Since when is 47% in a non-scientific survey a majority?
The original statement still stands. "47% of Slashdot Users are using Windows as their *main* OS". I am not one of those 47 percent, but I still use Windows once in a while. I would expect a good portion of those 53 percent do as well.
Consumer Reports discussed a similar issue a year or two years ago. They said that as soon as Tanya Harding checked in for a sprained wrist at a small private hospital, the employees made over 300 separate queries for her medical records.
Apparently he feels the terrorists were perfectly within their rights to drive an airliner full of innocent civilians into the Pentagon.
Again, he might not have known about that part. Initially, most of us didn't know the Pentagon was attacked by an airliner.
"prosecutors simply added up all the R&D cost"
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 1
"Federal prosecutors simply added up all the R&D costs associated with the source code I had accessed, and used that number (approx $300 million) as the loss, even though it was never alleged that I intended to use or disclosed any source code. [...] none of my victims had reported any losses attributable to my activities to their shareholders..."
There is no excuse for the way you were treated, but for the sake of argument -- if I catch someone breaking in and stealing my stereo. It doesn't matter if the guy couldn't make it out of my house and it does not matter if he couldn't make me suffer that loss. It only matters that the guy had my stereo in his hands while he was trying to get away.
"For instance, one prosecutor argued that my attorney should not be able to review the electronic evidence with me on a laptop computer, because I could somehow break into the Bureau of Prisons computers and release myself from custody, or write a virus/worm that would somehow leak out from the computer and wreak havoc upon the free world. I was astonished that the judge bought into these scenarios, even when my attorney pointed out the laptop did not have modem or network capability."
This got me thinking. Why don't we focus on educating our judges and congressmens for a while? And by that I mean, giving them somekind of free adhoc technical education. Next time one of us needs to fill up a classroom, or fill up a technical conference, we could send a free (non-transferable) complimentary ticket to our nearest judge or congress representative.
Many of them wouldn't have the time to go, but who knows, if they get flooded with enough legitimate offers -- some might. Hell, we could even extend this offer to their immediate family members and immediate staff members.
"
In previous cases these incidents have usually been ignored by law enforcement, as it's understandably hard to explain how someone 'stole' stuff from you when it's all bits on some game server.
[...]
Looks like in this case the person losing the stuff went further than EA/Origin customer support and got law enforcement onto the case - and they actually responded and arrested the guy!"
It probably helped that the thief put some monetary value on the stolen property as he was selling it.
In my state, you can shoot my dog, you'll have a small fine for being cruel to an animal, and you'll have to pay me $10 for the depreciated value of the dog (assuming the dog is a mutt). But on the other hand, if you steal my dog and for some reason you sold it for $500, then that would constitute felony theft and there is a much better chance that the police and the court might be willing to get involved.
stephanruby: What else do you want? Do you want a just olympics too?
composer777: "Why are you taking the focus off the ideas? I mean, sure, you can get in as many cheap shots as you want. But a rational person will simply see this sentence as a lead in for cheap ad hominem attacks."
I didn't mean to make an attack on your person. I was trying to lead into a comparaison. I believe what you're advocating to do is very difficult and I am not sure how you mean to achieve those ends.
composer777: "Who cares about the Olympics? Why would you reduce something like life and death down to entertainment that repeats ever 2 years."
I didn't know we were talking about something as important as life and death, so please give me a concrete example.
Basicly, you are saying that giving every person an equal amount of opportunity as Adam Smith preached in "The Wealth of Nations" is a bad thing?
How do you define "equal amount of opportunity"? Do you think every child starts out equally? What happens to the child who starts out with highly educated parents?
By the way, I am not basing my political values on Adam Smith, I am basing them on my personal experience, as I migrated to the US from France.
"...The sooner people realize this, the sooner we will have implemented a just society. "
What makes you feel we all share your goal of a "just society"? What else do you want? Do you want a just olympics too? Would a just olympic event mean to you that there is no widening gap between the athletes and the couch potatoes. Is that your ultimate goal in life? To make everybody the same?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. You do realize that most spammers forge the From address (and frequently use someone else's actual email address)?
