It's kind of astonishing to think that security around the President was so much less then. It's not like they didn't know that people had a gripe against Lincoln. Yeah, nobody had assassinated a President before, but sovereign rulers had been the target of people with grievances before.
I wonder if they were just naive about security, or if perhaps it was a more genteel time in general.
I've found OpenOffice's change tracking to be more flaky than MS Word's. I particular miss Word's "Accept this change" feature; OO.o's version of it is a dialogue box listing the changes and is far less helpful.
That said, they're both flaky. They both dramatically slow down operation. And they both lead to weird formatting glitches.
I wish the feature worked better. I use it for editing down Shakespeare plays. It's useful to be able to look back and see what I've cut, and sometimes I change my mind about the cuts. That's something plain old undo doesn't really handle well. I've used both Word and OO.o for it. I use OO.o because it's about equally buggy and therefore the price is right.
And you consider the act of creating your own CD (learning to play music, recording, distributing) morally equivalent to copying the bits from somebody else's CD?
Doing the right thing, at this point, will require saying unpopular things, making unpopular decisions, acting out of principle, and self-sacrifice. Honestly, I don't expect that from anyone in Washington. Nor do I expect that voters are smart enough to vote for somebody who was willing to make those decisions. "I'm going to raise your taxes, eliminate the special project funding in your district, and increase the retirement age" isn't the snappiest campaign slogan.
Generally, voters get the government they deserve.
Re:Here's how it works from another perspective
on
How Image Spam Works
·
· Score: 1
It's a good point. I've done plenty of incredibly stupid things, and bought my fair share of stupid stuff.
I'm pretty sure, however, that for the most part I didn't make life worse for everybody in the universe by doing so. OK, I exaggerate a bit, but that's the nub. I really don't care if somebody gets ripped off buying fake Viagra or getting into a stupid stock scam.
But every time somebody does those things, 10,000 emails get dumped into my inbox, and your inbox, and everybody else's inbox. Spammers annoy the entire world trying to get to that infinitesimal fraction who are so desperate that they're not thinking about how they're making my day worse through their actions.
I find that there are at least two different things driving doubters. One is, fundamentally, money. Fixing global warming is going to cost somebody a lot of money. I know that there are various claims that it can be done on the cheap or even have an economic advantage, but it seems pretty simple on the surface that if you hold yourself to rules and somebody else doesn't, they're going to beat you economically, at least in the short term. If there's any doubt that humans cause global warming, or that humans could fix global warming, or that things would get better if we did fix global warming, then it's very much in their best interest to make sure those doubts are heard.
But a lot of people haven't analyzed it out that far. For them, it's reason #2, a kind of herd instinct. I don't single out global-warming doubters for that. Quite the contrary: very few global-warming believers are actually in a position to make the claim directly. There are a few thousand scientists with direct knowledge of the problem; everybody else is just taking their word for it. Instead, they believe because it sounds reasonable to them, and they believe it because it reinforces their ideology.
That's what it all comes down to: a collection of liberal causes all back each other up and believe global warming. A collection of conservative causes all back each other up and doubt it. These causes are unrelated on the surface; there's no reason to find a correlation between global warming skepticism, opposition to gun control, demand for reduced government (and reduced taxes), more influence of religion, etc. except the underlying ideology.
That's where your "self-hood" comes to be at stake. If global warming is real, and human caused, etc. then an entire conservative philosophy is at risk. And the converse. If anything more so: a large class of global warming believer is only to happy to believe that this will force large corporations like car and oil companies to shut down, and it's just really really nice that the actual evidence happens to agree with them.
The lines of ideology aren't absolute. Some conservatives are starting to find that the evidence is too strong for global warming, and other aspects of their ideology start to kick in. For example, evangelicals believe that allowing the earth to warm is a failure of our custodianship of the planet.
As the publisher of J. Anec. Evid., I deplore the myth that anecdotal evidence is worse than your so-called "peer reviewed" evidence. We peer at each claim for quite a while, and only publish it if it meets our stringent two-pronged criteria:
1. It sounds good to us. 2. It makes some point that needs to be made.
Both Science and Nature have only ONE prong: repeatability. So citations from the Journal of Anecdotal Evidence are twice as sciency.
