Thanks for setting the record straight. And especially for being brave enough to address the problem of political repression and scapegoating, if albeit a little obliquely.
That's certainly true, but I was referring to actual collusion:
I think it's almost impossible for the volume of spam being delivered around the world to not be able to tell where it's coming from.
I know that many people unknowingly have zombie machines that are serving as spam relays, but given the volume of traffic, there can't really be anywhere to hide, can there?
So why isn't anything REALLY being done about the problem?
It appears ISPs are ALSO in cahoots...
Think how successful spam has been.
Then think how often something can become so universally successful all the while being hated...
There must be some HUGE money behind it, and the people who could stop it have to be being paid off...
When the board member said to Mr. Bradbury [SIC] "You're giving aesthetic reasons, are there any PRACTICAL reasons?"
He could have kept on with the approach he had taken at the outset;
Have Columbus Cabot and Verazzanno given us any return on investment?
Look around you at the United States; the most prosperous nation in the world. All the growth, all the profit, all that from taking the chance the kings of yesterday took on those explorers.
Could the explorers or the kings have predicted all the riches that resulted? Of course not.
Well, apart from the logical connundrum of the cat recognizing when it's dead, the cat must certainly know if it is not dead, but that isn't the question here; YOU won't know what the cat knows/doesn't know until YOU look in the box, and that is the moment where YOU branch to whatever universe you are in.
Otherwise, there is no point to even looking in the box; the cat's fate was decided ahead of time.
So in other words, you're in an unknowable universe, because you don't have enough time to verify all observations, only your own, but the good news is that nothing is decided until you do.
>Whether that means phantom universes, wave-particle duality, or little green men, is really of no importance until one of those interpretations leads to novel, verifiable predictions.
How do you explain qbits without a many-worlds interpretaion? The processing does happen; researchers made a 7-qbit "computer" and it worked.
Where did the extra calculations occur? The other states are being calculated, but there are too many of them for the quantity of storage used.
Did you ever make a mistake and later feel sorry for it?
According to your statement, the ONLY way for you to atone is by first being punished, and later being marked as a sinner who CANNOT be trusted to NOT commit the act again. Repent being out of the question, we can never trust you again.
That's a good philosophy... Not.
Anyhow, whether you agree with me or not doesn't matter; we all have hells, and you'll have to live in yours, and I'll live in mine. Have fun.
>Say I had complete faith in Jesus, If I raped and killed your mother, could I still go to heaven?
That depends; could you REALLY, TRULY and HONESTLY repent for it?
It's like going in the direction you are FACING, if you only SAY you are, you still wind up in hell or whatever.
But if your heart and soul really are facing God, then that's where you're going.
It IS simple.
And I believe you (or God) are the only one(s) who can really make the evaluation.
You will judge YOURSELF, and you know that lying is useless, don't you?
Not very different from some of budhism; a soul that takes a direction will continue in it unless the soul changes their direction of their own free will, the choice will determine whether the next life is of suffering or of exaltation.
Anyhow, don't forget that the bible was written by MEN, and even though they "may" have been divinely inspired, it still had to filter through that mess that is the human heart.
And so we get things like St-Paul, who was a crank, in fact.
When he left the other apostles and went to Rome to do some soul-saving, he was little more than a ridiculed, homeless, street-roaming ranting lunatic who most people spit on and jeered at.
Of course he wanted to save these people, but over time, his heart must have hardened against all these orgiastic, debauched romans, and he wrote letters back to the other apostles condeming the excesses.
I don't believe St-Paul had anything against gays, for example, but he saw a lot of wickedness and wantoness from them because they practiced what they did without love or respect for one another.
It WAS the trend at the time.
St-Paul was simply human. So he railed against these excesses, and scholars have derived that gays are evil because of it.
So centuries of persecution follow...
I wish we had Jesus around to clarify things. I really do. I feel he'd have a whoppin' amount of common-sense to lay down on us.
>Is it just me or are anti-piracy measures just growing more and more inconvenient for legitimate users (product activation etc) and not at all more inconvenient for pirates (who get modified versions with the annoying features removed)?
That's ALWAYS been the case.
Security is only there to protect against bad-guys, and the only people jumping through hoops because of it are honest people....
'course there's no telling how many times security settings have prevented a dumb user from inadvertantly wrecking a server either.
>The kind [of bug] you cannot get with FOSS since you can see the code for yourself and fix the problems.
I wish more people could, and I expect if open-source operating systems become the de-facto standard that more and more people WILL be able to read the code and fix problems (after all, this is the infancy of the computer revolution, isn't it?)
But I also believe 99.999% of people using Linux today CAN'T fix kernel bugs.
And the percentage will surely go even higher (99.999999) when Linux becomes mainstream.
Still, it's the FREEDOM to be able to read the code and fix the bugs that's important.
Commoditizing software and making the software industry into a lot of small, local businesses instead of a few really BIG ones will surely lower the average salary of coders, but I like the vision of a future where truly comitted young people take up computer science not for sports-star salaries, but because they hear the call of it and they will hopefully bring about a rennaissance in computer science.
