There are so many gotchas with deriving location from IP, particularly for dialup users, that I don't think anyone relies on that by itself any more. Anyway, my point was that AOL knows your location because you tell the software and it in turn tells AOL's login service, which passes that information around the publishing system as you move through it.
Google/Gmail displays ads based on keyword text. The advertiser knows nothing about you as a person, just that your search string/e-mail message contains certain words. Come to think of it, I don't remember ever giving Gmail any statistical info about myself. As far as I remember I just clicked the invite link I got in my e-mail and gave them my desired username and password.
What Microsoft is doing is what AOL has done for years -- providing data on the actual person such as age, gender, and location. AOL users have an object called the "q_context" that follows them around (like a cookie) that contains basic demographic info about you, and display objects can use info in the q_context to do things like pop up your local weather in a field, or (presumably) an ad targeted at your age and gender as well as your location.
This is nothing new, and it's really nothing all that bad, but it's still a lot more than Google does.
The various bits about governmental requests are no doubt there because, whether or not Google notifies you of the fact, they would be required to make such disclosures under US law (see the PATRIOT Act among others). That they're telling you this and others are not is an indication that other companies would rather not disclose it for fear you might be suspicious of them. Google is trying to be as up-front with you as they can, and they're telling you "we will protect you as best we can, but sometimes that ability may be taken out of our hands by current US law".
As far as the data retention disclosures, that's for technological reasons. It is not ever possible to guarantee data has been destroyed until you've physically destroyed the disk (sometimes not even then). Again, this boils down to Google saying "just because you delete a message, file or whatever, does not mean that traces of it don't still exist; under certain circumstances we may be required by law to recover those traces or allow them to be recovered by others." It's called forensic data retrieval, and it's used all the time to recover potentially-incriminating deleted files from hard drives. Others are still required to do this, they just don't tell you that. Surely you're not suggesting that every time you delete a file, Google go out and copy all the other files on that disk off to another one, then "delete" your files by slagging the disk with a thermite grenade? As paranoid as I am about my data, I'm just not that unrealistic about it.
As to the "ex-CIA guy", #1: cite a source, #2, even assuming it's absolutely true, do you have any idea how many people are running around in the IT industry with classified-data clearances? At one company I worked at in 2001, at least four of the eight people on my team had immediately previously held TS/SCI or better clearance. DoD lifestyle polygraph, the whole bit. We weren't doing anything remotely involving any intelligence agencies, it was just the vagaries of the pool of developers with the skills the company needed, and the location (DC suburbs of Northern Virginia). You can't swing a dead cat within 100 miles of the DC Beltway without hitting somebody who holds at least a "blue-dot" clearance.
The cookie is nothing all that sinister either, though I do wish Google gave me the option to not have it carry over from Gmail to Google Groups. The expiration date I'm sure looks very familiar to anybody with more than a passing familiarity with time_t.
The joke among my friends who worked among military contractors was that the answer to any question from a non-cleared person was "I can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of truth or falsehood in that statement or any other."
Can a judge really determine if jurors were "confused" by evidence presented and thereby remove a person's (and community's) constitutional right to be judged by a jury of peers?
The guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of peers is a guarantee of due process not only to the accused but to the community as well. How DARE this judge do this? What law in his state, I wonder, allows him to supercede this U.S. Constitutional right? What am I missing here?
The wording of the Constitution, for one. The Constitution says nothing about a community's expectation of justice done. The Seventh Amendment says "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." No mention of the community or even the accused there. It does mention "according to the rules of the common law". Common law in both England and the US has long held that an appellate court may overturn a conviction on various grounds.
As to due process, the Fourteenth Amendment says "...No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...." No mention of the community there either, and remember the 13th-15th Amendments were intended to enforce Reconstruction -- to restrict the community from turning on individuals they considered "undesirable" (to wit, newly-emancipated slaves).
American and British law since either country has had any concept of rule of law (as opposed to monarchic despotism) has held that it is more in the community interest to allow the guilty to go free, even on the flimsiest of technical grounds, than to invite government abuses of power by taking even the smallest chance of penalizing, imprisoning, or executing an innocent man.
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
Those are just the automatic penalties. Additional penalties may apply after your trial and (presumable) conviction for DUI. And those apply only to the DUI charge itself. If, God forbid, you actually hit and/or injured someone, those would be separate charges and if convicted you could face significant jail time.
Look at it like this. Theoretically if you drove drunk a lot, but never broke the law, you'd never get pulled over in the first place, so you'd never suffer (modulo roadblocks which exist in a real gray area Constitutionally). If you do cause problems, you're going to pay the penalty for those and an additional penalty for being drunk at the time.