I do realize this and I don't have a problem with blocking a strangers' email address, even if it's a forgery. Right now, I have 30+ specific filters set up, so I know my email is being passed around on the internet, but I guess I really don't have that much spam.
Re:It never ceases to amaze me...
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"...how O'Reilly repeatedly price their conferences out of the range of most of the people that build, or are likely to build, the very software the conferences are about."
Most technical conferences give out lots and lots of free complimentary tickets to their events. That's partly why the remaining tickets get to be so expensive. If you don't receive any free complimentary tickets yourself, then it could possibly mean you're not really part of the social fabric of those communities.
I am not making an assertion, so please don't get upset, I am just making a guess based on my personal experience.
"Oh? Many people set their filters to tag'n'bag (or simply dump) any non plain-ascii email."
Many legitimate people unwittingly send html emails. You may not want to receive emails from those kinds of people, but I don't know what the big deal is. Personally, I have KDE mail, I set it not to render html, and whenever I do receive some spam, I filter it by the email which sent it to me. This way, I don't get false positives, I do receive some *new* spam once every month, but I certainly don't receive enough to lose any sleep over it.
"What's to stop l33t hax0rs from tooling around with a Mr. Electricity Soldering Kit and changing how much is on it? "
In Japan I remember people that did just this to Japanese (microchip) phone cards.
Unless they're foolish enough to think their cards are hacker-proof, I would figure they'd try to mitigate this problem with some kind of unique id on each card. Every night, a central database could reconcile the amount left on each card along with each specific id number. I say "every night" because that's how the debit smart card system already works in France. Once you entered your pin number, the approval doesn't even take half a second (unlike in the US), the approval is instanteneous because the amount left on the card and the public key for the pin number is also stored on the card.
Re:Card to card transfers?
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"I wonder if there will be a way to transfer money directly from one card to another, although I suppose you would need a separate machine for that."
I suspect there will be a way to do this, but I have a feeling they won't make it easy for us to do so. The leftover change remaining on those prepaid cards is very tempting to the issuing organizations. In France, you already can't get a refund for the leftover change you have in your phone cards.
As consumers, it is important that we don't utilize this mode of paiment until we get this refund/rollover issue guaranteed and clarified.
They just said no-one should be forced to say it (although they could always say it on their free will). That decision does not sound crackpot at all to me.
Here is the parable that originally convinced our congress not to force our kids to say the pledge of allegiance. The Children's Story -- by James Clavell
If you want to do a great service for your country, buy it, read it, and give a copy to your politicians. It's a great little story and it's not based on politically correct nonsense -- so the typical american politician might actually enjoy it.
I think you're affected by the 'My-Country-Is-Alone-In-The-World' syndrom, which, curiously, seems to affect lots of Americans, even when the topic of the discussion is *internationalized* domain names (!). Something must be very wrong, here...
Don't feel too bad. We would all be speaking French and using Minitel Numbers (instead of domain names) if the French government had actually gotten its act together and decentralized and deregulated the industry (instead of giving away free computers to the masses and controling the network like crazy).
"... except when it comes to software development, eh? Or is the 'bazaar' anything but? "
I am not sure what you're getting at?
"Excuse me for making use of the English language. Besides, if it's a duck and all that, well..."
Again, I think you have a poor understanding of what "communism-type" and "dictatorship" are suppose to be about. That's not a fact, that's my opinion. You're entitled to your own opinion. You're even entitled to call your own dubious opinion a non-judgemental fact, so please don't feel obligated to "excuse" yourself for it (I was certainly not asking for your apology).
"Ohhhh, the classic 'if you don't like it, fuck off' or it's more popular variation 'stop complaining and [write some code|fork the source]' post. Hadn't seen that one in a while."
