You are on crack. No mathematics is going to magically reconstruct pixel information that has been destroyed. If it does, I'm going to get straight to work on a program that starts with a blank hard drive and mathematically interpolates "what should be there"...music, movies, software, whatever.
If there was even a remote chance that your phone was going to interfere with the airplane electronics, the FAA would have issued the regulation to prevent it, not the FCC. Not to mention which, if airplanes were really that fragile, there wouldn't be any need to hijack them, would there? Why not get a $200 ham UHF radio and semi-directional antenna at Fry's, and bring down everybody on approach at LAX.
Re:Spam is dead for me.
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I've had an e-mail address for over 15 years. My spam in the past 2 months is less than I had 10 years ago. I post my main address unobfuscated on/. and 25 other public forums. My signal to noise ratio is 100:1. In 5 days I received about 200 real e-mails and 3 spam.
Me too, me too, me too. Except that 3 spam in 5 days would be unusual for me.
I gave up hosting my own e-mail late last year. I moved all my employees and family to gmail.
Oops, not me too. I still run my own mail on my own domains and have given up nothing. I didn't have to turn over the storage and routing to some distant corporation (even though it's maybe not so distant for me, I work at Google). It's called server side Spamassassin. Mix with sendmail, postfix, or Exim, season with procmail, it's really not that hard. At least not for somebody that was already running mail servers on their domains. There have been good times and bad times in the last 10 years' arms race with spammers, but for now, spam is a solvable problem.
You obviously don't live in L.A. Anything that succeeds, was genius and needs to be compensated accordingly. Anything that fails, was somebody else's fault, or bad luck. This logic should be second nature to a "BushCheney08," no?
Sometimes, educational software (and software in the schools) can be useful, but the biggest problem is that it seems like we use computers for the sake of using computers, and not for the sake of learning.
More to the point, it seems like we use computers for the sake of transferring large amounts of money from parents and school budgets to hucksters and con artists. I used to work for a company that subcontracted for Leapfrog, which was at the time pushing to get their gimmicky talking-book machines into schools (maybe they still are, I don't know). Same crap, different decade.
The reviewer seems to have covered all the basic information, but didn't emphasize some of the less obvious features that, for me, make the Squeezebox worth its price tag..
Every conceivable output interface--optical SPDIF, coax SPDIF, headphone jack, RCA (although truth be told, you might as well just use the RCA output since the Squeezebox's DAC is probably better than the one you were going to plug it in to)
Completely useable with just the remote and built-in display--some of these devices require a TV to provide a decent interface, and I hate having the TV on (not to mention the bedroom where there is no TV)
Being able to sync multiple players--on those rare occasions when I have a party, I lock the players together and play one stream to the whole house without dragging cables around
Wireless version also a wireless bridge (in v2 and v3)--if you have something else in the living room that wants to plug in to the network, like a game console, this feature saves you an extra $75 right there.
Transparently plays any file format you've got--the box itself can decode mp3, flac, or straight PCM, but if you have something else the server will decode it on the fly and stream it to the box. Although this does require you to have some CPU power on the machine running slimserver, of course.
It has no onboard storage--for me this is a feature, because otherwise there would be yet more copies of the music that needed constant maintenance to stay up to date, like the iPods
Also, I happen to be one of those people that has to compulsively hack up every device to do unnatural things, which means that the open-source Perl server is critical (even though it is kind of a beast). Some more neat things for hackers:
You can directly control the text on the display (actually you can do bitmapped graphics on the v2 and v3 models), so people have it scroll their emails as they come in, RSS headlines, play Tetris, caller ID when the phone rings,whatever
You get notification of button presses on the remote control, which you can reprogram to do whatever you want: make your computer do something, or send X10 automation commands if you've got your geek on to that degree
It can pass through arbitrary PCM streams, so you can even play weird stuff like DTS-encoded 5.1 channel wav files
You can of course integrate it with any other web pages you were writing, so you can do the all-important now playing on your blog
The slimserver does everything in plain old HTTP including mp3 streaming, so you can use your whole TCP bag of tricks like ssh port forwarding to connect an xmms client from work, for example
The server can do bandwidth limiting per client. You could have a local player at home set for unlimited bandwidth so the server will send a lossless stream and you won't miss a single precious bit, and another player at work connected through ssh, and the server will automatically transcode everything to the maximum bitrate you set
It has a plugin interface, so you can get lots of these tricks to work without writing the code yourself
I know there's lots I'm forgetting but I have to try to get this post in while there is still a chance somebody will see it...
