Look at the latest (but totally predictable) development in countries that have gone this way. Because they pay for your poor decisions they are claiming the power to totally control your life. Diet police ascendent. In AU they are actually sitting around and talking like civilized people (when they are nothing but, as this is pure fascism) about mandatory assessment of everyone and taxing people differently based on their results as a way to enforce norms of behaviour less stressful on their overloaded nationalized health system. Britain is talking about denying people access to medical care if their BMI exceeds government limits, they smoke, etc.
Sources for these (wild) claims? Because as an Australian, they're news to me. I get used to all kinds of wacky things being said about Australia here. Most seem to be based on the Simpsons' cartoons or from various advocacy groups' collections of dubious anecdotes.
I don't want to disparage JRRT. He created a whole genre, he had immense integrity. I loved his books when I was a teenager. But he wasn't a great wordsmith.
A few who have surpassed him, IMHO:
Ursula K Le Guin
Fritz Leiber
Michael Moorcock
Gene Wolfe
Roger Zelazny
Not everything by these authors is "great" some are a bit uneven, but their best work is really "first rate" literature by any standard.
I've never gone for the doorstop fantasy trilogies that fill many bookshop fantasy shelves. Some may be good, but I never felt the urge to try them, they just looked so derivative. I doubt though I'm missing anything by bypassing Robert Jordan. I'm told that George RR Martin's is pretty good though, I liked his earlier work.
Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?
Well, I read them 40 years ago. I can't recall either. According to TFA:
...its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring
This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.
Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?
...its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring
This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.
Aside from our ancestors in Africa, there were other humans in the world at the time of this die off. For instance the Neanderthals were in Europe and the Mid East. Interesting to speculate if they could have survived if us Cro Magnon types hadn't come out of Africa and wiped them out. I guess they might have evolved to be pretty similar to us after the Ice Age, though might have taken longer to get there.
And as for this Slashdot discussion, how I'd love to mod all the crap from global warming deniers and creationists down to -1. They dominate so many threads here and provoke tedious debates on the same subjects over and over and over and over. Stay on topic or go somewhere else.
agree to a point, but why not allow the debate in public schools if both are not proven? School should be a place where students are tought to think on their own, and derive their own conclusions to things which are not fact. So why not have all the different ideas of creation there for the taking, and let them come up with their own conclusion rather than shoving only one theory down their neck?
Presumably you're talking about a science class. In that domain, evolution is proven. Irrefutably. Only those who stick their fingers in their ears and say LA LA LA loudly (or believe every word of the King James Bible was carved in a stone by God Himself) can say otherwise. Read a book. Go to a natural history museum and look at the evidence.
The Pope himself does not advocate Creationism. Neither does the Dalai Lama. Only fundamentalist Americans (and the Taleban) have the gall to convince themselves that the world is an elaborate hoax by God who planted all the evidence of billions of years of evolution and geology as a test of faith.
Idiocy like this virtually forces intelligent children away from faith and into atheism.
I will illustrate your point, with an example I saw on CNN:...An activist, acting somewhat akin to a religious zealot, took a balanced BBC article & turned it into a one-sided piece using the tactics of threats and coercion...
Please CITE the CNN story.
CNN puts every story online, so you should have no trouble. If it exists. Odd how you have no names or dates. But I'm just paranoid, I guess.
And Roland got his "for more information" link to his blog through again. Recently the editors have omitted these (though if you look in the firehose, Roland puts his spammy blog link in every submission).
So, except for a somewhat wider range of accepted voltages, there doesn't seem to be any significant OLPC benefit, from this point of view at least:P.
The laptops you can get cheap on Ebay are going to be all different, all certainly much heavier, more fragile, than the OLPC. Each one will have a different, proprietary, battery, probably with little capacity left. Each will have a different charger, some quite heavy. Most won't have wifi, many will have bad sectors on hard disks, and insufficient RAM.
Trying to load a common OS on them will be fraught, some hardware will only have Windows 98 binary drivers.
I've bought a couple of used laptops, it's been educational. But I wouldn't wish supporting a classroom of such on a technician in a third-world school (or even a first world school). I think 20% of then would be DOA and within two months 80% of them would be useless one way or another, through being dropped, connected to the wrong charger, dust entering the vents, overheating, scratched screens, etc, etc.
