I haven't seen a single person suggesting that possession of such devices be criminalised, so it looks like "Slashdot" is standing by its principles.
As to the more relevant debate of whether such devices should be used in public on non-consenting participants, I hope Slashdot stands by its principles of being against treating innocent people as if they were criminals, and being against irritating tactics used by private corporations.
You have no idea how commonplace teen-on-adult violence is in the UK at present, do you?
I am, and I'm also aware of the teen-on-teens-and-young-people violence. I'm not sure how blasting all teenagers - as well as people in their 20s, and children and babies - with this noise is helpful to them, when they're just as much victims of this violent minority of teens.
This reminds me of the case of Sophie Lancaster, a goth who was attacked and violently murdered by some teens, possibly due to her appearance. This was covered with sympathy by one of the local newspapers - yet a few weeks later, the same paper was running a story about "goths kids loitering around shopping centre and terrorising poor old shopkeepers".
Not all young people are responsible for such violent acts - and most of them live in just as much fear as older people do. Demonising all of them just adds to the stigma.
I'm sorry, could you point me to the part in the article that says scientists have perfected an anti-chav device?
As someone who's lived among chavs, that's all the more reason I don't want them resulting in a decline of people's rights, and I think it's insulting to lump all young people in with chavs. I also know, unlike you, that not all chavs are teenagers - perhaps you have obviously not lived amongst them?
I'm not normally so right-wing, but there is definitely a big, serious problem here. And unfortunately nobody in Government has a clue how to deal with it.
There is a problem, but this is not a solution to the problem. You appear to be falling for the "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" fallacy.
Yes, this is why it's perfectly legal to blast noise out my window. There are no laws against noise pollution, because it doesn't hurt anyone, it's merely annoying. Similarly it's legal for me to pinch your nose and drop a bag of flour over your head - doesn't hurt, it's just annoying.
Oh wait, that's not true. Apparentely it's only true if it only affects teenagers and young children.
It's a weapon that targets young people. So? Racial profiling may suck but it works so we do it.
I don't think the point is that it's bad because it's discriminating, just that that doesn't make it okay.
I mean, consider if these devices were heard by everyone. If they were annoying[*], surely there'd be an uproar? If I blasted noise out of my property where it could be heard elsewhere, I'd risk having the police come round for noise pollution unless I had an appropriate licence.
But the attitude seems to be that it's okay because it's only young people it affects, at which point, it's fair game to call it out as discrimination.
Setting up a device to deter teens may suck but let's be honest - they a large group that tends to do stupid shit in large groups. It's just a smart idea.
A minority of teens. But older people in their 20s also cause trouble. And around my way, there are much older people who loiter about and drink. Not that moving any of them along fixes the problem, they just loiter elsewhere.
You might as well argue that someone who writes a computer virus is discriminating
Good analogy. Is writing computer viruses legal? No, exactly.
selling DVD players are discriminating against the elderly
Not so good analogy. Is selling a DVD causing harm to anyone?
* - someone in the article claims it's no louder than traffic. I don't know whether it's annoying or not, but if it isn't, I don't see how such a device would work in the first place.
Except that the CDTV wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer and lacked a lot more than just a floppy drive.
It most certainly was a general purpose computer, and you could plug in keyboard and mouse - and a floppy if you wanted (and it was later sold as a general purpose computer). This makes about as much sense as saying the imac wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer. It's the classic Apple trick of claiming a "first", where everything else previous is ignored by changing the definitions (e.g., claiming the first 64 bit "PC"). It's also again a case of having it both ways - not including things is branded as a step forward, but here you discount the CDTV because you could buy it without even more things.
The Amiga CDTV was the first (or at least one of the earlier ones) to drop the floppy drive. I don't think that's any major step in any case, but let's not pretend Apple were doing any innovating to do the same thing years later. It was just part of a natural gradual trend as floppy drives became less common.
I personally don't care. I really have no need for playing around with relics. My guess is no but that their real value- to give hobbyists a hobby.
Exactly, so you refute your own point. A ThinkPad, like any PC, does fine as it is. Needing a particular niche OS is only a requirement for giving hobbyists a hobby, and I personally don't care.
Greetings from the year 1998! I am a time traveller from the time when the imac was first introduced. This was at a time known as in your past, and technology wasn't the same as it is now. People commonly used to use these old fashioned things known as floppy disks, especially as the computer had no things like CD writers (let alone DVD writers) to save things on.
