You could go either way with that. You could suggest that possessing fake child porn would spur a person on to actually molest a child. You could also suggest that it would provide enough of a release that the person wouldn't feel enough of a need to actually molest a real child. I don't know which is more likely, and I suspect you don't either. I imagine it's somewhere in the middle: some people might react one way, and some the other.
... except that pretty much everyone who uses does so for italics, and expects italics, and everyone who uses does so for bold and expects bold. So the semantic idealists failed.
One of the most important rules in software is: "be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you output."
This "rule" is what has gotten us into the browser incompatibility mess in the first place.
There's certainly some value in an interpreter fixing up minor errors, but the problem is when those fixups make it such that *correct* code can't always be interpreted as it was meant to, or can be interpreted in different, incompatible, non-conforming ways.
You long for a world where, if I put my STRONG tag and my EM tag in the wrong order, a completely trivial error, the browser should show absolutely nothing. Even though it's obvious to everybody what I *meant*, since a computer thinks like a computer and rejects it like a retard.
You've picked a ridiculously simple example that fails to prove your point. The problem is: where do you draw the line? I'm sure many experienced web developers here could come up with some great examples of HTML out in the wild that's incorrect, but the browsers accept it, all in slightly different ways that make the rendered page look different.
This "be liberal in what you receive" tenet is also why we have things like special cases for certain IMAP servers in client code.
I have no problem with censorship if the reasons are right. Yes, it's a slippery slope, and yes, what's "right" is subjective, but in this particular instance, I have no problem with it.
Maybe the next time Wales decides to censor something I won't agree.
This is merely a poignant reminder that nothing is really free, nothing is really decentralized, and the people "in charge" who pay for it ultimately get to decide how it works. A benevolent dictator is only benevolent if you agree with his/her methods.
On the plus side, I find the transparency after the fact refreshing and a reasonable compromise in this case.
Biographies of living persons must be written conservatively, with regard for the subject's privacy... The possibility of harm to living subjects is one of the important factors to be considered when exercising editorial judgment.
The whole "maintaining integrity" bit is compelling here, but I would think (and hope!) that one's commitment to human life would be stronger than their commitment to journalistic integrity. You're free to disagree with that, but in that case there's really nothing to argue about: it's just a difference of opinion.
I absolutely hate to say -- or even think -- this, but... this sounds like a great argument for TPM/DRM/TCPA/whatever it's called.
Let's face it: you can't educate users about security. Many people will understand, but many will not. And it just takes a few people who don't get it to cause a problem.
In the instance of your example, it would be useful if the person who created that original.doc file could have placed restrictions on the file such that at least 1) it can't be sent anywhere unencrypted, 2) it can't be stored on an unencrypted medium, 3) data cannot be copied out of the document and into an unsecured location.
Sure, you can always use the analog hole (manually retype the information into a new document), but one would *hope* that the restrictions placed on the file would make someone think twice about doing that, and possibly realise that the restrictions are there for a reason. Or perhaps I'm just giving people too much credit and am foolishly thinking you can solve a social problem with a technical solution.
But seriously... it's astounding how blatantly careless and idiotic some people are when dealing with sensitive information.
(Cornell alum here who fortunately has *not* so far been notified that his data was among that leaked.)
Thing is, people already *do* have the ability to use the phone of their choice, for the most part. You can easily buy a phone off ebay, unbranded, unlocked, and, assuming your network is compatible (which usually leaves out the CDMA providers), you can just put your SIM card in the new phone and do whatever you want. That's what I did; I have an unbranded, unlocked Motorola U9 that I'm using on T-Mobile's network in the US.
Besides, I don't really care about the carriers. The customer is king. If customers demand a more robust infrastructure that can handle more bandwidth-intensive applications, the carriers had damn well better provide it. If not, I'm sure there'd be another carrier willing to provide it and take my money.
Well, sorry, but that's just how it works. If you can't sign the contract... don't. There are other options, more expensive, usually, but that's the tradeoff you have to make. The initial month is nice to figure out if your phone will work in the places you care *now*, and that'll have to be good enough. Again: if you don't like the terms, don't accept them.
