Up until just a few years ago, the cards said right on them that they were not to be used as ID. [...] But it demonstrates one thing clearly: don't trust government guarantees
No, it demonstrates simply the need for an official identification method. SSN simply filled the need.
The implication is that I don't need identification or special permission to move freely about the country of which I am a citizen.
Sooo... how do they know you are a citizen if you don't have identification ?!? The logic fails me. Note: I'm from a country with customary identification papers, and I've never been asked to show them EVER on the street. But when conducting business with the state (voting, going through customs, getting a speeding ticket, etc) sure, that's what they are for. I don't see what the big deal is.
The implication is that I am not free to move about the country of which I am a citizen.
I fail to see the connection. You can be harassed by police whether you have a piece of paper in your pocket or not.
Yeah, I wrote some bootloader code recently to write a kernel to a flash without wear leveling (very low level embedded stuff) and I was really nervous the first time I ran it: if I'd goofed the code and written to the same cell at each iteration, it would have taken about one second to fry the flash !
BTW, why is it so hard to completely block spam in foreign languages and/or scripts ? I get tons of spam in russian and chinese and I've tried plenty of filters in kmail with no success. If the message is displayed in chinese, the mailer knows it's in chinese, so it COULD delete it instead. What's the setting for that ?!?
Nice comment. I'd like to add that if you often see the computer itself (a Mac in most cases), you NEVER see an existing OS. In most cases the OS is some CGI stuff quickly put together to show a 'you've got mail' window, a chat window of no actually existing client, etc... I find this strange. If they are willing to pay to show the hardware, why don't they show the OS ? Are they ashamed of it ?!?
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
It astounds me that the entire economic system of most of the word is based on a concept that can only be sustained for a short period. Then what ? Why aren't there economists working on alternate systems to this constant growth ?
And back on the subject here at hand, part of the reason for the decrease in computer purchases is that they are becoming 'good enough'. Processors haven't raised their MHz noticeably in the last 5 years. Hard disks were at 2Tb 3 years ago, and there are only two models at 3Tb on the market now. You can't do much more with a tower PC now than 5 years ago. Laptops don't have much more battery life now than 3 years ago. Sometimes you have disruptive tech like the EeePC, but that stabilised too. As for the phones, I have a 18 months old HTC and the later models aren't much better. But it's much better than all the generations that came before, so it was worth upgrading before, not now.
It not so much the sign of a recession as of a mature market.
I'm no fuddy-duddy. I'm willing to change when an obviously superior idea comes along. What fucks me off about Microsoft is that they rearrange where you find the fucking things but they're ultimately the same fucking screen from the last four versions. But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.
Don't even get me started on that fucking ribbon.
Yeah, at least on Linux you can easily experiment with strange window managers without breaking everything, you can have different ones for different users, and you can even run them simultaneously (gnome apps under KDE). And finally, for system configuration there's always the reliable command line. So I don't hold much hope for Windows UI changes.
I'm a professional developer and user; I've found the ribbon interface to be a good thing. We often hear a lot of complaining when the old way of doing things changes, even if those changes prove in the long run to have been an improvement, from those who cut their teeth on the old. For those who start their Office experience with 2007/2010, they will probably look at the previous generation and wonder, "how the hell did you put up with that?"
I put up with that by doing [File][Some menu][Some sub-menu]. Done. Now explain to me how to do the same thing in your damn ribbon ? "click on the 17th icon of the 3rd ribbon line, well, that is unless you are in such or such mode where it's the 2nd icon of the 3rd line... well anyway the icon looks like a slightly crushed oval with random lines across it". Yeah, how do YOU put up with that ?!? PS: I'm a pro developer too, and I do user interfaces.
I always though that the dollar bill, as opposed to just any money in the world, was made on purpose easy to counterfeit so that it would be used as the de facto worldwide currency. I mean it's only 2 colors (green and black) and the security measures on it are ridiculous (some hair in the paper, are you serious?). The paper is too similar to basic paper for the average Joe to tell (it indeed dissolves if you forget it in your pants while using the washing mashine). If you take most other moneys, like the Euro, you have 20 things on it that make it very hard to counterfeit.
You can make cute little memory associations that will let you easily remember a really long number, or a sequence of cards, or whatever.