Personally I dislike the DUI laws simply because they were (I feel unconstitutionally) coerced from the states by the exercise of federal power of the purse. They did the same thing with speed limits but pretty much gave that up some years ago. Maybe one day they'll let the people of the states decide their DUI laws for themselves again too.
Wow. Yes, all those kids on LiveJournal ARE blogging. What you describe up there as a false definition of Blog is in fact the current and accepted one, if you had any real concept of the genre, you would know that. Slashdot is a blog.
Accepted by who? Anybody who wants to call their web postings "blogging"? "Blog" at one time had a coherent definition (well, "weblog" did, anyway). It was still bad coinage, but it denoted a useful category. Then "weblogging" became the hot new thing, and suddenly everybody wanted to start calling their personal website a "weblog" (or later, just a "blog") on the flimsiest pretext. The definition broadened to the point where it's no longer a useful category. Anytime a term becomes so broadly defined that it becomes impossible to clearly delineate the set of what it defines, it becomes useless, with the degree of fuzziness directly correlating to the degree of uselessness. Remember "portals"?
Just having some level of fame or intelligence or beauty or what-have-you does not give anyone claim over whether you can call something a "Blog".
No, it doesn't. But those people, whose opinions and ideas are watched by multitudes, often write in an audience-oriented style, rather than your average LJ's tone which is more oriented to the individual writing the entry. Their writing resembles a classic weblog more than the average online diary entry. A LiveJournal can be a blog, but I would argue that most are not -- they're just online journals. Call them journals, which is descriptive and tells us useful things about them, instead of trying to shoehorn them into a trendy category just because the authors want to be cool.
No matter how cruddy romance novels are, we still call them "books", just because they are not in the same league as an encyclopedia or Joyce, that doesn't mean that they can't be called a "book".
Romance novels are books, but are they literature? Is "literature" a useful descriptor of a particular subset of works? Is a LiveJournal page a priori a blog, and if so, is the term "blog" of any use any more?
At least your nom-d'blog is telling of your outlook.
It's not a "nom-de-" anything, much less a "nom d'blog". It's just a convenient identifier for "me" in the context of most of my online interactions. (Nom-de- being, as it happens, another coinage I think has become untenably overused by people who want to think it's cool to have an alternate "persona" of some sort.)
What you have done here is the internet equivalent of storming out onto your lawn and yelling, "Get off my lawn you little COCKSUCKERS!!!" Right down to pre-supposing that most of us don't know what "bated" is.
All evidence is that your average person online doesn't. For that matter your average person offline probably doesn't any more. Nobody duels any more, with or without "bated blade". As to me storming out on the virtual lawn, I would hold that my opinion on the matter is at least as valuable as yours, given that you claim I've been participating in one since before the word "blog", or, apparently, "weblog" were even coined.
I always thought the "logfile -> weblog" origin story was kinda BS, but hey, no less an authority than Slashdot's Jon Katz indirectly vectored it, so...
At any rate you're the first to offer a semi-reasonable explanation for the origin, but I still think it's a stretch and that "blog" is just a bad term all around, especially now.
I hate the word "blog". I know, it's heretical to say that. But the whole origin of the word is stupid, vague and probably fictional. There was, of course, originally the word "weblog", and that set my teeth on edge too. A "Web log" is, literally, the record of HTTP transactions with a server. Supposedly, "weblog" originally came to be applied to online discussion sites like Drudge imitators because these people would obsessively tail or otherwise monitor their logfiles in real time and watch the hits come.
The trouble is, no one I know who does or ever did run such a site has ever done this. I did it whenever I posted a link to something I wrote on USENET, and people I knew (hardcore geeks, most of em) thought I was a little weird for doing it (and some of them thought that about me posting to USENET too).
Nowadays you can't do that with most blogs, which are hosted on servers not owned by the "blogger". And "blog" has become so broadly applied that people now call any page written in a first-person singular tone that allows feedback a "blog". Sorry, your LiveJournal page is NOT A BLOG. It's not anything particularly special or worthy of a special name, unless maybe you're Linus Torvalds or John Carmack or somebody else whose every word people hang on with bated* breath.
It's time to face the facts. The term "weblog" was nonsensically conceived to begin with, even more nonsensical in later application, and is now so diluted as to be essentially meaning-free anyway. It denotes no useful categorization. The only thing in its favor is that it was the first term to come into existence to denote what was, at the time, a usefully-demarcated subset of online content. Simple inertia should not rule the day and I for one move that we begin the hunt for a new, more-appropriate term.
