One time a friend of mine has his MSN linked to Eliza, and someone had a full length convo with it... further proving that the Turing test is more a test of the stupidity of users then the intelligence of the computer.
I broke up with a girlfriend for this very reason. She logged onto my BBS (way back when we didn't have no stinkin' Internet) and had a conversation with an Eliza type program I was launching when people tried to "chat with SysOp". Got home from wherever I was and read the log. She'd talked with "me" for quite some time. Pages upon pages of discussion, with her becoming more and more angry at "me" for the somewhat rude things I was "saying".
I realized at that moment she was a complete and total idiot, and ended the relationship.
New Hampshire's current Governor is the founder of Cabletron (a high tech company)
Oh, come on. We used a lot of Cabletron equipment at my last employer. It is decidedly low-tech... (read: worst networking gear I've ever had the displeasure of using)
Roads are a problem here because of the huge amounts of population growth
That is the biggest line of BS. Huge amounts of population growth = corresponding increase in taxes. Our local government increased taxes for fire and police because of the "huge growth in the community." Several thousand more homes have been built, and with it, millions more in taxes are rolling in. Yet they claim they're broke and can't afford to protect these new subdivisions from crime and fire without additional taxes. I call bullshit.
At all times, this equipment is completely under the control of the ISP
Which scares the hell out of me. I know what little computer geeks do with this information. They sift through it. They keep tabs on people they like or don't like. Given access to this sort of data, they will abuse it. I know the little geeks do this because I am one. I wouldn't trust me with access to the Internet logs of an entire ISP. Why should I trust anyone else? It'd be too tempting to play with. "Hmmm, I wonder what kind of weird things so-and-so is into? Let's just take a peek at his account..."
But I would prefer to have these freedoms not through the furtive actions of looking over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching, but by the pervasive understanding throughout our society that we respect and even support one another's freedoms.
You're living in a dream world. Hey, I agree with you, but hell will freeze over before we "respect and even support one another's freedoms." Don't go taking my privacy away based on some fantasy that it will bring about a wonderful revolution in attitude, where everyone is happy and the world is like a Care Bear movie.
Life doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
The examples given thus far have been tame. "Some cop will harass you because he doesn't agree with your views." Wait until you start doing serious research on, say, abortion. You post anonymous messages on forums because you've knocked your girlfriend up and need advice on how to abort. Someone with access to the monitoring equipment decides he doesn't like that, so he has the both of you killed.
Don't think it could happen? There are people on both sides of every major debate who will kill you to protect their interests. I believe the murdered abortion doctors are a testament to that.
No, I'm sorry, but your fantasy world doesn't exist, and it never will. You may defend my freedoms, but that doesn't mean my neighbor will. I may trust you, but when I have no privacy, I have to trust everyone - and society has shown time and time again that an awful lot of people aren't trustworthy.
See, I was going to mod him down to where he should be, but there was no "-1, Didn't RTFA". I need one. While I'm at it, I could also use a "-1, Clueless" for those people who get modded up after posting false quotes, urban legends, etc...
It's cute, and would have been a great story, oh, say, 16 days ago. What the hell is it doing on the front page today? Did Taco strike an advertising deal with the Weekly World News?
I beg to differ. Last night, I had four 486 DX4/100 motherboards sitting at my house, all with PCI slots. Today, I have three, because I've sneakily hidden one of the worthless pieces of crap in a magazine rack in my neighbor's bathroom. Tomorrow, I shall hide one behind his couch.
If you were my neighbor, this could be a great lesson in late model 486 bus architectures.
I realize the power the scheduler adds to these PVRs. No, I've never used one, so you're right in that I can't appreciate what the schedule adds. However, I understand the features; I just don't want to use them. I watch so little TV that my only reason for having a PVR would be to snag decent quality captures of a couple of shows here and there for recording to VCD.
Last I checked (admittedly over a year ago) the unit was virtually worthless without a subscription.
Which is why I, also, will not buy one. I don't want the subscription. I don't care about it. I just want to use it like a VCR - record when I want to, manually or via a schedule. Oh, and extract the MPEGs from my computer, but I'm happy with an end-user hack for that...
