I'm not so sure about this. There are plenty of times where, as a kid, I would have been willing to talk to my mom or my dad about something that I didn't want both of them to hear. Not only that, but the whole psychology of doing this in the dining room seems counterproductive. The dining room is a public place, whereas the bedroom is a private area. If you're discussing private things over dinner, it can make a kid quite uncomfortable. Being in the bedroom can be much, much more comforting.
I'm in the same boat as the poster above. I'm 19, recently in college, and my parents took the same approach. They were involved in my life, but not restrictive. They taught me values, but they didn't enforce them on me. They expected me to make mistakes, and I did. In fact, they let me. And in the end, I had to accept the consequences of those mistakes.
I looked at porn, and my dad knew about it. He even let me know that it was perfectly alright and natural--everyone does it at that age. It'd be weird *not* to.
It seems I've turned out alright. I have roughly the same values as my parents, and I don't at all feel that they were imposed upon me. I'm carrying a 3.84GPA at my university, am triple majoring, am a Junior after a full year, am participating in Model UN, and I've founded a campus political organization. I've been a network administrator for a small company for five years. I haven't drank or done drugs, because neither actually interest me. I've also learned to respect the dangers and responsibility involved in sex, and have chosen to hold off until I can afford the possible consequences. Frankly, if that's not turning out pretty good, I don't know what is.
The reason behind all this is that my parents trained me to be an adult, like the above poster said. Obviously, not everyone can be treated exactly the same way--everyone is different. But I am a firm believer that a more relaxed approach that teaches your child rather than protects him/her is far more effective.
Asking Slashdotters to calmly explain the fallacy of a Windows zealot's argument is like asking Steve Ballmer to shut up and just breathe for a second.
Are you afraid of those options? Get used to it, because that's the real world. Go buy a new car and the first thing the salesman is going to ask you is what options you want. And I don't see people getting themselves all in a lather because Burger King says "have it your way."
Just because it happens in the real world doesn't mean it's the ideal. Frankly, I'd rather have a car that's more user-friendly than one with a hundred buttons I need to learn, to operate the smallest of things.
And just because I don't want to do something doesn't mean it's because I can't. Sure, I can figure out the options, and I can take time to customize the GUI to be *exactly* how I want it. But frankly, I'd rather put that time into being more productive, and say...working.
Not to mention, this is a completely different area than cars or burgers. Where I'm pretty sure most of America can figure out what foods they like, or how to navigate in a car, most of America is computer-illiterate. When we're trying to get more people into Linux, the last thing we need to do is make it visibly overcomplicated. I far prefer the mentality of the GNOME project, with fewer options but sane defaults.
Let's use the car analogy. Right now, when you get a car, you can get it manual or automatic, with a CD changer, satellite radio, sunroof, etc. They don't ask you if you'd rather have four gears or five, what you prefer for the resistance on the steering wheel, which side you want the pedals on, whether or not you want the gear shifter "inverted", and how you want the dash layed out.
Sure, some people might want them differently, but for 99% of the population, it just doesn't matter. They accept the fact that not every car is perfectly tailored to them, and they learn to cope in a week.
See, this is why I can't stand KDE. You folks make everything too complicated. When I go into a file selector, I want to be able to clearly see directories, files, a couple of helpful buttons, and not any other distracting shit.
I don't care about setting it up to play a different.wav file for different file types as they're selected, or being able to compile source files in the window by typing alt-ctrl-g with the files I want to compile highlighted, or changing the channel on my T.V. to a show matching the name of the file selected. I just want to select a damned file!
For Christ's sake, your configuration screen for the clock has what, four separate tabs? It's just a fucking clock!
The US government has promised to honour them. Not necessarily Joe Blogs on the street corner.
I suggest you take a closer look at your bills. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." The bills must be accepted for the payment of debts, services, etc., by U.S. law. You cannot pick which bills you will or will not accept, under U.S. law.
Check out Programming Linux Games, by a Loki developer by the name of John Hall.
It goes over SDL in depth, and shows how to integrate OpenGL into it as well. As well, it touches on some other APIs of note, such as SVGALib, GGI, ClanLib, OpenGL, Plib, Glide, Xlib (for video), GTK+, TK, Fltk, Qt, and SDL_gui (for menu widgets), OSS, ALSA, ESD, and OpenAL (for audio), and cl, Guile, and Scheme (for scripting).