* Not a typo. "Baited breath" is incorrect and in fact nonsensical usage.
There's a great scene in Cryptonomicon where Randy is explaining to Eberhard the reason that they have not been privy to the development of a major shift in corporate strategy until it is officially announced to everyone. He takes him aside for a two-person conversation, in which he explains the occasional desirability of making major business decisions as a series of two-person conversations rather than a single large bull session with everyone involved.
On the other hand, now you're sitting in jail in contempt of court until you remember your passphrase and produce your key.
The really paranoid solution would be yes, to encrypt documents, but to have a key that recognizes two passphrases -- one that decrypts the document to the real version, and one that decrypts it to something totally banal, like an e-mail to your husband on what to bring home from the store. Then you encrypt everything so that the court doesn't think you encrypting your shopping list is a bit fishy.
To really work it would also have to be impossible to tell that the key recognizes two passphrases, otherwise they could just demand both.
Essentially, what Schwartz did was exceed his authority to test (and in testing, occasionally subvert) security on Intel systems. Intel never proved real harm done, but Randal's defense of "I'm a hacker, this is what I do because of who I am" (not "because I was clearly authorized by Intel to") didn't fly with the jury either.
I don't think he did anything malicious, but he admitted he did things that anybody competent in security work or system administration at the time would have told you are a bad idea (moving password files from one system to another, gaining unauthorized access to internal systems and moving password data off them, etc.)
He did not, in fact, go to jail (except for the time he was held during booking). He was sentenced to restitution, appealed, and the restitution order was sent back to the lower court. Ultimately he did community service and paid a fine.
The percentage only works if the units are g/100 mL, and assuming the weight of alcohol and blood are both close to the weight of water (probably fallacious, but this is BOTE stuff anyway):
1 L = 1 kg
100 mL = 0.1 L = 0.1 kg = 100 g
g/100 mL = g/100 g = straight percentage
So a BAC of 1.0 g/deciliter (the way I've usually see it expressed) is equivalent to 1%. If it were milligrams/dL you'd potentially have BACs up to 100 000 (100 grams per 100 mL, * 1000 milligrams per gram, for blood that's pure alcohol) and there's no way your blood could be 100,000% alcohol.
For one thing, think of all the poor benighted users using Outlook, which interprets a semicolon as an address boundary. For another, RFC-822 specifies some definite syntax for the semicolon that this use appears to exist outside of.
Actually, in a manner of speaking, there is. The OP's quote is taken from the original proposed amendments to the Constitution, said list being drawn up by Congress an approved on March 1, 1789. As a note, there was a preamble to said list, it did include the quote as cited by the OP, and there were twelve proposed amendments, of which one was never approved and one was approved in 1992. The First Amendment was originally "Article the Third".
As related by Carl Sagan in one of his books, there was a very elegant experiment designed by a scientist named Wolf Vishniac for the Viking lander. He had done a lot of research into the survival of life in extreme environments like Mars'. His experiment was simple: mix Martian soil samples with a nutrient solution and see what happened. He was looking for changes in clarity or acidity, either of which could indicate active biology; these were much more general criteria than the life-detection experiments that were included.
Results in Vishniac's experiment would have indicated the possible presence of a broad spectrum of life, but might not have been absolutely conclusive; positive results from the included experiments, it was thought, would definitively indicate the presence of some form of life. (As it turns out, depending on who you ask, that wasn't as hard-and-fast as the team would have liked: clays found on earth will duplicate the "life" indications of the Viking experiments, and the Viking data indicate the possible presence of such soil on Mars.)
Due to space constraints, Vishniac's experiment was dropped from the lander. He continued his research on extreme environments in Antarctica, where he met his death by falling into a crevasse while hiking from one of his sample stations to another.
Sagan's opinion was that Vishniac's experiment should have been the one included.
What's wrong with just letting people save money on their own for their retirement? I say we end Social Security and let people plan for themselves.
What if your plan included a pension plan from Enron?
Here's an idea. Why not have the government insure pension funds? In the pre-Depression economy, a bank failure could wipe out your savings. Part of the Depression-era legislation was the creation of the FDIC, to insure bank accounts up to (currently) $100,000 per depositor per bank. A similar program could easily work for pension funds as well -- you would be insured to some basic level comparable to what you would expect under a Social Security-like scheme. The cost of insurance might be funded by a tax on annual retirement-fund investment gains.