This is an advantage of Computrace...they take care of all if it for you. Once the machine is reported stolen, and they get a beacon with the IP address, they coordinate everything with the ISP/Law Enforcement.
"Coordinate". What does that mean? Sending in a SWAT team? Or help you fill out an insurance claim form? Just how many laptops, what percentage, have they actually recovered?
I think a much better investment is 1) full disc encryption and 2) a secure backup. Put the money you would have paid Computrace in the bank and in a few months you'll have enough to replace your laptop.
Some things are just too easy to steal and resell, but not expensive enough to get the police excited about chasing them down.
t it originates in countries like Russia, where the owners of those large bot-nets reside. And the spam isn't being sent by US companies. Stock pump-and-dump schemes seem to come mostly from Europe.
"Originates" not "comes from". I still say USA. Anyway, at the moment most of my spam is about viagra and penis enhanceement, and references US sites. (Honourable mention to Nigerian 419ers, but these are small in volume.) I haven't seen any stock spam for a few months, actually.
More importantly, almost all payments solicited are via credit cards, all controlled by US financial institutions. Easily tracked and/or blacklisted if they had the will.
The "owners" of those zombie nets are not in the US.
But the people paying them often are. Though I concede that they are now doing their own scams, phishing especially. That's what happens when you outsource, after a short time your subcontractors realise they're doing the work and they don't need the Americans.
IIRC there was someone who tried an experiment some time ago. They tried to buy some of the v1|4|g|r|4 that they'd seen advertised in spam.
They couldn't find a single spam which actually led to someone genuinely trying to sell something.
Try it yourself. I just did, went to my trash folder and opened the first mail. Took me to sale-drug.com, which certainly looks like they have stuff for sale (or at least, they'll take my money). No need to take anyone's word for this, we all have plenty of spam.
After a few months with most of the spam being stock scams, it's back to good old penis enlargers, generic viagra and cialis. It's all so fucking repulsive and insulting.
It sounds like this randomness is weighted to still pay more attention to hot zones. Couldn't people with access to the same data still find the least likely places for security to be dispatched?
Of course. But it makes planning an exploit much harder. Before they might have been able to say they had 12 minutes (say) between sweeps, giving them that amount of time to get through a door, set a bomb, whatever. Now they might have an AVERAGE of 12 minutes, and possibly just 2 minutes Much more risky, and if they have to pass through more than one such point, they're almost sure to get caught.
. I'd really love to see something done but, at the same time, a good part of me is against regulations.
Most spam is selling fraudulent or non-existent goods. If investigated, the senders could be convicted for breaking existing laws. But each instance is too small for prosecutors to bother. So they do nothing. If even 1% of spammers weer tracked to source and the senders charged, it would disappear pretty quickly. If the spammers want to make money they need to be hooked into the financial system. Regardless of how they disguise their email, there will be a money trail. Charge them and make the credit card agencies blacklist them.
Government leaders just don't care because they personally never see it. They have staff to read their email and they only see the real stuff. The deepening swamp of crap most of us deal with is not real to them. The only opinions thry hear are from the marketers and fund raisers who don't want any restrictions.
My idea is that if x% of the traffic coming out of a country is abusive then those controlling..., then 100% of that traffic will just be bit-bucketted at the gateways
If you block a country because it is relaying spam, it will be switched to go via another country before the week is out. Meanwhile millions of innocent people will find themselves cut off.
Specifically, if required, then the U.S. of A. should be subject to these same rules.
You bet. Clean up your own act first. I'm not holding my breath. Easier to blame nasty foreigners.
Did you RTFA:
The US continues to relay far more spam than any other country,
I live in Hong Kong. About 80% of the spam I get is from the US. And yet I find my emails often bounced from US addresses because of similar enlightened attitudes.
Most of the world's spam ORIGINATES in the USA, is PAID FOR by USA companies. Your government does nothing to stop it. (What is it, two or three prosecutions in the last 5 years?) American companies lobby to prevent any effective measures to stop spam. Bit bucket Florida and you might make a dent in it for a while. But attack the source, not the routing.