Well, he pushed through an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit [irs.gov], specifically designed to provide tax breaks to lower income working people.
People who pay zero in federal taxes still qualify for this. It's another form of welfare.
The top 50% of wage earners in the country (those who make over $27,682 per year) pay 96.09% of the taxes. Reference. Yet Clinton is a "good guy" for reducing taxes for the "poor", and the Republicans are "bad" for reducing taxes for the "rich"? The poor pay virtually nothing in federal taxes! You can only cut taxes for the people that actually pay them.
This just proves that Microsoft are full of shit when they say you must use IE - if all that is required is a differetn user-agent string, then they are simply censoring browsers. Not surprising of course.
Oh, but it gets worse than that: Way back when most people were using Windows 98, and right around the beginning of the anti-trust trial, I had set my father's PC up with Windows 98 Lite (thus totally stripping Internet Explorer out). The PC had limited system resources and removing IE resulted in a considerable performance increase.
He bought a new game which required a newer version of DirectX, and it wasn't included on the game CD. So I hopped onto Microsoft's site (with Netscape) to download it.
No dice. They wouldn't let me have it. Said it required Exploder. I ran home, downloaded it from my spare PC with IE, brought it over on CDR and guess what? No problems. It worked flawlessly. Here was a legitimate customer of theirs who wanted support for the product he had purchased, and the fuckers wouldn't let him have it because he wasn't using their browser. They're like little kids on a playground: "No! You can't play with my toys unless you say you're my best friend and stop being friends with Tommy!"
I only wish I could have testified during the trial about this - as well as the "We can't remove IE, it's tied to the OS" shit, when everyone and their dog was running Windows 98 with no trace of IE thanks to a 30kb script (98 Lite).
Microsoft could be a great company if they'd stop all this childish bullshit. Their products are, more often than not, great - other than these unnecessary "features".
The problem is, everyone on slashdot would rather just complain on slashdot instead of actually writing thier representative a well worded letter.
I wrote my rep a well worded letter - it was about the fees being imposed on webcasters some time back. The response was typical of a politician - A lot of doubletalk, refusal to take a stand on either side of the issue, with an assurance that he is working to ensure the best interests of the country. Right.
When you rip off my copyrighted work, I sure get upset. I have a hard time being mad as MS for feeling the same way.
The XBOX situation is a little different, don't you think? Say you created a portable MP3 player that ran Linux. Say it only played MP3s. Would you be pissed if someone modified your bootloader to allow playback of Ogg? Because that's all we're dealing with here - modified bios code. Sorry if I have little sympathy for the "victim". The rights of XBOX owners to modify a product they own outweighs any control Microsoft thinks they have over consumers. Microsoft should have no right to dictate how I use my XBOX (hypothetically - I don't, and never will, own an XBOX).
If the guy was actually distributing pirated games, then I'd be on the other side of the fence.
Hmm. I'm not saying anything, but a lot of people wanted Enron execs jailed for similarly 'victimless' crimes.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost huge amounts of money, and thousands of employees lost their jobs, all due to the greed and corruption of Enron officials. How is that 'victimless'?
Right, because Bush created the DMCA... [/sarcasm]
This has nothing to do with our current president, you twit. These laws were enacted by our politicians under Clinton - but even Clinton had no say in it so we can't blame him, either. Stop placing blame where it doesn't belong.
Economy is crashing, > 6% unemployment rate is common in urban areas across the country
Due to the dot com crash. You remember the dot com market, don't you? Where sites like Yahoo, who had little to no revenue, were selling stock for $160 a share? The market was total bullshit and investors finally realized it. THAT is the problem with our economy right now.
The current president has little to do with the economy. These things are built up over time. Gore could be in office right now and the economy would still be shit. Deal with it.
It would be different if they blocked it by default to prevent idiots who don't know what they're doing from leaving open relays, but refusing to remove said blocks is sleazy.
On this point, and in regards to broadband services, we agree 100%. I would think they could provide a disclaimer or something for you to sign, with a penalty to be paid if you abuse the privilege...
