The easiest way to do this is to charge people a amall (or large, depending on your personal preference) one-time, non-refundable under any circumstances, fee for an account. Say, $10, or whatever floats your boat. You now have a technically private board, with a very low barrier to entry for honest people, willing to follow the rules you set out. For trolls, they can make as many accounts as they want, you just earn $10 each time they get their jollies breaking your rules.
Every side wins, except the trolls. You win by getting some money to support your forums and whatever else, your honest users win because there are few trolls who would constantly pay $10 for a new account every time you banned them. The trolls can keep making accounts and be idiots as long as their bank account holds out, so I guess you could say they win as well.
Both camps have a lot of vocal jerks in them, who apparently hate each other for NO GOOD REASON.
That, and the fact that neither GNOME or KDE is worth the time of day as far as I'm concerned. They're both bloated Windows-wannabes. I'll pass. No thanks. I gave at the office.
Anyone out there who wants to try something that's ACTUALLY different, check out Enlightenment (which is what I use for Linux) or AfterStep or WindowMaker. Real people providing real alternatives to the twerps in the GNOME and KDE battalions. Psssst, you can even use GNOME and KDE software in them...
OK, so they lost 8 million dollars, so what?
on
Apple Reports Q1 Loss
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They've got 4.4 BILLION (that's Billion, with a B) in the bank.
Somehow, I fail to be able to dredge up anything resembling panic for Apple's future.
Dark Age of Camelot also makes you "Accept" both the software license and the Terms of Service every time you run the software, before you can even log in. I imagine it would be pretty hard to claim ignorance when you are presented with the license and terms of service every single time you ran the software and logged on.
However, I would still very much recommend that anyone at all nervous about what they are agreeing to with "click through" licensing to not just assume that they aren't legally unenforceable. Read the EULA, if you don't like it, don't install it. If you can't read the EULA before purchase and ti's a problem for you, don't buy the software.
In order to deface siteroot/index.html you have to break into the company's machines. You can't just spraypaint it from the outside and have it painted over. Everything has to be checked to make sure the vandal really was just a vandal and not a thief/saboteur/etc. It isn't just window breaking. You have to get into the store to do this, and that's breaking and entering at the very least. Laws need to be either passed or altered to reflect this, because this whole "it's just graffiti" stuff is just uninformed people spouting off with their uninformed opinion about stuff they know nothing about and never bothered to research.
and you don't wind up with a stupid kid doing 20 years for what amounts to vandalism
Proof positive that you don't know what you're talking about. This is not mere vandalism. You can't just spray paint a website from the outside. You have to break into the company and alter company records to do it. If a "stupid kid" broke in to a store that had one of those big displays that flashes messages and gives you the time on them (like a lot of banks seem to have) they may not be doing 20 years, but they'll be in juvie for a good long time, at least for B&E at the minimum.
You're not allowed to break and enter houses, therefore by the same laws you're not allowed to break and enter servers.
The problem is, depending on where you are, the legal definition of "breaking & entering" doesn't include accessing through a computer network. These things need to get defined in the law, because we have a legal system, not a justice system. You can't arrest someone becase they did something wrong...only if they did something illegal.
Now, as to contributory negligence on the part of the sysadmin, that would be a separate case.
Which would be a civil matter, and is currently well being taken care of by our overly healthy lawsuit economy.
Agreed. However, even if they don't use such security conveniences, someone "chucking a cinder block thru the front window" is still vandalism, and if caught they will face the penalty the law proscribes. They don't get let off because the owner was an idiot. Idiot victims are not, should not, and cannot be a free pass to committing a crime. See also: telephone scammers preying on senior citizens. It's still a crime even if the victims "should have known better".
If I leave my doors open and unlocked, and someone comes in and steals or defaces my property within my home or office, if caught and a jury convicts them of it, they'll go to jail just the same as if I'd had my house built inside a vault with my heartbeat as it's passcode. It's still theft and vandalism, and it deserves the same punishments.
Blaming the victim, is what you're doing. It's a fallacy in cases of computer crime just as much as it is a fallacy in rape cases, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the victims of careless bombing by the Air Force in Afganistan. Of course people should take precautions and secure their Internet-exposed machines as much as possible, but failing to do so is not, and should not be a crime. I thank my few lucky stars that the people making these laws will ignore idiocy like what you and many others have spouted in this discussion. There's the first thing I agree with them on.