Or, you could reform the tax system by allowing taxpayers to designate on their form 1040 which government programs they want their tax dollars going to. You'd have an optional Schedule form that would include boxes two or three levels deep in each agency or cabinet department, and taxpayers could specify a dollar amount to go to that agency or program or department or whatever. If the dollar amounts add up to more than their actual tax, then the amounts get reproportioned so that they add up properly. If they add up to less, the leftover dollars go to the General Fund. If the taxpayer doesn't file the optional schedule, their entire tax payment goes to the General Fund. In this scheme, the pension insurance would be funded by taxpayer contributions to it, with additional needed allocations coming out of the General Fund. Note that this would shut up everybody who currently says "I don't want my tax dollars going to fund X." OK, your tax dollars don't have to. Didn't file the allocation schedule? SHUT YER PIE-HOLE, you had your chance and you blew it.
Classified activities currently funded from the black budget would be funded by an automatic percentage deduction from each taxpayer; their individual allocations would be made proportionally from the rest of the amount they pay.
(That's ~ in the mathematical sense of "approximately", not the alternate programming usage of "bitwise NOT".)
An AC wrote:
it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb.
Seems like about 90% of the time, the "submitter's" blurb for a Slashdot story is the first paragraph of the linked article, cut and pasted. (And surprise, surprise, that's exactly what happened here!) Sometimes you can tell because of pronoun usage ("we" instead of "they", etc.) and sometimes a particularly slimy submitter will "revise" a cut-n-pasted blurb to make it look like the submitter actually did write it.
Given that any story of sufficient interest probably has half a dozen duplicate submitters, I would think it would be possible to choose a submission that does not plagiarize the author of the story, but then again, I did some real journalism for awhile.
The IRS wanted electronic filing in their own interest -- it's easier for them to deal with and according to a tax preparer I know, all returns have been electronic at IRS for years. Your paper return doesn't survive past the electronic entry system there.
Initially the IRS wanted to just develop its own tax-prep software in-house. The tax-prep industry (H&R Block, Intuit, Jackson Hewitt, etc.) got wind of this and screamed bloody murder about it -- what would free filing available directly through the IRS do their business?
A deal was eventually struck whereby the tax-prep companies agreed to offer free filing to lower-income filers (and I believe the income ceiling rises each year until the 80% target's met). In return, the IRS agreed not to develop competing tax-prep software and to allow the tax-prep folks to bombard you with ads for additional services which you would pay for.
Essentially what the story submitter complains about as the IRS "protecting its partners" was the IRS' bid to get us free electronic filing at all in the face of what would have been concerted legal and political resistance from a very wealthy industry.
Personally I'd rather see the IRS say "blow it out your asses, tax industry. We require Americans to do this, it's only fair that we allow them to do it electronically for free since that saves us time, money and manpower anyway." But for now this is a good first step.
Bug 239415. You'll note that it's marked as a duplicate now. Firefox on Linux still has a LOT of these "Firefox segfaults as soon as you open a page" bugs in Bugzilla. I started noticing it occasionally with 0.9; 1.0 did it even more. I've wiped my profile and recreated it more times than I can count, still does no good. And even if that fixed it, it's still a bug, because browser-generated data should never cause later versions of the browser to crash. If later versions need to recompose that data to suit themselves, fine, but it shouldn't be the user's job to.
Ironically, at work it's rock-solid... on Windows XP.
The problem is not with the way Firefox and Thunderbird "store user's files". The problem has to do with the way they temporarily open files in helper apps for viewing -- on *nix, at least, they use the global/tmp directory, which means anyone can see what files you have open, and because of the way it sets up permissions on them (makes them world-readable), anybody may be able to read them while you have them open.
I'm not too worried about the third one. For one thing, it is easily worked around by setting your $TMP or $TEMP environment variable. Really the global visibility of the files isn't a "bug" in Firefox/Thunderbird or any other app that does this. They're just following the standard system practice of using whatever directory is specified by TMP/TEMP to open their temporarily files in. The issue is that common practice on that score is moderately insecure and may expose info to other users, but there's nothing application authors should do about that.
The permissions issue is the only real "security" problem, but I would bet they did it that way to allow viewers that may be running setuid nobody to still view the file for the user. Perhaps the answer is simply to have documentation about viewers running setuid nobody (or other restricted users) and a configurable list of such viewers that the user can add to. After that, files destined for ordinary viewers should be permissioned 500, and files destined for setuid restricted-user viewers could be permissioned 544 or something else appropriate.