There would be three types of messages, according to the rules.
The first would be a national alert from the president, probably involving a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
The second would involve imminent threats that could include natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes or university shootings.
The third would be reserved for child abductions, so-called Amber alerts.
Does anyone else find it absurd to equate the abduction of one child with a natural disaster? I realise that to THINK OF THE CHILDREN is mandatory in any political initiative, as of course is THINK OF THE TERRORISTS (though in this case the latter is actually justified), but sending out alerts to the entire population (even if geographically limited) every time a child goes missing seems to be both pointless and annoying. There are a myriad of crimes committed every day that are equally as serious. People will opt out after a short time after being deluged with the equivalent of a Fox news-ticker of crime-as-it-happens crawling across their phone all day long.
But what if Universal had signed a contract with each and every DJ and reviewer that got a promo copy
Then of course they could enforce this contract. The whole point is that they are trying to UNILATERALLY take away legal rights of people WITHOUT any contract. If you allowed this there is no doubt they would be slapping all kinds of restrictions on every CD, book, DVD they produced.
the world would be better off if the person with the physical object gets to resell it, no matter what the contract says. But is the world better off if Universal sees what happens and stops giving out review and promo copies?
Universal is free to try to make contracts with reviewers before sending them CDs. They choose not to, not wanting to annoy them. Their choice. Will the world be better off? Excuse me while I snicker.
And Universal is going to quite logically not send out promo copies
No, quite logically they will. They NEED promotion. They spend more on promotion than any other single expense. If promotional items turn up on eBay months later, so what? There are only a relative handful of these. If people reproduced them that's another case entirely. Only rabid collectors want this kind of thing, and they buy every release of their favoured artist anyway.
I've got a bunch of prepublication copies of books, various people in the trade have donated to a local thrift shop. Publishers have been sending these out to reviewers and purchasing managers for CENTURIES, and for centuries, the reviewers have given them away or sold them later. It's been going om in music ever since 78 RPM records. There is demonstrably no damage to the music publishers. The only reason it's an issue now is that it's more visible, being on eBay. But the actual number of discs on offer is the same as ever.
No, there aren't many of what we would call rights in France. Freedom of Speech for example. They couldn't have a Led Zeppelin day on the radio for example, since a fixed percentage of the music must be in French.
Sacrebleu! Your right not to play any French music on publicly owned radio frequencies is sacred. Let them try to pry that from your cold dead hands.....
Or you could just play a few French covers of Stairway to Heaven to make up the quota.
The problem, as usual, is Windows. If you RTFA, they just set up a site and emailed the power station guys that there was a change to their pensions or health benefits, for more information.... so they clicked on the link and were pwned immediately. No specifics, but does anyone doubt this was Internet Explorer running on Windows?
Solution: Others have pointed out the need to transfer information routinely via the Internet. How about the desktops run Ubuntu, or OSX or ANYTHING except Windows? Risks of an exploit of the desktop will be much reduced, and even if successful, there is a bigger barrier if it has to work across different OSs (sadly the power supply monitoring software apparently runs on Windows, and is unlikely to be rewritten).
Whatever the solution, it will have as Step 1: Get rid of Windows facing the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Sources for these (wild) claims? Because as an Australian, they're news to me. I get used to all kinds of wacky things being said about Australia here. Most seem to be based on the Simpsons' cartoons or from various advocacy groups' collections of dubious anecdotes.
I don't want to disparage JRRT. He created a whole genre, he had immense integrity. I loved his books when I was a teenager. But he wasn't a great wordsmith.
A few who have surpassed him, IMHO:
Not everything by these authors is "great" some are a bit uneven, but their best work is really "first rate" literature by any standard.
I've never gone for the doorstop fantasy trilogies that fill many bookshop fantasy shelves. Some may be good, but I never felt the urge to try them, they just looked so derivative. I doubt though I'm missing anything by bypassing Robert Jordan. I'm told that George RR Martin's is pretty good though, I liked his earlier work.
Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?
Well, I read them 40 years ago. I can't recall either. According to TFA:
This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel....its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.
And as for this Slashdot discussion, how I'd love to mod all the crap from global warming deniers and creationists down to -1. They dominate so many threads here and provoke tedious debates on the same subjects over and over and over and over. Stay on topic or go somewhere else.