Re:Here's how it works from another perspective
on
How Image Spam Works
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You know that the IQ bell curve has two tails. Somebody's got to be in the left tail. And since spam is nearly free, you only need to find a few idiots.
Then again, they've got to be coming to the intersection point between "Dumb enough to buy v1@gra from a spammer" and "Too freaking stupid to use a computer or have any money".
Um, how are you generating that electric? Coal. Slaves. Ground-up hamsters. I don't care, as long as it isn't oil.
I don't care if it's electric, either. As long as it's not oil. Having a massive economic dependency on one of the most dangerously unstable regions of the world scares the bejeezus out of me.
Not to mention that it's the only funding source for Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism, and other isms ultimately giving GWB an excuse for a Global War On An Emotion. If somebody were to invent a solar-powered car we'd be pulling troops out of Iraq the following afternoon.
Somehow, I'd hoped that 13 years from now we'd be all electric, or otherwise not tied permanently to OPEC's apron strings. Hybrids are a nice improvement, but they're not exactly flying cars or solar power.
I suppose in Car Industry terms, 13 years isn't all that far off. I suspect that a car model is perhaps 5 to 7 years in the making, or longer for a really radical redesign.
But to think that I'll be turning 50 and cars will still be burning plain old gasoline, with only a moderate improvement in performance over right now... that makes me depressed.
AAPL is up.32% at the moment, on a day when the NASDAQ is down the same amount and the Dow is up.2%. So on a see-a-point-draw-a-line basis, I'd have to say there's nothing better for Apple stock than negative articles about their prospects.
Headlines do move stocks, but not little one-shot things like this. The market dismisses study articles like this one. There may be some investor who says, "Some research analyst says it's gonna tank? Get me outta that!" but it's less influential than, say, an upgrade or downgrade.
At the moment Apple stock is being driven steadily upwards by speculation about the coming of the iPhone, and by several consecutive quarters of better-than-expected earnings. iTMS video is a tiny blip on their earnings radar, and investors care about it only to the degree that it drives iPod sales, which have been an enormous win for Apple.
In general, don't try to time the market to headlines. If you're reading the news on the Internet, everybody else heard it before you did, and the price already reflects the news. As a Slashdotter you're better qualified to judge the significance of long-term trends than your average dipstick, so you can do well investing in tech stocks. But for market-timing you're going to get your butt kicked by a bunch of technical day-traders. (Not that they're getting rich, either, for the most part, but their herky-jerky movements on the news make it hard to apply cogent analysis of that news to the stock price.)
I always assume that any piece of legislation does the opposite of what its title says. The "Clear Skies Act" greatly increased the amount of pollution allowed. The "Freedom to Farm Act" was all about making it harder to be an individual farmer and easy to be a food-factory megacorporation. And let's not even get into the PATRIOT Act.
The same goes for lobbying groups. Any advertisement paid for by "The Group To Preserve Habitat For Cute Little Critters" has oil fingerprints all over the check.
And if you've got xenopolycythemia, you've got less than a year to live. Unless you can find the cure on some artificial asteroid that you happen by chance to run into at precisely the time you're diagnosed.
Very much so. And for the most part, you can at least imagine that [despised] was created by at most a few dozen people, over a few years, with more or less the same goal in mind.
Legislation, on the other hand, is created by people who absolutely despise each other, over the course of centuries. Whenever the balance of power shifts, they add MORE source code to the mix, trying to counteract what the other guys added.
And there's no debugger. The best you can hope for is to throw the legislation out there and hope that it has the effect you want.
It would be nice to throw it out and start all over every so often, but it's impossible to know if the new bugs and switchover costs outweigh dealing with upgrading the existing hunk of crap.
This is really about the separation of powers. The President insists that since he has wartime authorization, he has pretty wide authority to break the law. That is, the law is written, and he doesn't have to follow it because another law trumps it. That's what you get when you have a big, complex legal code.
This bill doesn't really change anything legally, but when it comes time for the third branch of government to have their say on the issue, Congress' intentions will be unambiguous: yes, they do mean that FISA is the ONLY way you can do domestic wiretapping.
It would be nice if laws could be simple and unambiguous, like a well-written piece of software. Instead, laws are written over a long time by a lot of different people, just like real software. Software crashes; laws get inconsistencies. You can point it out for laughs but when it's your phone they're tapping, or your right to life/liberty/property sitting in the ambiguity, it's not so funny.
