There is also the chance that you picked up an email address that had formerly belonged to another user, who wasn't very protective of his email address. As such, he sent his email address (that is, YOUR email address) all in the wild, then let his account expire, and you picked it up. Now you have to deal with his spam. While I'm not really proud of Microsoft or Hotmail, I don't think they 'sell' their email lists to every spammer who wants them. Certainly not 171 in one week.
The reason I came up with this theory is because I have two Hotmail accounts. One consists of letters and numbers, while another was a word I made up. The made up word has yet to receive any unsolicited emailings (Microsoft sends one every other week or so, but that's acceptable, because its basically a newsletter for the service that I'm currently using). The other...well, it gets about 10 emails an hour. And the other is the newer email address.
Maybe I'm a little too late to jump in on this one, but from all the high ranked posts that just say "You don't know what you want, go to college!" I don't think they're all right. However, they do have a point. Chances are you really don't have a very good understanding of everything in the world, and a University is a good place to get a varied world view with multiple perspectives you hadn't thought of. However, the four-year-deal isn't for everyone.
Everyone always hypes the bachelors programs as the end all of college. Its not. In fact, jumping right in can be overwhelming, cause you to lose focus and swear 'Why the hell am I taking Composition? I want to work on computers!' Thus, I propose that you don't go to a 4 year University, but rather head to a Community College and start work on an AA. Why you might ask? Very simple. You start gaining the benefits of working on a degree, without committing yourself to 4 whole years. If after 2 years you're screaming 'I want to work on computers!' You can cut out with a 2 year AA. If you went straight for the BA, you don't have that option.
Also, the first two years at a University is spent primarily on general education (math, writing, speech, basic history, etc). At a four year University, they have to do so many of these courses that they tend to have massive class sizes. During my first two years at the University of Central Florida, it wasn't uncommon to be in a class of 200-300 people. In a Community College setting, you generally won't find a class above 50 people, allowing for much more personal interaction (and interest) from your instructor. This can be key to getting the best out of the education you're paying for, as I've found that if the professor knows you by name, you will gain between 2-5% on your final grade. This is, in part, because you've been paying attention to your professor, and in part, because the professor _knows_ that you have been paying attention.
Furthermore, you're really not selling yourself short by starting at a Community College. After you get your AA, if you wish to continue, you can go to a 4 year University after that (and only have to work for another 2 years) and get a Bachelors degree. Despite what everyone says, the University is not for everyone.
My credientials on the subject matter: I enrolled at the University of Central Florida's BA program directly in the Fall of 1999 as a Computer Science student. I decided I hated to think of computers as anything more than a tool to accomplish non-computer related tasks, and switched over to Political Theory (which I find far more fun). I graduated last month, and am going on to do PhD research in Political Theory starting next fall.
I also had the opportunity to work in an Internet Service Provider straight out of High School (with heavy implication that I would be offered a management position). They pay had the potential to be pretty good, however, I had no desire to live that life at that time.
Take these opinions however you wish, it is your life. Don't let what nameless people on Slashdot tell you dictate what you do.
Unfortunately, I'm a University Student (one of those eternal students actually). That means I end up doing a lot of word processing, paper writing, and the like. And its not always in English either. At the same time, having a grammar checker on hand does make proof-reading my own papers much easier, for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement, and the use of active voice instead of passive voice. In my brief experiments with both OpenOffice and AbiWord, both lacked a grammar checker to do this.
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking. However, MS Word isn't exactly perfect in this respect. I do large amounts of my writing in the University computer labs, on their mass installs of MS Word, which only deal in English. Microsoft charges extra for increased language support in Word (last I checked it was a fairly sizable amount of money too). But I digress...
Unfortunately, its hard to break the MS Word strangle hold not only because of the file format being so nasty to deal with, but also the fact that MS has developed a very good and useful feature in its grammar checker.
Technically, the US constition wasn't all that revolutionary at all. It was essentially a synthesis of previous democratic experiments (mentioned by other replies) mixed with the Philosophers of John Locke (or need we forget, "Life, Liberty, and Property"). At best, the Constitution might be described as a "proof of concept" document, derived from the various contractarian Philosophers (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, etc).
In fact, the US has been democratic _long_ before the revolution took place, which is why the transition to democracy was so easy in the US. All the states had been governing themselves democraticly for hundreds of years. Don't forget, colonists first started showing up in the new world in the 1500-1600's, and the revolution didn't take place until the late 1700's. Furthermore, the first Constitution (the Articles of Confederation) failed miserably.
Lets take this further. If you look at virtually every other "Democratic" country in the world, they don't run their country anything like the way the US does it. Instead of this wacky US Presidential system, most countries tend to use Parlimentary systems, which in turn are prone to having higher turnout, better ability to implement policy, quicker response times, higher stability, and are generally agreed to be a better system.
The only reason to think that the US Constitution is such a great thing is because you are a US citizen and have been raised under the myths that this is the greatest country on the planet. Not to be belittling, but every country has those myths. Everyone has their claim to fame, and use it to claim that they're the best people on the Earth. That's also not to say that everything your country tells you is just a lie to increase your patriotism, some of it may be true. Just don't swallow it whole. Be critical of everything, and determine what you believe for yourself.
As for the influence of computers? They have, for a fact, revolutionized data collection, number crunching, and communication. Never before could you get the daily newspaper from anywhere in the world the very day that the paper came out. It was never possible to create virtually uncrackable encrypted messages in real time, and transmit them across the globe. Never before was it possible for a camera to look at your face and determine if you were likely to be a criminal. This is all in just a few years.