On the other hand, what college student is likely to even have his game noticed by a possible publisher? Not very likely. I'm sure the $25,000 and the recognition of having developed the game are far better than what you would be able to get doing it on your own.
This is exactly why they're targeting college students. These guys have no other way to get into the business, and the simple opportunity to have your game published and have credit for the original design going to you is a significant step in getting there. Hell, I'll bet it would be worth it without the $25,000.
Each account needs a corresponding user on the system (you can, however, block login, I believe, to those users, such that they can not actually log into the system
Why do people always say this? Isn't this why we created PAM? AFAIK, uw-imapd supports PAM fully, and will rely on whatever modules are in the chain. If you don't want to require user accounts for mail on the box, use another method of authentication--possibly exporting the users via LDAP, and using pam_ldap. But that's just one of a number of ways.
With P2P you really don't know what you're getting. You may think you're downloading The Lion King but you may end up with Debbie Does Dallas.
Let's be serious. How often does this happen. I've been downloading contents from peer to peer networks since the advent of scour.net, and have had no gross misrepresentations of content such as you imply happen. The worst I've ever seen is badly labelled pornography (which was still clearly labelled as pornography). I maintain that this kind of misrepresentation happens on such an infrequent basis as to assume it to be insignificant.
P2P has NO SUCH MECHANISM to warn users about what they may actually be getting. Since the sharers have NO MEANS AVAILABLE to warn users what they're sharing then it's reasonable that the app itself must.
Christ, I know when I was a kid, that warning mechanism did nothing other than to encourage me to enter the site.
"Oh wow, you mean there's naked people on this site? Sweet!"
Seriously, though, the name of the file being downloaded is usually enough. Very few people have anything to gain from misrepresenting their content in such a large manner, and the few who do are just sick. Thankfully, some networks (such as KaZaA) have rating mechanisms for content. If it's being misrepresented, it's almost always marked as poor quality.
Ultimately, kids who want to view pornography are going to, much like kids who want to drink and kids who want to smoke. Prominently labelling content as being pornographic will only cause it to gain attention. Kids won't see the warning--their attention will only be brought to the fact that it's pornography. And as any good marketer knows, having attention brought to your product is the most important thing. Whether or not it's seen in a bad light or good light is secondary.
I also maintain that if such a mechanism is wanted by a sufficient number of people, someone will implement it without being under threat of law--and, even better, it will probably be implemented in a technologically sound way. If Sharman Networks wants to increase its subscriber base, it will add features that its clientele want. If they want this feature, it will be added.
Even better than all this, though, is that parents already have mechanisms for blocking kids from doing things that might be deemed inappropriate by the parents. Parents can restrict their children's user's rights, and they can actually parent their kids, watching them while they're on untrusted networks. Just as you wouldn't leave your kid alone on the streets of New York, you shouldn't leave your kid alone while he or she is surfing the internet. Sure, many parents don't have the desire nor time to do these things. However, are these same parents likely to put forth the time and effort to implement a mechanism for blocking access to peer to peer networks? How can parents even trust these mechanisms, in times like these where children often know more about the operation of computers than their parents?
Then why should we be able to hold Firestone accountable for crappy tires they sold? Obviously, a tire can be deconstructed to see exactly what materials it's made of, as well as the quality of it's construction. It's your fault if you don't look at them yourself, right?
Oh, and your argument falls apart even in the software industry. You have access to the executing assembly code of Windows, and even the code that isn't executing. You're telling me that if Microsoft open-sourced its assembly code, it should be held under difference circumstances than if it hadn't? There's no real difference either way...no matter what license they release their software under, you'll always have the ability to inspect the assembly. Sure, it's harder than C, but that's not the point. The code is there for you to inspect. Just as you might not be able to read the assembly, Joe Shmoe user isn't going to be able to read the C either.
What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
We've been over this. They adapt, or die.
What's worse? Supporting millions of people who have nothing to contribute to the world on the backs of those who do, or forcing them to adapt or die?
Sorry, but there's a fatal flaw in the argument that we should keep these people around: they create more people. Sure, it may start off with 10 million unemployed. What happens when each of them have three children? That's thirty million unemployed (not to mention, the unemployed children resulting from employed people giving birth). Next time around? Ninety million. It's exponential, and the only thing you can do is delay the inevitable, at the expense of having the fate befall far larger numbers.