Assuming you're the kind of user with privileges to install this on your computer to begin with, every application you run already has those permissions. Any program you run has the same permissions you have when you run it, unless there are admin policies to the contrary in place. So, these apps don't inherently represent any more of a security risk than the ordinary search built into your OS.
So, do you trust your OS vendor? If so, why, exactly? For that matter, do you really trust your antivirus vendor?
My dad worked in two nuclear power plants and on several naval vessels (some nuclear) as a welder. He says the same thing about looking for steam leaks (with a broomhandle instead of a 2x4), but it's not because the steam will ignite the wood -- it's because those leaks may be thousands of PSI. What you're looking for, is for the end of the broom to suddenly fall off as the steam pressure carves it right in two.
...I've just never understood how people can get stuck in a place they hate. I know that there are special circumstances (sick family member, custody issues, etc.) but without those restrictionss, I think it's only good and healthy to explore those options.
Sure, but in the cases I'm talking about, everybody in the area is in the "special circumstance" of being too poor to afford to move anywhere else. Other people, yeah, some of them need to decide which is the bigger pain, staying put or moving, then act on that decision and shut up already.
...It's not fair that my wife and I had to move several hundred miles to honor her non-compete agreement, but that was better than the alternative of insisting on our right to stay put (and go jobless).
Well, in a case like that, courts have previously ruled that there are limits to how much your previous employer is allowed to disrupt your life in forcing you to look for a new job. Non-competes are a very murky area of law and a court might well decide that any given one is too onerous to be enforceable. I would bet money that some bright young lawyer would be just itching to take that case on a contingency basis for you; besides, as long as you don't bandy it about at your old workplace, how are they even going to know? I doubt they'd even go to the trouble of doing a periodic background check.
Slashdot Mirror
There are so many gotchas with deriving location from IP, particularly for dialup users, that I don't think anyone relies on that by itself any more. Anyway, my point was that AOL knows your location because you tell the software and it in turn tells AOL's login service, which passes that information around the publishing system as you move through it.
What Microsoft is doing is what AOL has done for years -- providing data on the actual person such as age, gender, and location. AOL users have an object called the "q_context" that follows them around (like a cookie) that contains basic demographic info about you, and display objects can use info in the q_context to do things like pop up your local weather in a field, or (presumably) an ad targeted at your age and gender as well as your location.
This is nothing new, and it's really nothing all that bad, but it's still a lot more than Google does.
The various bits about governmental requests are no doubt there because, whether or not Google notifies you of the fact, they would be required to make such disclosures under US law (see the PATRIOT Act among others). That they're telling you this and others are not is an indication that other companies would rather not disclose it for fear you might be suspicious of them. Google is trying to be as up-front with you as they can, and they're telling you "we will protect you as best we can, but sometimes that ability may be taken out of our hands by current US law".
As far as the data retention disclosures, that's for technological reasons. It is not ever possible to guarantee data has been destroyed until you've physically destroyed the disk (sometimes not even then). Again, this boils down to Google saying "just because you delete a message, file or whatever, does not mean that traces of it don't still exist; under certain circumstances we may be required by law to recover those traces or allow them to be recovered by others." It's called forensic data retrieval, and it's used all the time to recover potentially-incriminating deleted files from hard drives. Others are still required to do this, they just don't tell you that. Surely you're not suggesting that every time you delete a file, Google go out and copy all the other files on that disk off to another one, then "delete" your files by slagging the disk with a thermite grenade? As paranoid as I am about my data, I'm just not that unrealistic about it.
As to the "ex-CIA guy", #1: cite a source, #2, even assuming it's absolutely true, do you have any idea how many people are running around in the IT industry with classified-data clearances? At one company I worked at in 2001, at least four of the eight people on my team had immediately previously held TS/SCI or better clearance. DoD lifestyle polygraph, the whole bit. We weren't doing anything remotely involving any intelligence agencies, it was just the vagaries of the pool of developers with the skills the company needed, and the location (DC suburbs of Northern Virginia). You can't swing a dead cat within 100 miles of the DC Beltway without hitting somebody who holds at least a "blue-dot" clearance.
The cookie is nothing all that sinister either, though I do wish Google gave me the option to not have it carry over from Gmail to Google Groups. The expiration date I'm sure looks very familiar to anybody with more than a passing familiarity with time_t.
Don't look too hard for evil that isn't there.
The joke among my friends who worked among military contractors was that the answer to any question from a non-cleared person was "I can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of truth or falsehood in that statement or any other."
Can a judge really determine if jurors were "confused" by evidence presented and thereby remove a person's (and community's) constitutional right to be judged by a jury of peers?
The guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of peers is a guarantee of due process not only to the accused but to the community as well. How DARE this judge do this? What law in his state, I wonder, allows him to supercede this U.S. Constitutional right? What am I missing here?
The wording of the Constitution, for one. The Constitution says nothing about a community's expectation of justice done. The Seventh Amendment says "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." No mention of the community or even the accused there. It does mention "according to the rules of the common law". Common law in both England and the US has long held that an appellate court may overturn a conviction on various grounds.
As to due process, the Fourteenth Amendment says "...No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...." No mention of the community there either, and remember the 13th-15th Amendments were intended to enforce Reconstruction -- to restrict the community from turning on individuals they considered "undesirable" (to wit, newly-emancipated slaves).
American and British law since either country has had any concept of rule of law (as opposed to monarchic despotism) has held that it is more in the community interest to allow the guilty to go free, even on the flimsiest of technical grounds, than to invite government abuses of power by taking even the smallest chance of penalizing, imprisoning, or executing an innocent man.
ahh Virginia...
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
Those are just the automatic penalties. Additional penalties may apply after your trial and (presumable) conviction for DUI. And those apply only to the DUI charge itself. If, God forbid, you actually hit and/or injured someone, those would be separate charges and if convicted you could face significant jail time.
Look at it like this. Theoretically if you drove drunk a lot, but never broke the law, you'd never get pulled over in the first place, so you'd never suffer (modulo roadblocks which exist in a real gray area Constitutionally). If you do cause problems, you're going to pay the penalty for those and an additional penalty for being drunk at the time.
Personally I dislike the DUI laws simply because they were (I feel unconstitutionally) coerced from the states by the exercise of federal power of the purse. They did the same thing with speed limits but pretty much gave that up some years ago. Maybe one day they'll let the people of the states decide their DUI laws for themselves again too.
Damn it. I hate it when I get punned down at the slightest claws.
Wow. Yes, all those kids on LiveJournal ARE blogging. What you describe up there as a false definition of Blog is in fact the current and accepted one, if you had any real concept of the genre, you would know that. Slashdot is a blog.
Accepted by who? Anybody who wants to call their web postings "blogging"? "Blog" at one time had a coherent definition (well, "weblog" did, anyway). It was still bad coinage, but it denoted a useful category. Then "weblogging" became the hot new thing, and suddenly everybody wanted to start calling their personal website a "weblog" (or later, just a "blog") on the flimsiest pretext. The definition broadened to the point where it's no longer a useful category. Anytime a term becomes so broadly defined that it becomes impossible to clearly delineate the set of what it defines, it becomes useless, with the degree of fuzziness directly correlating to the degree of uselessness. Remember "portals"?
Just having some level of fame or intelligence or beauty or what-have-you does not give anyone claim over whether you can call something a "Blog".
No, it doesn't. But those people, whose opinions and ideas are watched by multitudes, often write in an audience-oriented style, rather than your average LJ's tone which is more oriented to the individual writing the entry. Their writing resembles a classic weblog more than the average online diary entry. A LiveJournal can be a blog, but I would argue that most are not -- they're just online journals. Call them journals, which is descriptive and tells us useful things about them, instead of trying to shoehorn them into a trendy category just because the authors want to be cool.
No matter how cruddy romance novels are, we still call them "books", just because they are not in the same league as an encyclopedia or Joyce, that doesn't mean that they can't be called a "book".
Romance novels are books, but are they literature? Is "literature" a useful descriptor of a particular subset of works? Is a LiveJournal page a priori a blog, and if so, is the term "blog" of any use any more?
At least your nom-d'blog is telling of your outlook.
It's not a "nom-de-" anything, much less a "nom d'blog". It's just a convenient identifier for "me" in the context of most of my online interactions. (Nom-de- being, as it happens, another coinage I think has become untenably overused by people who want to think it's cool to have an alternate "persona" of some sort.)
What you have done here is the internet equivalent of storming out onto your lawn and yelling, "Get off my lawn you little COCKSUCKERS!!!" Right down to pre-supposing that most of us don't know what "bated" is.
All evidence is that your average person online doesn't. For that matter your average person offline probably doesn't any more. Nobody duels any more, with or without "bated blade". As to me storming out on the virtual lawn, I would hold that my opinion on the matter is at least as valuable as yours, given that you claim I've been participating in one since before the word "blog", or, apparently, "weblog" were even coined.
At any rate you're the first to offer a semi-reasonable explanation for the origin, but I still think it's a stretch and that "blog" is just a bad term all around, especially now.
