Gee whiz, whence the hostility? I don't think I'm special; unusual, possibly, in my travel profile. Then again, I don't think so; I'm going to speculate the vast majority of air travel is done on business purposes by people travelling for between one and five days. But that's really pure speculation on my part, and in any case my description is just intended to give some thoughts as to why I may not be as angry or disillusioned with air travel as some other people.
I get on those things and can't get a bloody mary in FAST enough..and are they ever slow and surly delivering them.
Shrug...I've never encountered a slow or surly attendant. Sure, some of them are harried, but I'm constantly surprised at just how chipper most of them are. Possibly they react differently if they encounter a passenger who's predisposed to be annoyed and grumpy at everything?
I don't know that I completely blame the airlines...if people were willing to pay more than $300 for a RT ticket...
We agree. One of the comments in that link you posted was that people are angry about fuel prices. I suspect the airline bean counters aren't terribly chuffed about them, either, but there's not much they can do about it.
Unfortunately, airlines can't please everyone, and they are stuck with a population that wants everything, demands luxury and drinks flowing and abundant goodies, but gets irate at so-called outrageous ticket prices. (If you fly a lot, or are quite wealthy, you can mitigate much of the aggravation by utilizing airline lounges and flying business or first class, but of course most people aren't in that position.) It's a devil of a position to be in for cash-strapped airlines with increasing costs for regulatory compliance, unpredictable fuel costs thanks to political instability, uncertain weather impacts, and so on...
I didn't say I enjoy it; I said I don't experience big problems on anything like the sort of regular basis you are suggesting most people do.
The link you post is discussing factors that by and large don't apply to me - the vast majority of my flying is for business, so someone else books and pays for me, so I don't really care about the prices.
I also don't pay bag fees - my trips are of short duration, so I always take a carry-on bag. However, that frequently has to be checked as the airplane is full. So I'm at risk of lost baggage, but again I've been lucky and not had that problem.
Yep, lots. I feel pretty confident in stating I likely fly far more frequently than you.
And I don't experience a "major fiasco" on any kind of a regular basis. Maybe I'm lucky, but I should be having a lot of problems to justify your comments. For reference, I'm flying out of PHL, one of the busiest airports in the U.S.
I was looking to find this topic, rather than be redundant. For me, OneNote or MS Word, but OneNote is by far superior as a note taking solution.
Paper and pencil don't work for me for one very simple reason - I took touch-typing in fourth form (=14 years old) and never looked back. My typing is faster and more accurate, allows me to concentrate more on what the speaker is saying, and has the advantage I can read it afterwards (that last point is not a given if I use a pencil).
The added cost-basis is obviously less than $2. Done.
You missed a bit. The backup reference. You can't just say "obviously" and wave your hands and say "done" and expect to get away with it. And from your comments, I'm still not convinced you understand what is meant by cost-based accounting.
Finally, if you're going to complain that "/. sucks these days", how about raising the tenor by justifying your ranting and not being so nasty in your responses to people?
1. Why? Why do you want to understand these people? I'm serious. Why deliberately fill your head with hatred and evil and seek to know what motivates these people? Can you? Is it possible? To what end?
2. No you wouldn't be put in jail. Read it again.
3. Rant mode.
Screw all this pompous "blah blah blah I'll defend to the death your right to say anything, even if I disagree with it, etc.". I understand the good and mighty intentions behind it, but look at what it's done. This has been promoted to ridiculous extremes in the past few decades, and the result has been an absolution of personal moral accountability. People no longer feel they have to take responsibility for their actions; instead, they can do and say and be and behave however they want, no matter how offensive or stupid or wrong, and not have to worry about the consequences.
Screw it. Time to say there are absolutes, and some things are wrong, and should be censored. Maybe this wouldn't be necessary in an ideal world, but society has declined too far.
Sigh...what a pessimistic way to go into the weekend.
I'm sure to be marked as flamebait on a piracy-friendly site like Slashdot, but doesn't it strike you as a little bit ironic that you're making this comment on a story which is all about political responses to citizens who are doing illegal stuff?