Let me introduce you to the concept of time. Things that as they were in my time, may not be as they are in your time.
I admire Apple for pushing such horrible technologies as teh floppy drive into extinction (at least on Mac.
Then I hope you admire the Amiga CDTV even more. It dropped the floppy years before Apple even thought of it. I dunno why people give the Imac the credit.
Besides, if you really needed a floppy drive you could always get a USB version.
This makes no sense. The Imac was great at forcing people off the floppy, but at the same time, people could still pay out extra and get a floppy? Which is it?
the concept of a common computing environment with well-defined, public (and mostly-open) APIs and by encouraging the commoditization of computing
Eh? I was happily coding in such a manner on non-Microsoft platforms for years, before (in the late 90s) I finally had to convert to Windows because that's all there was.
My impression of it is that the law required there to be evidence of terrorist intent, so they were following not just the spirit, but the actual wording of the law itself, and the original prosecution wrongly interpreted the law more broadly.
Had the Government simply criminalised simple possession alone (as it wants to do with some other things it doesn't like, e.g., pr0n), then chances are they wouldn't have been acquitted. In fact it wouldn't surprise me that it sees this case as a "loophole" that needs to be closed in order to "fight terrorism"...
Login using anonymous temporary openid, say something rude about Linux, log out, wash, rinse, repeat.
Last time I looked, Slashdot already allowed anonymous comments. Yes I would expect the anonymous bonus modifers for those that use them to also apply to default OpenID comments, otherwise that would be a bug. The implementations I've seen such as on LiveJournal do treat OpenID as anonymous as far as things like comment settings are concerned, so I don't know why you persist with this strawman argument.
I know that, that doesn't change the point, I just wasn't explicitly clear. I wouldn't expect a site that previously refused anonymous comments to allow OpenID - but that doesn't mean OpenID is useless, or that all OpenID comments are equivalent to an anonymous one. Yes, OpenID means that the person replying has been authenticated by that URL. Yes, OpenID should by default be given the same privileges as "anonymous" comments, because you could have an OpenID server that is open to anyone.
This is no different to email. You could set up an email server that allows anyone to access it. But that doesn't mean that _all_ email accounts are run by this way. If I receive an email from myfriend@myfriend'semailthatIknow, I can know it's from him, or someone he's given permission to use. Yes, there is still the possibility that he's let someone else use his account, but this is a long way from saying that email accounts are useless and it's equivalent to people emailing you anonymously!
Similarly, if I know my friend owns that URL, then I do know that it will either be my friend, or someone he has allowed access too. Just because there exists some anonymiser OpenID server is no more relevant than an anonymous email server, because I'll know that the OpenID is from http://www.jkg.in/openid - you can't use it to spoof someone else's URL.
Also it is possible to give extra privileges to specific OpenID accounts, which you can't do with anonymous accounts. For example, I use OpenID to allow people on other blogs to read my "friends only" posts. Does the existence of http://www.jkg.in/openid mean that anyone can read those posts? Of course not.
Saying the users from one blog work on another blog isn't saying much. When I can log into slashdot and my bank with the same ID then there's a single signon system
Well Slashdot is just another blog (in the sense of "forum that I might want to leave comments on). Yes it would be good that more blog hosts and websites support it, but that's a problem with lack of support, not a problem with OpenID itself. Hopefully support will grow in time. Slashdot isn't the be all and end all of websites.
My bank has its own set of login methods that are much more secure than simply typing in a password, so I wouldn't expect it to support OpenID. I'm not sure why you think being able to identify yourself on a range of different sites is useless, just because there exists one site that still has its own system.
If you allow users to log onto a blog or forum via openID, spammers get to avoid the captcha.
No, you can still make OpenID users type in a captcha if you wish.
So you're forced to grant openID users the same privileges as anonymous posters.
The difference is that the person I'm replying to knows I own that OpenID account, rather than me just being a random anonymous person.
Zero gains here, at best OpenID can prevent a user from filling in a couple of text boxes when registering with a site.
Well that is the point, and it's more like fill in multiple text boxes, provide my email address, wait for email to arrive (or possibly wait ages for account to be approved), click on link, then finally be allowed to leave a comment, which by now I've probably forgotten.
Do that on every single site, just to leave a comment? In practice, I give up and don't bother.
