBM's comparison, you would download their published source code, install Linux (I'm guessing that step isn't something you've done already - am I right?) and try the well-documented tests yourself.
That way, you would find yourself being quoted in all sorts of national tech magazines about IBM's fraudulent benchmarks, rather than just being modded up for some dumbass insinuations on Slashdot.
Since filesharing networks like KaZaA are technically illegal in most respects, I hardly think this is surprising.
If I claimed that the internet was technically illegal because you could use it to distribute copyrighted music or child porn, you'd think I was an idiot.
And yet you've bought in completely to the "sending files from one computer to another is morally wrong" claim, just under a different name. And all of the implicit assumptions that could justify that claim, "A tool is evil if it can be used to do evil things", "The RIAA owns everything that can be encoded as a sound file", did they manage to convince you of those too?
I won't say that Clarke's gone completely senile, but honestly, did you read 3001? What the hell was that?
I'd like to see a real SF writer consultant (didn't B5 have Harlan Ellison?), but someone who's writing good stuff currently. Michael Flynn, for example, is pretty good at plausible near-future settings.
would NEVER make it in there since the show would be labeled as a gay show and no geek would admit to watching it.
They could go halfway, and make a female character homosexual - that would be almost as "culturally daring", and wouldn't lose them many viewers. Or, they could make an attractive female character bisexual, not lose any viewers, and attract hordes of additional love-starved geeks to the audience. Watch for a later introduction of such a character; this is too win-win an idea for the writers not to come to the same conclusion eventually.
So only attacks against state and financial institutions, and computers used for interstate or foreign commerce and communication can be deemed terrorism.
You've mixed up one of your logical operators, there; there's a big difference between "and" and "or". The correct operator is "or". As you quoted the first time:
which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication
Only computers used for interstate communication, huh? That would be everything that has an IP address...
No, "O(n) NP-complete" proves that trolls don't actually have to understand the jargon, they just have to use a lot of it to get modded up by someone who understands less.
Baker, Sept. 17, 10:30am: But frankly, I don't hear a lot of calls for sacrificing civil liberties today.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sept. 17, 7:30pm: In a press conference earlier today, Ashcroft indicated that he would be asking Congress to expand the ability of law enforcement officers to perform wiretaps. EFF believes this broad legislation would result in unintended negative consequences for civil liberties of law-abiding ciizens by making it unnecessary for law enforcement officers to obtain a court wiretap order before requiring ISPs to release e-mail message header information and Internet browsing patterns of their subscribers.
Perhaps Mr. Baker should have said "I didn't hear a lot of calls yesterday," just to be on the safe side.
In any auto-update system, there is a single point of failure... but it is not the server that hosts the update packages, it is the computer that signs the packages! If you compromise the file server, you can destory the signed packages, but you cannot insert your own malicious packages without compromising the computer with your OS provider's public key.
And this signing computer can be ultra secure. It doesn't have to be on the network at all; a CD writer would be sufficient. It doesn't have to be running an architecture or operating system remotely related to anything else, just something capable of running GPG. You could have it loaded to the brim with intrusion detection software, you could have the entire OS on read-only media, you could do all sorts of things that just can't be done on all the random computers out on people's desks.
Auto-updating does introduce the possibility that a malicious employee could introduce trojan packages... but they could be doing that right now, just as easily, just a little more infrequently. "seineew era sreenigne epacsteN", anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Throw it away, regardless of whether it is electronic or paper. In fact, I'm less likely to throw away the electronic stuff; it creates less clutter. So your distinction between email and mail in this respect is false.
But there's a more important point to be made: to a political representative, there is no such thing as unsolicited mail. When they signed up as a candidate for my representation, that was a solicitation of both my vote and my opinion, and they had better not ignore the latter after they've received enough of the former.
When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
By "all the major news sites", I take it you mean cnn.com, msnbc.com, or whatever?
Its composed of people like you and I, not evil robots that try to strip us of everything we own in some gigantic conspiracy to "ruuuule the wooooorld"
A few questions:
How many times, in the last century alone, has a nation killed tens of thousands of it's own people in a consolidation of government power? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The fact that you probably need to research an accurate answer to the first two, and that the answer to #3 is not "zero", should worry you just a little.
Given the above answers, do statements like: "Some civil servants might not care about my privacy as much as they should" really seem that outlandish?
If the government were as truly evil as you think they are, they would have already killed you, or would have prevented you from being born in the first place, let alone let you (gasp) speak openly in public!
Oh, of course! They're not committing genocide yet, so obviously everything is hunky-dory in the binary "perfect good" vs. "infinite evil" world you live in. Sorry if we're confusing you by suggesting the existance of gray...