So...what's more important? A synthesis of existing concepts that came about as a second attempt and was never successful again any place else in the world? Or a magic box that has radicalized how life operates the world over?
For some reason I was drawn to this. The report has a section on "What people find annoying." Without much suprise, many are stating that Spam is becoming highly problematic. The most annoying of the spam being considered sales solititation. They also have this to say about 'adult' spamming:
We also probed into a particular type of spam that is often cited as an annoyance to Internet users-messages with adult content or from adult Web sites. More than half-56%-of U.S. email users have at one time or another received an email from an adult Web site or that contained adult content. Twenty percent report that this occurs often, with Internet veterans twice as likely as novices to receive such messages (24% for veterans versus 12% for novices). The greater incidence for veterans is likely to be nothing more than a reflection of the number of years they have been online. Their more extensive surfing habits increases the chances that traces of information identifying their email addresses have been picked up by these sites.
One has to wonder if the veteran Internet users are just more likely to look for porn. After all, everyone I met during High School who went on the Internet always followed it up by "You can get free pictures of naked women there!" Well, not everyone, but all of the non-computer geeks at least. Food for thought.
Okay, this seems to be a point of confusion from the comments I have read.
30% deflation means that the currency of EverQuest can buy more EverQuest stuff every year.
30% inflation would imply that your same amount of EverQuest money would buy you less EverQuest stuff.
Thus, the value of items in EverQuest depreciate drastically over time, in opposition to the real world. As many people have pointed it, this is because items in EverQuest that were once scarce become phased out by new items that are better and replace the old high value items.
Thus, if you hold large quanitities of money in EverQuest, its better to hang onto it for awhile before making a purchase, because you will be able to buy more later. However, if you hold large quantities of valuable items, you'd better sell them fast, because they are only going to lose value over time.
Part of me thinks it has a lot to do with the online mentality of a lot of people who are powerless in the real world, but feel empowered when online. I'm most likely pulling this out of my ass, but its something I've seen fairly often when hanging around EFnet in years past.
In real life, you can't just take something from someone else, unless you're much bigger than them. When you're online, you just need to have the ability to access a lot of bandwidth. So, if someone has a channel on IRC that I want, I DoS the server, split it and take the channel. Now, supposedly this doesn't happen as much these days, but it used to happen fairly often back in the day.
There's also online cliques, who for lack of better explaination seem to act as online gangs. Loose groups of friends who associate, talk, and dislike the same people. Thus, much like real life gangs, if one gets ticked off at another, they get their friends to make their life hellish for the opposing party. I wouldn't be suprised if they DoS'd a dialup user just in an attempt to knock him offline and went a little overboard. Or were trying to DoS an IRC bot. Or even a webpage.
Of course, I really have no idea what caused this incident. This is mostly just speculation. But I'm fairly certain at least one script kiddie has had similar motives in mind during his mischief. Kids will be kids, and that involves doing stupid stuff that they don't understand the consequences of. That doesn't mean we should string them up, but it does mean we should make efforts to make it more difficult for them to do damage.
Aside from promises made aproximately 40 years ago (and every decade since then), I don't know of anyone who honestly expected AI to arrive in 2001, especially no one who knew anything about it in 2001, or in 2000, or 1999, etc. Claiming its vaporware was a bit off. No one is marketing HAL to the masses everyday, like the other things on the list.
Secondly, Blizzard has always been late with their games. Usually several years late. In fact, I submitted a story (that actually got accepted) to Slashdot a few months ago saying that Warcraft3 wouldn't be out until 2002. Blizzard is almost always the first to say "Calm down, its not ready yet" as opposed to other items on the list that we were always being told "Expect to get this real soon!"
I always felt Vapor involved products that we were falsely told to expect soon. Both AI and Warcraft3 were things that we should have known weren't coming anytime soon. Thinking otherwise is a result of being ill informed.
This is a _court case_. Your judges aren't elected. They don't run campaigns. They get life tenure. There is absolutely, positively nothing at all writing your representitives will do in this case. Your representitives can't do much of anything when the judge says that the Television execs are right. About your only hope in this case is to donate money to ReplayTV. Your congress person has nothing to do with this at this point.
The law is on the books. They can't go back an retroactively change the law just so the television networks lose. That'd be unconstitutional as an ex post facto law.
People, the time for writing your congressmen is long before the lawsuits start. You should not mod up people who say to write congressmen when its in the court room. You shouldn't even post "write your congressmen" messages in places like this. It doesn't do anything at all.
Why is privacy desirable? Because not everything society disagrees with is illegal. For example, if I was a nudist, but didn't want to be treated like a fruit cake hippy by society, I might be a nudist in my home and want it to remain private information in my home. Do I have something to hide? Yes, my personal, 100% legal practices that I don't want people to know.
The same could be said for masturbation. Or the type of pornography I like to read in the privacy of my own home. The websites I read about health care (if I had genitle deformity, I sure as hell wouldn't want anyone to know that). If I'm politically against a war in Afghanistan, but I don't want to make that known for fear of being beaten up, I should have the right to keep that private from the world.
Just because I want to keep something private doesn't mean I'm doing something wrong. You need to understand that. Hell, if I recall, when Ashcroft went before the House Committee, the House was upset over the violations of Martin Luther King's privacy in an effort to defame him and make him out to be a bad guy.
THAT is why privacy is desirable.