My anecdote, equally baffling - I have a Yahoo account I use for everything, which is all over the place on old mailing lists where I didn't bother to obfuscate it. I've had it for about, ooh, 15 years, I think.
I get a handful of spam mails that makes it past the filter. As in perhaps one or two a month, maximum. I use it for personal e-mails, to sign up for mailing lists (literally hundreds, over the years that I've had it), registration on technical bulletin boards, everything.
I get more spam at my work account which I've had for a shorter period of time, isn't nearly as publicized as my Yahoo account, and is protected by a regiment of anti-spam software on our servers.
All good points. Avoid the screen of text type slides. Make sure you talk to the bullet points, rather than reading them.
And rehearse your talk a few times. Make sure you know what you're going to say and can say it without looking at the screen (and away from your audience). Find an empty conference room and run through your presentation. Out loud.
You might feel silly, but you'll come across as knowledgeable and confident. Professional speakers will charge you thousands of dollars to tell you that it's ultra important to rehearse. There's a reason they get paid so much to talk to you.
4) permanent deprivation of the items use by rightful owner
means that taking someone's car for a joyride and returning it after several hours (a la Ferris Bueller's Day Off) also fails to qualify as theft, given these statements. Words are easy to twist.
Now - shall we get past the semantics and debate actualities, or is that a forlorn hope?
Some people (like you) will argue until the day is done that copyright infringement is not theft. You will not be convinced otherwise.
Some people (like me) will argue until the day is done that copyright infringement is theft. They (I) will not be convinced otherwise.
Now that's out of the way, how about we accept this incompatibility and read the article and comment on some of the interesting points he raises? Like his view on BitCoin and predictions for the future of downloading. Agree or disagree? Discuss.
I like this one:
...the majority is too dumb to learn anything. For example, we get the same question about dynamic IP at least ten times a day. The answer is right on the first page. Itâ(TM)s on every page, actually. Ignorance is bliss but most people abuse it. They never really learn, they just get used to something.
Or this hypothetical. Is abusing the GPL wrong? If so, why is that wrong and piracy is okay? At a high level, it's the exact same issue - someone says "I've produced this intellectual property, I want other people to do this or not do that with it", and someone else says "too bad, I'm going to do what I want. Deal with it".
Did you know that if you're not interested in a story, you can do this thing called "not clicking on it" and that'll keep it ENTIRELY out of your hair
You'd think so (and I'm usually the first one to think exactly the same), but then there'd also be no need for AdBlocker. After all people can just NOT LOOK at the ads.
For me, the Raspberry Pi stuff over the last few weeks has really gotten annoying. I'd just as soon they give it a rest, too. It's turning me off of the product just because it's become the Slashdot equivalent of one of those advertisements which is so prevalent that it gets to saturation point and turns away those people who may have been on the fence initially.
There were plenty around in the ealry 1980's, and some in the 1970s
Strictly speaking there were, indeed, self-replicating viruses in the 70s, but those were really just harmless proofs of concept. Forward to the early 80s (from the always 100% reliable Wikipedia):
A program called "Elk Cloner" was the first personal computer virus to appear "in the wild"â"that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1981 by Richard Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread via floppy disk.
But the harmful viruses, as in malware, started in the mid-80s.
The first IBM PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written.
Remember, we're talking in terms of major virus scares. In that context, yeah, Michelangelo really was the first biggie that got a lot of people talking and in a fearful state.
The author seems to know what he's talking about. He talks about earlier viruses, and gives a lot of very interesting detail about Michelangelo. You should read the article.
Yep, as soon as they fire the guy at Apple who was responsible for the iPhone daylight saving bug in November 2010. And again in March 2011.
Also Flickr, with their own leap year bug. And Sony.
Not saying this isn't a black eye for MS - and yes, testing for leap year should be thought out ahead of time - but in fairness they're not the only people to have ever been caught out by something like this.