True, but lots of clones and forks do hurt a project.
Too bad. Don't do things with your project that make too many people want to fork it, and you'll be fine. If a lot of forks appear, it just means you aren't fulfilling your users' needs. Which isn't even a bad thing! Forks are generally good, not bad.
And in this case, your comment is a bit of a straw man -- as far as I can tell, Tomboy has one single fork/clone. Unless you're going to argue that *one* is "too many," I don't see how it's a problem...
I don't dislike C# because I think it's a bad language (I don't know enough about it to form an opinion); I dislike it because it's an extension of a possibly-encumbered Microsoft technology. I don't trust Microsoft. I see no need to do anything with C# while there are other technologies that do everything I need without tying me to something with a murky future, controlled by a company I don't trust.
A technology doesn't become invalid just because you can achieve all of the same goals by using a different technology. People like C#. There's a market for mono. Unless you've written apps in all the languages you mention (as well as C#), you really can't say which is "better" -- and even that is a subjective opinion.
Having said that, I dislike C# and Mono, and wish it wasn't necessary. Maybe that's just because C# and.NET come from Microsoft, but... that's where my opinion stands. I don't trust them.
Sure, that might save the state 90% of the cost of repaving, but how about the cost to drivers who use these roads frequently and will have to replace their tires more frequently? It might still be an overall savings, but it might not.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either?
Well, in my opinion I don't have to. In my mind, I just have to prove that any given god (pick one) cannot exist. And they all, invariable, makes certain testable claims, typically miracles. As any miracle hypothesis always ends up disproven, you can conclude that gods non-existence from that.
That sounds reasonable, assuming there actually are testable claims for every god/religion. I'm not really sure either way. Of course, this doesn't rule out some other "being" that we haven't thought up yet, but why over-complicate things...
But it all depends on what you *mean* with proof. Facts about the physical world can never be proven any more than you could prove that the next beer can you drop will actually fall to the floor instead of hanging in thin air. Yet, since I rather like beer, I would rather not drop the can.
Heh, true in an absolute sense, but not in any real-world practical sense. We take it as a given that gravity exists, and works, even though we don't completely know how. If we can't rely on some things as being "truth," then I don't think we can really live meaningfully. Of course it's a matter of degree. I tend to find such extremism in thought about the nature of reality to be interesting, even if mainly just mental masturbation.
Omnipotence is, fortunately, logically impossible (making the stone too heavy for them to lift, e.g.). So any god that claims omnipotence has automatically disproven itself. Yes, I am a mathematician, I can't help it.
Sure, sure, but you can revise "omnipotence" to be something like "maximally powerful." It is conceivable -- if unlikely -- that you could come up with a being that is logically consistent, but could produce "supernatural" (or perhaps just highly technologically advanced) feats that would easily foil any attempt to discover him.
Personally, I find Dawkins best when talking about evolution, and there are some excellent and interesting passages about that. God's (as he defines God) reasonble-sure-non-existence is like 5-minutes worth of thought.
I never understood why people find this debate so interesting at all. Atheism is the only reasonable intelligent choice if you have to choose, like "a-alfism", "a-dragon-ism", "a-moby-dick-ism" and so on and on and on.
Well, that's presupposing that people are both reasonable and logical, and never let emotions, upbringing, or thousands of years of history influence their thinking. We all have biases and incorrect assumptions about the world around us. Some people just have assumptions that we consider surprising. I know quite a few people who "believe" who are (otherwise) intelligent, reasonable people. While I continue to find that odd, I don't consider those people any less intelligent for it.
Being agnostic simply means that you are ready to revise and of those opinions if contrary evidence should turn up.
Sure. Most theists are (hopefully) agnostic but don't think of themselves as such, whether for political reasons (agnosticism being closely associated with that "distasteful" atheism) or just lack of association with the term.
Being atheistic simply means banking on the ---by far --- more likely scenario. People agree about this for any "a-***" except for some weird reason deism/theism.
Yep. Probably psychological effects. People tend to feel more comfortable knowing they're not the top of the food chain, and that there's someone looking over them, and that the buck doesn't stop at them.