My family were AOL users for a year or two, long enough ago that we used the DOS-based interface. We didn't stop, either, until after I got a dialup University account and they got a commercial PPP account in 1995.
I've been using Linux since 1997. Perhaps the current crop of AOLers would also require a couple years "transition" period, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.
Operating a computer in your office is much simpler than doing it on a frozen rock with bombs falling nearby and a poor power supply
And H.263 encoding is effortless, whereas MPEG-4 would require the reporter on the scene to recompile the Linux kernel before he could transmit!
Yes, if you can record, encode and transmit in near-real time the quality could be better, but then you're talking about a much more technically complicated setup that a reporter with limited resources has to manage.
There is no such thing as one codec which is more "technically complicated" to the user than another. The underlying math may be harder, but it all boils down to "frames go in here, encoded byte stream comes out here" in the end.
I suspect that changing the codec would require new videophone hardware, and that's the real problem... but the new phone won't be a whit more complicated than the old, and won't require any changes to the data link inbetween.
Even if the answer (in 95/98) is a simple right-click, that's a skill that I bet a high percentage of users don't have or understand
Really, now.
I sympathize with people who think a command line is too hard (although I suspect it won't be for their kids), but RIGHT-CLICKING!?! The second most important button on their thousand dollar device, and you are annoyed that this proposed solution requires people to give up their ignorance of it's existance! How ridiculous is that?
I don't want to "draw a line", I want the lines that have existed for over a century to be enforced!
Spam, for example, comes in three forms:
1) Unsolicited email with no return address, which I can easily block.
2) Unsolicited email with an accurate return address, to which I can send a form letter reply and cost the spammer more than he cost me.
3) Wire fraud.
Is it too much to ask that wire fraud be prosecuted?
How about Microsoft? Am I the only one wondering why the DOJ is basically dropping a case it's already won against decades of clear, repeated violations of antitrust law by a company that was ignoring previous court orders in the process?
How about encryption and free speech? How is it that Adobe is able to fraudulently advertise a broken encryption system, but I am not allowed to honestly describe how it breaks?
And copyright? I'll grant you that the interpretation of "for limited times" has grey areas, but we're well past those grey areas and into the black with current laws.
Is it so damned unreasonable to expect the United States government to just follow it's own laws, especially the rules laid out in the document that legitimizes it's existance?
Just to explain the gaping plothole:
"They're powered by batteries made out of people! PEOPLE!!!
...
Oh, yeah, and they have cheap cold fusion."
"But Morpheus, why do they need human batteries if they have..."
"Shut up and watch the pretty VR, Neo."
Yes, I know "1 personal appearance == 50,000 emails", but you should at least have email properly represented on the list!
A couple variations you missed:
R. personal (not "actiongram") email;
S. personal email with in-district postal address for reply;
Which letters would you assign to which fingers?
I'm thinking: A, C, D, I, M, O, and S should all be in the same group.
I'd be able to type "DMCA", "MS", "CIA", "SSSCA", or "Osama" with just my middle finger!
I've never heard of "The Apocalypse" before, and I'm sure it was a pretty good title for an article a month ago...
But today, when I see "Apocalypse 3" in a link from a previous story... I wasn't sure whether to click to read the story, or get up to check for mushroom clouds outside the window.
I'm such a nerd... I didn't get up.
Hydrogen induces cracking in nearly everything
You're thinking of hydrogen embrittlement? That's true in general, not true in this case. Fortunately, "nearly everything" doesn't include aluminum - we'd have had a lot more trouble with the space program if it did.
Although I doubt the FBI would arrest a member of the RIAA on a simple rumor of infringement from a small business, like they did with Dmitry, but its about time we started hitting them over the head with the very laws they use to hurt us. Encrypt EVERYTHING and copyright EVERYTHING from now on!
(c) Copyright 2001 by Caleb Mulford. All rights reserved
Ever wonder why cracking is about to be classified as "computer terrorism", yet you couldn't so much as get a cop to unplug one of those Code Red servers spamming you? Because it's not the crime that matters to the FBI, it's the damage. If the damage is billions of theoretical dollars of "lost" publisher revenue, or a scathing Newsweek expose on the rise of internet child pornographers, then you can get some FBI attention. If the crime is that somebody is misusing your little soundbite on Slashdot, you're not going to see squat in the way of enforcement.
I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here
Benchmarks did come out favoring Windows. They were indeed loudly shot down with criticisms of the testing protocol, and with criticisms of the (Microsoft-funded, in this case) bias of the testing agency. And yes, both those criticisms were just as valid: e.g. not very.