How about this one: What can a STUDENT at one of these schools do to help? I've tried teaching as many people as possible about computer safety (take a health classes' STD safety course, apply to computers basically), and I'm ineligable to become a dorm tech right now... anyone?
Write your own exploit of the vulnerabilities that patches them, and force feed it to any computer spamming you with virus-born packets;)
Don't forget, if you use this solution, to give users notice that you will install patches on their system, and make them accept this. If not, you could face serious legal issues.
Because I'm sure that they'd far rather spend sixty times the amount of support costs trying to get users acquainted with Linux, rather than have their network flooded with virii every now and then.
Now don't get me wrong--I'm just as much a die-hard Linux advocate as anyone, but it's just not feasible to tell every kid on a college campus to suddenly switch operating systems. They're going to need to figure out how, and you're going to be the ones to tell them. This is going to send your costs through the roof.
He's trying to solve problems for his university, not create new ones.
Do some intrusion detection on the network--possibly through Snort. If any machine is spamming out MSBlast messages or Sobig emails, drop their connection via MAC address and refuse to give them another DHCP lease. Then, when the person comes in to complain, let them know their computer was infected and flooding the network, and give them a floppy with the proper security patch on it.
It might be a bit annoying to automate the process (except for handing out floppies) at first, but it seems like it could significantly help, while at the same time educating users to update their patches.
The advance is remarkable, but not practical: the laser would need power from a number of power plants to transmute the waste produced from just one nuclear plant.
They wouldn't happened to have tested this little bugger out on, say, Thursday, would they?
That's the ticket, companies never plan for extra capacity in order to prevent system failures. Because obviously, the greatest way to increase profits is to piss off your customers with frequent outages of service. I mean, after all, this strategy worked with Enron, didn't it?
Admit it--you never could get that business degree, could you?
Slashdot Mirror
Blockquoth the poster:
So in otherwords, you advocate that we put a perfectly good machine in a closet and completely fill up it's hard drive for no purpose whatsoever?
Even the most Cyber Baby'esque child in your house can't totally remove the logs of internet traffic.
Of course I can't, mom. *smile sweetly*
I'm in the same boat as the poster above. I'm 19, recently in college, and my parents took the same approach. They were involved in my life, but not restrictive. They taught me values, but they didn't enforce them on me. They expected me to make mistakes, and I did. In fact, they let me. And in the end, I had to accept the consequences of those mistakes.
I looked at porn, and my dad knew about it. He even let me know that it was perfectly alright and natural--everyone does it at that age. It'd be weird *not* to.
It seems I've turned out alright. I have roughly the same values as my parents, and I don't at all feel that they were imposed upon me. I'm carrying a 3.84GPA at my university, am triple majoring, am a Junior after a full year, am participating in Model UN, and I've founded a campus political organization. I've been a network administrator for a small company for five years. I haven't drank or done drugs, because neither actually interest me. I've also learned to respect the dangers and responsibility involved in sex, and have chosen to hold off until I can afford the possible consequences. Frankly, if that's not turning out pretty good, I don't know what is.
The reason behind all this is that my parents trained me to be an adult, like the above poster said. Obviously, not everyone can be treated exactly the same way--everyone is different. But I am a firm believer that a more relaxed approach that teaches your child rather than protects him/her is far more effective.
Asking Slashdotters to calmly explain the fallacy of a Windows zealot's argument is like asking Steve Ballmer to shut up and just breathe for a second.
Are you afraid of those options? Get used to it, because that's the real world. Go buy a new car and the first thing the salesman is going to ask you is what options you want. And I don't see people getting themselves all in a lather because Burger King says "have it your way."
Just because it happens in the real world doesn't mean it's the ideal. Frankly, I'd rather have a car that's more user-friendly than one with a hundred buttons I need to learn, to operate the smallest of things.
And just because I don't want to do something doesn't mean it's because I can't. Sure, I can figure out the options, and I can take time to customize the GUI to be *exactly* how I want it. But frankly, I'd rather put that time into being more productive, and say...working.