If you don't value your time, then yes, there are zero gains.
And I note you couldn't be bothered to register with Slashdot, so obviously you don't think it's just a "couple of text boxes"...
Sounds like something wrong with that site. I use my LiveJournal OpenID to leave comments on other blogs, without having to sign up for a new account at every single blog host.
Do you have several different email accounts, out of fear that if one email account is compromised, they can send out emails to everyone you know?
Do you think Jabber is a bad idea, because then if that's compromised, they can pretend to be you when chatting to anyone, but AIM, Yahoo and MSN are safer because they are separate?
I think you misunderstand what OpenID is. it's not a "central authentication". It's just a way that means you can use your login to identity to other sites. Just like my gmail email account can not only email people at gmail, but also at every other email server. Yes, theoretically having loads of separate email accounts - one for gmail ppl, one for Yahoo ppl, etc, is more safer, but I don't know anyone who does that.
Nope, OS X is a "resurrected NeXT". It fits your first post quite well. Classic MacOS had to be ditched by Apple.
I just find it odd that Slashdot of all places, whilst fanatical about some certain niche platforms, seems very hostile to others. It's just like Firefox is loved, whilst Opera is frowned upon. From the viewpoint of someone on Windows, Windows fits your ideal desktop definition whilst OS X or Linux for many people don't. You can't have it both ways - dismissing BeOS based on a lack of popularity, whilst saying it isn't an issue for OS X or Linux.
the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Not quite - AmigaOS had support for graphics cards, non-planar graphics formats and so on, and whilst it would no longer fit on a floppy, it still ran in a few megabytes of memory on slower processors. And whilst obviously graphics cards are far more complex today, Windows running on PCs back in the 90s still took far more resources.
Also I had no problem with printing, there were scalable fonts and 3D graphics, and sound cards. Again, perhaps not on an 880k floppy, but still very small.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen a single person suggesting that possession of such devices be criminalised, so it looks like "Slashdot" is standing by its principles.
As to the more relevant debate of whether such devices should be used in public on non-consenting participants, I hope Slashdot stands by its principles of being against treating innocent people as if they were criminals, and being against irritating tactics used by private corporations.
And how would this noise have prevented that death?
All it would have done is annoy his innocent children too.
You have no idea how commonplace teen-on-adult violence is in the UK at present, do you?
I am, and I'm also aware of the teen-on-teens-and-young-people violence. I'm not sure how blasting all teenagers - as well as people in their 20s, and children and babies - with this noise is helpful to them, when they're just as much victims of this violent minority of teens.
This reminds me of the case of Sophie Lancaster, a goth who was attacked and violently murdered by some teens, possibly due to her appearance. This was covered with sympathy by one of the local newspapers - yet a few weeks later, the same paper was running a story about "goths kids loitering around shopping centre and terrorising poor old shopkeepers".
Not all young people are responsible for such violent acts - and most of them live in just as much fear as older people do. Demonising all of them just adds to the stigma.
I'm sorry, could you point me to the part in the article that says scientists have perfected an anti-chav device?
As someone who's lived among chavs, that's all the more reason I don't want them resulting in a decline of people's rights, and I think it's insulting to lump all young people in with chavs. I also know, unlike you, that not all chavs are teenagers - perhaps you have obviously not lived amongst them?
I'm not normally so right-wing, but there is definitely a big, serious problem here. And unfortunately nobody in Government has a clue how to deal with it.
There is a problem, but this is not a solution to the problem. You appear to be falling for the "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" fallacy.
Come on, the noise is annoying. It doesn't hurt.
Yes, this is why it's perfectly legal to blast noise out my window. There are no laws against noise pollution, because it doesn't hurt anyone, it's merely annoying. Similarly it's legal for me to pinch your nose and drop a bag of flour over your head - doesn't hurt, it's just annoying.
Oh wait, that's not true. Apparentely it's only true if it only affects teenagers and young children.
It's a weapon that targets young people. So? Racial profiling may suck but it works so we do it.
I don't think the point is that it's bad because it's discriminating, just that that doesn't make it okay.
I mean, consider if these devices were heard by everyone. If they were annoying[*], surely there'd be an uproar? If I blasted noise out of my property where it could be heard elsewhere, I'd risk having the police come round for noise pollution unless I had an appropriate licence.