Until we level the playing field and help everyone have a tolerable standard of living.
OK. You first. If you invite a few homeless junkies into your home, provide them with shelter and food and whatnot out of your pocket and care for them for the rest of their lives, perhaps the rest of us will learn from your example.
I suggest you ask any number of the maimed Iraqi's (a bit too late to ask the dead ones) whether no major acts of terrorism have occured. They might have a different perspective to you.
I'm sure they might, considering their own "government" has butchered millions of them over the years. While civilian causalities are unfortunate, in the end the people of Iraq will be better off. They'll be able to buy food and medicine with the profits from their oil, instead of facilities intended to kill people.
Do you have any idea what Saddam's regime does to the people? Let me give you a hint: When their athletes lose to other countries, they are tortured and often murdered for "shaming" Iraq. That's just the tip of the iceberg, my friend. Now tell me again how awful we are for removing this regime from power?
Maybe thought should be given to the question why a terrorist wants to strike...
That's a great idea. The next time someone breaks into your home, holds your family at gunpoint and brutally rapes your wife, why don't you ask him why he's doing this? You know, try to understand his feelings and motivation. Surely this is your fault. You must have done something to provoke him. If you two have an intimate conversation about the situation, perhaps you can change your behavior to prevent this from happening again.
Me, I'll blow his fu**ing head off the moment he steps into my home, because I don't give a damn how he justifies his actions.
Instead he brings more, and cuts taxes in a way that benefits nobody... well, nobody that I've ever met.
Oh. I see. That $300-$600 check that arrived in your mailbox last year didn't count, right? And the decrease in taxes you paid in 2002 - that doesn't count?
I make a healthy middle class salary and have benefited greatly from Bush's tax cuts. Where the hell have you been?
Slashdot Mirror
One time a friend of mine has his MSN linked to Eliza, and someone had a full length convo with it... further proving that the Turing test is more a test of the stupidity of users then the intelligence of the computer.
I broke up with a girlfriend for this very reason. She logged onto my BBS (way back when we didn't have no stinkin' Internet) and had a conversation with an Eliza type program I was launching when people tried to "chat with SysOp". Got home from wherever I was and read the log. She'd talked with "me" for quite some time. Pages upon pages of discussion, with her becoming more and more angry at "me" for the somewhat rude things I was "saying".
I realized at that moment she was a complete and total idiot, and ended the relationship.
New Hampshire's current Governor is the founder of Cabletron (a high tech company)
Oh, come on. We used a lot of Cabletron equipment at my last employer. It is decidedly low-tech... (read: worst networking gear I've ever had the displeasure of using)
Practice what you preach. I was modded up because everybody else understood what I was saying.
;)
Technically, only three people, but yeah...
Roads are a problem here because of the huge amounts of population growth
That is the biggest line of BS. Huge amounts of population growth = corresponding increase in taxes. Our local government increased taxes for fire and police because of the "huge growth in the community." Several thousand more homes have been built, and with it, millions more in taxes are rolling in. Yet they claim they're broke and can't afford to protect these new subdivisions from crime and fire without additional taxes. I call bullshit.
At all times, this equipment is completely under the control of the ISP
Which scares the hell out of me. I know what little computer geeks do with this information. They sift through it. They keep tabs on people they like or don't like. Given access to this sort of data, they will abuse it. I know the little geeks do this because I am one. I wouldn't trust me with access to the Internet logs of an entire ISP. Why should I trust anyone else? It'd be too tempting to play with. "Hmmm, I wonder what kind of weird things so-and-so is into? Let's just take a peek at his account..."
But I would prefer to have these freedoms not through the furtive actions of looking over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching, but by the pervasive understanding throughout our society that we respect and even support one another's freedoms.
You're living in a dream world. Hey, I agree with you, but hell will freeze over before we "respect and even support one another's freedoms." Don't go taking my privacy away based on some fantasy that it will bring about a wonderful revolution in attitude, where everyone is happy and the world is like a Care Bear movie.
