I was interested to see how people would react to this when I posted it. I agree with your statement about consent; I'd say that's important in terms of morality, but is that relevant to whether it's a mental disorder?
The question before us is: given consenting adults engaging in (online or otherwise) age-play (where one or both of them is a minor), are they pedophiles? Are they mentally disordered?
If so, then indeed by WHO standards at least, prior to 1992 any two consenting adults engaging in (online or otherwise) homosexual acts would be mentally disordered. The fact that the last sentence seems absurd (at least it does to me) is enough to give pause before answering the earlier question.
Unfortunately the actual story involves real child pornography, about which the law is clear. But that aspect of the story is less interesting to me, and I suspect also other slashdotters. The interesting discussion to be had here is about the online roleplay aspect of it.
But once there the disk is still trashing for some time.
This might just be a typo, but I see it far too much. In my old age I really am trying to to become less of a pedant, but I just can't pass this one by. It's thrashing, not trashing.
I'd guess that disk trashing is when you go dumpster diving for used hard disks.
Then use a decent mail client that can skip quoted text.
Is that your best argument? Using proper inline quoting (with pruning irrelevant quoted text) or top-posting that becomes unnecessary. Besides, there is no decent mail client. They all suck.
You see, that way you can actually read the discussion from top to bottom, just like a book, and have all the relavent information in proper order. Proper netiquette which, apparently, nobody remembers or follows.
I used to feel this way too, being one of the more pedantic, elitist, hardcore, old school netiquette snobs around. However after having lived in the real world for a while, I find the practice of full bottom posting to be far more annoying than full top posting (where "full" means the entire quoted text is preserved).
On a mailing list or active thread among many people, it quickly becomes tiresome to constantly scroll down to the start of the reply for every new email that comes in. My old school snobbery
still insists that the proper method is to prune your quoted reply text to the relevant context and reply inline. But for those who are too lazy to do this (nearly everyone except us throwbacks) and as a result end up quoting the entire email, I find in this case top posting to be far more practical and sensible than bottom posting.
They have specifically created a centralized system where the email for millions of people depend on the uptime of their two (?!?!) data centres.
Your information isn't quite right here. RIM has more than two data centers in more than two locations in more than two continents.
And I don't quite understand why so many US gov't users are allowed to route their email through a NOC in Canada (disclosure: I'm Canadian).
Governments tend to be (justifiably) paranoid customers. I'm sure it's safe to assume that each government does a fair amount of investigation before deciding it's safe to use BlackBerry for official use. And even then I expect it's only permitted for certain classification levels -- probably low ones.
... which doesn't work with some DVD players and cannot be ripped by any program under Linux.
This isn't quite true, at least for certain definitions of "ripped." I know someone (not me of course) who initially had troubles dd'ing a Greys Anatomy DVD (damaged by ARccOS) but had no problems ripping the tracks individually using mplayer (i.e. mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile 1.mpg). I'm sure mencoder would have worked fine too, for transcoding.
Seems to me that I remembered quite right, in fact. GNOME was started in 1997; Qt was GPLed in 2000. That's 3 years. Your bias (in presuming my wrongness) is your interpretation of "proprietary hold." From the perspective of a FOSS desktop, if vendors (say Red Hat) can't distribute a derivative of Qt, then that qualifies as "proprietary hold." The ability to distribute derivatives is hardly useful only a "small handful of zealots." The QPL was just not viable for a free desktop, and, from a licensing perspective, there was still a place for GNOME even in 1998.
There were some minor licensing issues, but with Trolltech's cooperation those were quite easily worked out.
The "licensing issues" you refer to were not minor; they were simply not compatible with the ethos of a fully free desktop. To the best of my recollection, at the time of GNOME's inception there was no end in sight to Trolltech's proprietary hold on Qt. Qt was GPLed at least three years after GNOME was began. Dealing with Qt's "minor licensing issues" was not as trivial and straightforward as you make it sound.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (a Core 2 Duo E6600 w/2 Gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder.
I'm about as anti-Windows as they come, and everyone around me will attest to the frequency at which I bitch about Windows (as I am in the unenviable position to have to use it on occasion at work). So I'm the last person who would use Vista, or defend it, but...
... I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad. 20 minutes to copy a 17M file on a local disk, something is clearly wrong here. In the worst of conditions, that operation should take not longer than a few seconds. If your experience is typical and consistent with others, I'd be keen to read some more formal benchmarks to this effect. But I really think there's no way Vista is working as designed on your computer. Questioning Microsoft's competence is daily routine for me, but this pushes the realm of reason.
Who needs a compile farm when most of what we need can be run from a single moderately decent workstation?
The single reason I have ever used SF's compilefarm is to test my code on 64 bit architecture. For testing on different distros, I indeed do it all locally (using chroot environments). But for testing x86_64, if you don't happen to have a 64 bit CPU, VMWare is not going to help.