Actually, I wasn't looking for a recipe, I was simply stating the inevitable.
It's at once the whole crux of the problem AND the whole solution:
Access should be available to all, yes, but there ARE legitimate uses for secure communications.
In fact, if the airlines really want to capitalize, they should grant access to all, do it right, complete with cacheing or even mirroring of the most popular "downloads"
The two are not dissociative; increased use of WiFi will certainly make the skies seem "friendlier" to the average traveler,
And for the client with greater security needs, a public/private key session with the airline's router.
It could work this way; the airline gives you their key, you use it with your credit-card and they charge you $ to get the packets out of the plane undecipherable.
Coupled with a computer-locked tight-beam connection to earthstation microwave receivers if you want.
Most people won't want to bother with something like that and risk getting hacked from other machines in the plane and whoever else is in range on whatever un-secure medium they use for the unencrypted WiFi.
It'll be sold like flight-insurance! Just need to change the forms a bit...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for setting the record straight.
And especially for being brave enough to address the problem of political repression and scapegoating, if albeit a little obliquely.
That's certainly true, but I was referring to actual collusion:
I think it's almost impossible for the volume of spam being delivered around the world to not be able to tell where it's coming from.
I know that many people unknowingly have zombie machines that are serving as spam relays, but given the volume of traffic, there can't really be anywhere to hide, can there?
So why isn't anything REALLY being done about the problem?
It appears ISPs are ALSO in cahoots...
Think how successful spam has been.
Then think how often something can become so universally successful all the while being hated...
There must be some HUGE money behind it, and the people who could stop it have to be being paid off...
Yeah, I understand what you meant, but I really don't find the prospect that appealing.
Yes, I'm using Mozilla.
I have a theory that MS is actually making money somehow by having unsecure products like Outlook and IE.
Do you really think the software industry will collapse?
Mom & Pop software comapanies, yes, but not huge monopolies.
The only ones to be hurt by this will be the small software-houses, and the only ones protected by it will be the large software-house.
And of course because of population-apathy, nothing will stop it.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer as a result of this.
*gosh* No one could have seen THAT coming!
When the board member said to Mr. Bradbury [SIC] "You're giving aesthetic reasons, are there any PRACTICAL reasons?"
He could have kept on with the approach he had taken at the outset;
Have Columbus Cabot and Verazzanno given us any return on investment?
Look around you at the United States; the most prosperous nation in the world. All the growth, all the profit, all that from taking the chance the kings of yesterday took on those explorers.
Could the explorers or the kings have predicted all the riches that resulted? Of course not.
Imagine what we'll discover THIS TIME.
I've been waiting for my flying car since the 1950s!
And now they're finally here!
Well, apart from the logical connundrum of the cat recognizing when it's dead, the cat must certainly know if it is not dead, but that isn't the question here; YOU won't know what the cat knows/doesn't know until YOU look in the box, and that is the moment where YOU branch to whatever universe you are in.
Otherwise, there is no point to even looking in the box; the cat's fate was decided ahead of time.
So in other words, you're in an unknowable universe, because you don't have enough time to verify all observations, only your own, but the good news is that nothing is decided until you do.
>Whether that means phantom universes, wave-particle duality, or little green men, is really of no importance until one of those interpretations leads to novel, verifiable predictions.
How do you explain qbits without a many-worlds interpretaion?
The processing does happen; researchers made a 7-qbit "computer" and it worked.
Where did the extra calculations occur? The other states are being calculated, but there are too many of them for the quantity of storage used.
LOL!
Yeah, *wipes away tear of laughter*, but you gotta give it to Ballmer; he really IS willing to look foolish like that...
For the money he's making... Where do I sign up? I can do the monkey-boy!
http://www.ntk.net/media/developers.mpg
Yes, but the acid test is the word VAGINA!
Vagina vagina vagina vagina!!!
>Sure we dont have Disney dollars, but [...]
Keep passing laws like this, and some day in the not-too-distant future, you may actually end up with the Disney corporation logo on your greenbacks.
>Especially laughable is the idea of repentance
So you are saying that no one can repent?
Did you ever make a mistake and later feel sorry for it?
According to your statement, the ONLY way for you to atone is by first being punished, and later being marked as a sinner who CANNOT be trusted to NOT commit the act again. Repent being out of the question, we can never trust you again.
That's a good philosophy... Not.
Anyhow, whether you agree with me or not doesn't matter; we all have hells, and you'll have to live in yours, and I'll live in mine. Have fun.
>Say I had complete faith in Jesus, If I raped and killed your mother, could I still go to heaven?
That depends; could you REALLY, TRULY and HONESTLY repent for it?
It's like going in the direction you are FACING, if you only SAY you are, you still wind up in hell or whatever.
But if your heart and soul really are facing God, then that's where you're going.
It IS simple.
And I believe you (or God) are the only one(s) who can really make the evaluation.