I understand why you may feel this is what I said. Reading it back myself, it sounds like this is what came out, but this is not what I meant. There is no sensible backpedaling on this one, I did a piss poor job at expressing my opinion. So here comes my retraction (for what it's worth).
First, to recap, here is what I said:
"In any case, you make a valid point regarding the lofty titles. Lofty titles are a sign of ego-driven organizations. Perhaps, now that you've pinpointed the problem, you could start your own branch called the 'EgolessBSD'?"
So here is what I wish I would have said:
Bungi, I think you're on to something. I've heard so many nonsensical self-agrandizing titles, I am really getting sick of them myself. Unfortunatly, "lofty" titles are not only the province of open source projects, really stupid "lofty" titles and really stupid acronyms can also be found in for-profit corporations. For example, I used to work for a department at a company that changed its name to the "World-Wide Consumer Insights Department", please don't ask me what it meant, I still haven't figured it out and I used to work there. In addition, if you look at the World Wide Web, a model of sorts for anarcho-capitalism, I think you'll find a plethora of really stupid "lofty" names all over the place. So in the end, I think "lofty" titles are ego-driven and not necessarily politically-inspired as you seem to imply.
Perhaps, someone could start an an open source egoless Operating System. The contributions could all be anonymous and noone would be given any credit for their work. The concept would work somewhat like http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
, or http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CollectiveCodeOwnership
, and people would be discouraged to take credit or put initials next to their work. This would take care of the "lofty" title problem, since without a name, they wouldn't care about their title.
Personally, this is not something I would want to work on myself, since I am an ego-driven individual, but since this idea works somewhat for a good portion of the content on the WikiWikiWeb -- who knows? It could actually work for a BSD operating system.
"...a communist-type dictatorship that runs largely on good will (and I make no judgement regarding that, that's just what it is)."
Communist-type dictatorships do not run on good will, they run on coercion. I am surprised that such a non-judgemental post would use so many politically-loaded words (i.e. "communist-type" and "dictatorship").
"Any projects needs leadership, but even avoiding dumb lofty titles and meaningless labels..."
In any case, you make a valid point regarding the lofty titles. Lofty titles are a sign of ego-driven organizations. Perhaps, now that you've pinpointed the problem, you could start your own branch called the "EgolessBSD"?
Very true. I had never written a computer program before sophomore year in college. Loved it so much I changed my major to CS. I still graduated on time, with a very high GPA in major.
I'm not saying this to brag, but to say that programming requires certain innate abilities that cannot be taught.
According to your web page, you went to Clemson University. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but if you had gone to a better university, you would probably have flunked out in a couple of weeks.
"BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Indiana University was crowned the nation's No. 1 "party school" Monday in an annual Princeton Review survey that school leaders and medical experts derided as irresponsible and unscientific.
Following IU in the rankings were Clemson University, the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Florida..."
hmm... I see, why isnt/. using PNG or JPEG , the images don't look suited to GIF.
Don't quote me on that, but I think GIFs are for graphics/drawings with less pixel variations and png/jpeg are for photographs with lots of details. Anyway, that's what I remember.
I guess I could go look it up, but I am to lazy to do so right now.
I hope this guy is paying royalties to Tintin's friend : Professor Tournesol. He was definitely first [casterman.com]
I think Leonardo Da Vinci predates Professor Tournesol. (Granted, Leonardo's submarine was only a "semi-submersible")
http://www.loadstar.prometeus.net/leonardo/ships.h tml
"The 'submarine' was simply a shell with room enough for one person to sit inside. It was topped with a conning tower which had a lid and pre-dated the true submarine by over one hundred years. Leonardo was to describe it as a "ship to sink another ship."
Leonardo considered that the best way to defend against underwater attack by ships similar in design to his 'submarine' was to have double-hulled boats. This would not only solve the problem of ramming, but also that of divers interfering with the vessel. By this time he had already devised a method by which divers could separate the planks of ships.