HTTP is not a stateful protocol -- sort of, if all you know is RFC 2616. But if you're using any kind of language to create dynamic content on the server, the first thing that happens is almost always to set a session cookie for purposes of maintaining state.
HTTP is not a connected protocol -- sort of, unless you count persistent connections which have been allowed since RFC 2068 (HTTP 1.1). And now XmlHttpRequest muddies that question even more.
This isn't the Constitution we're talking about; I don't know why people bother to argue from "first principles" such as "HTTP is not stateful." There's nothing morally superior about a stateless protocol. The protocol has changed over time. There's no point pretending it hasn't.
...people weren't hot on a GPS transmitter inside secured locations either.
Why? The latitude and longitude of the secured location was classified? Or was it that the crack team of Coke prize deliverypeople was going to rappel down from a stealth helicopter carrying TV cameras?
I'm not blaming you; I'm sure it was a real policy, just the idiotic knee-jerk kind that TFA was also filled with. I especially liked how "Regularly changing passwords of letters and numerals" was listed as a "defense" against the totally l33t, totally new, super-sneaky practice of using a digital camera as a USB drive.
Honestly, 95 out of 100 "security experts" in these IT rags have just memorized five or six bullet points that they spew forth when their button is pushed. Like a $2.99 talking picture frame at Wal-mart, but with less memory.
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
Oh. Well, in that case, off you go.
Hey now, it worked for Microsoft, except that nobody at Microsoft ever said they were sorry. Break the law, get convicted, punishment is that you have to promise not to do it again. A clever precedent to set, given the whoppers that the Bush administration already had in the works in 2001...
It should be illegal to advertise the price after rebate more prominently than the price before.
That appears to be exactly the case in Connecticut. I lived there until I left for college in California, and still go there every year for Christmas, and last time I was there I noticed that every advertisement listed the in-store price, and the after-rebate price was in the small print with the description of the rebate itself. It's the same corporations--Staples, Best Buy, etc.--so I assume they weren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or because the citizens are unusually clever (although it is a tradition, see nutmeg state).
So yes, I couldn't agree more, the STORE's advertisements should be required to display the price that you will pay IN THE STORE, and the rebate should be advertised as an extra discount available to some people under some circumstances requiring persistence and luck, which is what it is.
But if I could say "I'm looking for an ACADEMIC ABSTRACT" then I won't find porn, commerical sites, or little Susy's musings. I'll find abstracts.
What? The people operating the porn site, or the commercial site, really don't give damn what you were looking for, do they, and will tag their pages with whatever magic word you filter on. Surely I'm not the only person that remembers that every WWW search engine used to work exactly the way you describe, basically depending on the page authors to honestly index their own work, and that they were nearly useless. Google's big innovation was throwing out that entire worthless system and evaluating the links to a page rather than its content.
Might we see a wave of what were previously PC-only titles get ported to the 360 as game houses catch on?
Why would you want them? There were plenty of PC ports on the Xbox, most of them games that flopped on the PC and so their publishers were desperate to extract a little more income by porting it to a console. Even a good PC game, after a half assed porting job, plays like crap on a console controller. These games are how the Xbox got a reputation as a crappy imitation PC where mediocre, formulaic games go to die. It's hard to see a gigantic library of crap ports as a selling point.