Recently for a job interview I knew there'd be tests that involved memorizing letter/number combinations. I was on the plane ride to the interview when I read off a webpage a method to do those associations. It worked great, but I didn't get the job: I guess other people had more than one hour to learn and practice ! Or maybe memory wasn't everything and job competency was actually required !!! Anyway, as an engineer it's a lot more important for me to remember the order of magnitude of a value than the exact value in day to day life.
In The execution channel, Ken McLeod imagines a camera firmware that can recognizes when 'pain or suffering' is being filmed and automatically transmits it to a pirate TV. It's not that far off when your average virus now listens to your calls...
While they are at it, why don't they force all keyboard manufacturers to include a firmware backdoor that records everything typed ? After all, if you are posting subversive messages, you have to type them first, and the manufacturers are at fault for allowing their products to be used to facilitate terrorism, right ?
The white space with slashdot 3.0 is getting completely out of hand. The comment above is only 14 lines but take out my entire screen on a 1920x1200 screen, even with a small font. I can put 2 lines between each line of text. Taco: fix this !
I don't know what you mean by tags, but if it's some kind of external metadata, it gets lost on the first backup or hard-drive change [hence why I always thought WinFS was doomed fromt he start]. If it's internal EXIF info, then it needs a special program to read and search through them. Filename baby, filename...
media/pictures/family (with various subfolders like "zoo", "picnic", "christmas 2010", etc.)
I'll expand on that. The very best way to sort personal pictures is to put them in dated directories with dated filenames, then add relevant info to the folder/filename.
For instance 20100201_SkiEverest/20100201_064554_Ascent.jpg. It's sometimes hard to remember how you named a file, but it's easy to remember more or less the date (or the month if not the year). I use a script to date the images according to the exif info.
I don't know why the mention of 'FOSS government' brings you to comment on 'everybody shooting their mouth on iPad'. Surely you can think better ways to use FOSS concepts in government. The first thing to come to my mind would be SVN for law: how did a specific law change, who did the changes, when, who first suggested it (list lobbyists), list all cases where it was applied, etc... Another would be data publication and visualization: any branch or office must publish some data on its work, and tools to look through it (yeah, that's very generic). FOSS electronic voting technology to avoid the treason of Bush I and II. And plenty of other _methods_.
Use drones to airdrop a small kit containing a satphones with free satellite access for a while and a solar charger. Make sure the satphone is by default enabled as an open wifi hotspot. Spread all over the country. Be sure to include free porn memberships in uptight countries. I mean, come on, this has got to be a lot more efficient for democracy than sending tanks (and cheaper to boot), and a lot safer than sending journalists.
So, lawmakers want to appease everyone at the same time ? It may sound reasonable but then what happens when the next team of freak-ass idiots want a piece of the cake too, say for instance the 'drinking urine is good for your health' crowd ? Those same politicians will support introducing a 'drink your own urine' minute at school, right ? Of course they don't give a fuck, as they send their own kids to boarding schools across the country, so they'll probably support it out of spite instead of just not reading the bill.
but feels compelled to ALSO ignore my hard initial-selection work and expand the other end of the selection too.
Yeah, I remember that shit too, before the ribbon made me give up Office completely. There's actually an option somewhere called 'intelligent selection' or some stupid crap like that. Remove it and it will select from where you clic.
Think about it; This article actually tries to put a POSITIVE SPIN on GENOCIDE. I see this all the time from "greenies", who basically view all of humanity as somehow "unnatural" and a pox upon Mother Earth. They view humans as utterly expendable and particularly those humans who happen to disagree with their eco-religion. See the "No Pressure" [youtube.com] videos created by the eco-militant 10:10 group as a fairly recent example. It's a twisted and evil worldview and any sane reason-based person should reject it utterly.
It's certainly twisted, but not as much as the religious freaks who have 12 kids or more. Now those people make me want to puke. Their absolute egoism at wanting to propagate their genes and religion at the long-run cost of the entire human race is beyond words. What's so hard in understanding that only some many humans fit in the enclosed system called Earth. If we don't limit our numbers ourselves, tried and true methods like famine, wars and epidemics will.
Err, not sure if you are joking or serious, but I puked so much while watching Highlander 2 that I'm still not ready to risk Highlander 3, even after all those years !
Slashdot Mirror
Up until just a few years ago, the cards said right on them that they were not to be used as ID. [...] But it demonstrates one thing clearly: don't trust government guarantees
No, it demonstrates simply the need for an official identification method. SSN simply filled the need.