Not to mention, this is a completely different area than cars or burgers. Where I'm pretty sure most of America can figure out what foods they like, or how to navigate in a car, most of America is computer-illiterate. When we're trying to get more people into Linux, the last thing we need to do is make it visibly overcomplicated. I far prefer the mentality of the GNOME project, with fewer options but sane defaults.
Let's use the car analogy. Right now, when you get a car, you can get it manual or automatic, with a CD changer, satellite radio, sunroof, etc. They don't ask you if you'd rather have four gears or five, what you prefer for the resistance on the steering wheel, which side you want the pedals on, whether or not you want the gear shifter "inverted", and how you want the dash layed out.
Sure, some people might want them differently, but for 99% of the population, it just doesn't matter. They accept the fact that not every car is perfectly tailored to them, and they learn to cope in a week.
See, this is why I can't stand KDE. You folks make everything too complicated. When I go into a file selector, I want to be able to clearly see directories, files, a couple of helpful buttons, and not any other distracting shit.
.wav file for different file types as they're selected, or being able to compile source files in the window by typing alt-ctrl-g with the files I want to compile highlighted, or changing the channel on my T.V. to a show matching the name of the file selected. I just want to select a damned file!
I don't care about setting it up to play a different
For Christ's sake, your configuration screen for the clock has what, four separate tabs? It's just a fucking clock!
Not as long as there's a warning.
The US government has promised to honour them. Not necessarily Joe Blogs on the street corner.
I suggest you take a closer look at your bills. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." The bills must be accepted for the payment of debts, services, etc., by U.S. law. You cannot pick which bills you will or will not accept, under U.S. law.
Check out Programming Linux Games, by a Loki developer by the name of John Hall.
It goes over SDL in depth, and shows how to integrate OpenGL into it as well. As well, it touches on some other APIs of note, such as SVGALib, GGI, ClanLib, OpenGL, Plib, Glide, Xlib (for video), GTK+, TK, Fltk, Qt, and SDL_gui (for menu widgets), OSS, ALSA, ESD, and OpenAL (for audio), and cl, Guile, and Scheme (for scripting).
I can see it now...not only will this not hurt spammers in any way, but it'll give them a lucrative new business model.
What's that? A competitor in California? Sure, I'll fake emails from them, for a price.
Just because it's routed through Korea won't be proof enough that the company didn't send it. Hell, it's advertising *their* product, isn't it?
On the other hand, what college student is likely to even have his game noticed by a possible publisher? Not very likely. I'm sure the $25,000 and the recognition of having developed the game are far better than what you would be able to get doing it on your own.
This is exactly why they're targeting college students. These guys have no other way to get into the business, and the simple opportunity to have your game published and have credit for the original design going to you is a significant step in getting there. Hell, I'll bet it would be worth it without the $25,000.
You do know who pays for 800 numbers, right?
Each account needs a corresponding user on the system (you can, however, block login, I believe, to those users, such that they can not actually log into the system
Why do people always say this? Isn't this why we created PAM? AFAIK, uw-imapd supports PAM fully, and will rely on whatever modules are in the chain. If you don't want to require user accounts for mail on the box, use another method of authentication--possibly exporting the users via LDAP, and using pam_ldap. But that's just one of a number of ways.
With P2P you really don't know what you're getting. You may think you're downloading The Lion King but you may end up with Debbie Does Dallas.
Let's be serious. How often does this happen. I've been downloading contents from peer to peer networks since the advent of scour.net, and have had no gross misrepresentations of content such as you imply happen. The worst I've ever seen is badly labelled pornography (which was still clearly labelled as pornography). I maintain that this kind of misrepresentation happens on such an infrequent basis as to assume it to be insignificant.
P2P has NO SUCH MECHANISM to warn users about what they may actually be getting. Since the sharers have NO MEANS AVAILABLE to warn users what they're sharing then it's reasonable that the app itself must.
Christ, I know when I was a kid, that warning mechanism did nothing other than to encourage me to enter the site.
"Oh wow, you mean there's naked people on this site? Sweet!"
Seriously, though, the name of the file being downloaded is usually enough. Very few people have anything to gain from misrepresenting their content in such a large manner, and the few who do are just sick. Thankfully, some networks (such as KaZaA) have rating mechanisms for content. If it's being misrepresented, it's almost always marked as poor quality.