Your tomatoes will be lovely, and you will still have magnificent Southern bacon, but when Raleigh creeps from Zone 7 to Zone 9, your lettuce is going to bolt before you even get the seeds in the ground. Think of the poor BLTs!
A lot of people don't want to be challenged by their entertainment. They saw a TV show that they liked yesterday, and what they want more than anything in the world is to watch that same TV show again. You need to change it just enough that they're not bored by an exact repetition, but core should be as close to identical as humanly possible.
Sci-fi fans aren't entirely immune to it, either. They brought Zombie Star Trek out for years after it should have been given a dignified burial. James Bond film scripts have been (until the most recent one) essentially mad-libs. And they'll even watch the same old movies (e.g. The Empire Strikes Back) until they can quote the dialogue and can spot changes on a frame-by-frame basis (and accuse those of doing so of raping their childhoods).
Poor Battlestar is just too expensive to continue. It must cost nearly as much as Lost, a show which probably has 10 times the viewership. Better to let it die than to compromise their vision.
I thought I was the only one in the world who did that.
It's particularly fun when they've filled the page with javascript that tries to pop stuff up when you depress the mouse button. I ended up installing NoScript primarily to defeat those mechanisms.
That's pretty much standard stuff in science reporting these days:
1. Scientist develops an improvement in an old but unused technology.
2. Nobody had ever heard of the old technology, so they can't explain the new stuff until they explain the old stuff.
3. The press writes about the old stuff, not realizing that it's not news.
Plus bonus step 4: scientist, trying to ensure that grants continue, points out that eventually there's a major improvement to be made, which the press promptly presents as "imminent".
You see this all the time on Slashdot, especially in conjunction with solar-cell stuff. There's news there, but it's not what the press is talking about, because the actual news is less interesting.
The whole system is screwed up in my opinion... Of course. But solutions are not easy to come by. Ultimately, elections are unfair things. John Kerry got 48% of the popular vote in 2004 and gets 0% say in how the office of the President is run. The same goes for every election ever held. Somebody wins, and they get to make all of the decisions, and the only reason they have the slightest inclination to serve the people who voted for them is that they want to be elected again. For the people who didn't vote for them, and won't vote for them... they just as well might not exist.
That's not just a flaw of representation. You could replace every decision with a direct election and end up with the same problem. Put the Iraq question to a vote, and 60% vote to pull out, which means that 40% are essentially ignored. They can't keep 40% of the troops in or fund it at 40%.
Ultimately, it means that any system you put in is screwed up. If you're lucky you can find something that everybody (or nearly everybody) agrees is a little better than the present one. But there isn't some vastly better system out there waiting to replace ours if only the government/the businesses/the Illuminati would let us have it.
I suspect you're right. I can't imagine that copying is going away, though I also suspect that them suing the bejeezus out of people isn't going away, either. People are reluctant to leave their BitTorrent clients running forever because it makes them a target. That makes it harder to find movies to download, and that means at least some people decide that it's easier to buy it from Amazon or iTMS.
That's why they don't care how much they make from the lawsuits, or how much they spend. It's much more about frightening people than it is about getting revenue directly. And that's frightening people into obeying the law, so they don't even lose sleep over it. If a half-million people buy a disc at a $5 profit for them rather than download it via Bittorrent, that $2.5 million buys a lot of lawyer time to sue people with.
I'll be sad to see the summer blockbuster go away. Slashdotters are gearing up right now to see Spider-Man 3 tomorrow night, and that's the sort of movie that can't be made to be released on YouTube.
If it goes, it goes, like the buggy-whip makers. I'm sure that was an art form which some people missed, too.
I don't think that the Slashdot concerns are irrational or inconsistent. I think that they're unproductive. My concern is that the absolutist stance, combined with the impossibility of a perfect solution, means that you're going to end up taking whatever abuse they can dish out.
You phrase it in a very confrontational way: your rights versus their "profits". Illegal copying doesn't just cut into their profits; it cuts into their ability to make any money at all.
If you put all of the burden on them to respect your rights, while insisting that it's also entirely up to them to protect theirs, then they're going fight you tooth and nail to squeeze your rights as small as the law and their considerable legal budget will let them.