The implication is that I don't need identification or special permission to move freely about the country of which I am a citizen.
Sooo... how do they know you are a citizen if you don't have identification ?!? The logic fails me. Note: I'm from a country with customary identification papers, and I've never been asked to show them EVER on the street. But when conducting business with the state (voting, going through customs, getting a speeding ticket, etc) sure, that's what they are for. I don't see what the big deal is.
The implication is that I am not free to move about the country of which I am a citizen.
I fail to see the connection. You can be harassed by police whether you have a piece of paper in your pocket or not.
Because some projects take longer than 14 years to complete?
Sounds like my current software project...
Yeah, I wrote some bootloader code recently to write a kernel to a flash without wear leveling (very low level embedded stuff) and I was really nervous the first time I ran it: if I'd goofed the code and written to the same cell at each iteration, it would have taken about one second to fry the flash !
See, it's ALWAYS Microsoft's fault !
BTW, why is it so hard to completely block spam in foreign languages and/or scripts ? I get tons of spam in russian and chinese and I've tried plenty of filters in kmail with no success. If the message is displayed in chinese, the mailer knows it's in chinese, so it COULD delete it instead. What's the setting for that ?!?
Nice comment. I'd like to add that if you often see the computer itself (a Mac in most cases), you NEVER see an existing OS. In most cases the OS is some CGI stuff quickly put together to show a 'you've got mail' window, a chat window of no actually existing client, etc... I find this strange. If they are willing to pay to show the hardware, why don't they show the OS ? Are they ashamed of it ?!?
You have to keep buying. There must be Growth!
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
It astounds me that the entire economic system of most of the word is based on a concept that can only be sustained for a short period. Then what ? Why aren't there economists working on alternate systems to this constant growth ?
And back on the subject here at hand, part of the reason for the decrease in computer purchases is that they are becoming 'good enough'. Processors haven't raised their MHz noticeably in the last 5 years. Hard disks were at 2Tb 3 years ago, and there are only two models at 3Tb on the market now. You can't do much more with a tower PC now than 5 years ago. Laptops don't have much more battery life now than 3 years ago. Sometimes you have disruptive tech like the EeePC, but that stabilised too. As for the phones, I have a 18 months old HTC and the later models aren't much better. But it's much better than all the generations that came before, so it was worth upgrading before, not now.
It not so much the sign of a recession as of a mature market.
I'm no fuddy-duddy. I'm willing to change when an obviously superior idea comes along. What fucks me off about Microsoft is that they rearrange where you find the fucking things but they're ultimately the same fucking screen from the last four versions. But where do you go to configure network properties? It's a goddamn easter egg hunt.
Don't even get me started on that fucking ribbon.
Yeah, at least on Linux you can easily experiment with strange window managers without breaking everything, you can have different ones for different users, and you can even run them simultaneously (gnome apps under KDE). And finally, for system configuration there's always the reliable command line. So I don't hold much hope for Windows UI changes.
I'm a professional developer and user; I've found the ribbon interface to be a good thing. We often hear a lot of complaining when the old way of doing things changes, even if those changes prove in the long run to have been an improvement, from those who cut their teeth on the old. For those who start their Office experience with 2007/2010, they will probably look at the previous generation and wonder, "how the hell did you put up with that?"
I put up with that by doing [File][Some menu][Some sub-menu]. Done. Now explain to me how to do the same thing in your damn ribbon ? "click on the 17th icon of the 3rd ribbon line, well, that is unless you are in such or such mode where it's the 2nd icon of the 3rd line... well anyway the icon looks like a slightly crushed oval with random lines across it". Yeah, how do YOU put up with that ?!? PS: I'm a pro developer too, and I do user interfaces.
I always though that the dollar bill, as opposed to just any money in the world, was made on purpose easy to counterfeit so that it would be used as the de facto worldwide currency. I mean it's only 2 colors (green and black) and the security measures on it are ridiculous (some hair in the paper, are you serious?). The paper is too similar to basic paper for the average Joe to tell (it indeed dissolves if you forget it in your pants while using the washing mashine). If you take most other moneys, like the Euro, you have 20 things on it that make it very hard to counterfeit.
You can make cute little memory associations that will let you easily remember a really long number, or a sequence of cards, or whatever.