Little content, little meaning...
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This just sounds like a Microsoft publicity stunt more than anything. A sort of "We have evolved beyond needing prompts, and are now fully graphically inspired."
Still, I'd be willing to argue that the removal of legacy DOS functionality isn't always a good thing. You break functionality with code that used to run on previous MS Operating systems. Furthermore, I'd imagine everyone who's been working in computers for awhile has watched the Windows GUI break, and then need the command prompt to fix it.
Now on the other hand, this may be a plus. Microsoft might actually believe that Windows is stable enough that you don't need the DOS prompt anymore. Stability is always good. But even on the most stable platform in the world, I'd still rather not have something crippled from my operating system just because MS doesn't think I need it anymore.
But back to this little tid bit of a story...just a marketing ploy, not really news.
After talking to Alice, I'm not sure how anyone could mistake this thing for a human. Maybe I asked it an illegal question or something, but...
Thomas> You sound like Eliza.
Alice> ELIZA is my ancestor.
It doesn't even seem to attempt to conceal that its a program. Maybe they used a different version for the tournament? Something that doesn't flat out say its a program if you ask it?
I didn't think this was all that big of a deal. There have long been suggestions of Sega working with Microsoft on the XBox. Didn't we even hear that the XBox might play Dreamcast discs natively at some point? Rumor or not, this isn't really huge news.
Unless you look at the hardware, of Sega discussing building an arcade version of the XBox. Again, I really don't consider this news. Sega pulled out of the _home_ console market, they were always doing well in the arcade market, and never intended to pull out of that at all.
So put two and two togeather. Sega makes games for XBox, and Sega makes arcade games. Wouldn't it make sense that Sega would want an Arcade version of XBox in order to make the transition from Arcade to home easiest?
It is suggested you read the article. The building has been treated for both water, and fire, and strength.
The strength tests they used were the following: (1) The strongest man in Great Britain took a sledge hammer to one of the tubes. It was only slightly dented. I'd imagine Lumber acts the same way when he takes a sledge hammer to it. (2) They built a test bridge out of the material, and drove a 1 ton van onto it, which did not dent at all.
The fire test involved taking a flame thrower to untreated and treated cardboard. The untreated burned pretty good, but the treated charred, but remained physically mostly in tact (similar to lumber). Don't expect it to survive burning jet fuel, but it should do okay.
The water test involved the local fire department hosing the place down with fire hoses. The inside remained dry, with no leaks or damp spots.
However, its life is only expected to be 20 years. Which really isn't that bad, for a recycable building.
Am I the only one who remembers why they stopped building hydrogen blimps? You know that problem with them being _highly explosive_?
Sure, you'd avoid the problem of burning jet fuel after the crash, but wouldn't having a compressed and concentrated supply of hydrogen on board equate to a bigger boom from the start?
While much of the people here seem to think that everything that is easily replicated should be free (like software), there is a question of paying for intellectual content online.
Sure, to draw the metaphor out a bit more, if people are willing to create free software in their sparetime, other people should be willing to create free content of other sorts (ie, Slashdot for example, would be created by people who didn't get paid to do this). However, even if you decide to undertake a free software project in your spare time, usually you don't have to shoulder the cost of distribution all by yourself.
Bandwidth costs money. The better the content, the more bandwidth it'll take. So even if you had a society where people were willing to generate all your content for free...you still have to pay for bandwidth.
I'd imagine the people in the content business also like to get paid for their work occasionally too. Having money to eat is a good thing.
Furthermore, all the people who say "You have a third alternative, take your business elsewhere" when presented with the option to pay for content or view ads...well, I mean sure you have that option. But you're not exactly taking any business anywhere. If you're not viewing a site's ads, you're not making them any revenue. And if you're not paying them for a subscription, again, they're still not seeing any revenue. So, by your taking your business elsewhere, you're _helping_ them, by not wasting their bandwidth and not giving anything back. Not exactly a punishment.
Until we shed this thing we call a market economy, you're going to have to give some value back for people to even attempt to give you anything.
This is something I've found rather interesting in the wake of the events of 9/11. There has been a big push to pull elements directed at children that spread the wrong ideals, or so it would seem. While this is an understandable reaction (one would think), this doesn't always imply pulling "violent" messages. Quite the contrary.
As mentioned in this story, they pulled the anti-war song "99 Red Balloons." As mentioned a few days ago, Cartoon Network pulled a cartoon called "Mobile Suit Gundam", which often times treats war as something that greedy leaders start and average soldiers have to fight, even though its meaningless.
To me, pulling shows like this implies that Big Media is going the patriotic route, and not the critical route if and when a war starts. They clearly don't want the young men who are going to the war to have "anti-war" sentiments, as that might discourage enlistment for our upcoming battle. This disturbs me more than the pulling of entertainment with violent messages.
As an odd side note, Cartoon Network still plays "Dragonball Z", where fighting and combat is seen as something enjoyable, fun and looked forward to. In fact, it now runs for two hours instead of one, in wake of recent events.
Someone needs to remain critical, if for nothing else, to play Devil's Advocate. I don't like when all I have is one description of how its going to be.
The op-ed article spends some time referring to people who are constantly watched as prisoners, which indirectly implies that its perfecally okay to continue the monitoring the private conversations of prisoners. This in and of itself, creates a problem, as you are divinding up society into two camps. Those who are permitted to be watched at all times, and those who are not permitted.