And now they want to install a whole fucking OS that's a precompiled binary???
How did Balmer get to Negroponte? Does he have his mother tied up in a basement?
You're not supposed to hide SSIDs. If you break the implementation of the AP, don't blame a client for not connecting.
If this was done deliberately, see this for why it's "worse than no wireless security at all".
And an incorrect usage of "begs the question".
(I assume "sumbitter" is deliberate -- seems to be somehow more descriptive of many articles.)
Presumably you're talking about a science class. In that domain, evolution is proven. Irrefutably. Only those who stick their fingers in their ears and say LA LA LA loudly (or believe every word of the King James Bible was carved in a stone by God Himself) can say otherwise. Read a book. Go to a natural history museum and look at the evidence.
The Pope himself does not advocate Creationism. Neither does the Dalai Lama. Only fundamentalist Americans (and the Taleban) have the gall to convince themselves that the world is an elaborate hoax by God who planted all the evidence of billions of years of evolution and geology as a test of faith.
Idiocy like this virtually forces intelligent children away from faith and into atheism.
Please CITE the CNN story.
CNN puts every story online, so you should have no trouble. If it exists. Odd how you have no names or dates. But I'm just paranoid, I guess.
Tagged "blogspam" and "fuckroland".
The laptops you can get cheap on Ebay are going to be all different, all certainly much heavier, more fragile, than the OLPC. Each one will have a different, proprietary, battery, probably with little capacity left. Each will have a different charger, some quite heavy. Most won't have wifi, many will have bad sectors on hard disks, and insufficient RAM.
Trying to load a common OS on them will be fraught, some hardware will only have Windows 98 binary drivers.
I've bought a couple of used laptops, it's been educational. But I wouldn't wish supporting a classroom of such on a technician in a third-world school (or even a first world school). I think 20% of then would be DOA and within two months 80% of them would be useless one way or another, through being dropped, connected to the wrong charger, dust entering the vents, overheating, scratched screens, etc, etc.
"Coordinate". What does that mean? Sending in a SWAT team? Or help you fill out an insurance claim form? Just how many laptops, what percentage, have they actually recovered?
I think a much better investment is 1) full disc encryption and 2) a secure backup. Put the money you would have paid Computrace in the bank and in a few months you'll have enough to replace your laptop.
Some things are just too easy to steal and resell, but not expensive enough to get the police excited about chasing them down.
If I knew who "the Dude" was, or what the clip you reference came from, I might think it was funny. Not everyone has the same cultural referents.
If you're a golfer, you need a set of clubs and funny patterned pants. You don't need a computer of any description.
"Originates" not "comes from". I still say USA. Anyway, at the moment most of my spam is about viagra and penis enhanceement, and references US sites. (Honourable mention to Nigerian 419ers, but these are small in volume.) I haven't seen any stock spam for a few months, actually.
More importantly, almost all payments solicited are via credit cards, all controlled by US financial institutions. Easily tracked and/or blacklisted if they had the will.
The "owners" of those zombie nets are not in the US.
But the people paying them often are. Though I concede that they are now doing their own scams, phishing especially. That's what happens when you outsource, after a short time your subcontractors realise they're doing the work and they don't need the Americans.
Try it yourself. I just did, went to my trash folder and opened the first mail. Took me to sale-drug.com, which certainly looks like they have stuff for sale (or at least, they'll take my money). No need to take anyone's word for this, we all have plenty of spam.
After a few months with most of the spam being stock scams, it's back to good old penis enlargers, generic viagra and cialis. It's all so fucking repulsive and insulting.
Some things work in movies. Some things work in real life.
Of course. But it makes planning an exploit much harder. Before they might have been able to say they had 12 minutes (say) between sweeps, giving them that amount of time to get through a door, set a bomb, whatever. Now they might have an AVERAGE of 12 minutes, and possibly just 2 minutes Much more risky, and if they have to pass through more than one such point, they're almost sure to get caught.