If you want to get technical, then yes, I'd agree. This is also why I don't see Facebook as the big evil that is the ubiquitous viewpoint on Slashdot. They also don't give my personal information to advertisers. They do the same as Google - they say to advertisers "we can target users extremely discretely" (discretely, here, meaning precisely).
Google, on the other hand, grabs a huge amount of information from all over the place and aggregates it in a much more insidious way than does Facebook. That's why I use Facebook and try to avoid Google. Facebook has the information I choose to give them. Google has the information that I can't avoid giving them*. Big difference.
Unless you don't use Google services such as Search, Maps, YouTube, GMail, blah blah blah. Which I don't, for the reasons above.
Oh come on, really? The mortgage broker may trot out all kinds of statistics and "this is what's standard" and so on and so forth, but eventually you're going to be given a monthly payment figure. You will be told "your monthly payment will be $1,234".
It's then up to you to be an adult and take responsibility and say why yes, with all my other expenses, I can afford that, or, bummer, no, I cannot afford that and I must look for something within my means.
I don't disagree that there's a huge amount of detail to go through with a home purchase. I had what seemed like a hundred different fees and one-time taxes and documentation charges and goodness knows what else. I asked questions and got answers, but I certainly couldn't tell you now what half of them were supposed to be.
But at the bottom of the page, it was all added up. Here's what you pay today. Here's what you pay every month going forwards for the next 30 years.
If someone is falsifying paperwork and credit scores, then I'm not impressed. But they still have to give you a piece of paper to sign that says "here's what you pay". And you still must take responsibility and decide if you can afford it. It may be less ego-busting to say it was someone else's fault, but there aren't that many situations (even in the worst of all the war stories from the mortgage meltdown) where people were told their monthly payment would be $1,000 and then had it actually turn out to be $1,750.*
* Yes, I know about ARMs. You sign up and hope you can get a huge bump in salary or keep refinancing at silly low rates in perpetuity, before it adjusts to a really high level. Tempting to people who want a bigger house than they can afford, difficult to understand at the time, I know. But - again - you have to take personal responsibility and ask what the payment will be in five years when it adjusts, and consider with all risks and possibilities if that new payment would be feasible for you.
I always read the contract on a loan. Especially something the size of a mortgage. And if I don't understand something, I ask them to explain it. I've (politely and patiently) sat in an office while someone who couldn't explain a phrase in my refinancing papers called around other offices until they found someone who could.
One very young lady happily told me to take my time and read everything, and became visibly cooler when she realized I was going to do just that. Too bad. She was the only one who's ever shown her impatience. And no, I can't afford legal counsel.
I might ask some silly questions because it's not my area of expertise. But at least I come out the other side knowing what I've just signed.
Pennsylvania. It happened when I refinanced my mortgage. It stings to be told how much less your home is worth (even if you don't need to sell), but the tax relief is nice.
And I notice from the earlier reply that this is also true in Virginia.
IT is a service industry. You are there to help people get their jobs done
Agreed. What is the first job of IT in a university? To ensure the network stays up, is reliable, and is stable so that students can do their work. It takes just one jackass who has an overinflated opinion of his own abilities and too much access to screw up hundreds or thousands of machines and prevent the students from doing their work.
The flipside is that if a story were to appear on Slashdot about a large university whose network went down for several hours or days because of something accidental or malicious done by a student, people would be falling over themselves to gripe about the incompetence of the network admins.
And most of the people commenting on this story have likely never administered a network as big and diverse as the network installed in a typical university.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee whiz, whence the hostility? I don't think I'm special; unusual, possibly, in my travel profile. Then again, I don't think so; I'm going to speculate the vast majority of air travel is done on business purposes by people travelling for between one and five days. But that's really pure speculation on my part, and in any case my description is just intended to give some thoughts as to why I may not be as angry or disillusioned with air travel as some other people.
I get on those things and can't get a bloody mary in FAST enough..and are they ever slow and surly delivering them.
