If Dubya had an AOL account (which wouldn't surprise me, but I digress) and some company started to use his address book and send email pretending they originate from him I think there would be a certain lack of enthusiasm by Dubya.
And what if Bush clicked a button saying "Yes please, send these people an email"? Whether you think it's right or wrong, it's highly misleading to suggest they are sending these emails without authorisation. At least, assuming the comments in this thread are correct - are you disputing this, and saying they spam without authorisation? (I've never used it, so I wouldn't know.)
To put this in perspective, what do you think would happen if you sent an email in the name of George Bush to the FBI?
Erm, if George Bush himself logged onto a website, and clicked a button saying "Please send an email to the FBI", then yes I think that would be legal.
I'm not saying this "feature" is a good idea - it's not. But keep things in perspective - this is not misrepresentation.
Correction to my last post - it seems there's little evidence that they are sending emails without the user's authorisation, and I'd say perhaps we should boycott sites which make scaremongering claims...
(This really isn't news - sending emails like this has been done for years, the dodgy bit is handing out your password to gain access to address book details.)
That's good to hear - the article is very misleading, suggesting that although they ask you which to select, this step is missed out, but looking closely, it never actually says this.
The important point appears to be: but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it's causing a problem.
I.e., he's assuming that people must be unaware of what's happening, and implying that they spam everyone with no actual evidence. I think he's overestimating people - judging how common it is for people to pass on stupid email forwards on so on, I can quite believe that people are willingly spamming everyone with this great new site they found.
Or simply, don't give them your password in the first place.
Both with Facebook and, according to the summary, Flixster, the user is asked for the password, and (at least with Facebook) it is not a requirement to using the site. Both Facebook and Flixster say this is for the purpose of inviting people, and according to another comment, Facebook will let you choose which people to send to.
Note that sending an email that looks like it's from someone else isn't anything new - for years I've received "Join this site" emails from people, and "Tell someone about this article" links are common on webpages.
The issue with Flixster seems to be that it tells you you'll be able to select who to send to, but then according to the article, spams them all anyway. Also with both Flixster and Facebook, handing over passwords is rather dodgy - but still, the only workaround needed is simply to not use the "feature".
Star Trek: 5 series, 704 episodes, 10 films, spanning several decades. Stargate: 2 series, 274 episodes, 1 film, spanning just over one decade.
(From Wikipedia)
So to be fair, they don't anywhere near compare on numbers, or how long they've been around.
And I think the other posters are right about there being more competition - look how the mainstream/cultural impact of Star Trek seems to be significantly less with later series.
You really need better writers. Just putting a cute woman on screen is not enough.
And how is that any different to what Apple did - portraying PC as boring guy in a suit, Mac as hip and trendy, and then reeling off a load of assertions.
Here is how the capitalism/self policing works out: if the Napa valley people want the site grape.com but grape.com is full of naked women doing odd things with grapes, they take their case to ICANN and sue for the site name demonstrating that it is a porn site and therefore should have the.xxx domain not the.com domain. Similarly, if farmer Joe discovers that people with foot fetishes drink a lot of wine so buys grape.xxx, but all it really depicts is a bunch of naked feet in grapes, the site that has the kinky grape women can also come and point out that naked feet are not pornography in any country where the internet is not already banned and sue to get grape.xxx for themselves. Other than arbitrating, the government does not have to directly police anything. The market will dictate and force the appropriate domains.
I'm not sure how a single organisation making the decisions, or people suing, has anything to do with capitalism and the market?
Leaving it to the market would mean giving to the one who pays the most, and then allowing them to trade.
A good course on assembly and how it relates to machine language IS math AND computer science.
It's one particular type of maths and computer science, but unless you think a computer programmer should know everything there is to know about maths and computer science, this doesn't mean that assembly is a requirement.
Difficult to define or enforce should not be a reason to avoid a law. What constitutes murder vs. manslaughter vs self defense? What is the difference between libel and parody?
Yes but going through a criminal trial to assess every website is not practical.
And it's not clear how to handle the Internet being international - I suppose servers are still in one country, but it becomes difficult if every country has different requirements.
Personally, I like my porn and I'm tired of people saying it's harmful to children and trying to restrict or eliminate it using that argument. Take away that argument and you take away the primary excuse for restrictions. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it!
Well yes I agree with you here, but I'm tempted to go for a more broader "for adults / no children", so it doesn't have the same connotations of being just porn.
How about "if it shows nudity for non-educational purposes."