He considered how lost ships could be recovered, and designed air-filled tanks which divers could attach to the hulls of a sunken ships in an attempt to re-float them. And once your ship is once more on the surface you need to remove the excess water. Leonardo then designed a machine which would extract the water and then dry the holds of ships.
His designs included a one-man battleship, and in considering ships for wartime use Leonardo realised the importance of making guns easier to load and fire. This same drawing displays two remote-control guns with rapid-firing mechanisms. "
"I'm no republican, but I still don't see where Bush has done anything legally wrong."
Legally wrong? We shouldn't judge our leader by the laws he has "not broken". That's a louzy way to judge a leader. Besides, Bush has broken plenty of international laws, correction, Bush has arrogantly decided what is legal and what is not legal (i.e. illegal combatants, the Geneva convention, disarmement treaties, interrogation techniques, etc.). Eventually, many of his decisions will be deemed illegal, but that will take time -- time to uncover and time to adjudicate. Saying that he has not done anything illegal does not say much. Our President is immune to international laws since he is doing the illegal activities under the banner or our country and he is also immune from most of our national laws since in the end he can pardon pretty much whomever he wants.
"Supposedly he began supporting Lisa and her mother after he left Apple (and started NeXT and Pixar)."
As Chris Rock would say. That's what the guy is supposed to do. Noone will give you props for something you're suppose to do. In any case, with the advent of DNA technology, it would have been really really stupid for him to keep on denying her existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mod this anonymous coward up before this thread degenerates even more into stupidity.
Quick, let's get this ported unto Linux!
The original statement still stands. "47% of Slashdot Users are using Windows as their *main* OS". I am not one of those 47 percent, but I still use Windows once in a while. I would expect a good portion of those 53 percent do as well.
Consumer Reports discussed a similar issue a year or two years ago. They said that as soon as Tanya Harding checked in for a sprained wrist at a small private hospital, the employees made over 300 separate queries for her medical records.
Again, he might not have known about that part. Initially, most of us didn't know the Pentagon was attacked by an airliner.
There is no excuse for the way you were treated, but for the sake of argument -- if I catch someone breaking in and stealing my stereo. It doesn't matter if the guy couldn't make it out of my house and it does not matter if he couldn't make me suffer that loss. It only matters that the guy had my stereo in his hands while he was trying to get away.
This got me thinking. Why don't we focus on educating our judges and congressmens for a while? And by that I mean, giving them somekind of free adhoc technical education. Next time one of us needs to fill up a classroom, or fill up a technical conference, we could send a free (non-transferable) complimentary ticket to our nearest judge or congress representative.
Many of them wouldn't have the time to go, but who knows, if they get flooded with enough legitimate offers -- some might. Hell, we could even extend this offer to their immediate family members and immediate staff members.
It probably helped that the thief put some monetary value on the stolen property as he was selling it.
In my state, you can shoot my dog, you'll have a small fine for being cruel to an animal, and you'll have to pay me $10 for the depreciated value of the dog (assuming the dog is a mutt). But on the other hand, if you steal my dog and for some reason you sold it for $500, then that would constitute felony theft and there is a much better chance that the police and the court might be willing to get involved.
Assuming that I was one of those people you were talking about, how would one go about verifying this? And how would one change this?
composer777: "Why are you taking the focus off the ideas? I mean, sure, you can get in as many cheap shots as you want. But a rational person will simply see this sentence as a lead in for cheap ad hominem attacks."
I didn't mean to make an attack on your person. I was trying to lead into a comparaison. I believe what you're advocating to do is very difficult and I am not sure how you mean to achieve those ends.
composer777: "Who cares about the Olympics? Why would you reduce something like life and death down to entertainment that repeats ever 2 years."
I didn't know we were talking about something as important as life and death, so please give me a concrete example.
Basicly, you are saying that giving every person an equal amount of opportunity as Adam Smith preached in "The Wealth of Nations" is a bad thing?