Apparently, many people have this delusion that there is someone watching them all the time.
So... basically you're saying that by posting "data" that they could have fabricated with apparently publicly available information (which they could probably find by googling for posts just like yours), this suggests the hack might be legit? I'm not buying it. If they wanted to provide "proof," they'd post a sampling of entries of actual customer data.
This is probably just a stunt by some disgruntled/bored kid somewhere.
Really? I've been a T-Mobile customer for a little over 2 years now, and I've never had a problem with them. Of course, I've only had to call customer service twice. Both times they were friendly, quick, and helpful. One time I was having call dropping issues that turned out to be problems with my handset, but they tried to get to the bottom of it without assuming it was my fault. The other time I was going overseas and wanted to unlock my phone so I could use a local SIM card... The CSR immediately offered to email me the unlock code for my phone (which was still under the 2-year subsidized contract) and agreed that using a local SIM was a great way to save money while traveling.
So... HAH, my anecdotal report meets yours in battle! I'm sure there are plenty of people with both good and bad experiences.
As much as we'd all like to claim that "malicious hacking" is called "cracking," really, it's only the open source community that knows or cares about the difference. It's a futile battle... and there are far more important things to get bent out of shape about.
I think he means it's (vaguely) hard to spell out the URL of the site to someone who doesn't know of it. Say it out loud: "slash-dot-dot-org" Er... "/..org?" What? If you add in the protocol scheme it's even worse: "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org." Ugh. (Ok, so no one would add on the http:/// prefix when telling someone a URL... but it's still kinda funny.)
I don't really agree with that. Aside from the usual, cliched "two wrongs don't make a right" tripe... what gives you the right to be a dick? Companies have obligations to their creditors and shareholders before anything else -- as required by law, even. The whole fascination/worship of the CEO position is weird, but it seems everyone these days seems to think that the executive team is orders of magnitude more important than the rest of the people who work at the company. Lame? Yeah. Deal with it. Or start your own company.
So sure, companies don't show much in the way of obligation to their workers beyond the paycheck and whatever current benefits they're contractually obligated to provide. Why is that such a bad thing? Why does that somehow imply that workers should show a complete lack of ethics and undermine the company and/or do illegal things when they're unhappy? Grow up. We're not 8-year-olds throwing tantrums.
If you don't like your job or the terms by which you are compensated, renegotiate or find a new job. It's not personal; it's business. Can't find someone else who will hire you? Well, that's really your problem, not your current company's. I don't trust my employer to look out for my interest before that of the company's, but I'm not going to adopt the attitude that I'm somehow entitled to fuck them over if I'm the least bit unhappy.
(Disclaimer: I like my job, for the most part. My company treats workers pretty well, despite recent cost-cutting due to the recession, which, yes, has resulted in fewer perks. But that's ok. Life goes on.)
Slashdot Mirror
You could go either way with that. You could suggest that possessing fake child porn would spur a person on to actually molest a child. You could also suggest that it would provide enough of a release that the person wouldn't feel enough of a need to actually molest a real child. I don't know which is more likely, and I suspect you don't either. I imagine it's somewhere in the middle: some people might react one way, and some the other.
... except that pretty much everyone who uses does so for italics, and expects italics, and everyone who uses does so for bold and expects bold. So the semantic idealists failed.
One of the most important rules in software is: "be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you output."
This "rule" is what has gotten us into the browser incompatibility mess in the first place.
There's certainly some value in an interpreter fixing up minor errors, but the problem is when those fixups make it such that *correct* code can't always be interpreted as it was meant to, or can be interpreted in different, incompatible, non-conforming ways.
You long for a world where, if I put my STRONG tag and my EM tag in the wrong order, a completely trivial error, the browser should show absolutely nothing. Even though it's obvious to everybody what I *meant*, since a computer thinks like a computer and rejects it like a retard.
You've picked a ridiculously simple example that fails to prove your point. The problem is: where do you draw the line? I'm sure many experienced web developers here could come up with some great examples of HTML out in the wild that's incorrect, but the browsers accept it, all in slightly different ways that make the rendered page look different.