Life doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
The examples given thus far have been tame. "Some cop will harass you because he doesn't agree with your views." Wait until you start doing serious research on, say, abortion. You post anonymous messages on forums because you've knocked your girlfriend up and need advice on how to abort. Someone with access to the monitoring equipment decides he doesn't like that, so he has the both of you killed.
Don't think it could happen? There are people on both sides of every major debate who will kill you to protect their interests. I believe the murdered abortion doctors are a testament to that.
No, I'm sorry, but your fantasy world doesn't exist, and it never will. You may defend my freedoms, but that doesn't mean my neighbor will. I may trust you, but when I have no privacy, I have to trust everyone - and society has shown time and time again that an awful lot of people aren't trustworthy.
Neither did your bone-head mods.
See, I was going to mod him down to where he should be, but there was no "-1, Didn't RTFA". I need one. While I'm at it, I could also use a "-1, Clueless" for those people who get modded up after posting false quotes, urban legends, etc...
It's cute, and would have been a great story, oh, say, 16 days ago. What the hell is it doing on the front page today? Did Taco strike an advertising deal with the Weekly World News?
Most 486s don't have PCI slots.
I beg to differ. Last night, I had four 486 DX4/100 motherboards sitting at my house, all with PCI slots. Today, I have three, because I've sneakily hidden one of the worthless pieces of crap in a magazine rack in my neighbor's bathroom. Tomorrow, I shall hide one behind his couch.
If you were my neighbor, this could be a great lesson in late model 486 bus architectures.
I realize the power the scheduler adds to these PVRs. No, I've never used one, so you're right in that I can't appreciate what the schedule adds. However, I understand the features; I just don't want to use them. I watch so little TV that my only reason for having a PVR would be to snag decent quality captures of a couple of shows here and there for recording to VCD.
Last I checked (admittedly over a year ago) the unit was virtually worthless without a subscription.
Which is why I, also, will not buy one. I don't want the subscription. I don't care about it. I just want to use it like a VCR - record when I want to, manually or via a schedule. Oh, and extract the MPEGs from my computer, but I'm happy with an end-user hack for that...
Well, he pushed through an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit [irs.gov], specifically designed to provide tax breaks to lower income working people.
People who pay zero in federal taxes still qualify for this. It's another form of welfare.
The top 50% of wage earners in the country (those who make over $27,682 per year) pay 96.09% of the taxes. Reference. Yet Clinton is a "good guy" for reducing taxes for the "poor", and the Republicans are "bad" for reducing taxes for the "rich"? The poor pay virtually nothing in federal taxes! You can only cut taxes for the people that actually pay them.
I think that video cellphones would be a better idea than landlines.
How would this work, exactly? Hold the phone to your head with one hand and hold the camera out in front of you with the other?
If you think cellphone-using SUV drivers are bad now, just WAIT until this catches on!
This just proves that Microsoft are full of shit when they say you must use IE - if all that is required is a differetn user-agent string, then they are simply censoring browsers. Not surprising of course.
Oh, but it gets worse than that: Way back when most people were using Windows 98, and right around the beginning of the anti-trust trial, I had set my father's PC up with Windows 98 Lite (thus totally stripping Internet Explorer out). The PC had limited system resources and removing IE resulted in a considerable performance increase.
He bought a new game which required a newer version of DirectX, and it wasn't included on the game CD. So I hopped onto Microsoft's site (with Netscape) to download it.
No dice. They wouldn't let me have it. Said it required Exploder. I ran home, downloaded it from my spare PC with IE, brought it over on CDR and guess what? No problems. It worked flawlessly. Here was a legitimate customer of theirs who wanted support for the product he had purchased, and the fuckers wouldn't let him have it because he wasn't using their browser. They're like little kids on a playground: "No! You can't play with my toys unless you say you're my best friend and stop being friends with Tommy!"
I only wish I could have testified during the trial about this - as well as the "We can't remove IE, it's tied to the OS" shit, when everyone and their dog was running Windows 98 with no trace of IE thanks to a 30kb script (98 Lite).
Microsoft could be a great company if they'd stop all this childish bullshit. Their products are, more often than not, great - other than these unnecessary "features".