You will judge YOURSELF, and you know that lying is useless, don't you?
Not very different from some of budhism; a soul that takes a direction will continue in it unless the soul changes their direction of their own free will, the choice will determine whether the next life is of suffering or of exaltation.
Anyhow, don't forget that the bible was written by MEN, and even though they "may" have been divinely inspired, it still had to filter through that mess that is the human heart.
And so we get things like St-Paul, who was a crank, in fact.
When he left the other apostles and went to Rome to do some soul-saving, he was little more than a ridiculed, homeless, street-roaming ranting lunatic who most people spit on and jeered at.
Of course he wanted to save these people, but over time, his heart must have hardened against all these orgiastic, debauched romans, and he wrote letters back to the other apostles condeming the excesses.
I don't believe St-Paul had anything against gays, for example, but he saw a lot of wickedness and wantoness from them because they practiced what they did without love or respect for one another.
It WAS the trend at the time.
St-Paul was simply human. So he railed against these excesses, and scholars have derived that gays are evil because of it.
So centuries of persecution follow...
I wish we had Jesus around to clarify things. I really do. I feel he'd have a whoppin' amount of common-sense to lay down on us.
>And Bill Gates is personally holding a gun to your temple every couple of years?
Yes; by not supporting the version of Windows that people are currently running.
"Uprade or take your chances"
Maybe it's not a gun per se...
With Linux, kernels may fall to the wayside, but there's no charge to get a newer one.
Well, I say no charge, but there IS an implicit agreement that you will give back to the community... Can that be considered onerous?
You're wrong.
My goal in switching to Linux wasn't to destroy Microsoft.
Hard to believe as you may find it, it was to become LEGIT!
There's no way I can afford to shell out for something like Windows XP every couple of years.
And now, everything I run is legit. And free. Can't forget about the freedom.
Sulu: Captain, it's the Borg, again. they want us to integrate their technology.
Spock: Captain, I expect they are doing this so they can still feel relevant in the future open-source, linux-dominated software world.
Kirk: Mr Sulu, set phasers to "ignore"
Sulu: Aye, Captain.
>Is it just me or are anti-piracy measures just growing more and more inconvenient for legitimate users (product activation etc) and not at all more inconvenient for pirates (who get modified versions with the annoying features removed)?
...
That's ALWAYS been the case.
Security is only there to protect against bad-guys, and the only people jumping through hoops because of it are honest people.
'course there's no telling how many times security settings have prevented a dumb user from inadvertantly wrecking a server either.
Never mind.
>The kind [of bug] you cannot get with FOSS since you can see the code for yourself and fix the problems.
I wish more people could, and I expect if open-source operating systems become the de-facto standard that more and more people WILL be able to read the code and fix problems (after all, this is the infancy of the computer revolution, isn't it?)
But I also believe 99.999% of people using Linux today CAN'T fix kernel bugs.
And the percentage will surely go even higher
(99.999999) when Linux becomes mainstream.
Still, it's the FREEDOM to be able to read the code and fix the bugs that's important.
Commoditizing software and making the software industry into a lot of small, local businesses instead of a few really BIG ones will surely lower the average salary of coders, but I like the vision of a future where truly comitted young people take up computer science not for sports-star salaries, but because they hear the call of it and they will hopefully bring about a rennaissance in computer science.
At least that's what I HOPE will happen.
Know, your knot.
Actually, I wasn't looking for a recipe, I was simply stating the inevitable.
It's at once the whole crux of the problem AND the whole solution:
Access should be available to all, yes, but there ARE legitimate uses for secure communications.
In fact, if the airlines really want to capitalize, they should grant access to all, do it right, complete with cacheing or even mirroring of the most popular "downloads"
The two are not dissociative; increased use of WiFi will certainly make the skies seem "friendlier" to the average traveler,
And for the client with greater security needs, a public/private key session with the airline's router.
It could work this way; the airline gives you their key, you use it with your credit-card and they charge you $ to get the packets out of the plane undecipherable.
Coupled with a computer-locked tight-beam connection to earthstation microwave receivers if you want.
Most people won't want to bother with something like that and risk getting hacked from other machines in the plane and whoever else is in range on whatever un-secure medium they use for the unencrypted WiFi.
It'll be sold like flight-insurance! Just need to change the forms a bit...
*obligatory Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference, move your audio slider to "british accent"*
'tis but a scratch!
I've had WORSE!
LOL
I believe you totally, proverbialcow.
Also, have you considered what you'd actually be PAYING for?
The bandwidth can't be infinite... So everyone on the plane will be sharing the same outbound channel at what, 3KB ?
Doesn't sound like a good deal to me...
Then again, the airlines used to offer phone service on planes, and that cost some incredible amount too...
What about proxying?
If you're flying with office mates, one buys service time, and proxies the other(s).
before someone finds a way to hack this Wifi security and EVERYONE flying uses it without cost?
>What separates a catastrophic failure from a regular failure when you're talking about this suit?
The number of limbs the bear eats.