Ultimately, kids who want to view pornography are going to, much like kids who want to drink and kids who want to smoke. Prominently labelling content as being pornographic will only cause it to gain attention. Kids won't see the warning--their attention will only be brought to the fact that it's pornography. And as any good marketer knows, having attention brought to your product is the most important thing. Whether or not it's seen in a bad light or good light is secondary.
I also maintain that if such a mechanism is wanted by a sufficient number of people, someone will implement it without being under threat of law--and, even better, it will probably be implemented in a technologically sound way. If Sharman Networks wants to increase its subscriber base, it will add features that its clientele want. If they want this feature, it will be added.
Even better than all this, though, is that parents already have mechanisms for blocking kids from doing things that might be deemed inappropriate by the parents. Parents can restrict their children's user's rights, and they can actually parent their kids, watching them while they're on untrusted networks. Just as you wouldn't leave your kid alone on the streets of New York, you shouldn't leave your kid alone while he or she is surfing the internet. Sure, many parents don't have the desire nor time to do these things. However, are these same parents likely to put forth the time and effort to implement a mechanism for blocking access to peer to peer networks? How can parents even trust these mechanisms, in times like these where children often know more about the operation of computers than their parents?
Then why should we be able to hold Firestone accountable for crappy tires they sold? Obviously, a tire can be deconstructed to see exactly what materials it's made of, as well as the quality of it's construction. It's your fault if you don't look at them yourself, right?
Oh, and your argument falls apart even in the software industry. You have access to the executing assembly code of Windows, and even the code that isn't executing. You're telling me that if Microsoft open-sourced its assembly code, it should be held under difference circumstances than if it hadn't? There's no real difference either way...no matter what license they release their software under, you'll always have the ability to inspect the assembly. Sure, it's harder than C, but that's not the point. The code is there for you to inspect. Just as you might not be able to read the assembly, Joe Shmoe user isn't going to be able to read the C either.
What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
We've been over this. They adapt, or die.
What's worse? Supporting millions of people who have nothing to contribute to the world on the backs of those who do, or forcing them to adapt or die?
Sorry, but there's a fatal flaw in the argument that we should keep these people around: they create more people. Sure, it may start off with 10 million unemployed. What happens when each of them have three children? That's thirty million unemployed (not to mention, the unemployed children resulting from employed people giving birth). Next time around? Ninety million. It's exponential, and the only thing you can do is delay the inevitable, at the expense of having the fate befall far larger numbers.
How about this one: What can a STUDENT at one of these schools do to help? I've tried teaching as many people as possible about computer safety (take a health classes' STD safety course, apply to computers basically), and I'm ineligable to become a dorm tech right now... anyone?
Write your own exploit of the vulnerabilities that patches them, and force feed it to any computer spamming you with virus-born packets ;)
Don't forget, if you use this solution, to give users notice that you will install patches on their system, and make them accept this. If not, you could face serious legal issues.
Because I'm sure that they'd far rather spend sixty times the amount of support costs trying to get users acquainted with Linux, rather than have their network flooded with virii every now and then.
Now don't get me wrong--I'm just as much a die-hard Linux advocate as anyone, but it's just not feasible to tell every kid on a college campus to suddenly switch operating systems. They're going to need to figure out how, and you're going to be the ones to tell them. This is going to send your costs through the roof.
He's trying to solve problems for his university, not create new ones.
Do some intrusion detection on the network--possibly through Snort. If any machine is spamming out MSBlast messages or Sobig emails, drop their connection via MAC address and refuse to give them another DHCP lease. Then, when the person comes in to complain, let them know their computer was infected and flooding the network, and give them a floppy with the proper security patch on it.
It might be a bit annoying to automate the process (except for handing out floppies) at first, but it seems like it could significantly help, while at the same time educating users to update their patches.
The advance is remarkable, but not practical: the laser would need power from a number of power plants to transmute the waste produced from just one nuclear plant.
They wouldn't happened to have tested this little bugger out on, say, Thursday, would they?
Fortunately, the theorem was never that "state-owned enterprises will always fail and private ones will always succeed forever and ever amen".
One example does not a rule make.
That's the ticket, companies never plan for extra capacity in order to prevent system failures. Because obviously, the greatest way to increase profits is to piss off your customers with frequent outages of service. I mean, after all, this strategy worked with Enron, didn't it?
Admit it--you never could get that business degree, could you?