The testing protocol, just as in this case, deliberately chose an aspect of performance that didn't have much practical meaning (load balancing between many 100MB NICs rather than using one GB card; using pipes on Windows instead of sockets/COM).
The testing agency, just as in this case, was horribly biased.
So what was the difference? Well, first of all, the biases were a lot more real before. People pointed out hand-tuning that was applied to NT and not Linux, hardware choices that seemed to deliberately use the least supported options, and misconfigurations of the Linux software. Do you have any similar things to point out here, other than "Everybody knows you shouldn't use pipes on Windows"?
The second difference? Even after those biases were taken into account, there was still aspects in which Linux's performance could be improved, and so it was, gradually over the next 18 months, until it now beats Windows in the same configurations. Do you think that the converse will be true, and Windows 2003 will have blazing performance in all forms of IPC? Would you like to bet money?
If you actually thought that there was an ounce of deceit in IBM's comparison, you would download their published source code, install Linux (I'm guessing that step isn't something you've done already - am I right?) and try the well-documented tests yourself.
That way, you would find yourself being quoted in all sorts of national tech magazines about IBM's fraudulent benchmarks, rather than just being modded up for some dumbass insinuations on Slashdot.
Go on. We're waiting.
Since filesharing networks like KaZaA are technically illegal in most respects, I hardly think this is surprising.
If I claimed that the internet was technically illegal because you could use it to distribute copyrighted music or child porn, you'd think I was an idiot.
And yet you've bought in completely to the "sending files from one computer to another is morally wrong" claim, just under a different name. And all of the implicit assumptions that could justify that claim, "A tool is evil if it can be used to do evil things", "The RIAA owns everything that can be encoded as a sound file", did they manage to convince you of those too?
So, you have illegal tracks. Please refrain from making arguments in this case.
I jaywalked from the bus stop to get home this afternoon; I guess I'd better keep my mouth shut too.
gunzip -c > executable
That way you don't have to do nearly as much typing.
I won't say that Clarke's gone completely senile, but honestly, did you read 3001? What the hell was that?
I'd like to see a real SF writer consultant (didn't B5 have Harlan Ellison?), but someone who's writing good stuff currently. Michael Flynn, for example, is pretty good at plausible near-future settings.
would NEVER make it in there since the show would be labeled as a gay show and no geek would admit to watching it.
They could go halfway, and make a female character homosexual - that would be almost as "culturally daring", and wouldn't lose them many viewers. Or, they could make an attractive female character bisexual, not lose any viewers, and attract hordes of additional love-starved geeks to the audience. Watch for a later introduction of such a character; this is too win-win an idea for the writers not to come to the same conclusion eventually.
So only attacks against state and financial institutions, and computers used for interstate or foreign commerce and communication can be deemed terrorism.
You've mixed up one of your logical operators, there; there's a big difference between "and" and "or". The correct operator is "or". As you quoted the first time:
which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication
Only computers used for interstate communication, huh? That would be everything that has an IP address...
I have a really funny sig line that is too long for this. Bummer.
f yr sg brly ds nt ft n th spc thn try t wtht ny vwls. Wll tht wrk?
No, "O(n) NP-complete" proves that trolls don't actually have to understand the jargon, they just have to use a lot of it to get modded up by someone who understands less.
Baker, Sept. 17, 10:30am: But frankly, I don't hear a lot of calls for sacrificing civil liberties today.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sept. 17, 7:30pm: In a press conference earlier today, Ashcroft indicated that he would be asking Congress to expand the ability of law enforcement officers to perform wiretaps. EFF believes this broad legislation would result in unintended negative consequences for civil liberties of law-abiding ciizens by making it unnecessary for law enforcement officers to obtain a court wiretap order before requiring ISPs to release e-mail message header information and Internet browsing patterns of their subscribers.
Perhaps Mr. Baker should have said "I didn't hear a lot of calls yesterday," just to be on the safe side.
In any auto-update system, there is a single point of failure... but it is not the server that hosts the update packages, it is the computer that signs the packages! If you compromise the file server, you can destory the signed packages, but you cannot insert your own malicious packages without compromising the computer with your OS provider's public key.
And this signing computer can be ultra secure. It doesn't have to be on the network at all; a CD writer would be sufficient. It doesn't have to be running an architecture or operating system remotely related to anything else, just something capable of running GPG. You could have it loaded to the brim with intrusion detection software, you could have the entire OS on read-only media, you could do all sorts of things that just can't be done on all the random computers out on people's desks.
Auto-updating does introduce the possibility that a malicious employee could introduce trojan packages... but they could be doing that right now, just as easily, just a little more infrequently. "seineew era sreenigne epacsteN", anyone?