Shrug...I've never encountered a slow or surly attendant. Sure, some of them are harried, but I'm constantly surprised at just how chipper most of them are. Possibly they react differently if they encounter a passenger who's predisposed to be annoyed and grumpy at everything?
I don't know that I completely blame the airlines...if people were willing to pay more than $300 for a RT ticket...
We agree. One of the comments in that link you posted was that people are angry about fuel prices. I suspect the airline bean counters aren't terribly chuffed about them, either, but there's not much they can do about it.
Unfortunately, airlines can't please everyone, and they are stuck with a population that wants everything, demands luxury and drinks flowing and abundant goodies, but gets irate at so-called outrageous ticket prices. (If you fly a lot, or are quite wealthy, you can mitigate much of the aggravation by utilizing airline lounges and flying business or first class, but of course most people aren't in that position.) It's a devil of a position to be in for cash-strapped airlines with increasing costs for regulatory compliance, unpredictable fuel costs thanks to political instability, uncertain weather impacts, and so on...
I didn't say I enjoy it; I said I don't experience big problems on anything like the sort of regular basis you are suggesting most people do.
The link you post is discussing factors that by and large don't apply to me - the vast majority of my flying is for business, so someone else books and pays for me, so I don't really care about the prices.
I also don't pay bag fees - my trips are of short duration, so I always take a carry-on bag. However, that frequently has to be checked as the airplane is full. So I'm at risk of lost baggage, but again I've been lucky and not had that problem.
Flown lately?
Yep, lots. I feel pretty confident in stating I likely fly far more frequently than you.
And I don't experience a "major fiasco" on any kind of a regular basis. Maybe I'm lucky, but I should be having a lot of problems to justify your comments. For reference, I'm flying out of PHL, one of the busiest airports in the U.S.
I was looking to find this topic, rather than be redundant. For me, OneNote or MS Word, but OneNote is by far superior as a note taking solution.
Paper and pencil don't work for me for one very simple reason - I took touch-typing in fourth form (=14 years old) and never looked back. My typing is faster and more accurate, allows me to concentrate more on what the speaker is saying, and has the advantage I can read it afterwards (that last point is not a given if I use a pencil).
Why so angry (this and other comments)?
The added cost-basis is obviously less than $2. Done.
You missed a bit. The backup reference. You can't just say "obviously" and wave your hands and say "done" and expect to get away with it. And from your comments, I'm still not convinced you understand what is meant by cost-based accounting.
Finally, if you're going to complain that "/. sucks these days", how about raising the tenor by justifying your ranting and not being so nasty in your responses to people?
Cost based accounting. Look it up or do an MBA class and learn about it.
I see a bunch of posts stating:
The summary (not even the article!) makes it clear it's more than just the altitude/pressure. There's cabin humidity, for starters.
cabin humidity levels kept low by design
As well as all the packaging, preprocessing, etc., that goes into the cabin food.
1. Why? Why do you want to understand these people? I'm serious. Why deliberately fill your head with hatred and evil and seek to know what motivates these people? Can you? Is it possible? To what end?
2. No you wouldn't be put in jail. Read it again.
3. Rant mode.
Screw all this pompous "blah blah blah I'll defend to the death your right to say anything, even if I disagree with it, etc.". I understand the good and mighty intentions behind it, but look at what it's done. This has been promoted to ridiculous extremes in the past few decades, and the result has been an absolution of personal moral accountability. People no longer feel they have to take responsibility for their actions; instead, they can do and say and be and behave however they want, no matter how offensive or stupid or wrong, and not have to worry about the consequences.
Screw it. Time to say there are absolutes, and some things are wrong, and should be censored. Maybe this wouldn't be necessary in an ideal world, but society has declined too far.
Sigh...what a pessimistic way to go into the weekend.
government is so corrupt
I'm sure to be marked as flamebait on a piracy-friendly site like Slashdot, but doesn't it strike you as a little bit ironic that you're making this comment on a story which is all about political responses to citizens who are doing illegal stuff?