The trouble is, no one I know who does or ever did run such a site has ever done this. I did it whenever I posted a link to something I wrote on USENET, and people I knew (hardcore geeks, most of em) thought I was a little weird for doing it (and some of them thought that about me posting to USENET too).
Nowadays you can't do that with most blogs, which are hosted on servers not owned by the "blogger". And "blog" has become so broadly applied that people now call any page written in a first-person singular tone that allows feedback a "blog". Sorry, your LiveJournal page is NOT A BLOG. It's not anything particularly special or worthy of a special name, unless maybe you're Linus Torvalds or John Carmack or somebody else whose every word people hang on with bated* breath.
It's time to face the facts. The term "weblog" was nonsensically conceived to begin with, even more nonsensical in later application, and is now so diluted as to be essentially meaning-free anyway. It denotes no useful categorization. The only thing in its favor is that it was the first term to come into existence to denote what was, at the time, a usefully-demarcated subset of online content. Simple inertia should not rule the day and I for one move that we begin the hunt for a new, more-appropriate term.
* Not a typo. "Baited breath" is incorrect and in fact nonsensical usage.
There's a great scene in Cryptonomicon where Randy is explaining to Eberhard the reason that they have not been privy to the development of a major shift in corporate strategy until it is officially announced to everyone. He takes him aside for a two-person conversation, in which he explains the occasional desirability of making major business decisions as a series of two-person conversations rather than a single large bull session with everyone involved.
The really paranoid solution would be yes, to encrypt documents, but to have a key that recognizes two passphrases -- one that decrypts the document to the real version, and one that decrypts it to something totally banal, like an e-mail to your husband on what to bring home from the store. Then you encrypt everything so that the court doesn't think you encrypting your shopping list is a bit fishy.
To really work it would also have to be impossible to tell that the key recognizes two passphrases, otherwise they could just demand both.
I don't think he did anything malicious, but he admitted he did things that anybody competent in security work or system administration at the time would have told you are a bad idea (moving password files from one system to another, gaining unauthorized access to internal systems and moving password data off them, etc.)
He did not, in fact, go to jail (except for the time he was held during booking). He was sentenced to restitution, appealed, and the restitution order was sent back to the lower court. Ultimately he did community service and paid a fine.
1 L = 1 kg
100 mL = 0.1 L = 0.1 kg = 100 g
g/100 mL = g/100 g = straight percentage
So a BAC of 1.0 g/deciliter (the way I've usually see it expressed) is equivalent to 1%. If it were milligrams/dL you'd potentially have BACs up to 100 000 (100 grams per 100 mL, * 1000 milligrams per gram, for blood that's pure alcohol) and there's no way your blood could be 100,000% alcohol.
For one thing, think of all the poor benighted users using Outlook, which interprets a semicolon as an address boundary. For another, RFC-822 specifies some definite syntax for the semicolon that this use appears to exist outside of.
There is NO "preamble" to the Bill of Rights.
Actually, in a manner of speaking, there is. The OP's quote is taken from the original proposed amendments to the Constitution, said list being drawn up by Congress an approved on March 1, 1789. As a note, there was a preamble to said list, it did include the quote as cited by the OP, and there were twelve proposed amendments, of which one was never approved and one was approved in 1992. The First Amendment was originally "Article the Third".
Results in Vishniac's experiment would have indicated the possible presence of a broad spectrum of life, but might not have been absolutely conclusive; positive results from the included experiments, it was thought, would definitively indicate the presence of some form of life. (As it turns out, depending on who you ask, that wasn't as hard-and-fast as the team would have liked: clays found on earth will duplicate the "life" indications of the Viking experiments, and the Viking data indicate the possible presence of such soil on Mars.)
Due to space constraints, Vishniac's experiment was dropped from the lander. He continued his research on extreme environments in Antarctica, where he met his death by falling into a crevasse while hiking from one of his sample stations to another.
Sagan's opinion was that Vishniac's experiment should have been the one included.
What's wrong with just letting people save money on their own for their retirement? I say we end Social Security and let people plan for themselves.
What if your plan included a pension plan from Enron?
Here's an idea. Why not have the government insure pension funds? In the pre-Depression economy, a bank failure could wipe out your savings. Part of the Depression-era legislation was the creation of the FDIC, to insure bank accounts up to (currently) $100,000 per depositor per bank. A similar program could easily work for pension funds as well -- you would be insured to some basic level comparable to what you would expect under a Social Security-like scheme. The cost of insurance might be funded by a tax on annual retirement-fund investment gains.