Yeah, they sure a bunch of losers. Not contributing a damn thing to society, just uselessly wanking about how much their dog ate and why their friends from high school don't write. Serious people only get their news and information, from trusted, reliable sources.
Seriously, what the hell is it about blogging that inspires such hatred in some people's hearts? Too many of you guys got ex-girlfriends with Livejournal accounts?
And yet, if his screen scraper program becomes impractical, nobody will suffer more than Google. Winning over a bunch of jokers from Hotmail at the expense of popularizing a technology that cripples their real business of machine indexing web pages would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
Offtopic maybe, but as long as we're talking about the Crushlink sites, everyone should know that it is a well documented spam scam. This made the news sites a while back, although I am too lazy to google for the links. Basically, Crushlink and a couple others are all run by the same group of con artists out of Harvard(!), and get started by harvesting email addresses with spam bots. Later, of course, they hardly need the bots, because each sucker that got the first spam enters the real live email addresses of everybody they know, then each of those suckers does the same...
What broke the story was a site even more deceptive than Crushlink, whose name I forget (and probably shouldn't advertise anyway). This site would start with a similar spam ("Someone has a crush on you!"), get you to answer a bunch of personal questions, then manufacture a fictitious "secret admirer" that had--believe it or not--many of the same interests you did. Of course, the site goes on to entice you to enter more email addresses in exchange for more hints about your "secret admirer". I'll admit I fell for it for a while too, but at least I only gave/dev/null aliases on my own machine!
If "usable" means "WYSIWYG", probably not. TeX is non-WYSIWYG by design, like HTML once was; this is much of its appeal. (Giving a receptionist a copy of Word does not make him a competent typographer, any more than giving him a scalpel makes him a competent surgeon.) Nevertheless, there are several well-designed GUI front ends to TeX and LaTeX that make it easier for non-programmers to use:
This is both the encryption and decryption step. If you know that I'm likely to be talking about the "World Trade Center", you can then plug that key phrase into the resulting cyphertext at every possible point and look at the result. If you get a message back that looks like:
"T*e atta** **ll *e at ******* on t*e World Trade Center"
you can be pretty sure that you've identified part of the message because the result looks an awful lot like reasonable english. There are statistical ways to do this without having to attack it by eyeballing english. They're even pretty reliable.
What in the hell? This is how you would start a known-plaintext attack against a substitution cipher. It has no relevance whatsoever to a one time pad.
The entire point of the (ideal) OTP is that the key is truly random and of equal length as the message. Because of these facts, guessing part of the message reveals no information whatsoever about the rest of the message. Thus, guessing World Trade Center, even correctly, will not yield something like:
"T*e atta** **ll *e at ******* on t*e World Trade Center"
You would instead have:
"(* x 37)World Trade Center"
More importantly, it is useless to make guesses like this in the first place, because unlike other ciphers, the one time pad will provide you with no feedback as to whether your guess was right. The same ciphertext, produced by a one time pad, might decrypt to "World Trade Center", or "Golden Gate Bridge", or "Buy milk and eggs", all with equal probability.
Want to release your revolutionary, unbreakable cipher? Here's what I would do if I were you:
Get at least an undergraduate degree in discrete mathematics. A PhD is not overkill either.
Read Schneier's Applied Cryptography. In its entirety. Do the exercises.
Use the bibliography to locate other serious texts on the specific algorithms that interest you. Read them. In their entirety.
Still think your invention is revolutionary and unbreakable? Then you might start to attend conferences, and maybe one day, very humbly, ask for opinions from other researchers in the field. Be prepared to have your illusions shattered at this point.
Or, did you learn somewhere along the way that your invention is neither new nor difficult to break? Then, attempting to make a commercial product out of it will at best go completely unnoticed, and at worst your breathless press releases will gather just enough attention to utterly and permanently destroy your credibility amongst real cryptographers.