We here on Slashdot are the technicians: tell them what's possible and feasible and fair to both you and them. Because right now the Slashdot stance looks entirely like an insistence on the ability to copy illegally, and the courts are going to look down on that when it comes to it. Right now the only thing saving that point of view at all is that the **AAs have managed to make themselves look even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of astonishing to think that security around the President was so much less then. It's not like they didn't know that people had a gripe against Lincoln. Yeah, nobody had assassinated a President before, but sovereign rulers had been the target of people with grievances before.
I wonder if they were just naive about security, or if perhaps it was a more genteel time in general.
I've found OpenOffice's change tracking to be more flaky than MS Word's. I particular miss Word's "Accept this change" feature; OO.o's version of it is a dialogue box listing the changes and is far less helpful.
That said, they're both flaky. They both dramatically slow down operation. And they both lead to weird formatting glitches.
I wish the feature worked better. I use it for editing down Shakespeare plays. It's useful to be able to look back and see what I've cut, and sometimes I change my mind about the cuts. That's something plain old undo doesn't really handle well. I've used both Word and OO.o for it. I use OO.o because it's about equally buggy and therefore the price is right.
Your statement implies that they were ever going to RTFA. I find that a rather bold and unwarranted conclusion.
We're Slashdot: we already know everything we need to know. We're just waiting for everybody else to find it out.
And you consider the act of creating your own CD (learning to play music, recording, distributing) morally equivalent to copying the bits from somebody else's CD?
Generally, voters get the government they deserve.
It's a good point. I've done plenty of incredibly stupid things, and bought my fair share of stupid stuff.
I'm pretty sure, however, that for the most part I didn't make life worse for everybody in the universe by doing so. OK, I exaggerate a bit, but that's the nub. I really don't care if somebody gets ripped off buying fake Viagra or getting into a stupid stock scam.
But every time somebody does those things, 10,000 emails get dumped into my inbox, and your inbox, and everybody else's inbox. Spammers annoy the entire world trying to get to that infinitesimal fraction who are so desperate that they're not thinking about how they're making my day worse through their actions.
I find that there are at least two different things driving doubters. One is, fundamentally, money. Fixing global warming is going to cost somebody a lot of money. I know that there are various claims that it can be done on the cheap or even have an economic advantage, but it seems pretty simple on the surface that if you hold yourself to rules and somebody else doesn't, they're going to beat you economically, at least in the short term. If there's any doubt that humans cause global warming, or that humans could fix global warming, or that things would get better if we did fix global warming, then it's very much in their best interest to make sure those doubts are heard.
But a lot of people haven't analyzed it out that far. For them, it's reason #2, a kind of herd instinct. I don't single out global-warming doubters for that. Quite the contrary: very few global-warming believers are actually in a position to make the claim directly. There are a few thousand scientists with direct knowledge of the problem; everybody else is just taking their word for it. Instead, they believe because it sounds reasonable to them, and they believe it because it reinforces their ideology.
That's what it all comes down to: a collection of liberal causes all back each other up and believe global warming. A collection of conservative causes all back each other up and doubt it. These causes are unrelated on the surface; there's no reason to find a correlation between global warming skepticism, opposition to gun control, demand for reduced government (and reduced taxes), more influence of religion, etc. except the underlying ideology.
That's where your "self-hood" comes to be at stake. If global warming is real, and human caused, etc. then an entire conservative philosophy is at risk. And the converse. If anything more so: a large class of global warming believer is only to happy to believe that this will force large corporations like car and oil companies to shut down, and it's just really really nice that the actual evidence happens to agree with them.
The lines of ideology aren't absolute. Some conservatives are starting to find that the evidence is too strong for global warming, and other aspects of their ideology start to kick in. For example, evangelicals believe that allowing the earth to warm is a failure of our custodianship of the planet.
Actually, yeah, she is. But she doesn't wear the leather cat suit any more.
(I'm also old enough to remember parking hard drive heads. I thought self-parking drive heads were kind of a miracle.)
As the publisher of J. Anec. Evid., I deplore the myth that anecdotal evidence is worse than your so-called "peer reviewed" evidence. We peer at each claim for quite a while, and only publish it if it meets our stringent two-pronged criteria:
1. It sounds good to us.
2. It makes some point that needs to be made.
Both Science and Nature have only ONE prong: repeatability. So citations from the Journal of Anecdotal Evidence are twice as sciency.