What about non-nude pictures which have still been intended for sexual arousal? This is especially the case with less-vanilla stuff like BDSM material. And whilst you and I might count that as erotica rather than pornography, bear in mind that many people and Governments do not (e.g., the UK Government's definition of pornography in their plans to criminalise possession of simulated and consensual "extreme porn" is any image which was produced for the purposes of arousal, whether or not it shows nudity or sex).
On the other hand, there could be nude pictures which aren't porn, but aren't educational either. I mean, would a topless woman count? Breastfeeding? What about nudists?
Another problem, even if we have a fixed definition of porn, is that it's not easily to split everything up into different websites. For example, what if someone wants to post an erotic picture on their LiveJournal? Suddenly we'd have to have LiveJournal.xxx, and split it across two domains.
Personally I think rather than trying to split off "porn", it would be better to split off a "for kiddies [and anyone offended by stuff they don't have to look at] only" domain, leaving an "adult" Internet for the rest of us.
Should a 3D programmer be able to write a software renderer (as someone who's done this in the past, I'd like to think it can provide some better understanding - but at the same time I accept that someone who's only programmed for 3D hardware can have an understanding of what's going on, just because I've spent hours trying to write code to rasterise polygons doesn't make any difference).
Should a GUI programmer have hand-coded his own GUI library?
Assembly can be useful, but there are a great many useful-but-not-essential things in the field of computing.
Can you cite an actual example where hand-written assembler would be faster than the code which any modern compiler would generate? I'm not saying that no such case, but I'm just curious, as there's this common myth that rewriting anything in assember makes it faster.
I was amused by a recent post I saw on a forum where someone asked how to write something in assember, "to make it go faster". Someone suggested he take a look at the dissambled code generated by the compiler, and paste that into his code...
* Would you want an astronaut to understand physics and math? * Would you want a doctor to understand chemistry and biology? * Should somebody studying to be a Literature teacher take their full set of liberal arts courses, including history? * Should somebody earning a business degree take music appreciation?
Most of us probably said, "Yes" to most or all of those above. Even if the study seems irrelevant or too "low-level" or too "high-level" at the time, there are areas of coursework that help us understand things better.
You've lost me on the last two of those? There's no harm in taking them, but I wouldn't say that they should be taken (possibly this is due to my UK background, where unlike the US, people don't tend to study as wide a range of subjects at university level).
The answer may be Yes to the first two, but this is comparable to saying that a computer programmer should understand maths or computer science. Learning assembly, whilst it may still be useful in some ways, is a lot more specific than that.
I would agree that learning "broadly" is good as well as deeply, and assembly can be one example of that. But at the same time, those people who haven't studied assembly may have studied broadly in other areas, such as how an operating system works, or mathematics.
I hear there free wireless access points for the, uh... internets.
True, I hadn't considered that - but still, restricting adults' freedom out of fear that there are kiddies obtaining laptops and hanging out on street corners freeloading off of someone's wireless seems unnecessary to me;) It's still something which can be prevented with some minimal parental supervision.
If the Internet is so dangerous for children, I don't know why we don't treat it just like any other thing which is seen as dangerous for children, and make it adult only. For example, we wouldn't prevent adults from buying alcohol (or criminalise it) to prevent children getting hold of it.
The Internet may be widespread, but it's not like any child can have access to it - children don't sign up for their own ISPs, and Internet-cafes can be just like pubs. That just leaves using the parents' connection, which they can have total control over it. Yes, some will let them use it unsupervised, just as some parents buy their children alcohol, or don't care if their children get hold of their alcohol. It should be up to the parents, not the Government.
Whilst it is true that very bright children will tend not to conform to their surrounding culture, to say that heavy metal is the one refuge for them is nonsense. As many are into fine arts, classical music, jazz, soul, blues, whatever. It has more to do with personality and taste.
Perhaps this is true, but I think the point is that anyone into fine arts, classical music, jazz, soul, blues would be regarded as intelligent anyway (even if they weren't) where as metal kids would be regarded as idiot delinquents, so that's why it's notable, and why they've pointed out this particular case.
OTOH, at work I have a marvellous 12-year old PC with Windows 98. Reboots by the minute. No, it's not funny. If installing Windows is easy, let me make this point clear, and it's not an opinion -- it's a fact I've learned the hard way: Windows is not easy to use, despite what marketeers parrot everyday.