Honestly, don't Slashdot editors know better than to post this kind of thing? If the submitter does not have at least these basic credentials, then he has not invented the Revolutionary New Totally Unbreakable Encryption Scheme. He has not found a way to make the one time pad reusable. In fact, hearing this statement alone is enough to disqualify the new secret algorithm. A re-used one time pad is not a one-time pad. Period. The end. Making this claim is the mathematical equivalent to announcing that you have discovered a revolutionary new perpetual motion machine or incantation for turning lead to gold.
Should I be able to pop the hood on your car if it's in the parking lot of Wal-Mart because I'm curious as to how your car is different from mine.
No. Should you get life in the big house if you do that?
I'm interested in the architectural differences between our houses, so I break into your house because of my "curiosity."
If you did that, but did not take or break anything, do you think you would get life in prison?
I was under the impression that right and wrong were mutually exclusive. If it's not right then it has to be wrong.
This Axis-of-Evil crap, which you are parroting here, is one of the worst abuses that two useless Bush administrations has come up with. Before, it was the War on Drugs, now it's the War on Terrorism. Hey, future presidents! Got some societal ill that's obviously far too complex and pervasive for you to begin to address? Declare war on it!
The rhetoric has not changed: You are either for us or against us! God bless the USA! (insert patriotic theme a la Animal House.)
The methodology has not changed: Caught with a couple grams of an herb considered harmful by some? Lose your house, lose your car, do prison time comparable to assault or manslaughter. Caught using or (God forbid) writing a sequence of computer code that an American media corporation finds inconvenient? Lose your house, lose your equipment, and off to the cooler where you can only hope that someone like EFF or the ACLU takes up your case.
[Y]ou will go to jail. Pretty simple.
Indeed! As in, simplistic, oversimplified, and simple-minded. Who did more damage to life, liberty and the American Way--Kevin Mitnick or Kenneth Lay?
This being slashdot, I would have liked to think that somebody here actually knew how to update Red Hat. Three swings of the clue stick--
You do not have to pay to run up2date. You have to "register" the system, and Red Hat requires so little information that if you really must keep your $60, you can just register using the host name as the username and password. That's it.
If you choose not to pay for your up2date service, you will be locked out quite frequently with the message, "Free service limited due to high load." If the poster really hasn't seen this message before today, then he ain't been running up2date all that often in the last 6 months.
If you don't like being locked out sometimes, you can either pay the man or live with it. It's not that hard to live with. Put the up2date in a cron job and if it succeeds once every 10 days that's pretty much always good enough. Remember, patches for this one have actually been out for weeks.
I'm not a programmer (so sue me), but I do wonder about this... If you have two people, say one on Mars, and the other on Earth, and they have identical desire to produce code both doing the same thing, functioning on the same hardware (a requirement) eventually won't there be some code that is identical?
Coding is much more creative than many people realize. This argument is like saying, "William Shakespeare and Neil Simon both wrote plays, to be performed on stage, in the same language, with the purpose of being funny, so it should be no surprise if Neil Simon's latest script has 16 pages which are identical to A Midsummer Night's Dream."
The vast majority of opinions here seem to be amazingly childish.
Someone has finally called attention to the fact that the diamond engagement ring "tradition" and their high cost was entirely fabricated by a tiny group of wealthy persons, in order that they might become more wealthy.
As the poster has realized, diamonds have zero intrinsic value, zero resale value, zero investment value, and aren't especially attractive. More importantly, there is reason to believe that diamond production supports corrupt, oppressive governments, child labor, and maybe even the dreaded Bogeyman of 2002, terrorism.
But all this is unimportant, you say, because you have seen a few ads with women walking down the beach to classical music. Common sense and "consumer ethics" be damned, because we must buy these tiny, expensive-to-insure, pretentious monuments to conspicuous consumption?
Explain to me which, exactly, of these concerns is trivial again?
Why not put the money toward a down payment on a home? Or take a spectacular vacation? Which will bring you more happiness during the rest of your life, after your engagement of maybe a year is over? The value, commitment, and longevity of your relationship need not be commemorated by throwing away a great deal of money at the outset.