You know that the IQ bell curve has two tails. Somebody's got to be in the left tail. And since spam is nearly free, you only need to find a few idiots.
Then again, they've got to be coming to the intersection point between "Dumb enough to buy v1@gra from a spammer" and "Too freaking stupid to use a computer or have any money".
I don't care if it's electric, either. As long as it's not oil. Having a massive economic dependency on one of the most dangerously unstable regions of the world scares the bejeezus out of me.
Not to mention that it's the only funding source for Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism, and other isms ultimately giving GWB an excuse for a Global War On An Emotion. If somebody were to invent a solar-powered car we'd be pulling troops out of Iraq the following afternoon.
Thank you for that hopeful thought. I'd forgotten that we wouldn't need to reduce oil consumption to zero to screw OPEC over royally.
Somehow, I'd hoped that 13 years from now we'd be all electric, or otherwise not tied permanently to OPEC's apron strings. Hybrids are a nice improvement, but they're not exactly flying cars or solar power.
I suppose in Car Industry terms, 13 years isn't all that far off. I suspect that a car model is perhaps 5 to 7 years in the making, or longer for a really radical redesign.
But to think that I'll be turning 50 and cars will still be burning plain old gasoline, with only a moderate improvement in performance over right now... that makes me depressed.
AAPL is up .32% at the moment, on a day when the NASDAQ is down the same amount and the Dow is up .2%. So on a see-a-point-draw-a-line basis, I'd have to say there's nothing better for Apple stock than negative articles about their prospects.
Headlines do move stocks, but not little one-shot things like this. The market dismisses study articles like this one. There may be some investor who says, "Some research analyst says it's gonna tank? Get me outta that!" but it's less influential than, say, an upgrade or downgrade.
At the moment Apple stock is being driven steadily upwards by speculation about the coming of the iPhone, and by several consecutive quarters of better-than-expected earnings. iTMS video is a tiny blip on their earnings radar, and investors care about it only to the degree that it drives iPod sales, which have been an enormous win for Apple.
In general, don't try to time the market to headlines. If you're reading the news on the Internet, everybody else heard it before you did, and the price already reflects the news. As a Slashdotter you're better qualified to judge the significance of long-term trends than your average dipstick, so you can do well investing in tech stocks. But for market-timing you're going to get your butt kicked by a bunch of technical day-traders. (Not that they're getting rich, either, for the most part, but their herky-jerky movements on the news make it hard to apply cogent analysis of that news to the stock price.)
I always assume that any piece of legislation does the opposite of what its title says. The "Clear Skies Act" greatly increased the amount of pollution allowed. The "Freedom to Farm Act" was all about making it harder to be an individual farmer and easy to be a food-factory megacorporation. And let's not even get into the PATRIOT Act.
The same goes for lobbying groups. Any advertisement paid for by "The Group To Preserve Habitat For Cute Little Critters" has oil fingerprints all over the check.
And if you've got xenopolycythemia, you've got less than a year to live. Unless you can find the cure on some artificial asteroid that you happen by chance to run into at precisely the time you're diagnosed.
Very much so. And for the most part, you can at least imagine that [despised] was created by at most a few dozen people, over a few years, with more or less the same goal in mind.
Legislation, on the other hand, is created by people who absolutely despise each other, over the course of centuries. Whenever the balance of power shifts, they add MORE source code to the mix, trying to counteract what the other guys added.
And there's no debugger. The best you can hope for is to throw the legislation out there and hope that it has the effect you want.
It would be nice to throw it out and start all over every so often, but it's impossible to know if the new bugs and switchover costs outweigh dealing with upgrading the existing hunk of crap.
This is really about the separation of powers. The President insists that since he has wartime authorization, he has pretty wide authority to break the law. That is, the law is written, and he doesn't have to follow it because another law trumps it. That's what you get when you have a big, complex legal code.
This bill doesn't really change anything legally, but when it comes time for the third branch of government to have their say on the issue, Congress' intentions will be unambiguous: yes, they do mean that FISA is the ONLY way you can do domestic wiretapping.