The problem is, everyone on slashdot would rather just complain on slashdot instead of actually writing thier representative a well worded letter.
I wrote my rep a well worded letter - it was about the fees being imposed on webcasters some time back. The response was typical of a politician - A lot of doubletalk, refusal to take a stand on either side of the issue, with an assurance that he is working to ensure the best interests of the country. Right.
When you rip off my copyrighted work, I sure get upset. I have a hard time being mad as MS for feeling the same way.
The XBOX situation is a little different, don't you think? Say you created a portable MP3 player that ran Linux. Say it only played MP3s. Would you be pissed if someone modified your bootloader to allow playback of Ogg? Because that's all we're dealing with here - modified bios code. Sorry if I have little sympathy for the "victim". The rights of XBOX owners to modify a product they own outweighs any control Microsoft thinks they have over consumers. Microsoft should have no right to dictate how I use my XBOX (hypothetically - I don't, and never will, own an XBOX).
If the guy was actually distributing pirated games, then I'd be on the other side of the fence.
Hmm. I'm not saying anything, but a lot of people wanted Enron execs jailed for similarly 'victimless' crimes.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost huge amounts of money, and thousands of employees lost their jobs, all due to the greed and corruption of Enron officials. How is that 'victimless'?
Right, because Bush created the DMCA... [/sarcasm]
This has nothing to do with our current president, you twit. These laws were enacted by our politicians under Clinton - but even Clinton had no say in it so we can't blame him, either. Stop placing blame where it doesn't belong.
Dude, you just made my friends list. That was one of the best comments I've read in a long time.
Economy is crashing, > 6% unemployment rate is common in urban areas across the country
Due to the dot com crash. You remember the dot com market, don't you? Where sites like Yahoo, who had little to no revenue, were selling stock for $160 a share? The market was total bullshit and investors finally realized it. THAT is the problem with our economy right now.
The current president has little to do with the economy. These things are built up over time. Gore could be in office right now and the economy would still be shit. Deal with it.
It would be different if they blocked it by default to prevent idiots who don't know what they're doing from leaving open relays, but refusing to remove said blocks is sleazy.
On this point, and in regards to broadband services, we agree 100%. I would think they could provide a disclaimer or something for you to sign, with a penalty to be paid if you abuse the privilege...
Until we level the playing field and help everyone have a tolerable standard of living.
OK. You first. If you invite a few homeless junkies into your home, provide them with shelter and food and whatnot out of your pocket and care for them for the rest of their lives, perhaps the rest of us will learn from your example.
I suggest you ask any number of the maimed Iraqi's (a bit too late to ask the dead ones) whether no major acts of terrorism have occured. They might have a different perspective to you.
I'm sure they might, considering their own "government" has butchered millions of them over the years. While civilian causalities are unfortunate, in the end the people of Iraq will be better off. They'll be able to buy food and medicine with the profits from their oil, instead of facilities intended to kill people.
Do you have any idea what Saddam's regime does to the people? Let me give you a hint: When their athletes lose to other countries, they are tortured and often murdered for "shaming" Iraq. That's just the tip of the iceberg, my friend. Now tell me again how awful we are for removing this regime from power?
Maybe thought should be given to the question why a terrorist wants to strike...
That's a great idea. The next time someone breaks into your home, holds your family at gunpoint and brutally rapes your wife, why don't you ask him why he's doing this? You know, try to understand his feelings and motivation. Surely this is your fault. You must have done something to provoke him. If you two have an intimate conversation about the situation, perhaps you can change your behavior to prevent this from happening again.
Me, I'll blow his fu**ing head off the moment he steps into my home, because I don't give a damn how he justifies his actions.
Goodbye, sweet Karma...
Instead he brings more, and cuts taxes in a way that benefits nobody... well, nobody that I've ever met.
Oh. I see. That $300-$600 check that arrived in your mailbox last year didn't count, right? And the decrease in taxes you paid in 2002 - that doesn't count?
I make a healthy middle class salary and have benefited greatly from Bush's tax cuts. Where the hell have you been?