Slashdot Mirror
You are on crack. No mathematics is going to magically reconstruct pixel information that has been destroyed. If it does, I'm going to get straight to work on a program that starts with a blank hard drive and mathematically interpolates "what should be there"...music, movies, software, whatever.
If there was even a remote chance that your phone was going to interfere with the airplane electronics, the FAA would have issued the regulation to prevent it, not the FCC. Not to mention which, if airplanes were really that fragile, there wouldn't be any need to hijack them, would there? Why not get a $200 ham UHF radio and semi-directional antenna at Fry's, and bring down everybody on approach at LAX.
I've had an e-mail address for over 15 years. My spam in the past 2 months is less than I had 10 years ago. I post my main address unobfuscated on /. and 25 other public forums. My signal to noise ratio is 100:1. In 5 days I received about 200 real e-mails and 3 spam.
Me too, me too, me too. Except that 3 spam in 5 days would be unusual for me.
I gave up hosting my own e-mail late last year. I moved all my employees and family to gmail.
Oops, not me too. I still run my own mail on my own domains and have given up nothing. I didn't have to turn over the storage and routing to some distant corporation (even though it's maybe not so distant for me, I work at Google). It's called server side Spamassassin. Mix with sendmail, postfix, or Exim, season with procmail, it's really not that hard. At least not for somebody that was already running mail servers on their domains. There have been good times and bad times in the last 10 years' arms race with spammers, but for now, spam is a solvable problem.
You obviously don't live in L.A. Anything that succeeds, was genius and needs to be compensated accordingly. Anything that fails, was somebody else's fault, or bad luck. This logic should be second nature to a "BushCheney08," no?
Uh, the article you linked says that two thirds of American adults are fat, not two thirds of the people on Earth. That is a very different statement.
Sometimes, educational software (and software in the schools) can be useful, but the biggest problem is that it seems like we use computers for the sake of using computers, and not for the sake of learning.
More to the point, it seems like we use computers for the sake of transferring large amounts of money from parents and school budgets to hucksters and con artists. I used to work for a company that subcontracted for Leapfrog, which was at the time pushing to get their gimmicky talking-book machines into schools (maybe they still are, I don't know). Same crap, different decade.
The reviewer seems to have covered all the basic information, but didn't emphasize some of the less obvious features that, for me, make the Squeezebox worth its price tag..
Also, I happen to be one of those people that has to compulsively hack up every device to do unnatural things, which means that the open-source Perl server is critical (even though it is kind of a beast). Some more neat things for hackers:
I know there's lots I'm forgetting but I have to try to get this post in while there is still a chance somebody will see it...
HTTP is not a stateful protocol -- sort of, if all you know is RFC 2616. But if you're using any kind of language to create dynamic content on the server, the first thing that happens is almost always to set a session cookie for purposes of maintaining state.
HTTP is not a connected protocol -- sort of, unless you count persistent connections which have been allowed since RFC 2068 (HTTP 1.1). And now XmlHttpRequest muddies that question even more.
This isn't the Constitution we're talking about; I don't know why people bother to argue from "first principles" such as "HTTP is not stateful." There's nothing morally superior about a stateless protocol. The protocol has changed over time. There's no point pretending it hasn't.
Why? The latitude and longitude of the secured location was classified? Or was it that the crack team of Coke prize deliverypeople was going to rappel down from a stealth helicopter carrying TV cameras?
I'm not blaming you; I'm sure it was a real policy, just the idiotic knee-jerk kind that TFA was also filled with. I especially liked how "Regularly changing passwords of letters and numerals" was listed as a "defense" against the totally l33t, totally new, super-sneaky practice of using a digital camera as a USB drive.
Honestly, 95 out of 100 "security experts" in these IT rags have just memorized five or six bullet points that they spew forth when their button is pushed. Like a $2.99 talking picture frame at Wal-mart, but with less memory.
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
Oh. Well, in that case, off you go.