How do you define "equal amount of opportunity"? Do you think every child starts out equally? What happens to the child who starts out with highly educated parents?
By the way, I am not basing my political values on Adam Smith, I am basing them on my personal experience, as I migrated to the US from France.
What makes you feel we all share your goal of a "just society"? What else do you want? Do you want a just olympics too? Would a just olympic event mean to you that there is no widening gap between the athletes and the couch potatoes. Is that your ultimate goal in life? To make everybody the same?
I do realize this and I don't have a problem with blocking a strangers' email address, even if it's a forgery. Right now, I have 30+ specific filters set up, so I know my email is being passed around on the internet, but I guess I really don't have that much spam.
Most technical conferences give out lots and lots of free complimentary tickets to their events. That's partly why the remaining tickets get to be so expensive. If you don't receive any free complimentary tickets yourself, then it could possibly mean you're not really part of the social fabric of those communities.
I am not making an assertion, so please don't get upset, I am just making a guess based on my personal experience.
Many legitimate people unwittingly send html emails. You may not want to receive emails from those kinds of people, but I don't know what the big deal is. Personally, I have KDE mail, I set it not to render html, and whenever I do receive some spam, I filter it by the email which sent it to me. This way, I don't get false positives, I do receive some *new* spam once every month, but I certainly don't receive enough to lose any sleep over it.
In Japan I remember people that did just this to Japanese (microchip) phone cards.
Unless they're foolish enough to think their cards are hacker-proof, I would figure they'd try to mitigate this problem with some kind of unique id on each card. Every night, a central database could reconcile the amount left on each card along with each specific id number. I say "every night" because that's how the debit smart card system already works in France. Once you entered your pin number, the approval doesn't even take half a second (unlike in the US), the approval is instanteneous because the amount left on the card and the public key for the pin number is also stored on the card.
I suspect there will be a way to do this, but I have a feeling they won't make it easy for us to do so. The leftover change remaining on those prepaid cards is very tempting to the issuing organizations. In France, you already can't get a refund for the leftover change you have in your phone cards.
As consumers, it is important that we don't utilize this mode of paiment until we get this refund/rollover issue guaranteed and clarified.
Here is the parable that originally convinced our congress not to force our kids to say the pledge of allegiance. The Children's Story -- by James Clavell
If you want to do a great service for your country, buy it, read it, and give a copy to your politicians. It's a great little story and it's not based on politically correct nonsense -- so the typical american politician might actually enjoy it.
Don't feel too bad. We would all be speaking French and using Minitel Numbers (instead of domain names) if the French government had actually gotten its act together and decentralized and deregulated the industry (instead of giving away free computers to the masses and controling the network like crazy).
I am not sure what you're getting at?
"Excuse me for making use of the English language. Besides, if it's a duck and all that, well..."
Again, I think you have a poor understanding of what "communism-type" and "dictatorship" are suppose to be about. That's not a fact, that's my opinion. You're entitled to your own opinion. You're even entitled to call your own dubious opinion a non-judgemental fact, so please don't feel obligated to "excuse" yourself for it (I was certainly not asking for your apology).
"Ohhhh, the classic 'if you don't like it, fuck off' or it's more popular variation 'stop complaining and [write some code|fork the source]' post. Hadn't seen that one in a while."
I understand why you may feel this is what I said. Reading it back myself, it sounds like this is what came out, but this is not what I meant. There is no sensible backpedaling on this one, I did a piss poor job at expressing my opinion. So here comes my retraction (for what it's worth).
First, to recap, here is what I said:
"In any case, you make a valid point regarding the lofty titles. Lofty titles are a sign of ego-driven organizations. Perhaps, now that you've pinpointed the problem, you could start your own branch called the 'EgolessBSD'?"