This "be liberal in what you receive" tenet is also why we have things like special cases for certain IMAP servers in client code.
I have no problem with censorship if the reasons are right. Yes, it's a slippery slope, and yes, what's "right" is subjective, but in this particular instance, I have no problem with it.
Maybe the next time Wales decides to censor something I won't agree.
This is merely a poignant reminder that nothing is really free, nothing is really decentralized, and the people "in charge" who pay for it ultimately get to decide how it works. A benevolent dictator is only benevolent if you agree with his/her methods.
On the plus side, I find the transparency after the fact refreshing and a reasonable compromise in this case.
Either you represent facts or you have interests, choose wisely wikipedia.
You really believe an organisation like the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't "have interests?"
I had no idea that the people who run wikipedia actively changed stories for political ends.
Straw man. Attempting to save someone's life by suppressing a publicity storm is not a political end.
Reporting the kidnapping would have put Rohde in extreme danger.
Not forcibly un-reporting the kidnapping would have put Rohde in extreme danger.
Also note that Wikipedia has a page on biographies of living persons, which, among other things, notes:
Biographies of living persons must be written conservatively, with regard for the subject's privacy... The possibility of harm to living subjects is one of the important factors to be considered when exercising editorial judgment.
The whole "maintaining integrity" bit is compelling here, but I would think (and hope!) that one's commitment to human life would be stronger than their commitment to journalistic integrity. You're free to disagree with that, but in that case there's really nothing to argue about: it's just a difference of opinion.
Turns out that it wasn't so much the universities fault as it was the fault of some idiot IT person.
If the university hired that idiot IT person, then it's the university's fault. Full stop.
I absolutely hate to say -- or even think -- this, but... this sounds like a great argument for TPM/DRM/TCPA/whatever it's called.
.doc file could have placed restrictions on the file such that at least 1) it can't be sent anywhere unencrypted, 2) it can't be stored on an unencrypted medium, 3) data cannot be copied out of the document and into an unsecured location.
Let's face it: you can't educate users about security. Many people will understand, but many will not. And it just takes a few people who don't get it to cause a problem.
In the instance of your example, it would be useful if the person who created that original
Sure, you can always use the analog hole (manually retype the information into a new document), but one would *hope* that the restrictions placed on the file would make someone think twice about doing that, and possibly realise that the restrictions are there for a reason. Or perhaps I'm just giving people too much credit and am foolishly thinking you can solve a social problem with a technical solution.
But seriously... it's astounding how blatantly careless and idiotic some people are when dealing with sensitive information.
(Cornell alum here who fortunately has *not* so far been notified that his data was among that leaked.)
Thing is, people already *do* have the ability to use the phone of their choice, for the most part. You can easily buy a phone off ebay, unbranded, unlocked, and, assuming your network is compatible (which usually leaves out the CDMA providers), you can just put your SIM card in the new phone and do whatever you want. That's what I did; I have an unbranded, unlocked Motorola U9 that I'm using on T-Mobile's network in the US.
Besides, I don't really care about the carriers. The customer is king. If customers demand a more robust infrastructure that can handle more bandwidth-intensive applications, the carriers had damn well better provide it. If not, I'm sure there'd be another carrier willing to provide it and take my money.
Well, sorry, but that's just how it works. If you can't sign the contract... don't. There are other options, more expensive, usually, but that's the tradeoff you have to make. The initial month is nice to figure out if your phone will work in the places you care *now*, and that'll have to be good enough. Again: if you don't like the terms, don't accept them.
That's part of the problem. The carriers shouldn't be the phone manufacturers' customers. The people who end up using the phones should be.
IIRC they give you 30 days from your contract start date to change your mind.
True, but lots of clones and forks do hurt a project.
Too bad. Don't do things with your project that make too many people want to fork it, and you'll be fine. If a lot of forks appear, it just means you aren't fulfilling your users' needs. Which isn't even a bad thing! Forks are generally good, not bad.