Ack, sorry, yes. My bad. Apparently my university maths did dreadful things to my high school physics.
an interesting question about your point is this - if you take stuff to the top of a mountain, does it weigh 'more' or 'less' than at sea level?
More. High school physics teaches us that F=(GM1M2)/R squared
My anecdote, equally baffling - I have a Yahoo account I use for everything, which is all over the place on old mailing lists where I didn't bother to obfuscate it. I've had it for about, ooh, 15 years, I think.
I get a handful of spam mails that makes it past the filter. As in perhaps one or two a month, maximum. I use it for personal e-mails, to sign up for mailing lists (literally hundreds, over the years that I've had it), registration on technical bulletin boards, everything.
I get more spam at my work account which I've had for a shorter period of time, isn't nearly as publicized as my Yahoo account, and is protected by a regiment of anti-spam software on our servers.
All good points. Avoid the screen of text type slides. Make sure you talk to the bullet points, rather than reading them.
And rehearse your talk a few times. Make sure you know what you're going to say and can say it without looking at the screen (and away from your audience). Find an empty conference room and run through your presentation. Out loud.
You might feel silly, but you'll come across as knowledgeable and confident. Professional speakers will charge you thousands of dollars to tell you that it's ultra important to rehearse. There's a reason they get paid so much to talk to you.
Actually, I'll point out that:
4) permanent deprivation of the items use by rightful owner
means that taking someone's car for a joyride and returning it after several hours (a la Ferris Bueller's Day Off) also fails to qualify as theft, given these statements. Words are easy to twist.
Now - shall we get past the semantics and debate actualities, or is that a forlorn hope?
Some people (like you) will argue until the day is done that copyright infringement is not theft. You will not be convinced otherwise.
Some people (like me) will argue until the day is done that copyright infringement is theft. They (I) will not be convinced otherwise.
Now that's out of the way, how about we accept this incompatibility and read the article and comment on some of the interesting points he raises? Like his view on BitCoin and predictions for the future of downloading. Agree or disagree? Discuss.
I like this one:
...the majority is too dumb to learn anything. For example, we get the same question about dynamic IP at least ten times a day. The answer is right on the first page. Itâ(TM)s on every page, actually. Ignorance is bliss but most people abuse it. They never really learn, they just get used to something.
Or this hypothetical. Is abusing the GPL wrong? If so, why is that wrong and piracy is okay? At a high level, it's the exact same issue - someone says "I've produced this intellectual property, I want other people to do this or not do that with it", and someone else says "too bad, I'm going to do what I want. Deal with it".
Did you know that if you're not interested in a story, you can do this thing called "not clicking on it" and that'll keep it ENTIRELY out of your hair
You'd think so (and I'm usually the first one to think exactly the same), but then there'd also be no need for AdBlocker. After all people can just NOT LOOK at the ads.
For me, the Raspberry Pi stuff over the last few weeks has really gotten annoying. I'd just as soon they give it a rest, too. It's turning me off of the product just because it's become the Slashdot equivalent of one of those advertisements which is so prevalent that it gets to saturation point and turns away those people who may have been on the fence initially.
To all appearances, it's being called The New iPad.
And people thought a software version that had the year embedded in the title was a bad idea...
There were plenty around in the ealry 1980's, and some in the 1970s
Strictly speaking there were, indeed, self-replicating viruses in the 70s, but those were really just harmless proofs of concept. Forward to the early 80s (from the always 100% reliable Wikipedia):
A program called "Elk Cloner" was the first personal computer virus to appear "in the wild"â"that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1981 by Richard Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread via floppy disk.
But the harmful viruses, as in malware, started in the mid-80s.
The first IBM PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter piracy of the software they had written.
Remember, we're talking in terms of major virus scares. In that context, yeah, Michelangelo really was the first biggie that got a lot of people talking and in a fearful state.
The author seems to know what he's talking about. He talks about earlier viruses, and gives a lot of very interesting detail about Michelangelo. You should read the article.