Hey now, it worked for Microsoft, except that nobody at Microsoft ever said they were sorry. Break the law, get convicted, punishment is that you have to promise not to do it again. A clever precedent to set, given the whoppers that the Bush administration already had in the works in 2001...
It should be illegal to advertise the price after rebate more prominently than the price before.
That appears to be exactly the case in Connecticut. I lived there until I left for college in California, and still go there every year for Christmas, and last time I was there I noticed that every advertisement listed the in-store price, and the after-rebate price was in the small print with the description of the rebate itself. It's the same corporations--Staples, Best Buy, etc.--so I assume they weren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or because the citizens are unusually clever (although it is a tradition, see nutmeg state).
So yes, I couldn't agree more, the STORE's advertisements should be required to display the price that you will pay IN THE STORE, and the rebate should be advertised as an extra discount available to some people under some circumstances requiring persistence and luck, which is what it is.
But if I could say "I'm looking for an ACADEMIC ABSTRACT" then I won't find porn, commerical sites, or little Susy's musings. I'll find abstracts.
What? The people operating the porn site, or the commercial site, really don't give damn what you were looking for, do they, and will tag their pages with whatever magic word you filter on. Surely I'm not the only person that remembers that every WWW search engine used to work exactly the way you describe, basically depending on the page authors to honestly index their own work, and that they were nearly useless. Google's big innovation was throwing out that entire worthless system and evaluating the links to a page rather than its content.
Might we see a wave of what were previously PC-only titles get ported to the 360 as game houses catch on?
Why would you want them? There were plenty of PC ports on the Xbox, most of them games that flopped on the PC and so their publishers were desperate to extract a little more income by porting it to a console. Even a good PC game, after a half assed porting job, plays like crap on a console controller. These games are how the Xbox got a reputation as a crappy imitation PC where mediocre, formulaic games go to die. It's hard to see a gigantic library of crap ports as a selling point.
Yeah, they sure a bunch of losers. Not contributing a damn thing to society, just uselessly wanking about how much their dog ate and why their friends from high school don't write. Serious people only get their news and information, from trusted, reliable sources.
Seriously, what the hell is it about blogging that inspires such hatred in some people's hearts? Too many of you guys got ex-girlfriends with Livejournal accounts?
And yet, if his screen scraper program becomes impractical, nobody will suffer more than Google. Winning over a bunch of jokers from Hotmail at the expense of popularizing a technology that cripples their real business of machine indexing web pages would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
Offtopic maybe, but as long as we're talking about the Crushlink sites, everyone should know that it is a well documented spam scam. This made the news sites a while back, although I am too lazy to google for the links. Basically, Crushlink and a couple others are all run by the same group of con artists out of Harvard(!), and get started by harvesting email addresses with spam bots. Later, of course, they hardly need the bots, because each sucker that got the first spam enters the real live email addresses of everybody they know, then each of those suckers does the same...
What broke the story was a site even more deceptive than Crushlink, whose name I forget (and probably shouldn't advertise anyway). This site would start with a similar spam ("Someone has a crush on you!"), get you to answer a bunch of personal questions, then manufacture a fictitious "secret admirer" that had--believe it or not--many of the same interests you did. Of course, the site goes on to entice you to enter more email addresses in exchange for more hints about your "secret admirer". I'll admit I fell for it for a while too, but at least I only gave /dev/null aliases on my own machine!
What in the hell? This is how you would start a known-plaintext attack against a substitution cipher. It has no relevance whatsoever to a one time pad.
The entire point of the (ideal) OTP is that the key is truly random and of equal length as the message. Because of these facts, guessing part of the message reveals no information whatsoever about the rest of the message. Thus, guessing World Trade Center, even correctly, will not yield something like:
You would instead have:
More importantly, it is useless to make guesses like this in the first place, because unlike other ciphers, the one time pad will provide you with no feedback as to whether your guess was right. The same ciphertext, produced by a one time pad, might decrypt to "World Trade Center", or "Golden Gate Bridge", or "Buy milk and eggs", all with equal probability.
Want to release your revolutionary, unbreakable cipher? Here's what I would do if I were you:
Honestly, don't Slashdot editors know better than to post this kind of thing? If the submitter does not have at least these basic credentials, then he has not invented the Revolutionary New Totally Unbreakable Encryption Scheme. He has not found a way to make the one time pad reusable. In fact, hearing this statement alone is enough to disqualify the new secret algorithm. A re-used one time pad is not a one-time pad. Period. The end. Making this claim is the mathematical equivalent to announcing that you have discovered a revolutionary new perpetual motion machine or incantation for turning lead to gold.
Have you ever lowered your voice when talking on a public phone, since you didn't want to be overheard?
Have you ever left a party, or a restaurant, or a meeting, in order to continue a conversation you didn't want to have in front of everyone present?
Have you ever closed the blinds when you checked into a hotel room?
Have you ever closed the blinds on the windows of your own house?
Have you ever parked your car down the street, rather than right in front of an establishment of questionable repute?
Have you ever moved your prescription medications out of the bathroom before company came over?
Finally (the classic), have you ever sent a piece of mail in a sealed envelope?
Did you answer yes to any of the above? What are you trying to hide?
No. Should you get life in the big house if you do that?
If you did that, but did not take or break anything, do you think you would get life in prison?
This Axis-of-Evil crap, which you are parroting here, is one of the worst abuses that two useless Bush administrations has come up with. Before, it was the War on Drugs, now it's the War on Terrorism. Hey, future presidents! Got some societal ill that's obviously far too complex and pervasive for you to begin to address? Declare war on it!
The rhetoric has not changed: You are either for us or against us! God bless the USA! (insert patriotic theme a la Animal House.)
The methodology has not changed: Caught with a couple grams of an herb considered harmful by some? Lose your house, lose your car, do prison time comparable to assault or manslaughter. Caught using or (God forbid) writing a sequence of computer code that an American media corporation finds inconvenient? Lose your house, lose your equipment, and off to the cooler where you can only hope that someone like EFF or the ACLU takes up your case.
Indeed! As in, simplistic, oversimplified, and simple-minded. Who did more damage to life, liberty and the American Way--Kevin Mitnick or Kenneth Lay?
This being slashdot, I would have liked to think that somebody here actually knew how to update Red Hat. Three swings of the clue stick--
I'm not a programmer (so sue me), but I do wonder about this... If you have two people, say one on Mars, and the other on Earth, and they have identical desire to produce code both doing the same thing, functioning on the same hardware (a requirement) eventually won't there be some code that is identical?
Coding is much more creative than many people realize. This argument is like saying, "William Shakespeare and Neil Simon both wrote plays, to be performed on stage, in the same language, with the purpose of being funny, so it should be no surprise if Neil Simon's latest script has 16 pages which are identical to A Midsummer Night's Dream."
The vast majority of opinions here seem to be amazingly childish.
Someone has finally called attention to the fact that the diamond engagement ring "tradition" and their high cost was entirely fabricated by a tiny group of wealthy persons, in order that they might become more wealthy.
As the poster has realized, diamonds have zero intrinsic value, zero resale value, zero investment value, and aren't especially attractive. More importantly, there is reason to believe that diamond production supports corrupt, oppressive governments, child labor, and maybe even the dreaded Bogeyman of 2002, terrorism.
But all this is unimportant, you say, because you have seen a few ads with women walking down the beach to classical music. Common sense and "consumer ethics" be damned, because we must buy these tiny, expensive-to-insure, pretentious monuments to conspicuous consumption?
Explain to me which, exactly, of these concerns is trivial again?
Why not put the money toward a down payment on a home? Or take a spectacular vacation? Which will bring you more happiness during the rest of your life, after your engagement of maybe a year is over? The value, commitment, and longevity of your relationship need not be commemorated by throwing away a great deal of money at the outset.