RTFA - he wrote a script that displayed an image that the users had already downloaded to their hard drive and circulated it where pedophiles gathered.
Still very shady legally, and you can't have a society where people just trespass for whatever reason. However, he did very intelligently target it and accomplished a good thing. He was a better man than those that make us have laws, and that says something. At least, so far.
Okay, you're from Kerela - hasn't it been making pro-OSS moves for years now? Who started this move in the states of India?
By the way, as a lay observer, I really admire Kerela and the way their communist party interpreted Marx in a non-Leninist, non-Maoist way. It really is a different animal from what most people think of as communism, but I think it's a lot closer to what Marx intended.
At this point, it's fairly evident that people will listen to the media of their choosing. If a large segment of the population is out of touch with reality because they think one source has it right and alllll the others are insane, it's really their fault, and our obligation to have to defend their right to speak and vote in a free society where their votes count just as much as ours. We just have to deal with it.
The politicians can try, but I don't see the solution coming from Washington no matter how well-intentioned its proponents may be. Do you want fair and balanced coverage and have some time to spare? Read a larger variety of news sources, from multiple countries, from multiple points of view. You will gain a sense of who's biased how, and make first-hand decisions about who is being more reasonable and honest.
I have my own sites that I follow. Some air a specific point of view, but listening only to the echo chamber will weaken your perspective. Here is one site that I think does a fantastic job of presenting a wide range of views for your consideration.
So... are you not blaming your dad... who, was poor?
I know the case well enough to blame an individual who deliberately made us poor. There are plenty of people who are poor because they don't have an easy way up, and a blanket statement about a large group of people you or I don't know is another matter.
As someone who lived through a tax-evading, deadbeat dad leaving his family so poor that my sibling and I got one meal a day, the leftovers from a local Headstart lunch cafeteria, I know real poverty exists in America, not merely being unable to afford the latest Playstation.
As someone who got screwed out of college until I was 24 because our government expects us to make such dodgy so-called parents cough up tax information to even begin to apply for need-based student loans, I will say this country is really on a big kick of making children pay the price for the previous generation. Under a thin veneer of preachiness about the nuclear family and FUD about how the poor don't deserve help, the James Dobsons have helped make a society where a child has one, maybe two points of failure to determine whether they get a chance to prove their worth or not.
People I had no control over cost me my opportunity, the people who wanted to screw the poor for a tax cut helped gut the social services that could have offered a hand up, and when I did get to college after working shit jobs and having to leave my skills in C++ on the shelf as mere personal hobbies, I very quickly developed a boundless contempt for the trust-fund kids I sat next to with their entitled attitudes and their faux-conservative attitude against helping the poor. Marie Antoinette got a guillotine, and I'll keep raising a toast to that, and I'll keep tipping the working class people I encounter as generously as I can, because this country has no business hiding from its classist problem.
There is nothing like a meritocracy at work here, and I am tired of hearing people blame the poor while praising the pampered crooks and sheisters that stand on their backs.
Considering that Kerala has achieved the highest literacy rate in India, and achieved life expectancy and health indexes to rival the first world when it'd been on a third world budget for decades, and is for that matter a leader in that country's impressive development in IT, I should think that its endorsement of Linux should have done folks here proud, whether or not Kerala's government has voted communists in and out and in again or not.
But, Tamilnad has smart people too, so this is good news, especially if you find all that business of helping the working poor help themselves a radioactive concept and are keen to keep your distance from it.;)
You tell them. People who actually find that crap funny are an embarrassment. Some of us study our history and know that nobody was ready for the blitzkrieg in 1940.
I do have to raise the obvious objection to your second point, and that is that crash tests and general highway experience show that engineering counts for more than size. I'd rather be in a Mini Cooper than a Ford F150 in a crash anyday. And if you have that money to spend, get a BMW. I've heard anecdotes of BMW's cutting right through SUVs in collisions, and besides, a lower center of gravity, better control, and good construction will keep you a lot safer than sheer hulking size.
Yet what I don't see mentioned here is that Iran had a pretty good democracy going until the CIA worked to overthrow their elected leader and put a jackbooted dictator in his place to get their hands on some oil.
We've been getting blowback from this ever since, but most people in the USA don't know we're paying for the actions of unscrupulous spooks and their handlers.