On one hand, it seems absurd to ruin the entire life of a foolish 15 year-old for committing the equivalent of graffiti
More like breaking into your office to erase every whiteboard in the place and replace them with poorly spelled tags, changing the locks, or jus took the door off it's hinges, smashing the alarm system, and taking/destroying the gods know what else in the process.
Hacking a website doesn't just mean that the site was changed. Anyone with a lick of sense after an intrusion needs to take a hell of a lot of time and take stock of what they still have, what they might have copied or deleted, and if they left any backdoors so they could get back in and have their little fun. Calling is "just graffiti" shows a complete lack of understanding of information security. There is real damage done when someone "just" defaces a website. It can't just be painted over.
That's nothing really. Companies sell software with even bigger bugs. Pool of Radiance 2 would delete your C drive if you tried to uninstall it, and it wouldn't install anywhere other than your C drive.
I think you need a little less TV in your life and a little more learning.
I think you need to pull that stick out of your ass, pull your head out of the book and get a life. But hey I could be just as baselessly rude, abusive, and self-righteous as you are.
Will people want a G4 bad enough to pay the extra for the 12" PB vs the iBook?
*raises hand*
I was going to invest in one of the top-end iBooks, but I'm going for the 12" PowerBook instead, now that it's been announced. The G4 makes a difference. My laptop is a G3 iBook 500mhz. I have a G4 Cube here, which is 400mhz. The Cube is MUCH faster in just about every respect.
The presentation software was not the "least" of Jobs' annoucnements. Keynote is a clear shot across Microsoft's bow. A direct Powerpoint competitor. That's not a small thing.
He probably could, but then how do you know what relationship the Attourneys General of Massachussetts and New York have with each other? Or the Federal Justice Department, for that matter. Remember, the Governor of Massachussetts has been Republican since Dukakis.
A pile of shit by any other name smells just as foul.
Everyone hated Network Solutions...Verisign bought 'em, and they bought the hate right along with it. Maybe they figure that the bad blood will be isolated if they spin the old name and business back off into a more seperate entity.
And, for the record, the window manager I'm using is the default, ugly fucking window manager. fvwm, I believe. I don't know how much more lightweight you can get.
I don't care if the interface is "Aquafied", but it's a non-starter with me unless it runs without X11. I have XDarwin installed and use it pretty regularly, and it kills any real multitasking, either by slowing everything else down in rootless mode, or requiring a full desktop shift. It sucks, and I use it as little as humanly possible.
So thanks, but no thanks. I'll certainly try it when the actual port gets working, but until it runs without X11, it might as well not exist.
I would recommend finding a cheap used copy of Idoru (shouldn't be too hard, seems like zillions were printed) as it really helps bring a lot of things together, like explaining the whole nodal point thing much better, and of course, actually introducing the Idoru, who you'll want to have some background for. I had the same problems with Idoru, but reread it and it worked better somehow, the second time. Maybe it was just too dense and I needed to review it to pick up some of the stuff. If you can get through to the end of Idoru, it does pick up quite a bit.
The Difference Engine was actually a collaboration between Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Did you actually read it? It was pretty obvious, at least to me, which parts Sterling wrote, and which parts Gibson wrote. Sterling just can't write sci-fi. I've forced myself through more books of his than I wish to remember. The only ones I could stand reading more than once were The Artificial Kid and Islands in the Net, and that was barely. In other words, don't blame Gibson for the Difference Engine. He had "help."
Gibson had the guts to try for something different after the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa trilogy. For that I give him a hell of alot of credit. I admit that I really didn't like Virtual Light and Idoru on the first read through, but I reread them and I got most of it, and i've got a much better opinion of them now. All Tomorrow's Parties was one of the best books i've ever read. I practically flew through it. The less fantastic the setting, the more thoughtful it is.
But different tastes for different people, so there you go, eh? Personally, I say give the guy more computers. I'm eager to see what the new stuff is. If you aren't up for it, such is life.
The problem with this is that until someone gets an actual license from the DVDCCA, any software DVD-decoder currently available for Linux is of dubious legality in the United States (and coming soon to a sovereign nation near you). This stops end users cold. End of story. People don't WANT to break the law. Many of them do, but if there is a way to get what they want without breaking the law, people will go there first. So, until someone does this, the fact that it CAN be done is immaterial.