A 12 year old PC running Windows 98 is relevant to the 21st Century how? In that case, let's completely ignore Mac OS X and start going on about how awful the joke of an OS that classic Mac OS was... and I dare not ask what easy-to-use state Linux was in in 1998.
Re:On the contrary...
on
ReactOS Revealed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Kind of sad that in the entire history of Windows, there was only a 4-year window (no pun intended) of stable installation.
That's highly misleading - going by release dates, Windows 2000 was released in 2000, and Vista in 2007, giving us 7 years (presumably the OP was talking about when he had to deal with them, which includes beta releases and people still using an old version).
That's the same timeframe which Mac OS has only offered a stable OS (things like memory protection), in the form of OS X.
Of course, talking of "entire history of" is irrelvant anyway, since versions previous to NT were different operating systems, just as classic Mac OS has no connection to Mac OS X other than the name and company producing it.
However, how can you tell what a person is like when everybody tries to create images to set themselves apart?
I'm not quite sure how you mean? I know what people are like because I am friends with them. My preferred place is LiveJournal, where you mainly interact by posting/commenting, and not by looking at their "profile".
Are you trying to tell me that Slashdot is not a diverse culture, not a "melting pot" like the United States is told to be?
I haven't made any comment on the Slashdot demographic, I'm saying that what the average person is like doesn't matter on a social networking site (where as on a general forum like here, it does matter).
If you can't tell, I don't like the majority of the social networking demographic:( I do like most technology bloggers, though. They tend to write well and keep things interesting. Using proper, grammar of course.
One of the main points of "social networking" sites is that you interact specifically with those you want (e.g., your real life friends), as opposed to everyone like on Slashdot, so the average demographic doesn't matter.
My friends write well, keep things interesting, and use proper grammar, better than the average Slashdot poster or technology "blogger", so that's all that matters.
My feelings about MySpace are that if users are too unintelligent to create a basic website, they shouldn't have a website at all.
And there was me thinking that it's better to use existing tools than to reinvent the wheel (not that I think MySpace is a good tool, but that's another matter).
Slashdot Mirror
If Dubya had an AOL account (which wouldn't surprise me, but I digress) and some company started to use his address book and send email pretending they originate from him I think there would be a certain lack of enthusiasm by Dubya.
And what if Bush clicked a button saying "Yes please, send these people an email"? Whether you think it's right or wrong, it's highly misleading to suggest they are sending these emails without authorisation. At least, assuming the comments in this thread are correct - are you disputing this, and saying they spam without authorisation? (I've never used it, so I wouldn't know.)
To put this in perspective, what do you think would happen if you sent an email in the name of George Bush to the FBI?
Erm, if George Bush himself logged onto a website, and clicked a button saying "Please send an email to the FBI", then yes I think that would be legal.
I'm not saying this "feature" is a good idea - it's not. But keep things in perspective - this is not misrepresentation.
Correction to my last post - it seems there's little evidence that they are sending emails without the user's authorisation, and I'd say perhaps we should boycott sites which make scaremongering claims...
(This really isn't news - sending emails like this has been done for years, the dodgy bit is handing out your password to gain access to address book details.)
That's good to hear - the article is very misleading, suggesting that although they ask you which to select, this step is missed out, but looking closely, it never actually says this.
The important point appears to be: but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it's causing a problem.
I.e., he's assuming that people must be unaware of what's happening, and implying that they spam everyone with no actual evidence. I think he's overestimating people - judging how common it is for people to pass on stupid email forwards on so on, I can quite believe that people are willingly spamming everyone with this great new site they found.
Or simply, don't give them your password in the first place.
Both with Facebook and, according to the summary, Flixster, the user is asked for the password, and (at least with Facebook) it is not a requirement to using the site. Both Facebook and Flixster say this is for the purpose of inviting people, and according to another comment, Facebook will let you choose which people to send to.
Note that sending an email that looks like it's from someone else isn't anything new - for years I've received "Join this site" emails from people, and "Tell someone about this article" links are common on webpages.
The issue with Flixster seems to be that it tells you you'll be able to select who to send to, but then according to the article, spams them all anyway. Also with both Flixster and Facebook, handing over passwords is rather dodgy - but still, the only workaround needed is simply to not use the "feature".
Personally I only really got into Stargate from Season 9, and couldn't give a crap about Richard Dean Anderson...
SG-1 has ended after season 10. There won't be any new episodes on April.
It's because the US is behind the UK in showing them, but yes, it is a bit misleading.
Star Trek: 5 series, 704 episodes, 10 films, spanning several decades.