If you make it operate independent of anything inside the cockpit, controlled entirely via black boxes accessible only from outside the aircraft, I think it pretty much fits the definition. There's no effective way to access an external avionics bay while in flight. 500kts airspeed sees to it.
What about the paths from the black box to the aircraift systems it is designed to control? I'm surely no avionics expert, but if the systems themselves are accessible internally, then the path from the presumably tamper-proof black box to the systems being controlled strikes me as a viable attack vector. In any case, all we can do is speculate, but the very presence of the term "tamper-proof" sets off the snakeoil alarms.
As for tampering with it on the ground, if 500,000 DirecTV hackers can't hack Rupert Murdoch's P4/P5 smartcard after years of trying, it's highly unlikely a small band of fanatics could muster the resources to do something similar to the navigation black boxes on the ground.
A system whose security depends on the motivation or abilities of its attackers is designed to fail. I'm skeptical this is the best way to spend all that money. I'd be curious how many air marshalls could be hired with the money used to develop and deploy this unproven and unreviewed (as the article indicates its details are secret) technological (potentially non-) solution.
This is essentially what Jacobson explained in the deposition:
3 A. Again, every device is identified
4 through its IP address. The MAC address is only
5 valid from one local connection to another.
Although to be far, I guess it requires prior knowledge of how Ethernet works to frame his answer in the correct context. "Local connection" in his answer is ambiguous out of context, but refers to nodes on the same LAN.
I think his biggest smoking gun (and based on the deposition, he thinks it too) is that the payload of the packets generated from the computer (supposedly) running Kazaa contains the public IP address, and his conclusion is that since the IP reported in the payload matches the source IP of the packets, no NAT was used. At least on its surface, this sounds reasonable to me. The grandparent post mistakes the claim that the IP is contained in the payload. This is layer 7 stuff, and a NAT router will not perform any translation on this.
I'm too ignorant of the protocol used by Kazaa to know how smoking that gun really is, however. There are applications that will ask the server for its external IP address. IRC clients, for example, will do this in order to provide the correct public (rather than internal) IP address for DCC offers. The reliability of the IP address recorded in the payload (which is now in the domain of Kazaa protocol) should be determined.
But, having read the whole deposition, the biggest WTF from where I sit is the fact that Jacobson's own testimony shows Kazaa never touched the defendant's computer. Huh? So all the plaintiff has to go by is wishywashy evidence that ranges from difficult to impossible to prove, meanwhile the only solid source of information -- the defendant's computer -- completely vindicates her? Did I miss something fundamental or is this as big a WTF as I think it is?
Common sense in a courtroom? Now thats an oxymoron.
Although the courts have certainly produced their fair share of WTFs, I believe the judicial system is the last bastion of hope for the American people. (And the Canadian people too, in about a decade.)
Notice the question mark in the subject? And the last line of my submission? "Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"
Ahh yes, the timeless question mark. It truly lets us get away with any type of statement. Let me try one: puppetman discovered having upside down anal sex with retarded newborn goats?
They may push the service charge, but their contract with the bank/Moneris/other service provider specifically prohibits this. If you report them they will be warned and continued violations will get their account suspended.
Nice, I didn't know this. Do you have any specific sources for reference so I have some ammunition?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not very clear, but I meant where one or both of them roleplays a minor.
I was interested to see how people would react to this when I posted it. I agree with your statement about consent; I'd say that's important in terms of morality, but is that relevant to whether it's a mental disorder?
The question before us is: given consenting adults engaging in (online or otherwise) age-play (where one or both of them is a minor), are they pedophiles? Are they mentally disordered?
If so, then indeed by WHO standards at least, prior to 1992 any two consenting adults engaging in (online or otherwise) homosexual acts would be mentally disordered. The fact that the last sentence seems absurd (at least it does to me) is enough to give pause before answering the earlier question.
Unfortunately the actual story involves real child pornography, about which the law is clear. But that aspect of the story is less interesting to me, and I suspect also other slashdotters. The interesting discussion to be had here is about the online roleplay aspect of it.
This might just be a typo, but I see it far too much. In my old age I really am trying to to become less of a pedant, but I just can't pass this one by. It's thrashing, not trashing.
I'd guess that disk trashing is when you go dumpster diving for used hard disks.
I used to feel this way too, being one of the more pedantic, elitist, hardcore, old school netiquette snobs around. However after having lived in the real world for a while, I find the practice of full bottom posting to be far more annoying than full top posting (where "full" means the entire quoted text is preserved).
On a mailing list or active thread among many people, it quickly becomes tiresome to constantly scroll down to the start of the reply for every new email that comes in. My old school snobbery still insists that the proper method is to prune your quoted reply text to the relevant context and reply inline. But for those who are too lazy to do this (nearly everyone except us throwbacks) and as a result end up quoting the entire email, I find in this case top posting to be far more practical and sensible than bottom posting.
Your information isn't quite right here. RIM has more than two data centers in more than two locations in more than two continents.