I should probably address those who will tell me that I shouldn't be defending prisoners. In fact, I would suspect that the first thing people will say is 'Prisoners give up their right to privacy when they break the social contract that our society agrees to', ie, when they break laws. However, not all prisoners are gulity, nor are all prisoners truly that dangerous. Giving a prisoner who commited a minor offense private access to a phone is hardly endangering the community.
Prisoners are people, and judges are people. We should treat all people as much like people as we can. And I think that involves giving them as much privacy as we can. Unless we suspect something hoakey is going on, we should never, ever be permitted to monitor anyone's private messages. If you think a judge is corrupt and you've got some resemblance of evidence, get a warrant, and start listening. If you think a prisoner is trying to hire a hitman to kill a judge, and you've got evidence, get a warrant and start listening. If Joe Prisoner says he wants to call his wife to make sure she knows how to properly do the laundry and just to talk to her, if he's got phone rights, by all means let him have his private time.
By creating artifical lines between humans, and allocating rights to some and not others, a greater divide is created. If judges can't be monitored, but prisoners can, does that mean entry level workers can be monitored for no reason, and CEO's can't? Or does it mean that all criminals (past and present) be watched in the workplace, and no one with a completely clean record?
Why not just make it easy and flat forbid it except in the most extreme of circumstances?
Not bad, but not as big as one might think.
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Graham says SIAC converted to Linux quickly because of the software's open, flexible nature. "We were able to port our Artmail application in about two-and-a-half days," Graham said.
I would speculate they weren't running NT before if it was that easy to port their software over. So this takes a chunk out of the proprietary Unix market, sure, but if we were to consider this a Zero Sum game, Unix loses, Linux gains, Microsoft doesn't change a thing.
Now granted, other Unix shops might now say 'Well, if the NYSE does it, we can do it too!' But the Microsoft market won't feel any pressure from this until there is a similar porting comment when coming from a Windows shop.
Funny how greedily searching for solutions to others' miseries, miseries that those suffering pray for a solution to, solves those problems all the while people stand on rocks pontificating how evil that process is. Yet when you look in their socialist bag, you don't see too much at all.
Really? I see Brazil giving hundreds of thousands of disease infected human beings cheap drugs to help them with their medical problems. That's not much at all? Compared to the Capitalist solution of "If you're not going to make us billions of dollars (which you can't afford to pay, while we live in our expensive apartments and drive BMW's), you don't deserve to live."
pN: What is your history with the FreeBSD project?
Jordan: I started it along with three other folks back in 1992. It's grown quite a bit since then and so have most of us as well (too much sitting).
How come geeks either seem to be really large (as in above example) or anorexic and needing a lot more calories? Is it just that some don't get enough exercise because they're distracted by coding, while others don't get enough food because they're distracted by coding?
When my old Cyrix machine burnt out long ago, I was very much in need of a good, cheap, not very fast chip to replace my now dead machine. However, I came to realize that finding old machines like that is nearly as expensive as getting something like a used Celeron or other machine these days.
Which, in a way sucks. No reason in going for overkill. But then I also realized, it can't be much cheaper for chip makers to keep making these slower chips. They have to use the same techniques that they used awhile back, which does cost them money. So, once all R&D costs are out of the way, in a way, it does become reasonable to just stop making the slower chips.
However, what would really be nice is if the big chip makers stopped trying to go for "bigger and faster" and instead develop a line of chips that focuses only on "better and cheaper." I have tons of uses for 300MHz machines, but if a 300MHz machine costs the same as a 600+, what's the point? It'd be nice if someone actually designed consumer chips with the intent of being cheap instead of bigger.
Oddly, this reminds me of American Cars vs European Cars for some reason.
I'll be happy if Samuel Jackson gets in a light sabre battle with Samuel Jackson. Either that, or if Yoda whoops ass on a Yoda clone. If either of those things happen, I'll be content.
These things have been getting progressively worse it seems. Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks, and now "Attack of the Clones"? Part of me thinks that Lucas has a bet with another Hollywood Millionaire that says "I can put out any crap I want, and I'll outsell any film you put out, as long as I put "Star Wars" in the title.
"Attack of the Clones." That's horrible. If it was anything else, people would never consider watching it while sober.
I've got a better idea. Why don't we have a discussion here on Slashdot where you throw up potential other titles, and hopefully Lucas will change it before the film is released.
Well, my first question is really "Does anyone outside of Microsoft actually use passport for authentication?" Microsoft uses it a lot for MSN Messenger, Hotmail and all its other stuff, which isn't really bad (for Microsoft products that is). However, I have yet to see Passport used _outside_ of Microsoft.
Then, assuming that other companies do begin to use Passport at a significant level (despite no one using it after months of its deployment), there then becomes the question "What happens when Microsoft denies companies access to passport authentication?" For example, what happens if a Hotmail competitor wishes to use Passport authentication for its web mail login? Clearly, Microsoft would be helping their competitor if they allowed it, and acting monopolistically if they don't. That does provide a small problem for Microsoft.
Third is something that the article points out very early on about the very reason people need something like passport. To paraphrase, the article states that people dislike the idea of their online grocery store having access to their online stock trading when they use the same password. This problem doesn't go away with Passport, it is just enhanced. Now, instead of your grocery store having access to your stocks, Microsoft has access to both your grocery store and your stocks, without doing anything but being a middle man authenticator.