Because, relative to the great innovators, like Apple, Lotus, BeOS, Amiga/Commodore, Unix, IBM with OS/2 - they've never done anything but a bad rehash of outside work. Anytime you can say they "innovated", they killed a much more technologically advanced competitor because they leveraged the position that IBM foolishly gave them with the original PC - the provider of the OS preloaded with nearly every computer bought for years now, complete with agreements that locked all the computer manufacturers out of providing any affordable alternative. Many important innovations have reached the average computer user five to ten years after they should have, because Microsoft isn't about technology - it's about market control. That's exactly the kind of thing that will get most enthusiast's goats.
I think they're going to do it. As their old business model becomes increasingly defanged, they're going to become more of a software service shop. Look at what IBM tried in the 80's, trying to lock down the industry with PS/2 systems and MicroChannel Architecture busses, and where they went from there, and where they are now.
MS is already showing signs of "whatever the customer wants" thinking creeping in.
Now, with magnetic ram just around the corner, which keeps its charge powered or not, don't we have the answer right around the corner? And wouldn't asynchronous computing render this problem mostly solved?
Microsoft has done us a real disservice by implementing a broken ACPI, but the best response is to push forward the things that make that moot. For now, Ubuntu seems to get this right on my hardware out of the box, and my MacBook Pro handles it with ease. This can happen yet.
Here in my apartment complex, I pick up at least a dozen other wireless networks from my neighbors. At this point, I keep my cell phone with a headset, and I prefer to be cabled for big downloads. Otherwise, it's just too much of a good thing.
I find the copious bitching about how problematic power-saving is to be irresponsible. Most laptops can pull it off flawlessly. I run primarily off of my MacBook Pro because it is quiet compared to most desktops, energy-efficient, and comfortable. My experience with Macs is that the hibernate feature works well. My PC desktop hibernates without a problem, though it is newer hardware. But that's just it - there's a lot of hardware out there, or drivers for it, that is poorly designed from this respect. That doesn't mean you dismiss the problem, that means it's worth tackling.
Power your system down when you don't need it. Consider hibernating if sleeping doesn't work well. Don't underestimate a notebook or a Mac Mini or similar PCs like the shuttle. Consider LCD over CRT. Don't just turn off, turn off the power strips for your computer and other things too - a lot of electronics go onto a standby mode that consumes a large fraction of the power they would if left on. When you build or buy energy efficient, you tend to get lower profile and noise and heat as well. Enjoy it!
Microsoft could push the industry for fixing or working around the issues with current hardware, and get fixes and updates and wizards out there. I agree with the article's premise, without any pretense that it's a simple fix.
What would happen if these were used on highways to power electric cars? Batteries still only return a tenth of the energy put into charging them, so directly conveying power to automobiles would be interesting indeed.
Others have addressed your other points, but I'd like to pay special attention to #3. It's easy to downplay a small average number, for example, the rise in the oceans, but local effects can be significantly more dramatic.
The other thing is that while nature does adapt to changing conditions over time, the speed at which we're driving this change in CO2 and hence temperature is unprecedented over the past years, and it's going to result in mass extinction. This means coral reefs bleaching out and dying, pollinating species getting separated from their related plants, so forth: this is a great deal of stress on the ecosystem, and it's somewhere in the range from bad to Really Bad. See, global warming is a result of not just emissions, but destruction of the natural uptake, particularly in the ocean and in third world nations.
Note that my link does present a hopeful note. This is not doomsaying. However, our way of life does have to change at some point, and what Westerners need to know is that real quality of life doesn't cost you a planet.
The Bush administration will probably love this! This will just confirm their assertions that the Earth's climate can swign wildly on its own, therefore we have no influence on it, yeah right.
Well, there certainly are some looneys who'll say so, but really it's not a valid concern. This was 600 million years ago, prior to the rise of any multicellular life as we know it. The sun was weaker. Also, a rapid defrost would be, in biological terms, a golden opportunity for "evolutionary radiation" as many ecological niches open up for organisms to evolve into with no prior competition, which makes the "Cambrian explosion" of life a very reasonable outcome. But, would anything but microbes survive even a fraction of this much fluctuation today? Probably not. However, the biosphere's regulation of O2 and CO2 have been much greater since.