It would be nice if laws could be simple and unambiguous, like a well-written piece of software. Instead, laws are written over a long time by a lot of different people, just like real software. Software crashes; laws get inconsistencies. You can point it out for laughs but when it's your phone they're tapping, or your right to life/liberty/property sitting in the ambiguity, it's not so funny.
Your tomatoes will be lovely, and you will still have magnificent Southern bacon, but when Raleigh creeps from Zone 7 to Zone 9, your lettuce is going to bolt before you even get the seeds in the ground. Think of the poor BLTs!
Because a lot of people love comfort food.
A lot of people don't want to be challenged by their entertainment. They saw a TV show that they liked yesterday, and what they want more than anything in the world is to watch that same TV show again. You need to change it just enough that they're not bored by an exact repetition, but core should be as close to identical as humanly possible.
Sci-fi fans aren't entirely immune to it, either. They brought Zombie Star Trek out for years after it should have been given a dignified burial. James Bond film scripts have been (until the most recent one) essentially mad-libs. And they'll even watch the same old movies (e.g. The Empire Strikes Back) until they can quote the dialogue and can spot changes on a frame-by-frame basis (and accuse those of doing so of raping their childhoods).
Poor Battlestar is just too expensive to continue. It must cost nearly as much as Lost, a show which probably has 10 times the viewership. Better to let it die than to compromise their vision.
I thought I was the only one in the world who did that.
It's particularly fun when they've filled the page with javascript that tries to pop stuff up when you depress the mouse button. I ended up installing NoScript primarily to defeat those mechanisms.
That's pretty much standard stuff in science reporting these days:
1. Scientist develops an improvement in an old but unused technology.
2. Nobody had ever heard of the old technology, so they can't explain the new stuff until they explain the old stuff.
3. The press writes about the old stuff, not realizing that it's not news.
Plus bonus step 4: scientist, trying to ensure that grants continue, points out that eventually there's a major improvement to be made, which the press promptly presents as "imminent".
You see this all the time on Slashdot, especially in conjunction with solar-cell stuff. There's news there, but it's not what the press is talking about, because the actual news is less interesting.
That's not just a flaw of representation. You could replace every decision with a direct election and end up with the same problem. Put the Iraq question to a vote, and 60% vote to pull out, which means that 40% are essentially ignored. They can't keep 40% of the troops in or fund it at 40%.
Ultimately, it means that any system you put in is screwed up. If you're lucky you can find something that everybody (or nearly everybody) agrees is a little better than the present one. But there isn't some vastly better system out there waiting to replace ours if only the government/the businesses/the Illuminati would let us have it.
I suspect you're right. I can't imagine that copying is going away, though I also suspect that them suing the bejeezus out of people isn't going away, either. People are reluctant to leave their BitTorrent clients running forever because it makes them a target. That makes it harder to find movies to download, and that means at least some people decide that it's easier to buy it from Amazon or iTMS.
That's why they don't care how much they make from the lawsuits, or how much they spend. It's much more about frightening people than it is about getting revenue directly. And that's frightening people into obeying the law, so they don't even lose sleep over it. If a half-million people buy a disc at a $5 profit for them rather than download it via Bittorrent, that $2.5 million buys a lot of lawyer time to sue people with.
I'll be sad to see the summer blockbuster go away. Slashdotters are gearing up right now to see Spider-Man 3 tomorrow night, and that's the sort of movie that can't be made to be released on YouTube.
If it goes, it goes, like the buggy-whip makers. I'm sure that was an art form which some people missed, too.
I don't think that the Slashdot concerns are irrational or inconsistent. I think that they're unproductive. My concern is that the absolutist stance, combined with the impossibility of a perfect solution, means that you're going to end up taking whatever abuse they can dish out.
You phrase it in a very confrontational way: your rights versus their "profits". Illegal copying doesn't just cut into their profits; it cuts into their ability to make any money at all.
If you put all of the burden on them to respect your rights, while insisting that it's also entirely up to them to protect theirs, then they're going fight you tooth and nail to squeeze your rights as small as the law and their considerable legal budget will let them.
We here on Slashdot are the technicians: tell them what's possible and feasible and fair to both you and them. Because right now the Slashdot stance looks entirely like an insistence on the ability to copy illegally, and the courts are going to look down on that when it comes to it. Right now the only thing saving that point of view at all is that the **AAs have managed to make themselves look even worse.