Governments tend to be (justifiably) paranoid customers. I'm sure it's safe to assume that each government does a fair amount of investigation before deciding it's safe to use BlackBerry for official use. And even then I expect it's only permitted for certain classification levels -- probably low ones.
This isn't quite true, at least for certain definitions of "ripped." I know someone (not me of course) who initially had troubles dd'ing a Greys Anatomy DVD (damaged by ARccOS) but had no problems ripping the tracks individually using mplayer (i.e. mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile 1.mpg). I'm sure mencoder would have worked fine too, for transcoding.
Seems to me that I remembered quite right, in fact. GNOME was started in 1997; Qt was GPLed in 2000. That's 3 years. Your bias (in presuming my wrongness) is your interpretation of "proprietary hold." From the perspective of a FOSS desktop, if vendors (say Red Hat) can't distribute a derivative of Qt, then that qualifies as "proprietary hold." The ability to distribute derivatives is hardly useful only a "small handful of zealots." The QPL was just not viable for a free desktop, and, from a licensing perspective, there was still a place for GNOME even in 1998.
The "licensing issues" you refer to were not minor; they were simply not compatible with the ethos of a fully free desktop. To the best of my recollection, at the time of GNOME's inception there was no end in sight to Trolltech's proprietary hold on Qt. Qt was GPLed at least three years after GNOME was began. Dealing with Qt's "minor licensing issues" was not as trivial and straightforward as you make it sound.
I'm about as anti-Windows as they come, and everyone around me will attest to the frequency at which I bitch about Windows (as I am in the unenviable position to have to use it on occasion at work). So I'm the last person who would use Vista, or defend it, but ...
... I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad. 20 minutes to copy a 17M file on a local disk, something is clearly wrong here. In the worst of conditions, that operation should take not longer than a few seconds. If your experience is typical and consistent with others, I'd be keen to read some more formal benchmarks to this effect. But I really think there's no way Vista is working as designed on your computer. Questioning Microsoft's competence is daily routine for me, but this pushes the realm of reason.
The single reason I have ever used SF's compilefarm is to test my code on 64 bit architecture. For testing on different distros, I indeed do it all locally (using chroot environments). But for testing x86_64, if you don't happen to have a 64 bit CPU, VMWare is not going to help.
What about the paths from the black box to the aircraift systems it is designed to control? I'm surely no avionics expert, but if the systems themselves are accessible internally, then the path from the presumably tamper-proof black box to the systems being controlled strikes me as a viable attack vector. In any case, all we can do is speculate, but the very presence of the term "tamper-proof" sets off the snakeoil alarms.
A system whose security depends on the motivation or abilities of its attackers is designed to fail. I'm skeptical this is the best way to spend all that money. I'd be curious how many air marshalls could be hired with the money used to develop and deploy this unproven and unreviewed (as the article indicates its details are secret) technological (potentially non-) solution.
Ouch, that hurts. Truly I have been put in my place by a superior intellect.
Wait, didn't you even read the summary? They already thought of this: it's tamper-proof!
This is essentially what Jacobson explained in the deposition:
Although to be far, I guess it requires prior knowledge of how Ethernet works to frame his answer in the correct context. "Local connection" in his answer is ambiguous out of context, but refers to nodes on the same LAN.
I think his biggest smoking gun (and based on the deposition, he thinks it too) is that the payload of the packets generated from the computer (supposedly) running Kazaa contains the public IP address, and his conclusion is that since the IP reported in the payload matches the source IP of the packets, no NAT was used. At least on its surface, this sounds reasonable to me. The grandparent post mistakes the claim that the IP is contained in the payload. This is layer 7 stuff, and a NAT router will not perform any translation on this.
I'm too ignorant of the protocol used by Kazaa to know how smoking that gun really is, however. There are applications that will ask the server for its external IP address. IRC clients, for example, will do this in order to provide the correct public (rather than internal) IP address for DCC offers. The reliability of the IP address recorded in the payload (which is now in the domain of Kazaa protocol) should be determined.
But, having read the whole deposition, the biggest WTF from where I sit is the fact that Jacobson's own testimony shows Kazaa never touched the defendant's computer. Huh? So all the plaintiff has to go by is wishywashy evidence that ranges from difficult to impossible to prove, meanwhile the only solid source of information -- the defendant's computer -- completely vindicates her? Did I miss something fundamental or is this as big a WTF as I think it is?
Cheers,
Jason.
Take a step back and bask in the irony.
Although the courts have certainly produced their fair share of WTFs, I believe the judicial system is the last bastion of hope for the American people. (And the Canadian people too, in about a decade.)
The answer is $0. The real question is how much money will the ISP's customers have to spend ...
Ahh yes, the timeless question mark. It truly lets us get away with any type of statement. Let me try one: puppetman discovered having upside down anal sex with retarded newborn goats?
The whole question-marks-in-the-media phenomenon needs to stop.
Nice, I didn't know this. Do you have any specific sources for reference so I have some ammunition?