If anything, the positive feedback loops the research shows in how the albedo of ice giving way to oceans should cause us to take the ones we're observing now seriously, for anyone seriously interested in a rational approach.
Just for the record, since you're being a bit tongue-in-cheek, a healthy population needs genetic diversity, else you have a dead-species-walking that will die off from weakness or disease. That's why endangered species' have problems that don't go away even if their numbers bounce back. Just for the record.
And your converter will run on soil and sunshine? It will compensate with ecological pressure? It will provide food and shelter for what range of species?
I don't get why we've got to invent a machine that doesn't remotely approach the effectiveness and utility of what we'd be destroying to make it. They're machines, dammit, you have to build them!;)
I've been finding the installation process simpler for Linux distros for years. Installing Windows is a crazed festival of rebooting for drivers, system utilities, so forth. I'd rather edit a text file here and there than go through all that babysitting.
Cool. Sounds like fun. I've seen some hurricanes and been without power for over a week, and the difference between people who whined and people who went out and looked at stars they'd never seen before was something to see.
In other words, you're happily dependent on infrastructure based on rapidly dwindling resources, living in a largely simulated world. When was the last time the power went out for a week where you're at?
Somehow, I can't consider consumption of the world to the point of widespread destruction "winning", but some people never get past just counting the frags.
...the guy makes the point that he was totally wrong in his thoughts about what the area around Chernobyl would be like?
I'd like to know exactly who predicted that Chernobyl was going to turn into an Eden. I think that surprised everyone because such sudden removal of modern human presence on a large scale isn't exactly frequent. Hence, I think you're judging his argument unfairly, because it was a default to what everyone else said before, and now his thinking has diverged for whatever reason.
Lesson learned: nature can endure a disaster like Chernobyl better than daily human encroachment on habitat.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA - he wrote a script that displayed an image that the users had already downloaded to their hard drive and circulated it where pedophiles gathered.
Still very shady legally, and you can't have a society where people just trespass for whatever reason. However, he did very intelligently target it and accomplished a good thing. He was a better man than those that make us have laws, and that says something. At least, so far.
Okay, you're from Kerela - hasn't it been making pro-OSS moves for years now? Who started this move in the states of India?
By the way, as a lay observer, I really admire Kerela and the way their communist party interpreted Marx in a non-Leninist, non-Maoist way. It really is a different animal from what most people think of as communism, but I think it's a lot closer to what Marx intended.
At this point, it's fairly evident that people will listen to the media of their choosing. If a large segment of the population is out of touch with reality because they think one source has it right and alllll the others are insane, it's really their fault, and our obligation to have to defend their right to speak and vote in a free society where their votes count just as much as ours. We just have to deal with it.
The politicians can try, but I don't see the solution coming from Washington no matter how well-intentioned its proponents may be. Do you want fair and balanced coverage and have some time to spare? Read a larger variety of news sources, from multiple countries, from multiple points of view. You will gain a sense of who's biased how, and make first-hand decisions about who is being more reasonable and honest.
I have my own sites that I follow. Some air a specific point of view, but listening only to the echo chamber will weaken your perspective. Here is one site that I think does a fantastic job of presenting a wide range of views for your consideration.
And then, here are the rounds I usually make:
BBC world news
Google News
The Daily Star, an English-language Lebanese newspaper
The New York Times
The Guardian, a British news source
Le Monde, the English edition
Al Jazeera's English language page, like it or hate it
World Net Daily, if you want to know what the Christian Right is up to
Now, good luck.
I say this as someone who really likes Kucinich and would vote for him anyday.
So... are you not blaming your dad... who, was poor?
I know the case well enough to blame an individual who deliberately made us poor. There are plenty of people who are poor because they don't have an easy way up, and a blanket statement about a large group of people you or I don't know is another matter.
As someone who lived through a tax-evading, deadbeat dad leaving his family so poor that my sibling and I got one meal a day, the leftovers from a local Headstart lunch cafeteria, I know real poverty exists in America, not merely being unable to afford the latest Playstation.