Recently for a job interview I knew there'd be tests that involved memorizing letter/number combinations. I was on the plane ride to the interview when I read off a webpage a method to do those associations. It worked great, but I didn't get the job: I guess other people had more than one hour to learn and practice ! Or maybe memory wasn't everything and job competency was actually required !!! Anyway, as an engineer it's a lot more important for me to remember the order of magnitude of a value than the exact value in day to day life.
In The execution channel, Ken McLeod imagines a camera firmware that can recognizes when 'pain or suffering' is being filmed and automatically transmits it to a pirate TV. It's not that far off when your average virus now listens to your calls...
While they are at it, why don't they force all keyboard manufacturers to include a firmware backdoor that records everything typed ? After all, if you are posting subversive messages, you have to type them first, and the manufacturers are at fault for allowing their products to be used to facilitate terrorism, right ?
The white space with slashdot 3.0 is getting completely out of hand. The comment above is only 14 lines but take out my entire screen on a 1920x1200 screen, even with a small font. I can put 2 lines between each line of text. Taco: fix this !
I don't know what you mean by tags, but if it's some kind of external metadata, it gets lost on the first backup or hard-drive change [hence why I always thought WinFS was doomed fromt he start]. If it's internal EXIF info, then it needs a special program to read and search through them. Filename baby, filename...
...I'm going to be the first one here to volunteer for a job at Nasa to test that theory about sex in space. With lots of trials if necessary.
media/pictures/family (with various subfolders like "zoo", "picnic", "christmas 2010", etc.)
I'll expand on that. The very best way to sort personal pictures is to put them in dated directories with dated filenames, then add relevant info to the folder/filename. For instance 20100201_SkiEverest/20100201_064554_Ascent.jpg. It's sometimes hard to remember how you named a file, but it's easy to remember more or less the date (or the month if not the year). I use a script to date the images according to the exif info.
I don't know why the mention of 'FOSS government' brings you to comment on 'everybody shooting their mouth on iPad'. Surely you can think better ways to use FOSS concepts in government. The first thing to come to my mind would be SVN for law: how did a specific law change, who did the changes, when, who first suggested it (list lobbyists), list all cases where it was applied, etc... Another would be data publication and visualization: any branch or office must publish some data on its work, and tools to look through it (yeah, that's very generic). FOSS electronic voting technology to avoid the treason of Bush I and II. And plenty of other _methods_.
Use drones to airdrop a small kit containing a satphones with free satellite access for a while and a solar charger. Make sure the satphone is by default enabled as an open wifi hotspot. Spread all over the country. Be sure to include free porn memberships in uptight countries. I mean, come on, this has got to be a lot more efficient for democracy than sending tanks (and cheaper to boot), and a lot safer than sending journalists.
So, lawmakers want to appease everyone at the same time ? It may sound reasonable but then what happens when the next team of freak-ass idiots want a piece of the cake too, say for instance the 'drinking urine is good for your health' crowd ? Those same politicians will support introducing a 'drink your own urine' minute at school, right ? Of course they don't give a fuck, as they send their own kids to boarding schools across the country, so they'll probably support it out of spite instead of just not reading the bill.
but feels compelled to ALSO ignore my hard initial-selection work and expand the other end of the selection too.
Yeah, I remember that shit too, before the ribbon made me give up Office completely. There's actually an option somewhere called 'intelligent selection' or some stupid crap like that. Remove it and it will select from where you clic.
Think about it; This article actually tries to put a POSITIVE SPIN on GENOCIDE. I see this all the time from "greenies", who basically view all of humanity as somehow "unnatural" and a pox upon Mother Earth. They view humans as utterly expendable and particularly those humans who happen to disagree with their eco-religion. See the "No Pressure" [youtube.com] videos created by the eco-militant 10:10 group as a fairly recent example. It's a twisted and evil worldview and any sane reason-based person should reject it utterly.
It's certainly twisted, but not as much as the religious freaks who have 12 kids or more. Now those people make me want to puke. Their absolute egoism at wanting to propagate their genes and religion at the long-run cost of the entire human race is beyond words. What's so hard in understanding that only some many humans fit in the enclosed system called Earth. If we don't limit our numbers ourselves, tried and true methods like famine, wars and epidemics will.
And nothing stops you from using https://facebook.com/ [facebook.com] does it?
The EFF plugin for firefox Https-Everywhere uses https on many website whenever available. A must-have.
Err, not sure if you are joking or serious, but I puked so much while watching Highlander 2 that I'm still not ready to risk Highlander 3, even after all those years !