But what am I saying? Microsoft is the good guy, who would never abuse its power. That's why its okay for Microsoft to use its powers to "innovate," just like its okay for the US to develop defensive systems that give it the power to launch nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also the chance that you picked up an email address that had formerly belonged to another user, who wasn't very protective of his email address. As such, he sent his email address (that is, YOUR email address) all in the wild, then let his account expire, and you picked it up. Now you have to deal with his spam. While I'm not really proud of Microsoft or Hotmail, I don't think they 'sell' their email lists to every spammer who wants them. Certainly not 171 in one week.
The reason I came up with this theory is because I have two Hotmail accounts. One consists of letters and numbers, while another was a word I made up. The made up word has yet to receive any unsolicited emailings (Microsoft sends one every other week or so, but that's acceptable, because its basically a newsletter for the service that I'm currently using). The other...well, it gets about 10 emails an hour. And the other is the newer email address.
Maybe I'm a little too late to jump in on this one, but from all the high ranked posts that just say "You don't know what you want, go to college!" I don't think they're all right. However, they do have a point. Chances are you really don't have a very good understanding of everything in the world, and a University is a good place to get a varied world view with multiple perspectives you hadn't thought of. However, the four-year-deal isn't for everyone.
Everyone always hypes the bachelors programs as the end all of college. Its not. In fact, jumping right in can be overwhelming, cause you to lose focus and swear 'Why the hell am I taking Composition? I want to work on computers!' Thus, I propose that you don't go to a 4 year University, but rather head to a Community College and start work on an AA. Why you might ask? Very simple. You start gaining the benefits of working on a degree, without committing yourself to 4 whole years. If after 2 years you're screaming 'I want to work on computers!' You can cut out with a 2 year AA. If you went straight for the BA, you don't have that option.
Also, the first two years at a University is spent primarily on general education (math, writing, speech, basic history, etc). At a four year University, they have to do so many of these courses that they tend to have massive class sizes. During my first two years at the University of Central Florida, it wasn't uncommon to be in a class of 200-300 people. In a Community College setting, you generally won't find a class above 50 people, allowing for much more personal interaction (and interest) from your instructor. This can be key to getting the best out of the education you're paying for, as I've found that if the professor knows you by name, you will gain between 2-5% on your final grade. This is, in part, because you've been paying attention to your professor, and in part, because the professor _knows_ that you have been paying attention.
Furthermore, you're really not selling yourself short by starting at a Community College. After you get your AA, if you wish to continue, you can go to a 4 year University after that (and only have to work for another 2 years) and get a Bachelors degree. Despite what everyone says, the University is not for everyone.
My credientials on the subject matter: I enrolled at the University of Central Florida's BA program directly in the Fall of 1999 as a Computer Science student. I decided I hated to think of computers as anything more than a tool to accomplish non-computer related tasks, and switched over to Political Theory (which I find far more fun). I graduated last month, and am going on to do PhD research in Political Theory starting next fall.
I also had the opportunity to work in an Internet Service Provider straight out of High School (with heavy implication that I would be offered a management position). They pay had the potential to be pretty good, however, I had no desire to live that life at that time.
Take these opinions however you wish, it is your life. Don't let what nameless people on Slashdot tell you dictate what you do.
Unfortunately, I'm a University Student (one of those eternal students actually). That means I end up doing a lot of word processing, paper writing, and the like. And its not always in English either. At the same time, having a grammar checker on hand does make proof-reading my own papers much easier, for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement, and the use of active voice instead of passive voice. In my brief experiments with both OpenOffice and AbiWord, both lacked a grammar checker to do this.
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking. However, MS Word isn't exactly perfect in this respect. I do large amounts of my writing in the University computer labs, on their mass installs of MS Word, which only deal in English. Microsoft charges extra for increased language support in Word (last I checked it was a fairly sizable amount of money too). But I digress...
Unfortunately, its hard to break the MS Word strangle hold not only because of the file format being so nasty to deal with, but also the fact that MS has developed a very good and useful feature in its grammar checker.
Technically, the US constition wasn't all that revolutionary at all. It was essentially a synthesis of previous democratic experiments (mentioned by other replies) mixed with the Philosophers of John Locke (or need we forget, "Life, Liberty, and Property"). At best, the Constitution might be described as a "proof of concept" document, derived from the various contractarian Philosophers (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, etc).
In fact, the US has been democratic _long_ before the revolution took place, which is why the transition to democracy was so easy in the US. All the states had been governing themselves democraticly for hundreds of years. Don't forget, colonists first started showing up in the new world in the 1500-1600's, and the revolution didn't take place until the late 1700's. Furthermore, the first Constitution (the Articles of Confederation) failed miserably.
Lets take this further. If you look at virtually every other "Democratic" country in the world, they don't run their country anything like the way the US does it. Instead of this wacky US Presidential system, most countries tend to use Parlimentary systems, which in turn are prone to having higher turnout, better ability to implement policy, quicker response times, higher stability, and are generally agreed to be a better system.
The only reason to think that the US Constitution is such a great thing is because you are a US citizen and have been raised under the myths that this is the greatest country on the planet. Not to be belittling, but every country has those myths. Everyone has their claim to fame, and use it to claim that they're the best people on the Earth. That's also not to say that everything your country tells you is just a lie to increase your patriotism, some of it may be true. Just don't swallow it whole. Be critical of everything, and determine what you believe for yourself.
As for the influence of computers? They have, for a fact, revolutionized data collection, number crunching, and communication. Never before could you get the daily newspaper from anywhere in the world the very day that the paper came out. It was never possible to create virtually uncrackable encrypted messages in real time, and transmit them across the globe. Never before was it possible for a camera to look at your face and determine if you were likely to be a criminal. This is all in just a few years.