Stargate: 2 series, 274 episodes, 1 film, spanning just over one decade.
(From Wikipedia)
So to be fair, they don't anywhere near compare on numbers, or how long they've been around.
And I think the other posters are right about there being more competition - look how the mainstream/cultural impact of Star Trek seems to be significantly less with later series.
It hasn't been cancelled yet. The final episodes air this spring/summer.
Well, it's true that the final episodes have yet to air in some parts of the world, but it's still nonetheless been cancelled.
You really need better writers. Just putting a cute woman on screen is not enough.
And how is that any different to what Apple did - portraying PC as boring guy in a suit, Mac as hip and trendy, and then reeling off a load of assertions.
Here is how the capitalism/self policing works out: if the Napa valley people want the site grape.com but grape.com is full of naked women doing odd things with grapes, they take their case to ICANN and sue for the site name demonstrating that it is a porn site and therefore should have the .xxx domain not the .com domain. Similarly, if farmer Joe discovers that people with foot fetishes drink a lot of wine so buys grape.xxx, but all it really depicts is a bunch of naked feet in grapes, the site that has the kinky grape women can also come and point out that naked feet are not pornography in any country where the internet is not already banned and sue to get grape.xxx for themselves. Other than arbitrating, the government does not have to directly police anything. The market will dictate and force the appropriate domains.
I'm not sure how a single organisation making the decisions, or people suing, has anything to do with capitalism and the market?
Leaving it to the market would mean giving to the one who pays the most, and then allowing them to trade.
I agree that people try to move that line in both directions, but I think anyone rational -
;)
And that is where the problem lies
A good course on assembly and how it relates to machine language IS math AND computer science.
It's one particular type of maths and computer science, but unless you think a computer programmer should know everything there is to know about maths and computer science, this doesn't mean that assembly is a requirement.
Difficult to define or enforce should not be a reason to avoid a law. What constitutes murder vs. manslaughter vs self defense? What is the difference between libel and parody?
Yes but going through a criminal trial to assess every website is not practical.
And it's not clear how to handle the Internet being international - I suppose servers are still in one country, but it becomes difficult if every country has different requirements.
Personally, I like my porn and I'm tired of people saying it's harmful to children and trying to restrict or eliminate it using that argument. Take away that argument and you take away the primary excuse for restrictions. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it!
Well yes I agree with you here, but I'm tempted to go for a more broader "for adults / no children", so it doesn't have the same connotations of being just porn.
How about "if it shows nudity for non-educational purposes."
What about non-nude pictures which have still been intended for sexual arousal? This is especially the case with less-vanilla stuff like BDSM material. And whilst you and I might count that as erotica rather than pornography, bear in mind that many people and Governments do not (e.g., the UK Government's definition of pornography in their plans to criminalise possession of simulated and consensual "extreme porn" is any image which was produced for the purposes of arousal, whether or not it shows nudity or sex).
On the other hand, there could be nude pictures which aren't porn, but aren't educational either. I mean, would a topless woman count? Breastfeeding? What about nudists?
Another problem, even if we have a fixed definition of porn, is that it's not easily to split everything up into different websites. For example, what if someone wants to post an erotic picture on their LiveJournal? Suddenly we'd have to have LiveJournal.xxx, and split it across two domains.
Personally I think rather than trying to split off "porn", it would be better to split off a "for kiddies [and anyone offended by stuff they don't have to look at] only" domain, leaving an "adult" Internet for the rest of us.
Does this apply to other things?
Should a 3D programmer be able to write a software renderer (as someone who's done this in the past, I'd like to think it can provide some better understanding - but at the same time I accept that someone who's only programmed for 3D hardware can have an understanding of what's going on, just because I've spent hours trying to write code to rasterise polygons doesn't make any difference).
Should a GUI programmer have hand-coded his own GUI library?
Assembly can be useful, but there are a great many useful-but-not-essential things in the field of computing.
Can you cite an actual example where hand-written assembler would be faster than the code which any modern compiler would generate? I'm not saying that no such case, but I'm just curious, as there's this common myth that rewriting anything in assember makes it faster.
I was amused by a recent post I saw on a forum where someone asked how to write something in assember, "to make it go faster". Someone suggested he take a look at the dissambled code generated by the compiler, and paste that into his code...
* Would you want an astronaut to understand physics and math?
* Would you want a doctor to understand chemistry and biology?
* Should somebody studying to be a Literature teacher take their full set of liberal arts courses, including history?