I'm very much not surprised. The door to this was opened when the.Mac scheme was unveiled at MacWorld NYC. Anyone who didn't see something like this coming has had some damn big blinders on for the last 6 months.
However, I don't particularly like it, and I'd put money on this not ending with just these high-end iApps. And unfortunately, I don't think it's going to stop with Apple. "If Apple can get away with it," many others in the computer industry will say, "why can't we?"
I'm pretty sure that they will, in the end, get away with it. Even if fewer people than otherwise might get the upgrades, that's more money than they were getting before. Sure, some people pissed off about it now might not buy a new Mac, but they may still buy an iPod, or whatever new gadget they roll out next. People who buy Macs keep them around for a LONG time. The rapid upgrade cycle never hit the idiotic pace the Intel/AMD world has gotten to. The fact remains, even though Macs may not be the most hoss things on the computing planet, they're MORE than enough for the everyday computer user. I know people who still use the later 68k Macs, because they still do all they need. Word processing, e-mail, and the odd shareware game. While I probably will not purchase a new Mac because of this trend, I certainly am not going to throw the ones I have away. Apple's just recognizing this, and becoming more of a software company, because it has to be. It costs less to upgrade iDVD, iPhoto, or iMovie than to buy and deal with a whole new computing environment. That gives Apple money from people who probably weren't buying machines in the first place, giving them a new revenue stream.
Apple isn't the friendly computer company anymore. Steve Jobs specifically lead the charge to get rid of the "happy Mac" on the boot screen for Jaguar because it didn't fit in with the new image he wanted for the new operating system. They're a chic, boutique computer company, and they're acting like it. The ex-hippies aren't where the money's at, so they're dumping them like a hot potato, and going for the people who want to spend the money. The hip. The fashionable. The stylish. I'd learn to deal with it if I were you...or just dump Apple right back. They don't care, why should you?
Hmm, well lemme see. I take this old yardstick I happen to have around, and gee golly, the display is 15". Well, I'll be. Of course, if you count the non-display plastic crap as part of the display, then maybe, though it generally doesn't display more than fingerprint marks. I personally don't subscribe to marketing fictions like that, but you're free to.
Slashdot Mirror
The easiest way to do this is to charge people a amall (or large, depending on your personal preference) one-time, non-refundable under any circumstances, fee for an account. Say, $10, or whatever floats your boat. You now have a technically private board, with a very low barrier to entry for honest people, willing to follow the rules you set out. For trolls, they can make as many accounts as they want, you just earn $10 each time they get their jollies breaking your rules.
Every side wins, except the trolls. You win by getting some money to support your forums and whatever else, your honest users win because there are few trolls who would constantly pay $10 for a new account every time you banned them. The trolls can keep making accounts and be idiots as long as their bank account holds out, so I guess you could say they win as well.
Both camps have a lot of vocal jerks in them, who apparently hate each other for NO GOOD REASON.
That, and the fact that neither GNOME or KDE is worth the time of day as far as I'm concerned. They're both bloated Windows-wannabes. I'll pass. No thanks. I gave at the office.
Anyone out there who wants to try something that's ACTUALLY different, check out Enlightenment (which is what I use for Linux) or AfterStep or WindowMaker. Real people providing real alternatives to the twerps in the GNOME and KDE battalions. Psssst, you can even use GNOME and KDE software in them...
They've got 4.4 BILLION (that's Billion, with a B) in the bank.
Somehow, I fail to be able to dredge up anything resembling panic for Apple's future.
Dark Age of Camelot also makes you "Accept" both the software license and the Terms of Service every time you run the software, before you can even log in. I imagine it would be pretty hard to claim ignorance when you are presented with the license and terms of service every single time you ran the software and logged on.
However, I would still very much recommend that anyone at all nervous about what they are agreeing to with "click through" licensing to not just assume that they aren't legally unenforceable. Read the EULA, if you don't like it, don't install it. If you can't read the EULA before purchase and ti's a problem for you, don't buy the software.
In order to deface siteroot/index.html you have to break into the company's machines. You can't just spraypaint it from the outside and have it painted over. Everything has to be checked to make sure the vandal really was just a vandal and not a thief/saboteur/etc. It isn't just window breaking. You have to get into the store to do this, and that's breaking and entering at the very least. Laws need to be either passed or altered to reflect this, because this whole "it's just graffiti" stuff is just uninformed people spouting off with their uninformed opinion about stuff they know nothing about and never bothered to research.
and you don't wind up with a stupid kid doing 20 years for what amounts to vandalism
Proof positive that you don't know what you're talking about. This is not mere vandalism. You can't just spray paint a website from the outside. You have to break into the company and alter company records to do it. If a "stupid kid" broke in to a store that had one of those big displays that flashes messages and gives you the time on them (like a lot of banks seem to have) they may not be doing 20 years, but they'll be in juvie for a good long time, at least for B&E at the minimum.