So...what's more important? A synthesis of existing concepts that came about as a second attempt and was never successful again any place else in the world? Or a magic box that has radicalized how life operates the world over?
For some reason I was drawn to this. The report has a section on "What people find annoying." Without much suprise, many are stating that Spam is becoming highly problematic. The most annoying of the spam being considered sales solititation. They also have this to say about 'adult' spamming:
We also probed into a particular type of spam that is often cited as an annoyance to Internet users-messages with adult content or from adult Web sites. More than half-56%-of U.S. email users have at one time or another received an email from an adult Web site or that contained adult content. Twenty percent report that this occurs often, with Internet veterans twice as likely as novices to receive such messages (24% for veterans versus 12% for novices). The greater incidence for veterans is likely to be nothing more than a reflection of the number of years they have been online. Their more extensive surfing habits increases the chances that traces of information identifying their email addresses have been picked up by these sites.
One has to wonder if the veteran Internet users are just more likely to look for porn. After all, everyone I met during High School who went on the Internet always followed it up by "You can get free pictures of naked women there!" Well, not everyone, but all of the non-computer geeks at least. Food for thought.
The Section.
Okay, this seems to be a point of confusion from the comments I have read.
30% deflation means that the currency of EverQuest can buy more EverQuest stuff every year.
30% inflation would imply that your same amount of EverQuest money would buy you less EverQuest stuff.
Thus, the value of items in EverQuest depreciate drastically over time, in opposition to the real world. As many people have pointed it, this is because items in EverQuest that were once scarce become phased out by new items that are better and replace the old high value items.
Thus, if you hold large quanitities of money in EverQuest, its better to hang onto it for awhile before making a purchase, because you will be able to buy more later. However, if you hold large quantities of valuable items, you'd better sell them fast, because they are only going to lose value over time.
Part of me thinks it has a lot to do with the online mentality of a lot of people who are powerless in the real world, but feel empowered when online. I'm most likely pulling this out of my ass, but its something I've seen fairly often when hanging around EFnet in years past.
In real life, you can't just take something from someone else, unless you're much bigger than them. When you're online, you just need to have the ability to access a lot of bandwidth. So, if someone has a channel on IRC that I want, I DoS the server, split it and take the channel. Now, supposedly this doesn't happen as much these days, but it used to happen fairly often back in the day.
There's also online cliques, who for lack of better explaination seem to act as online gangs. Loose groups of friends who associate, talk, and dislike the same people. Thus, much like real life gangs, if one gets ticked off at another, they get their friends to make their life hellish for the opposing party. I wouldn't be suprised if they DoS'd a dialup user just in an attempt to knock him offline and went a little overboard. Or were trying to DoS an IRC bot. Or even a webpage.
Of course, I really have no idea what caused this incident. This is mostly just speculation. But I'm fairly certain at least one script kiddie has had similar motives in mind during his mischief. Kids will be kids, and that involves doing stupid stuff that they don't understand the consequences of. That doesn't mean we should string them up, but it does mean we should make efforts to make it more difficult for them to do damage.
Aside from promises made aproximately 40 years ago (and every decade since then), I don't know of anyone who honestly expected AI to arrive in 2001, especially no one who knew anything about it in 2001, or in 2000, or 1999, etc. Claiming its vaporware was a bit off. No one is marketing HAL to the masses everyday, like the other things on the list.
Secondly, Blizzard has always been late with their games. Usually several years late. In fact, I submitted a story (that actually got accepted) to Slashdot a few months ago saying that Warcraft3 wouldn't be out until 2002. Blizzard is almost always the first to say "Calm down, its not ready yet" as opposed to other items on the list that we were always being told "Expect to get this real soon!"
I always felt Vapor involved products that we were falsely told to expect soon. Both AI and Warcraft3 were things that we should have known weren't coming anytime soon. Thinking otherwise is a result of being ill informed.
Okay, you're karma whoring.
This is a _court case_. Your judges aren't elected. They don't run campaigns. They get life tenure. There is absolutely, positively nothing at all writing your representitives will do in this case. Your representitives can't do much of anything when the judge says that the Television execs are right. About your only hope in this case is to donate money to ReplayTV. Your congress person has nothing to do with this at this point.
The law is on the books. They can't go back an retroactively change the law just so the television networks lose. That'd be unconstitutional as an ex post facto law.
People, the time for writing your congressmen is long before the lawsuits start. You should not mod up people who say to write congressmen when its in the court room. You shouldn't even post "write your congressmen" messages in places like this. It doesn't do anything at all.
Why is privacy desirable? Because not everything society disagrees with is illegal. For example, if I was a nudist, but didn't want to be treated like a fruit cake hippy by society, I might be a nudist in my home and want it to remain private information in my home. Do I have something to hide? Yes, my personal, 100% legal practices that I don't want people to know.
The same could be said for masturbation. Or the type of pornography I like to read in the privacy of my own home. The websites I read about health care (if I had genitle deformity, I sure as hell wouldn't want anyone to know that). If I'm politically against a war in Afghanistan, but I don't want to make that known for fear of being beaten up, I should have the right to keep that private from the world.
Just because I want to keep something private doesn't mean I'm doing something wrong. You need to understand that. Hell, if I recall, when Ashcroft went before the House Committee, the House was upset over the violations of Martin Luther King's privacy in an effort to defame him and make him out to be a bad guy.