But the attitude seems to be that it's okay because it's only young people it affects, at which point, it's fair game to call it out as discrimination.
Setting up a device to deter teens may suck but let's be honest - they a large group that tends to do stupid shit in large groups. It's just a smart idea.
A minority of teens. But older people in their 20s also cause trouble. And around my way, there are much older people who loiter about and drink. Not that moving any of them along fixes the problem, they just loiter elsewhere.
You might as well argue that someone who writes a computer virus is discriminating
Good analogy. Is writing computer viruses legal? No, exactly.
selling DVD players are discriminating against the elderly
Not so good analogy. Is selling a DVD causing harm to anyone?
* - someone in the article claims it's no louder than traffic. I don't know whether it's annoying or not, but if it isn't, I don't see how such a device would work in the first place.
Except that the CDTV wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer and lacked a lot more than just a floppy drive.
It most certainly was a general purpose computer, and you could plug in keyboard and mouse - and a floppy if you wanted (and it was later sold as a general purpose computer). This makes about as much sense as saying the imac wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer. It's the classic Apple trick of claiming a "first", where everything else previous is ignored by changing the definitions (e.g., claiming the first 64 bit "PC"). It's also again a case of having it both ways - not including things is branded as a step forward, but here you discount the CDTV because you could buy it without even more things.
The Amiga CDTV was the first (or at least one of the earlier ones) to drop the floppy drive. I don't think that's any major step in any case, but let's not pretend Apple were doing any innovating to do the same thing years later. It was just part of a natural gradual trend as floppy drives became less common.
Both.
Same with the CDTV then.
I personally don't care. I really have no need for playing around with relics. My guess is no but that their real value- to give hobbyists a hobby.
Exactly, so you refute your own point. A ThinkPad, like any PC, does fine as it is. Needing a particular niche OS is only a requirement for giving hobbyists a hobby, and I personally don't care.
but does it run Mac OS X?
I dunno. Does the MacbookAir run BeOS? AmigaOS?
If they ship it with OS X its really not a competitor to anything else. Without a good OS, it is just a container for crappy content.
Granpa... What is an imac?
Spot on. God knows why you got modded off-topic ... if this is off-topic, it's the parent post that should be modded down.
Greetings from the year 1998! I am a time traveller from the time when the imac was first introduced. This was at a time known as in your past, and technology wasn't the same as it is now. People commonly used to use these old fashioned things known as floppy disks, especially as the computer had no things like CD writers (let alone DVD writers) to save things on.
Let me introduce you to the concept of time. Things that as they were in my time, may not be as they are in your time.
I admire Apple for pushing such horrible technologies as teh floppy drive into extinction (at least on Mac.
Then I hope you admire the Amiga CDTV even more. It dropped the floppy years before Apple even thought of it. I dunno why people give the Imac the credit.
Besides, if you really needed a floppy drive you could always get a USB version.
This makes no sense. The Imac was great at forcing people off the floppy, but at the same time, people could still pay out extra and get a floppy? Which is it?
the concept of a common computing environment with well-defined, public (and mostly-open) APIs and by encouraging the commoditization of computing
Eh? I was happily coding in such a manner on non-Microsoft platforms for years, before (in the late 90s) I finally had to convert to Windows because that's all there was.
On that note, I wonder if the campaign will cover fairly how individuals andd corporations should respect open source software?
My impression of it is that the law required there to be evidence of terrorist intent, so they were following not just the spirit, but the actual wording of the law itself, and the original prosecution wrongly interpreted the law more broadly.
Had the Government simply criminalised simple possession alone (as it wants to do with some other things it doesn't like, e.g., pr0n), then chances are they wouldn't have been acquitted. In fact it wouldn't surprise me that it sees this case as a "loophole" that needs to be closed in order to "fight terrorism"...
Login using anonymous temporary openid, say something rude about Linux, log out, wash, rinse, repeat.
Last time I looked, Slashdot already allowed anonymous comments. Yes I would expect the anonymous bonus modifers for those that use them to also apply to default OpenID comments, otherwise that would be a bug. The implementations I've seen such as on LiveJournal do treat OpenID as anonymous as far as things like comment settings are concerned, so I don't know why you persist with this strawman argument.