You're not allowed to break and enter houses, therefore by the same laws you're not allowed to break and enter servers.
The problem is, depending on where you are, the legal definition of "breaking & entering" doesn't include accessing through a computer network. These things need to get defined in the law, because we have a legal system, not a justice system. You can't arrest someone becase they did something wrong...only if they did something illegal.
Now, as to contributory negligence on the part of the sysadmin, that would be a separate case.
Which would be a civil matter, and is currently well being taken care of by our overly healthy lawsuit economy.
Agreed. However, even if they don't use such security conveniences, someone "chucking a cinder block thru the front window" is still vandalism, and if caught they will face the penalty the law proscribes. They don't get let off because the owner was an idiot. Idiot victims are not, should not, and cannot be a free pass to committing a crime. See also: telephone scammers preying on senior citizens. It's still a crime even if the victims "should have known better".
If I leave my doors open and unlocked, and someone comes in and steals or defaces my property within my home or office, if caught and a jury convicts them of it, they'll go to jail just the same as if I'd had my house built inside a vault with my heartbeat as it's passcode. It's still theft and vandalism, and it deserves the same punishments.
Blaming the victim, is what you're doing. It's a fallacy in cases of computer crime just as much as it is a fallacy in rape cases, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the victims of careless bombing by the Air Force in Afganistan. Of course people should take precautions and secure their Internet-exposed machines as much as possible, but failing to do so is not, and should not be a crime. I thank my few lucky stars that the people making these laws will ignore idiocy like what you and many others have spouted in this discussion. There's the first thing I agree with them on.
On one hand, it seems absurd to ruin the entire life of a foolish 15 year-old for committing the equivalent of graffiti
More like breaking into your office to erase every whiteboard in the place and replace them with poorly spelled tags, changing the locks, or jus took the door off it's hinges, smashing the alarm system, and taking/destroying the gods know what else in the process.
Hacking a website doesn't just mean that the site was changed. Anyone with a lick of sense after an intrusion needs to take a hell of a lot of time and take stock of what they still have, what they might have copied or deleted, and if they left any backdoors so they could get back in and have their little fun. Calling is "just graffiti" shows a complete lack of understanding of information security. There is real damage done when someone "just" defaces a website. It can't just be painted over.
That's nothing really. Companies sell software with even bigger bugs. Pool of Radiance 2 would delete your C drive if you tried to uninstall it, and it wouldn't install anywhere other than your C drive.
I think you need a little less TV in your life and a little more learning.
I think you need to pull that stick out of your ass, pull your head out of the book and get a life. But hey I could be just as baselessly rude, abusive, and self-righteous as you are.
Will people want a G4 bad enough to pay the extra for the 12" PB vs the iBook?
*raises hand*
I was going to invest in one of the top-end iBooks, but I'm going for the 12" PowerBook instead, now that it's been announced. The G4 makes a difference. My laptop is a G3 iBook 500mhz. I have a G4 Cube here, which is 400mhz. The Cube is MUCH faster in just about every respect.
The presentation software was not the "least" of Jobs' annoucnements. Keynote is a clear shot across Microsoft's bow. A direct Powerpoint competitor. That's not a small thing.
He probably could, but then how do you know what relationship the Attourneys General of Massachussetts and New York have with each other? Or the Federal Justice Department, for that matter. Remember, the Governor of Massachussetts has been Republican since Dukakis.
A pile of shit by any other name smells just as foul.
Everyone hated Network Solutions...Verisign bought 'em, and they bought the hate right along with it. Maybe they figure that the bad blood will be isolated if they spin the old name and business back off into a more seperate entity.
And, for the record, the window manager I'm using is the default, ugly fucking window manager. fvwm, I believe. I don't know how much more lightweight you can get.
As this is a prototyping project, it is merely a proof of concept intended for software engineers
Mostly non-functional. Printing barely supported according to their comments. Nice, but I don't alpha-test software I'm not working on myself.