THAT is why privacy is desirable.
This just sounds like a Microsoft publicity stunt more than anything. A sort of "We have evolved beyond needing prompts, and are now fully graphically inspired."
Still, I'd be willing to argue that the removal of legacy DOS functionality isn't always a good thing. You break functionality with code that used to run on previous MS Operating systems. Furthermore, I'd imagine everyone who's been working in computers for awhile has watched the Windows GUI break, and then need the command prompt to fix it.
Now on the other hand, this may be a plus. Microsoft might actually believe that Windows is stable enough that you don't need the DOS prompt anymore. Stability is always good. But even on the most stable platform in the world, I'd still rather not have something crippled from my operating system just because MS doesn't think I need it anymore.
But back to this little tid bit of a story...just a marketing ploy, not really news.
After talking to Alice, I'm not sure how anyone could mistake this thing for a human. Maybe I asked it an illegal question or something, but...
Thomas> You sound like Eliza.
Alice> ELIZA is my ancestor.
It doesn't even seem to attempt to conceal that its a program. Maybe they used a different version for the tournament? Something that doesn't flat out say its a program if you ask it?
I didn't think this was all that big of a deal. There have long been suggestions of Sega working with Microsoft on the XBox. Didn't we even hear that the XBox might play Dreamcast discs natively at some point? Rumor or not, this isn't really huge news.
Unless you look at the hardware, of Sega discussing building an arcade version of the XBox. Again, I really don't consider this news. Sega pulled out of the _home_ console market, they were always doing well in the arcade market, and never intended to pull out of that at all.
So put two and two togeather. Sega makes games for XBox, and Sega makes arcade games. Wouldn't it make sense that Sega would want an Arcade version of XBox in order to make the transition from Arcade to home easiest?
It is suggested you read the article. The building has been treated for both water, and fire, and strength.
The strength tests they used were the following: (1) The strongest man in Great Britain took a sledge hammer to one of the tubes. It was only slightly dented. I'd imagine Lumber acts the same way when he takes a sledge hammer to it. (2) They built a test bridge out of the material, and drove a 1 ton van onto it, which did not dent at all.
The fire test involved taking a flame thrower to untreated and treated cardboard. The untreated burned pretty good, but the treated charred, but remained physically mostly in tact (similar to lumber). Don't expect it to survive burning jet fuel, but it should do okay.
The water test involved the local fire department hosing the place down with fire hoses. The inside remained dry, with no leaks or damp spots.
However, its life is only expected to be 20 years. Which really isn't that bad, for a recycable building.
Am I the only one who remembers why they stopped building hydrogen blimps? You know that problem with them being _highly explosive_?
Sure, you'd avoid the problem of burning jet fuel after the crash, but wouldn't having a compressed and concentrated supply of hydrogen on board equate to a bigger boom from the start?
While much of the people here seem to think that everything that is easily replicated should be free (like software), there is a question of paying for intellectual content online.
Sure, to draw the metaphor out a bit more, if people are willing to create free software in their sparetime, other people should be willing to create free content of other sorts (ie, Slashdot for example, would be created by people who didn't get paid to do this). However, even if you decide to undertake a free software project in your spare time, usually you don't have to shoulder the cost of distribution all by yourself.
Bandwidth costs money. The better the content, the more bandwidth it'll take. So even if you had a society where people were willing to generate all your content for free...you still have to pay for bandwidth.
I'd imagine the people in the content business also like to get paid for their work occasionally too. Having money to eat is a good thing.
Furthermore, all the people who say "You have a third alternative, take your business elsewhere" when presented with the option to pay for content or view ads...well, I mean sure you have that option. But you're not exactly taking any business anywhere. If you're not viewing a site's ads, you're not making them any revenue. And if you're not paying them for a subscription, again, they're still not seeing any revenue. So, by your taking your business elsewhere, you're _helping_ them, by not wasting their bandwidth and not giving anything back. Not exactly a punishment.
Until we shed this thing we call a market economy, you're going to have to give some value back for people to even attempt to give you anything.
This is something I've found rather interesting in the wake of the events of 9/11. There has been a big push to pull elements directed at children that spread the wrong ideals, or so it would seem. While this is an understandable reaction (one would think), this doesn't always imply pulling "violent" messages. Quite the contrary.
As mentioned in this story, they pulled the anti-war song "99 Red Balloons." As mentioned a few days ago, Cartoon Network pulled a cartoon called "Mobile Suit Gundam", which often times treats war as something that greedy leaders start and average soldiers have to fight, even though its meaningless.
To me, pulling shows like this implies that Big Media is going the patriotic route, and not the critical route if and when a war starts. They clearly don't want the young men who are going to the war to have "anti-war" sentiments, as that might discourage enlistment for our upcoming battle. This disturbs me more than the pulling of entertainment with violent messages.
As an odd side note, Cartoon Network still plays "Dragonball Z", where fighting and combat is seen as something enjoyable, fun and looked forward to. In fact, it now runs for two hours instead of one, in wake of recent events.
Someone needs to remain critical, if for nothing else, to play Devil's Advocate. I don't like when all I have is one description of how its going to be.
The op-ed article spends some time referring to people who are constantly watched as prisoners, which indirectly implies that its perfecally okay to continue the monitoring the private conversations of prisoners. This in and of itself, creates a problem, as you are divinding up society into two camps. Those who are permitted to be watched at all times, and those who are not permitted.