As someone who got screwed out of college until I was 24 because our government expects us to make such dodgy so-called parents cough up tax information to even begin to apply for need-based student loans, I will say this country is really on a big kick of making children pay the price for the previous generation. Under a thin veneer of preachiness about the nuclear family and FUD about how the poor don't deserve help, the James Dobsons have helped make a society where a child has one, maybe two points of failure to determine whether they get a chance to prove their worth or not.
People I had no control over cost me my opportunity, the people who wanted to screw the poor for a tax cut helped gut the social services that could have offered a hand up, and when I did get to college after working shit jobs and having to leave my skills in C++ on the shelf as mere personal hobbies, I very quickly developed a boundless contempt for the trust-fund kids I sat next to with their entitled attitudes and their faux-conservative attitude against helping the poor. Marie Antoinette got a guillotine, and I'll keep raising a toast to that, and I'll keep tipping the working class people I encounter as generously as I can, because this country has no business hiding from its classist problem.
There is nothing like a meritocracy at work here, and I am tired of hearing people blame the poor while praising the pampered crooks and sheisters that stand on their backs.
Considering that Kerala has achieved the highest literacy rate in India, and achieved life expectancy and health indexes to rival the first world when it'd been on a third world budget for decades, and is for that matter a leader in that country's impressive development in IT, I should think that its endorsement of Linux should have done folks here proud, whether or not Kerala's government has voted communists in and out and in again or not.
;)
But, Tamilnad has smart people too, so this is good news, especially if you find all that business of helping the working poor help themselves a radioactive concept and are keen to keep your distance from it.
You tell them. People who actually find that crap funny are an embarrassment. Some of us study our history and know that nobody was ready for the blitzkrieg in 1940.
I do have to raise the obvious objection to your second point, and that is that crash tests and general highway experience show that engineering counts for more than size. I'd rather be in a Mini Cooper than a Ford F150 in a crash anyday. And if you have that money to spend, get a BMW. I've heard anecdotes of BMW's cutting right through SUVs in collisions, and besides, a lower center of gravity, better control, and good construction will keep you a lot safer than sheer hulking size.
Yet what I don't see mentioned here is that Iran had a pretty good democracy going until the CIA worked to overthrow their elected leader and put a jackbooted dictator in his place to get their hands on some oil.
We've been getting blowback from this ever since, but most people in the USA don't know we're paying for the actions of unscrupulous spooks and their handlers.
Because, relative to the great innovators, like Apple, Lotus, BeOS, Amiga/Commodore, Unix, IBM with OS/2 - they've never done anything but a bad rehash of outside work. Anytime you can say they "innovated", they killed a much more technologically advanced competitor because they leveraged the position that IBM foolishly gave them with the original PC - the provider of the OS preloaded with nearly every computer bought for years now, complete with agreements that locked all the computer manufacturers out of providing any affordable alternative. Many important innovations have reached the average computer user five to ten years after they should have, because Microsoft isn't about technology - it's about market control. That's exactly the kind of thing that will get most enthusiast's goats.
I think they're going to do it. As their old business model becomes increasingly defanged, they're going to become more of a software service shop. Look at what IBM tried in the 80's, trying to lock down the industry with PS/2 systems and MicroChannel Architecture busses, and where they went from there, and where they are now.
MS is already showing signs of "whatever the customer wants" thinking creeping in.
Now, with magnetic ram just around the corner, which keeps its charge powered or not, don't we have the answer right around the corner? And wouldn't asynchronous computing render this problem mostly solved?
Microsoft has done us a real disservice by implementing a broken ACPI, but the best response is to push forward the things that make that moot. For now, Ubuntu seems to get this right on my hardware out of the box, and my MacBook Pro handles it with ease. This can happen yet.
Here in my apartment complex, I pick up at least a dozen other wireless networks from my neighbors. At this point, I keep my cell phone with a headset, and I prefer to be cabled for big downloads. Otherwise, it's just too much of a good thing.
Actually, I hope Microsoft keeps pushing it. SCO is about finished, let's see the Nazgul ride from Armonk for round two. :)
I find the copious bitching about how problematic power-saving is to be irresponsible. Most laptops can pull it off flawlessly. I run primarily off of my MacBook Pro because it is quiet compared to most desktops, energy-efficient, and comfortable. My experience with Macs is that the hibernate feature works well. My PC desktop hibernates without a problem, though it is newer hardware. But that's just it - there's a lot of hardware out there, or drivers for it, that is poorly designed from this respect. That doesn't mean you dismiss the problem, that means it's worth tackling.