I know that, that doesn't change the point, I just wasn't explicitly clear. I wouldn't expect a site that previously refused anonymous comments to allow OpenID - but that doesn't mean OpenID is useless, or that all OpenID comments are equivalent to an anonymous one. Yes, OpenID means that the person replying has been authenticated by that URL. Yes, OpenID should by default be given the same privileges as "anonymous" comments, because you could have an OpenID server that is open to anyone.
This is no different to email. You could set up an email server that allows anyone to access it. But that doesn't mean that _all_ email accounts are run by this way. If I receive an email from myfriend@myfriend'semailthatIknow, I can know it's from him, or someone he's given permission to use. Yes, there is still the possibility that he's let someone else use his account, but this is a long way from saying that email accounts are useless and it's equivalent to people emailing you anonymously!
Similarly, if I know my friend owns that URL, then I do know that it will either be my friend, or someone he has allowed access too. Just because there exists some anonymiser OpenID server is no more relevant than an anonymous email server, because I'll know that the OpenID is from http://www.jkg.in/openid - you can't use it to spoof someone else's URL.
Also it is possible to give extra privileges to specific OpenID accounts, which you can't do with anonymous accounts. For example, I use OpenID to allow people on other blogs to read my "friends only" posts. Does the existence of http://www.jkg.in/openid mean that anyone can read those posts? Of course not.
Saying the users from one blog work on another blog isn't saying much. When I can log into slashdot and my bank with the same ID then there's a single signon system
Well Slashdot is just another blog (in the sense of "forum that I might want to leave comments on). Yes it would be good that more blog hosts and websites support it, but that's a problem with lack of support, not a problem with OpenID itself. Hopefully support will grow in time. Slashdot isn't the be all and end all of websites.
My bank has its own set of login methods that are much more secure than simply typing in a password, so I wouldn't expect it to support OpenID. I'm not sure why you think being able to identify yourself on a range of different sites is useless, just because there exists one site that still has its own system.
If you allow users to log onto a blog or forum via openID, spammers get to avoid the captcha.
No, you can still make OpenID users type in a captcha if you wish.
So you're forced to grant openID users the same privileges as anonymous posters.
The difference is that the person I'm replying to knows I own that OpenID account, rather than me just being a random anonymous person.
Zero gains here, at best OpenID can prevent a user from filling in a couple of text boxes when registering with a site.
Well that is the point, and it's more like fill in multiple text boxes, provide my email address, wait for email to arrive (or possibly wait ages for account to be approved), click on link, then finally be allowed to leave a comment, which by now I've probably forgotten.
Do that on every single site, just to leave a comment? In practice, I give up and don't bother.
If you don't value your time, then yes, there are zero gains.
And I note you couldn't be bothered to register with Slashdot, so obviously you don't think it's just a "couple of text boxes"...
Sounds like something wrong with that site. I use my LiveJournal OpenID to leave comments on other blogs, without having to sign up for a new account at every single blog host.
Do you have several different email accounts, out of fear that if one email account is compromised, they can send out emails to everyone you know?
Do you think Jabber is a bad idea, because then if that's compromised, they can pretend to be you when chatting to anyone, but AIM, Yahoo and MSN are safer because they are separate?
I think you misunderstand what OpenID is. it's not a "central authentication". It's just a way that means you can use your login to identity to other sites. Just like my gmail email account can not only email people at gmail, but also at every other email server. Yes, theoretically having loads of separate email accounts - one for gmail ppl, one for Yahoo ppl, etc, is more safer, but I don't know anyone who does that.
The Mac has been around since 1984.
Nope, OS X is a "resurrected NeXT". It fits your first post quite well. Classic MacOS had to be ditched by Apple.
I just find it odd that Slashdot of all places, whilst fanatical about some certain niche platforms, seems very hostile to others. It's just like Firefox is loved, whilst Opera is frowned upon. From the viewpoint of someone on Windows, Windows fits your ideal desktop definition whilst OS X or Linux for many people don't. You can't have it both ways - dismissing BeOS based on a lack of popularity, whilst saying it isn't an issue for OS X or Linux.
the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Not quite - AmigaOS had support for graphics cards, non-planar graphics formats and so on, and whilst it would no longer fit on a floppy, it still ran in a few megabytes of memory on slower processors. And whilst obviously graphics cards are far more complex today, Windows running on PCs back in the 90s still took far more resources.
Also I had no problem with printing, there were scalable fonts and 3D graphics, and sound cards. Again, perhaps not on an 880k floppy, but still very small.