Yep, as soon as they fire the guy at Apple who was responsible for the iPhone daylight saving bug in November 2010. And again in March 2011.
Also Flickr, with their own leap year bug. And Sony.
Not saying this isn't a black eye for MS - and yes, testing for leap year should be thought out ahead of time - but in fairness they're not the only people to have ever been caught out by something like this.
If you want to get technical, then yes, I'd agree. This is also why I don't see Facebook as the big evil that is the ubiquitous viewpoint on Slashdot. They also don't give my personal information to advertisers. They do the same as Google - they say to advertisers "we can target users extremely discretely" (discretely, here, meaning precisely).
Google, on the other hand, grabs a huge amount of information from all over the place and aggregates it in a much more insidious way than does Facebook. That's why I use Facebook and try to avoid Google. Facebook has the information I choose to give them. Google has the information that I can't avoid giving them*. Big difference.
Unless you don't use Google services such as Search, Maps, YouTube, GMail, blah blah blah. Which I don't, for the reasons above.
Oh come on, really? The mortgage broker may trot out all kinds of statistics and "this is what's standard" and so on and so forth, but eventually you're going to be given a monthly payment figure. You will be told "your monthly payment will be $1,234".
It's then up to you to be an adult and take responsibility and say why yes, with all my other expenses, I can afford that, or, bummer, no, I cannot afford that and I must look for something within my means.
I don't disagree that there's a huge amount of detail to go through with a home purchase. I had what seemed like a hundred different fees and one-time taxes and documentation charges and goodness knows what else. I asked questions and got answers, but I certainly couldn't tell you now what half of them were supposed to be.
But at the bottom of the page, it was all added up. Here's what you pay today. Here's what you pay every month going forwards for the next 30 years.
If someone is falsifying paperwork and credit scores, then I'm not impressed. But they still have to give you a piece of paper to sign that says "here's what you pay". And you still must take responsibility and decide if you can afford it. It may be less ego-busting to say it was someone else's fault, but there aren't that many situations (even in the worst of all the war stories from the mortgage meltdown) where people were told their monthly payment would be $1,000 and then had it actually turn out to be $1,750.*
* Yes, I know about ARMs. You sign up and hope you can get a huge bump in salary or keep refinancing at silly low rates in perpetuity, before it adjusts to a really high level. Tempting to people who want a bigger house than they can afford, difficult to understand at the time, I know. But - again - you have to take personal responsibility and ask what the payment will be in five years when it adjusts, and consider with all risks and possibilities if that new payment would be feasible for you.
I always read the contract on a loan. Especially something the size of a mortgage. And if I don't understand something, I ask them to explain it. I've (politely and patiently) sat in an office while someone who couldn't explain a phrase in my refinancing papers called around other offices until they found someone who could.
One very young lady happily told me to take my time and read everything, and became visibly cooler when she realized I was going to do just that. Too bad. She was the only one who's ever shown her impatience. And no, I can't afford legal counsel.
I might ask some silly questions because it's not my area of expertise. But at least I come out the other side knowing what I've just signed.
Pennsylvania. It happened when I refinanced my mortgage. It stings to be told how much less your home is worth (even if you don't need to sell), but the tax relief is nice.
And I notice from the earlier reply that this is also true in Virginia.
IT is a service industry. You are there to help people get their jobs done
Agreed. What is the first job of IT in a university? To ensure the network stays up, is reliable, and is stable so that students can do their work. It takes just one jackass who has an overinflated opinion of his own abilities and too much access to screw up hundreds or thousands of machines and prevent the students from doing their work.
The flipside is that if a story were to appear on Slashdot about a large university whose network went down for several hours or days because of something accidental or malicious done by a student, people would be falling over themselves to gripe about the incompetence of the network admins.
And most of the people commenting on this story have likely never administered a network as big and diverse as the network installed in a typical university.
Actually, I'd say it's that you're verging on libel and Slashdot is modding you +5 informative.