Are you going to give me the new computer?
Didn't think so...
I don't care if the interface is "Aquafied", but it's a non-starter with me unless it runs without X11. I have XDarwin installed and use it pretty regularly, and it kills any real multitasking, either by slowing everything else down in rootless mode, or requiring a full desktop shift. It sucks, and I use it as little as humanly possible.
So thanks, but no thanks. I'll certainly try it when the actual port gets working, but until it runs without X11, it might as well not exist.
I would recommend finding a cheap used copy of Idoru (shouldn't be too hard, seems like zillions were printed) as it really helps bring a lot of things together, like explaining the whole nodal point thing much better, and of course, actually introducing the Idoru, who you'll want to have some background for. I had the same problems with Idoru, but reread it and it worked better somehow, the second time. Maybe it was just too dense and I needed to review it to pick up some of the stuff. If you can get through to the end of Idoru, it does pick up quite a bit.
The Difference Engine was actually a collaboration between Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Did you actually read it? It was pretty obvious, at least to me, which parts Sterling wrote, and which parts Gibson wrote. Sterling just can't write sci-fi. I've forced myself through more books of his than I wish to remember. The only ones I could stand reading more than once were The Artificial Kid and Islands in the Net, and that was barely. In other words, don't blame Gibson for the Difference Engine. He had "help."
Gibson had the guts to try for something different after the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa trilogy. For that I give him a hell of alot of credit. I admit that I really didn't like Virtual Light and Idoru on the first read through, but I reread them and I got most of it, and i've got a much better opinion of them now. All Tomorrow's Parties was one of the best books i've ever read. I practically flew through it. The less fantastic the setting, the more thoughtful it is.
But different tastes for different people, so there you go, eh? Personally, I say give the guy more computers. I'm eager to see what the new stuff is. If you aren't up for it, such is life.
DVDs play fine after a visit to freshrpms.net.
The problem with this is that until someone gets an actual license from the DVDCCA, any software DVD-decoder currently available for Linux is of dubious legality in the United States (and coming soon to a sovereign nation near you). This stops end users cold. End of story. People don't WANT to break the law. Many of them do, but if there is a way to get what they want without breaking the law, people will go there first. So, until someone does this, the fact that it CAN be done is immaterial.
I'm very much not surprised. The door to this was opened when the .Mac scheme was unveiled at MacWorld NYC. Anyone who didn't see something like this coming has had some damn big blinders on for the last 6 months.
However, I don't particularly like it, and I'd put money on this not ending with just these high-end iApps. And unfortunately, I don't think it's going to stop with Apple. "If Apple can get away with it," many others in the computer industry will say, "why can't we?"
I'm pretty sure that they will, in the end, get away with it. Even if fewer people than otherwise might get the upgrades, that's more money than they were getting before. Sure, some people pissed off about it now might not buy a new Mac, but they may still buy an iPod, or whatever new gadget they roll out next. People who buy Macs keep them around for a LONG time. The rapid upgrade cycle never hit the idiotic pace the Intel/AMD world has gotten to. The fact remains, even though Macs may not be the most hoss things on the computing planet, they're MORE than enough for the everyday computer user. I know people who still use the later 68k Macs, because they still do all they need. Word processing, e-mail, and the odd shareware game. While I probably will not purchase a new Mac because of this trend, I certainly am not going to throw the ones I have away. Apple's just recognizing this, and becoming more of a software company, because it has to be. It costs less to upgrade iDVD, iPhoto, or iMovie than to buy and deal with a whole new computing environment. That gives Apple money from people who probably weren't buying machines in the first place, giving them a new revenue stream.
Apple isn't the friendly computer company anymore. Steve Jobs specifically lead the charge to get rid of the "happy Mac" on the boot screen for Jaguar because it didn't fit in with the new image he wanted for the new operating system. They're a chic, boutique computer company, and they're acting like it. The ex-hippies aren't where the money's at, so they're dumping them like a hot potato, and going for the people who want to spend the money. The hip. The fashionable. The stylish. I'd learn to deal with it if I were you...or just dump Apple right back. They don't care, why should you?
Hmm, well lemme see. I take this old yardstick I happen to have around, and gee golly, the display is 15". Well, I'll be. Of course, if you count the non-display plastic crap as part of the display, then maybe, though it generally doesn't display more than fingerprint marks. I personally don't subscribe to marketing fictions like that, but you're free to.