Or, you could reform the tax system by allowing taxpayers to designate on their form 1040 which government programs they want their tax dollars going to. You'd have an optional Schedule form that would include boxes two or three levels deep in each agency or cabinet department, and taxpayers could specify a dollar amount to go to that agency or program or department or whatever. If the dollar amounts add up to more than their actual tax, then the amounts get reproportioned so that they add up properly. If they add up to less, the leftover dollars go to the General Fund. If the taxpayer doesn't file the optional schedule, their entire tax payment goes to the General Fund. In this scheme, the pension insurance would be funded by taxpayer contributions to it, with additional needed allocations coming out of the General Fund. Note that this would shut up everybody who currently says "I don't want my tax dollars going to fund X." OK, your tax dollars don't have to. Didn't file the allocation schedule? SHUT YER PIE-HOLE, you had your chance and you blew it.
Classified activities currently funded from the black budget would be funded by an automatic percentage deduction from each taxpayer; their individual allocations would be made proportionally from the rest of the amount they pay.
An AC wrote:
it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb.
Seems like about 90% of the time, the "submitter's" blurb for a Slashdot story is the first paragraph of the linked article, cut and pasted. (And surprise, surprise, that's exactly what happened here!) Sometimes you can tell because of pronoun usage ("we" instead of "they", etc.) and sometimes a particularly slimy submitter will "revise" a cut-n-pasted blurb to make it look like the submitter actually did write it.
Given that any story of sufficient interest probably has half a dozen duplicate submitters, I would think it would be possible to choose a submission that does not plagiarize the author of the story, but then again, I did some real journalism for awhile.
Initially the IRS wanted to just develop its own tax-prep software in-house. The tax-prep industry (H&R Block, Intuit, Jackson Hewitt, etc.) got wind of this and screamed bloody murder about it -- what would free filing available directly through the IRS do their business?
A deal was eventually struck whereby the tax-prep companies agreed to offer free filing to lower-income filers (and I believe the income ceiling rises each year until the 80% target's met). In return, the IRS agreed not to develop competing tax-prep software and to allow the tax-prep folks to bombard you with ads for additional services which you would pay for.
Essentially what the story submitter complains about as the IRS "protecting its partners" was the IRS' bid to get us free electronic filing at all in the face of what would have been concerted legal and political resistance from a very wealthy industry.
Personally I'd rather see the IRS say "blow it out your asses, tax industry. We require Americans to do this, it's only fair that we allow them to do it electronically for free since that saves us time, money and manpower anyway." But for now this is a good first step.
Ironically, at work it's rock-solid... on Windows XP.
I'm not too worried about the third one. For one thing, it is easily worked around by setting your $TMP or $TEMP environment variable. Really the global visibility of the files isn't a "bug" in Firefox/Thunderbird or any other app that does this. They're just following the standard system practice of using whatever directory is specified by TMP/TEMP to open their temporarily files in. The issue is that common practice on that score is moderately insecure and may expose info to other users, but there's nothing application authors should do about that.
The permissions issue is the only real "security" problem, but I would bet they did it that way to allow viewers that may be running setuid nobody to still view the file for the user. Perhaps the answer is simply to have documentation about viewers running setuid nobody (or other restricted users) and a configurable list of such viewers that the user can add to. After that, files destined for ordinary viewers should be permissioned 500, and files destined for setuid restricted-user viewers could be permissioned 544 or something else appropriate.
So, do you trust your OS vendor? If so, why, exactly? For that matter, do you really trust your antivirus vendor?
My dad worked in two nuclear power plants and on several naval vessels (some nuclear) as a welder. He says the same thing about looking for steam leaks (with a broomhandle instead of a 2x4), but it's not because the steam will ignite the wood -- it's because those leaks may be thousands of PSI. What you're looking for, is for the end of the broom to suddenly fall off as the steam pressure carves it right in two.
Sure, but in the cases I'm talking about, everybody in the area is in the "special circumstance" of being too poor to afford to move anywhere else. Other people, yeah, some of them need to decide which is the bigger pain, staying put or moving, then act on that decision and shut up already.
Well, in a case like that, courts have previously ruled that there are limits to how much your previous employer is allowed to disrupt your life in forcing you to look for a new job. Non-competes are a very murky area of law and a court might well decide that any given one is too onerous to be enforceable. I would bet money that some bright young lawyer would be just itching to take that case on a contingency basis for you; besides, as long as you don't bandy it about at your old workplace, how are they even going to know? I doubt they'd even go to the trouble of doing a periodic background check.