Power your system down when you don't need it. Consider hibernating if sleeping doesn't work well. Don't underestimate a notebook or a Mac Mini or similar PCs like the shuttle. Consider LCD over CRT. Don't just turn off, turn off the power strips for your computer and other things too - a lot of electronics go onto a standby mode that consumes a large fraction of the power they would if left on. When you build or buy energy efficient, you tend to get lower profile and noise and heat as well. Enjoy it!
Microsoft could push the industry for fixing or working around the issues with current hardware, and get fixes and updates and wizards out there. I agree with the article's premise, without any pretense that it's a simple fix.
My information must be old or out of date then. Thanks for the correction.
It still might be an interesting idea for public transport, though.
What would happen if these were used on highways to power electric cars? Batteries still only return a tenth of the energy put into charging them, so directly conveying power to automobiles would be interesting indeed.
Others have addressed your other points, but I'd like to pay special attention to #3. It's easy to downplay a small average number, for example, the rise in the oceans, but local effects can be significantly more dramatic.
The other thing is that while nature does adapt to changing conditions over time, the speed at which we're driving this change in CO2 and hence temperature is unprecedented over the past years, and it's going to result in mass extinction. This means coral reefs bleaching out and dying, pollinating species getting separated from their related plants, so forth: this is a great deal of stress on the ecosystem, and it's somewhere in the range from bad to Really Bad. See, global warming is a result of not just emissions, but destruction of the natural uptake, particularly in the ocean and in third world nations.
Note that my link does present a hopeful note. This is not doomsaying. However, our way of life does have to change at some point, and what Westerners need to know is that real quality of life doesn't cost you a planet.
The Bush administration will probably love this! This will just confirm their assertions that the Earth's climate can swign wildly on its own, therefore we have no influence on it, yeah right.
Well, there certainly are some looneys who'll say so, but really it's not a valid concern. This was 600 million years ago, prior to the rise of any multicellular life as we know it. The sun was weaker. Also, a rapid defrost would be, in biological terms, a golden opportunity for "evolutionary radiation" as many ecological niches open up for organisms to evolve into with no prior competition, which makes the "Cambrian explosion" of life a very reasonable outcome. But, would anything but microbes survive even a fraction of this much fluctuation today? Probably not. However, the biosphere's regulation of O2 and CO2 have been much greater since.
If anything, the positive feedback loops the research shows in how the albedo of ice giving way to oceans should cause us to take the ones we're observing now seriously, for anyone seriously interested in a rational approach.
Just for the record, since you're being a bit tongue-in-cheek, a healthy population needs genetic diversity, else you have a dead-species-walking that will die off from weakness or disease. That's why endangered species' have problems that don't go away even if their numbers bounce back. Just for the record.
And your converter will run on soil and sunshine? It will compensate with ecological pressure? It will provide food and shelter for what range of species?
;)
I don't get why we've got to invent a machine that doesn't remotely approach the effectiveness and utility of what we'd be destroying to make it. They're machines, dammit, you have to build them!
I've been finding the installation process simpler for Linux distros for years. Installing Windows is a crazed festival of rebooting for drivers, system utilities, so forth. I'd rather edit a text file here and there than go through all that babysitting.
Cool. Sounds like fun. I've seen some hurricanes and been without power for over a week, and the difference between people who whined and people who went out and looked at stars they'd never seen before was something to see.
In other words, you're happily dependent on infrastructure based on rapidly dwindling resources, living in a largely simulated world. When was the last time the power went out for a week where you're at?
Somehow, I can't consider consumption of the world to the point of widespread destruction "winning", but some people never get past just counting the frags.
...the guy makes the point that he was totally wrong in his thoughts about what the area around Chernobyl would be like?
I'd like to know exactly who predicted that Chernobyl was going to turn into an Eden. I think that surprised everyone because such sudden removal of modern human presence on a large scale isn't exactly frequent. Hence, I think you're judging his argument unfairly, because it was a default to what everyone else said before, and now his thinking has diverged for whatever reason.
Lesson learned: nature can endure a disaster like Chernobyl better than daily human encroachment on habitat.