Most spam is selling fraudulent or non-existent goods. If investigated, the senders could be convicted for breaking existing laws. But each instance is too small for prosecutors to bother. So they do nothing. If even 1% of spammers weer tracked to source and the senders charged, it would disappear pretty quickly. If the spammers want to make money they need to be hooked into the financial system. Regardless of how they disguise their email, there will be a money trail. Charge them and make the credit card agencies blacklist them.
Government leaders just don't care because they personally never see it. They have staff to read their email and they only see the real stuff. The deepening swamp of crap most of us deal with is not real to them. The only opinions thry hear are from the marketers and fund raisers who don't want any restrictions.
If you block a country because it is relaying spam, it will be switched to go via another country before the week is out. Meanwhile millions of innocent people will find themselves cut off.
Specifically, if required, then the U.S. of A. should be subject to these same rules.
You bet. Clean up your own act first. I'm not holding my breath. Easier to blame nasty foreigners.
Did you RTFA:
And see the ROKSO list, note the nationalities.I live in Hong Kong. About 80% of the spam I get is from the US. And yet I find my emails often bounced from US addresses because of similar enlightened attitudes.
Most of the world's spam ORIGINATES in the USA, is PAID FOR by USA companies. Your government does nothing to stop it. (What is it, two or three prosecutions in the last 5 years?) American companies lobby to prevent any effective measures to stop spam. Bit bucket Florida and you might make a dent in it for a while. But attack the source, not the routing.
There would be three types of messages, according to the rules.
The first would be a national alert from the president, probably involving a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
The second would involve imminent threats that could include natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes or university shootings.
The third would be reserved for child abductions, so-called Amber alerts.
Does anyone else find it absurd to equate the abduction of one child with a natural disaster? I realise that to THINK OF THE CHILDREN is mandatory in any political initiative, as of course is THINK OF THE TERRORISTS (though in this case the latter is actually justified), but sending out alerts to the entire population (even if geographically limited) every time a child goes missing seems to be both pointless and annoying. There are a myriad of crimes committed every day that are equally as serious. People will opt out after a short time after being deluged with the equivalent of a Fox news-ticker of crime-as-it-happens crawling across their phone all day long.
Then of course they could enforce this contract. The whole point is that they are trying to UNILATERALLY take away legal rights of people WITHOUT any contract. If you allowed this there is no doubt they would be slapping all kinds of restrictions on every CD, book, DVD they produced.
the world would be better off if the person with the physical object gets to resell it, no matter what the contract says. But is the world better off if Universal sees what happens and stops giving out review and promo copies?
Universal is free to try to make contracts with reviewers before sending them CDs. They choose not to, not wanting to annoy them. Their choice. Will the world be better off? Excuse me while I snicker.
And Universal is going to quite logically not send out promo copies
No, quite logically they will. They NEED promotion. They spend more on promotion than any other single expense. If promotional items turn up on eBay months later, so what? There are only a relative handful of these. If people reproduced them that's another case entirely. Only rabid collectors want this kind of thing, and they buy every release of their favoured artist anyway.
I've got a bunch of prepublication copies of books, various people in the trade have donated to a local thrift shop. Publishers have been sending these out to reviewers and purchasing managers for CENTURIES, and for centuries, the reviewers have given them away or sold them later. It's been going om in music ever since 78 RPM records. There is demonstrably no damage to the music publishers. The only reason it's an issue now is that it's more visible, being on eBay. But the actual number of discs on offer is the same as ever.
Sacrebleu! Your right not to play any French music on publicly owned radio frequencies is sacred. Let them try to pry that from your cold dead hands.....
Or you could just play a few French covers of Stairway to Heaven to make up the quota.
The problem, as usual, is Windows. If you RTFA, they just set up a site and emailed the power station guys that there was a change to their pensions or health benefits, for more information.... so they clicked on the link and were pwned immediately. No specifics, but does anyone doubt this was Internet Explorer running on Windows?
Solution: Others have pointed out the need to transfer information routinely via the Internet. How about the desktops run Ubuntu, or OSX or ANYTHING except Windows? Risks of an exploit of the desktop will be much reduced, and even if successful, there is a bigger barrier if it has to work across different OSs (sadly the power supply monitoring software apparently runs on Windows, and is unlikely to be rewritten).
Whatever the solution, it will have as Step 1: Get rid of Windows facing the Internet.