So here is what I wish I would have said:
Bungi, I think you're on to something. I've heard so many nonsensical self-agrandizing titles, I am really getting sick of them myself. Unfortunatly, "lofty" titles are not only the province of open source projects, really stupid "lofty" titles and really stupid acronyms can also be found in for-profit corporations. For example, I used to work for a department at a company that changed its name to the "World-Wide Consumer Insights Department", please don't ask me what it meant, I still haven't figured it out and I used to work there. In addition, if you look at the World Wide Web, a model of sorts for anarcho-capitalism, I think you'll find a plethora of really stupid "lofty" names all over the place. So in the end, I think "lofty" titles are ego-driven and not necessarily politically-inspired as you seem to imply.
Perhaps, someone could start an an open source egoless Operating System. The contributions could all be anonymous and noone would be given any credit for their work. The concept would work somewhat like http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors , or http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CollectiveCodeOwnership , and people would be discouraged to take credit or put initials next to their work. This would take care of the "lofty" title problem, since without a name, they wouldn't care about their title.
Personally, this is not something I would want to work on myself, since I am an ego-driven individual, but since this idea works somewhat for a good portion of the content on the WikiWikiWeb -- who knows? It could actually work for a BSD operating system.
Communist-type dictatorships do not run on good will, they run on coercion. I am surprised that such a non-judgemental post would use so many politically-loaded words (i.e. "communist-type" and "dictatorship").
"Any projects needs leadership, but even avoiding dumb lofty titles and meaningless labels..."
In any case, you make a valid point regarding the lofty titles. Lofty titles are a sign of ego-driven organizations. Perhaps, now that you've pinpointed the problem, you could start your own branch called the "EgolessBSD"?
According to your web page, you went to Clemson University. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but if you had gone to a better university, you would probably have flunked out in a couple of weeks.
"BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Indiana University was crowned the nation's No. 1 "party school" Monday in an annual Princeton Review survey that school leaders and medical experts derided as irresponsible and unscientific.
Following IU in the rankings were Clemson University, the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Florida..."
Don't quote me on that, but I think GIFs are for graphics/drawings with less pixel variations and png/jpeg are for photographs with lots of details. Anyway, that's what I remember. I guess I could go look it up, but I am to lazy to do so right now.
I think Leonardo Da Vinci predates Professor Tournesol. (Granted, Leonardo's submarine was only a "semi-submersible")
http://www.loadstar.prometeus.net/leonardo/ships.h tml
"The 'submarine' was simply a shell with room enough for one person to sit inside. It was topped with a conning tower which had a lid and pre-dated the true submarine by over one hundred years. Leonardo was to describe it as a "ship to sink another ship."
Leonardo considered that the best way to defend against underwater attack by ships similar in design to his 'submarine' was to have double-hulled boats. This would not only solve the problem of ramming, but also that of divers interfering with the vessel. By this time he had already devised a method by which divers could separate the planks of ships.
He considered how lost ships could be recovered, and designed air-filled tanks which divers could attach to the hulls of a sunken ships in an attempt to re-float them. And once your ship is once more on the surface you need to remove the excess water. Leonardo then designed a machine which would extract the water and then dry the holds of ships.
His designs included a one-man battleship, and in considering ships for wartime use Leonardo realised the importance of making guns easier to load and fire. This same drawing displays two remote-control guns with rapid-firing mechanisms. "
Legally wrong? We shouldn't judge our leader by the laws he has "not broken". That's a louzy way to judge a leader. Besides, Bush has broken plenty of international laws, correction, Bush has arrogantly decided what is legal and what is not legal (i.e. illegal combatants, the Geneva convention, disarmement treaties, interrogation techniques, etc.). Eventually, many of his decisions will be deemed illegal, but that will take time -- time to uncover and time to adjudicate. Saying that he has not done anything illegal does not say much. Our President is immune to international laws since he is doing the illegal activities under the banner or our country and he is also immune from most of our national laws since in the end he can pardon pretty much whomever he wants.
As Chris Rock would say. That's what the guy is supposed to do. Noone will give you props for something you're suppose to do. In any case, with the advent of DNA technology, it would have been really really stupid for him to keep on denying her existence.