I should probably address those who will tell me that I shouldn't be defending prisoners. In fact, I would suspect that the first thing people will say is 'Prisoners give up their right to privacy when they break the social contract that our society agrees to', ie, when they break laws. However, not all prisoners are gulity, nor are all prisoners truly that dangerous. Giving a prisoner who commited a minor offense private access to a phone is hardly endangering the community.
Prisoners are people, and judges are people. We should treat all people as much like people as we can. And I think that involves giving them as much privacy as we can. Unless we suspect something hoakey is going on, we should never, ever be permitted to monitor anyone's private messages. If you think a judge is corrupt and you've got some resemblance of evidence, get a warrant, and start listening. If you think a prisoner is trying to hire a hitman to kill a judge, and you've got evidence, get a warrant and start listening. If Joe Prisoner says he wants to call his wife to make sure she knows how to properly do the laundry and just to talk to her, if he's got phone rights, by all means let him have his private time.
By creating artifical lines between humans, and allocating rights to some and not others, a greater divide is created. If judges can't be monitored, but prisoners can, does that mean entry level workers can be monitored for no reason, and CEO's can't? Or does it mean that all criminals (past and present) be watched in the workplace, and no one with a completely clean record?
Why not just make it easy and flat forbid it except in the most extreme of circumstances?
Graham says SIAC converted to Linux quickly because of the software's open, flexible nature. "We were able to port our Artmail application in about two-and-a-half days," Graham said.
I would speculate they weren't running NT before if it was that easy to port their software over. So this takes a chunk out of the proprietary Unix market, sure, but if we were to consider this a Zero Sum game, Unix loses, Linux gains, Microsoft doesn't change a thing.
Now granted, other Unix shops might now say 'Well, if the NYSE does it, we can do it too!' But the Microsoft market won't feel any pressure from this until there is a similar porting comment when coming from a Windows shop.
Funny how greedily searching for solutions to others' miseries, miseries that those suffering pray for a solution to, solves those problems all the while people stand on rocks pontificating how evil that process is. Yet when you look in their socialist bag, you don't see too much at all.
Really? I see Brazil giving hundreds of thousands of disease infected human beings cheap drugs to help them with their medical problems. That's not much at all? Compared to the Capitalist solution of "If you're not going to make us billions of dollars (which you can't afford to pay, while we live in our expensive apartments and drive BMW's), you don't deserve to live."
Right.
pN: What is your history with the FreeBSD project?
Jordan: I started it along with three other folks back in 1992. It's grown quite a bit since then and so have most of us as well (too much sitting).
How come geeks either seem to be really large (as in above example) or anorexic and needing a lot more calories? Is it just that some don't get enough exercise because they're distracted by coding, while others don't get enough food because they're distracted by coding?
When my old Cyrix machine burnt out long ago, I was very much in need of a good, cheap, not very fast chip to replace my now dead machine. However, I came to realize that finding old machines like that is nearly as expensive as getting something like a used Celeron or other machine these days.
Which, in a way sucks. No reason in going for overkill. But then I also realized, it can't be much cheaper for chip makers to keep making these slower chips. They have to use the same techniques that they used awhile back, which does cost them money. So, once all R&D costs are out of the way, in a way, it does become reasonable to just stop making the slower chips.
However, what would really be nice is if the big chip makers stopped trying to go for "bigger and faster" and instead develop a line of chips that focuses only on "better and cheaper." I have tons of uses for 300MHz machines, but if a 300MHz machine costs the same as a 600+, what's the point? It'd be nice if someone actually designed consumer chips with the intent of being cheap instead of bigger.
Oddly, this reminds me of American Cars vs European Cars for some reason.
I'll be happy if Samuel Jackson gets in a light sabre battle with Samuel Jackson. Either that, or if Yoda whoops ass on a Yoda clone. If either of those things happen, I'll be content.
These things have been getting progressively worse it seems. Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks, and now "Attack of the Clones"? Part of me thinks that Lucas has a bet with another Hollywood Millionaire that says "I can put out any crap I want, and I'll outsell any film you put out, as long as I put "Star Wars" in the title.
"Attack of the Clones." That's horrible. If it was anything else, people would never consider watching it while sober.
I've got a better idea. Why don't we have a discussion here on Slashdot where you throw up potential other titles, and hopefully Lucas will change it before the film is released.
Well, my first question is really "Does anyone outside of Microsoft actually use passport for authentication?" Microsoft uses it a lot for MSN Messenger, Hotmail and all its other stuff, which isn't really bad (for Microsoft products that is). However, I have yet to see Passport used _outside_ of Microsoft.
Then, assuming that other companies do begin to use Passport at a significant level (despite no one using it after months of its deployment), there then becomes the question "What happens when Microsoft denies companies access to passport authentication?" For example, what happens if a Hotmail competitor wishes to use Passport authentication for its web mail login? Clearly, Microsoft would be helping their competitor if they allowed it, and acting monopolistically if they don't. That does provide a small problem for Microsoft.
Third is something that the article points out very early on about the very reason people need something like passport. To paraphrase, the article states that people dislike the idea of their online grocery store having access to their online stock trading when they use the same password. This problem doesn't go away with Passport, it is just enhanced. Now, instead of your grocery store having access to your stocks, Microsoft has access to both your grocery store and your stocks, without doing anything but being a middle man authenticator.
But what am I saying? Microsoft is the good guy, who would never abuse its power. That's why its okay for Microsoft to use its powers to "innovate," just like its okay for the US to develop defensive systems that give it the power to launch nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation.