I watched it happen before -- the Scientologists use this technical extensively. The idea of a lawsuit, according to Hubbard, was not to win, but to harrass, to intimidate, to bankrupt, to exhaust, to ruin. In advanced cases, the broken victim can even be brought on board the attacker's cause, as a requirement for cessation of legal attacks. Oh, and gag clauses for the poor schmuck is standard as well.
You've just slandered the Church! We'll see you in court. Have a nice day.
Somebody doesn't know the difference between state and federal taxes,
It's obvious to me that YOU don't understand how they're linked. Federal Adjusted Gross Income is used by most states to figure out a person's state income (and ultimately the level of state income tax they pay). To the extent that any federal tax bills reduce the amount of AGI reported on your 1040, the states will either have to raise tax rates to recoup that or suck it up and cut services.
I don't want the government to be able to access anything about my life anytime they feel like it without having a good reason, and without having some valid checks on the process. Just because some agent of the government thinks I may be a terrorist or other criminal mastermind should not be reason enough to order taps on my phones, continuous surveillance on my net connection, my person and my friends.
There was a reason that search warrants used to be required before the gestapo could 'zoom-in' on your life. It's called the Constitution. The reason isn't to make it hard for law enforcement to do their jobs, it's to prevent them from REPEATING past violations of people's rights. I'm so sick and tired of hearing people say, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to fear." They always forget to add 'yet' at the end. As you sit back and let your freedoms erode, you lose your voice in what's right and what's not. 'They' will decide what's right and not right.
Finally, I would encourage people to top thinking that the ACLU or the EFF is going to bail them out . These are important organizations to people who believe in freedom, but they're just one voice. 1000 letters/voices from concerned citizens (and I don't mean 1000 cut-and-paste form letters) means a lot more than 1 from the ACLU or EFF. [Maybe that's naive in the U$ of today, but I like to maintain the illusion that people do care about a greater good].
Sorry this turned into a rant, but it's amazing how everyone seems to think that freedom and safety are mutually exclusive.
Duronio is being charged with securities fraud and one count of computer related fraud. The charges carry combined maximum sentences of 20 years in prison and fines of more than $1.25 million.
Nice to see computer laws working the right way for a change.
From the article:Recently, two Finnish churches refused to pay royalties to the country's copyright society for the performance of Christmas hymns. The congregations won their case in a district court, but the society has appealed.
There should be some minimal compensation, but this is just stupid. Is there no such thing as common sense anymore?
Your lightbulb goes on, you have an idea, you develop it, sell it, get a little money, everyone's happy right? When the hell is someone's ancestor going to claim rights to the Roman alphabet? What ever happened to "The Greater Good"... nevermind.
Please deposit $2 or have your civil liberties revoked. Thank you. Have a nice day.
"I wanna disconnect myself, pull my brain stem out and unplug myself." -- Rollins
I can easily make the argument that the money spent on defense is orders of magnitude more valuable than money spent ANYWHERE else.
Then please do. I don't understand how defense spending is inherently more beneficial than allocating money to other scientific endeavors.
Spending on defense is all well and good. Ultimately it comes back around to benefit society through new applications of military technology. But can't the same benefits be achieved without going through the middle man?
Okay, these guys 'stole' something. So charge them with some petty crime and send them on their way. It's not like they stole all the extra bandwidth, setup their own free DVD web site and pirated Harry Potter 2 24/7 for months on end.
IMHO, they should have just had their service cut off. It shouldn't take long to figure out some joker is sucking down way more bandwidth than they've been allocated. Oh wait, there I go again expecting people to be competent at what they do.
Capitalism is a system of economics, it shouldn't be a way of life.
Then you'd better never visit Tokyo dude. Because not only do you have to stand on the train, you're standing shoulder to shoulder, literally, during the rush hours. Zero personal space.
Get some comfortable shoes, a back brace and take a few deep breaths. Standing for an hour a day.. oh boo hoo.
This sounds like something Jon Katz would try and post.
Wow, video on CDs.. that's a great idea, but let's fast forward to reality for a second. Just in case anyone has forgotten, there are still plenty of schools in this country that don't even have TVs, let alone computers. Maybe we should focus more on bringing those sub-standard holes up to par and finding & paying good teachers. Creating a bunch of satellite learning centers is just plain unrealistic, unreasonable and will only widen education disparities.
What's next? supersonic flight? landing a man on the moon?
What exactly are we supposed to celebrate? The inept SAs that have failed to patch their systems? The sad lack of software development skills and abundance of corporate greed that combine to push shoddy software upon millions of users?
Maybe we should celebrate the resiliency of the Net. The fact that while attacks on systems continue to come daily, and at a seemingly increasing rate, everything still works most of the time.
--knowledge, not information, is power
Re:oh no... more global warming (...not...??)
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
If you voted for Al Gore, you are a freak, end of story
Well I'm not visiting America then. Half of you are freaks, apparently.
Since only about half of us stupid Yanks even bother to vote, but this standard only 25% of Americans are freaks.
What did real programmers do before interactivity? They sat down, figured out their program step by step, checked and rechecked for possible errors and then used the punch card machine to write it out and ran it. If it failed, they had to wait a day before they could get their program through the batch again.
Having to hand write code is probably a better way to test one's knowledge than having them use a computer for it. The reason being that you're in a different frame of mind. It's all part of being able to visualize things in different ways.
The way I did it was to think through the logical functions the programs had to perform (sometimes writing out a psuedo code version) and then converted it into actual code a section at a time.
College isn't always fun, but I found that I learned the most from the things I least wanted to do.
Some people seem to be suffering from an illusion that government is actually growing right now - why else would they be hiring? The simple truth of the matter is that most government IT workers are OLD. And I'm not talking, old like 30. They're old like 50, 60, 70. Yes, I used to work with a guy that was 70. Used to because he was diagnosed with cancer and died about a month later. Add to that the fact that like 1/4 or 1/3 (I can't recall the exact number) of government IT workers are retirement eligible.
The other issue is that not a lot of people want to work for the government. The government is pretty much 180-degrees from any sort of hacker ethic. No reward for risk, HUGE levels of red tape and you're pretty much surrounded by frickin idiots. Case in point, another person I work with just got a promotion and raise of around $10,000/yr... why? not because she was qualified or an outstanding performer, but because the position was open.
If you're out of work, you have to take what you can get... but the mediocrity of government is killing me.
When all the music companies try and put 5 CDs worth of music on these disks (to be unlocked by a special registration code), we will all get 5 CDs for the price of 1! Oh, yeah, I'm sure no one will break their reg code.. ha!
I think the big problem with this is that there is no real benefit to switching over to another digital format. I mean, CDs won out by replacing magnetic media (tapes and floppies) and records. I don't think we'll see another shift until we switch over to solid-state media - ROM chips or Flash cards of some sort.
People are stupid, but they're not as irrational as some high power execs like to imagine.
So, she can't buy a car to practice, and she can't practice without a car. It's a big mess. The only forseeable way around it is to let her drive one of our cars illegally until she gets good enough to pass the road test.
I lived there for a couple of years and had a great time. I fully agree with others who have actually experienced the high tech toilets, they are really nice.
The one thing I thought was really interesting though was that they have these ultra-high tech toilets.. and then there are the ultra-low tech toilets. Basically nothing more than a porcelain hole. You literally have to squat down to use it because there is no seat. and you'd better not lose your balance.
These super computers should be used by the NSA to help analyze every voice and text communication in the United States.
But seriously, I think it's great we can 'test' nukes without irradiating large portions of the country. I just wish we were as committed to saving the planet and living together as we are to spreading American mono-culture and smiting our enemies.
is that they are people too (well, sometimes). Managers are pretty much stuck in the middle... they get unreasonable and irrational demands from their bosses and they have to try and satisfy those that work for them. Good management is an art that many people are not well equiped to master and a capitalist system which weighs profit above everything else (necessarily) will never satisfy all parties completely.
Sometimes you just have to settle for doing the best you can with the rediculous constraints placed on you. Allow me to illustrate:
Customer wants web based training product to keep track of their students' progress. Use a cookie. They want the students to be able to use the training on multiple computers. Use a web server right? Uhmmm.. no. So I had to write an external program to copy cookies to/from a floppy diskette. It needs to be integrated into the training product itself. OOOOOOoookay. Now I know why people lust for retirement.
I have to wonder if the RIAA, by essentially pulling all their stuff off the Net, isn't leaving a void that might be better filled by low power broadcasters and independants? Really, they're doing us a favor.. how many net radio stations do you need, if they're all playing the same corporate generated drivel?
And doesn't an online-only broadcaster have certain advantages? They're not regulated and it's relatively cheap to start. Seems like it could be a sweet fusion of pirate radio and public access TV if done well.
Oh, what a wonderful time we live in that science can tell us sleeping 6 1/2 hours per night gives us the best chance at living longer than everyone else. How on Earth did we manage to live these thousands of years before accurate time keeping? Oh, that's right... we slept when we were tired, and woke up (usually) when our bodies told us it was time to.
Things like this are all well and good, but I've got better things to do with my day than worry whether I'm sleeping an hour too long or eating too many calories to reach my genetically predetermined maximum life-span.
Clinton and his lackeys began the Microsoft anti-trust actions. It just so happens it dragged on for so long that now Bush and his lackeys are in control. I believe that the government is not really interested in breaking up MS anymore. In fact, if a large group of states hadn't dissented with the settlement, it'd all be over and swept under the rug by now.
I don't think the current Executive has done anything to stop mega-mergers. In fact, the Post article reads: "The nation has only two major satellite providers, and they are seeking to merge."
Anyway, there is no inconsistency here, just different groups in power.
Slashdot Mirror
If the entire application crashes and the user had something valuable in another window, that data loss could be a big deal.
It's just the current window, not the whole application... at least on my system w/ IE6sp1.
Kevin said: I'm the only person in United States history that was held without an initial bail hearing.
I don't know if I quite buy that one. Certainly with the war on Terra, that is no longer a unique distinction.
I watched it happen before -- the Scientologists use this technical extensively. The idea of a lawsuit, according to Hubbard, was not to win, but to harrass, to intimidate, to bankrupt, to exhaust, to ruin. In advanced cases, the broken victim can even be brought on board the attacker's cause, as a requirement for cessation of legal attacks. Oh, and gag clauses for the poor schmuck is standard as well.
You've just slandered the Church! We'll see you in court. Have a nice day.
-- I bent my Wookie
Somebody doesn't know the difference between state and federal taxes,
It's obvious to me that YOU don't understand how they're linked. Federal Adjusted Gross Income is used by most states to figure out a person's state income (and ultimately the level of state income tax they pay). To the extent that any federal tax bills reduce the amount of AGI reported on your 1040, the states will either have to raise tax rates to recoup that or suck it up and cut services.
I don't want the government to be able to access anything about my life anytime they feel like it without having a good reason, and without having some valid checks on the process. Just because some agent of the government thinks I may be a terrorist or other criminal mastermind should not be reason enough to order taps on my phones, continuous surveillance on my net connection, my person and my friends.
There was a reason that search warrants used to be required before the gestapo could 'zoom-in' on your life. It's called the Constitution. The reason isn't to make it hard for law enforcement to do their jobs, it's to prevent them from REPEATING past violations of people's rights. I'm so sick and tired of hearing people say, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to fear." They always forget to add 'yet' at the end. As you sit back and let your freedoms erode, you lose your voice in what's right and what's not. 'They' will decide what's right and not right.
Finally, I would encourage people to top thinking that the ACLU or the EFF is going to bail them out . These are important organizations to people who believe in freedom, but they're just one voice. 1000 letters/voices from concerned citizens (and I don't mean 1000 cut-and-paste form letters) means a lot more than 1 from the ACLU or EFF. [Maybe that's naive in the U$ of today, but I like to maintain the illusion that people do care about a greater good].
Sorry this turned into a rant, but it's amazing how everyone seems to think that freedom and safety are mutually exclusive.
Nice to see computer laws working the right way for a change.
Too bad there's no law against stupid.
From the article:Recently, two Finnish churches refused to pay royalties to the country's copyright society for the performance of Christmas hymns. The congregations won their case in a district court, but the society has appealed.
There should be some minimal compensation, but this is just stupid. Is there no such thing as common sense anymore?
Your lightbulb goes on, you have an idea, you develop it, sell it, get a little money, everyone's happy right? When the hell is someone's ancestor going to claim rights to the Roman alphabet? What ever happened to "The Greater Good" ... nevermind.
Please deposit $2 or have your civil liberties revoked. Thank you. Have a nice day.
"I wanna disconnect myself, pull my brain stem out and unplug myself." -- Rollins
Then please do. I don't understand how defense spending is inherently more beneficial than allocating money to other scientific endeavors.
Spending on defense is all well and good. Ultimately it comes back around to benefit society through new applications of military technology. But can't the same benefits be achieved without going through the middle man?
Okay, these guys 'stole' something. So charge them with some petty crime and send them on their way. It's not like they stole all the extra bandwidth, setup their own free DVD web site and pirated Harry Potter 2 24/7 for months on end.
IMHO, they should have just had their service cut off. It shouldn't take long to figure out some joker is sucking down way more bandwidth than they've been allocated. Oh wait, there I go again expecting people to be competent at what they do.
Capitalism is a system of economics, it shouldn't be a way of life.
Then you'd better never visit Tokyo dude. Because not only do you have to stand on the train, you're standing shoulder to shoulder, literally, during the rush hours. Zero personal space.
Get some comfortable shoes, a back brace and take a few deep breaths. Standing for an hour a day.. oh boo hoo.
I don't know who Dr. James Parkinson was, but I don't go around calling it "Michael J. Fox's Disease".
It would have been nice to have both references.
This sounds like something Jon Katz would try and post.
Wow, video on CDs.. that's a great idea, but let's fast forward to reality for a second. Just in case anyone has forgotten, there are still plenty of schools in this country that don't even have TVs, let alone computers. Maybe we should focus more on bringing those sub-standard holes up to par and finding & paying good teachers. Creating a bunch of satellite learning centers is just plain unrealistic, unreasonable and will only widen education disparities.
What's next? supersonic flight? landing a man on the moon?
What exactly are we supposed to celebrate? The inept SAs that have failed to patch their systems? The sad lack of software development skills and abundance of corporate greed that combine to push shoddy software upon millions of users?
Maybe we should celebrate the resiliency of the Net. The fact that while attacks on systems continue to come daily, and at a seemingly increasing rate, everything still works most of the time.
--knowledge, not information, is power
Since only about half of us stupid Yanks even bother to vote, but this standard only 25% of Americans are freaks.
What did real programmers do before interactivity? They sat down, figured out their program step by step, checked and rechecked for possible errors and then used the punch card machine to write it out and ran it. If it failed, they had to wait a day before they could get their program through the batch again.
Having to hand write code is probably a better way to test one's knowledge than having them use a computer for it. The reason being that you're in a different frame of mind. It's all part of being able to visualize things in different ways.
The way I did it was to think through the logical functions the programs had to perform (sometimes writing out a psuedo code version) and then converted it into actual code a section at a time.
College isn't always fun, but I found that I learned the most from the things I least wanted to do.
Some people seem to be suffering from an illusion that government is actually growing right now - why else would they be hiring? The simple truth of the matter is that most government IT workers are OLD. And I'm not talking, old like 30. They're old like 50, 60, 70. Yes, I used to work with a guy that was 70. Used to because he was diagnosed with cancer and died about a month later. Add to that the fact that like 1/4 or 1/3 (I can't recall the exact number) of government IT workers are retirement eligible.
The other issue is that not a lot of people want to work for the government. The government is pretty much 180-degrees from any sort of hacker ethic. No reward for risk, HUGE levels of red tape and you're pretty much surrounded by frickin idiots. Case in point, another person I work with just got a promotion and raise of around $10,000/yr... why? not because she was qualified or an outstanding performer, but because the position was open.
If you're out of work, you have to take what you can get... but the mediocrity of government is killing me.
When all the music companies try and put 5 CDs worth of music on these disks (to be unlocked by a special registration code), we will all get 5 CDs for the price of 1! Oh, yeah, I'm sure no one will break their reg code.. ha!
I think the big problem with this is that there is no real benefit to switching over to another digital format. I mean, CDs won out by replacing magnetic media (tapes and floppies) and records. I don't think we'll see another shift until we switch over to solid-state media - ROM chips or Flash cards of some sort.
People are stupid, but they're not as irrational as some high power execs like to imagine.
So, she can't buy a car to practice, and she can't practice without a car. It's a big mess. The only forseeable way around it is to let her drive one of our cars illegally until she gets good enough to pass the road test.
Ever hear of a learners permit?
>The key is schools. Java is the it language now,
>and that matters more than people think.
By that logic, Pascal would have been a major language. But it was never really anything more than a teaching language.
I lived there for a couple of years and had a great time. I fully agree with others who have actually experienced the high tech toilets, they are really nice.
The one thing I thought was really interesting though was that they have these ultra-high tech toilets.. and then there are the ultra-low tech toilets. Basically nothing more than a porcelain hole. You literally have to squat down to use it because there is no seat. and you'd better not lose your balance.
These super computers should be used by the NSA to help analyze every voice and text communication in the United States.
But seriously, I think it's great we can 'test' nukes without irradiating large portions of the country. I just wish we were as committed to saving the planet and living together as we are to spreading American mono-culture and smiting our enemies.
is that they are people too (well, sometimes). Managers are pretty much stuck in the middle... they get unreasonable and irrational demands from their bosses and they have to try and satisfy those that work for them. Good management is an art that many people are not well equiped to master and a capitalist system which weighs profit above everything else (necessarily) will never satisfy all parties completely.
Sometimes you just have to settle for doing the best you can with the rediculous constraints placed on you. Allow me to illustrate:
Customer wants web based training product to keep track of their students' progress. Use a cookie. They want the students to be able to use the training on multiple computers. Use a web server right? Uhmmm.. no. So I had to write an external program to copy cookies to/from a floppy diskette. It needs to be integrated into the training product itself. OOOOOOoookay.
Now I know why people lust for retirement.
I have to wonder if the RIAA, by essentially pulling all their stuff off the Net, isn't leaving a void that might be better filled by low power broadcasters and independants? Really, they're doing us a favor.. how many net radio stations do you need, if they're all playing the same corporate generated drivel?
And doesn't an online-only broadcaster have certain advantages? They're not regulated and it's relatively cheap to start. Seems like it could be a sweet fusion of pirate radio and public access TV if done well.
-----
Imagine a world without advertising...
Oh, what a wonderful time we live in that science can tell us sleeping 6 1/2 hours per night gives us the best chance at living longer than everyone else. How on Earth did we manage to live these thousands of years before accurate time keeping? Oh, that's right... we slept when we were tired, and woke up (usually) when our bodies told us it was time to.
Things like this are all well and good, but I've got better things to do with my day than worry whether I'm sleeping an hour too long or eating too many calories to reach my genetically predetermined maximum life-span.
It's all about who controls the Executive...
Clinton and his lackeys began the Microsoft anti-trust actions. It just so happens it dragged on for so long that now Bush and his lackeys are in control. I believe that the government is not really interested in breaking up MS anymore. In fact, if a large group of states hadn't dissented with the settlement, it'd all be over and swept under the rug by now.
I don't think the current Executive has done anything to stop mega-mergers. In fact, the Post article reads: "The nation has only two major satellite providers, and they are seeking to merge."
Anyway, there is no inconsistency here, just different groups in power.