* Should somebody earning a business degree take music appreciation?
Most of us probably said, "Yes" to most or all of those above. Even if the study seems irrelevant or too "low-level" or too "high-level" at the time, there are areas of coursework that help us understand things better.
You've lost me on the last two of those? There's no harm in taking them, but I wouldn't say that they should be taken (possibly this is due to my UK background, where unlike the US, people don't tend to study as wide a range of subjects at university level).
The answer may be Yes to the first two, but this is comparable to saying that a computer programmer should understand maths or computer science. Learning assembly, whilst it may still be useful in some ways, is a lot more specific than that.
I would agree that learning "broadly" is good as well as deeply, and assembly can be one example of that. But at the same time, those people who haven't studied assembly may have studied broadly in other areas, such as how an operating system works, or mathematics.
I hear there free wireless access points for the, uh... internets.
True, I hadn't considered that - but still, restricting adults' freedom out of fear that there are kiddies obtaining laptops and hanging out on street corners freeloading off of someone's wireless seems unnecessary to me;) It's still something which can be prevented with some minimal parental supervision.
If the Internet is so dangerous for children, I don't know why we don't treat it just like any other thing which is seen as dangerous for children, and make it adult only. For example, we wouldn't prevent adults from buying alcohol (or criminalise it) to prevent children getting hold of it.
The Internet may be widespread, but it's not like any child can have access to it - children don't sign up for their own ISPs, and Internet-cafes can be just like pubs. That just leaves using the parents' connection, which they can have total control over it. Yes, some will let them use it unsupervised, just as some parents buy their children alcohol, or don't care if their children get hold of their alcohol. It should be up to the parents, not the Government.
Whilst it is true that very bright children will tend not to conform to their surrounding culture, to say that heavy metal is the one refuge for them is nonsense. As many are into fine arts, classical music, jazz, soul, blues, whatever. It has more to do with personality and taste.
Perhaps this is true, but I think the point is that anyone into fine arts, classical music, jazz, soul, blues would be regarded as intelligent anyway (even if they weren't) where as metal kids would be regarded as idiot delinquents, so that's why it's notable, and why they've pointed out this particular case.
OTOH, at work I have a marvellous 12-year old PC with Windows 98. Reboots by the minute. No, it's not funny. If installing Windows is easy, let me make this point clear, and it's not an opinion -- it's a fact I've learned the hard way: Windows is not easy to use, despite what marketeers parrot everyday.
... and I dare not ask what easy-to-use state Linux was in in 1998.
A 12 year old PC running Windows 98 is relevant to the 21st Century how? In that case, let's completely ignore Mac OS X and start going on about how awful the joke of an OS that classic Mac OS was
Kind of sad that in the entire history of Windows, there was only a 4-year window (no pun intended) of stable installation.
That's highly misleading - going by release dates, Windows 2000 was released in 2000, and Vista in 2007, giving us 7 years (presumably the OP was talking about when he had to deal with them, which includes beta releases and people still using an old version).
That's the same timeframe which Mac OS has only offered a stable OS (things like memory protection), in the form of OS X.
Of course, talking of "entire history of" is irrelvant anyway, since versions previous to NT were different operating systems, just as classic Mac OS has no connection to Mac OS X other than the name and company producing it.
However, how can you tell what a person is like when everybody tries to create images to set themselves apart?
I'm not quite sure how you mean? I know what people are like because I am friends with them. My preferred place is LiveJournal, where you mainly interact by posting/commenting, and not by looking at their "profile".
Are you trying to tell me that Slashdot is not a diverse culture, not a "melting pot" like the United States is told to be?
I haven't made any comment on the Slashdot demographic, I'm saying that what the average person is like doesn't matter on a social networking site (where as on a general forum like here, it does matter).
If you can't tell, I don't like the majority of the social networking demographic :( I do like most technology bloggers, though. They tend to write well and keep things interesting. Using proper, grammar of course.
One of the main points of "social networking" sites is that you interact specifically with those you want (e.g., your real life friends), as opposed to everyone like on Slashdot, so the average demographic doesn't matter.
My friends write well, keep things interesting, and use proper grammar, better than the average Slashdot poster or technology "blogger", so that's all that matters.
My feelings about MySpace are that if users are too unintelligent to create a basic website, they shouldn't have a website at all.
And there was me thinking that it's better to use existing tools than to reinvent the wheel (not that I think MySpace is a good tool, but that's another matter).