And in this case, your comment is a bit of a straw man -- as far as I can tell, Tomboy has one single fork/clone. Unless you're going to argue that *one* is "too many," I don't see how it's a problem...
I don't dislike C# because I think it's a bad language (I don't know enough about it to form an opinion); I dislike it because it's an extension of a possibly-encumbered Microsoft technology. I don't trust Microsoft. I see no need to do anything with C# while there are other technologies that do everything I need without tying me to something with a murky future, controlled by a company I don't trust.
A technology doesn't become invalid just because you can achieve all of the same goals by using a different technology. People like C#. There's a market for mono. Unless you've written apps in all the languages you mention (as well as C#), you really can't say which is "better" -- and even that is a subjective opinion.
.NET come from Microsoft, but... that's where my opinion stands. I don't trust them.
Having said that, I dislike C# and Mono, and wish it wasn't necessary. Maybe that's just because C# and
Well, that's much better. 50MB for a note-taking app is absolutely ludicrous. 5-6MB for a note-taking app is only garden-variety ridiculous.
[insert obligatory "you didn't get the joke" placeholder here]
Sure, that might save the state 90% of the cost of repaving, but how about the cost to drivers who use these roads frequently and will have to replace their tires more frequently? It might still be an overall savings, but it might not.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either?
Well, in my opinion I don't have to. In my mind, I just have to prove that any given god (pick one) cannot exist. And they all, invariable, makes certain testable claims, typically miracles. As any miracle hypothesis always ends up disproven, you can conclude that gods non-existence from that.
That sounds reasonable, assuming there actually are testable claims for every god/religion. I'm not really sure either way. Of course, this doesn't rule out some other "being" that we haven't thought up yet, but why over-complicate things...
But it all depends on what you *mean* with proof. Facts about the physical world can never be proven any more than you could prove that the next beer can you drop will actually fall to the floor instead of hanging in thin air. Yet, since I rather like beer, I would rather not drop the can.
Heh, true in an absolute sense, but not in any real-world practical sense. We take it as a given that gravity exists, and works, even though we don't completely know how. If we can't rely on some things as being "truth," then I don't think we can really live meaningfully. Of course it's a matter of degree. I tend to find such extremism in thought about the nature of reality to be interesting, even if mainly just mental masturbation.
Omnipotence is, fortunately, logically impossible (making the stone too heavy for them to lift, e.g.). So any god that claims omnipotence has automatically disproven itself. Yes, I am a mathematician, I can't help it.
Sure, sure, but you can revise "omnipotence" to be something like "maximally powerful." It is conceivable -- if unlikely -- that you could come up with a being that is logically consistent, but could produce "supernatural" (or perhaps just highly technologically advanced) feats that would easily foil any attempt to discover him.
Personally, I find Dawkins best when talking about evolution, and there are some excellent and interesting passages about that. God's (as he defines God) reasonble-sure-non-existence is like 5-minutes worth of thought.
I never understood why people find this debate so interesting at all. Atheism is the only reasonable intelligent choice if you have to choose, like "a-alfism", "a-dragon-ism", "a-moby-dick-ism" and so on and on and on.
Well, that's presupposing that people are both reasonable and logical, and never let emotions, upbringing, or thousands of years of history influence their thinking. We all have biases and incorrect assumptions about the world around us. Some people just have assumptions that we consider surprising. I know quite a few people who "believe" who are (otherwise) intelligent, reasonable people. While I continue to find that odd, I don't consider those people any less intelligent for it.
Being agnostic simply means that you are ready to revise and of those opinions if contrary evidence should turn up.
Sure. Most theists are (hopefully) agnostic but don't think of themselves as such, whether for political reasons (agnosticism being closely associated with that "distasteful" atheism) or just lack of association with the term.
Being atheistic simply means banking on the ---by far --- more likely scenario. People agree about this for any "a-***" except for some weird reason deism/theism.
Yep. Probably psychological effects. People tend to feel more comfortable knowing they're not the top of the food chain, and that there's someone looking over them, and that the buck doesn't stop at them.
Apparently, many people have this delusion that there is someone watching them all the time.
The government? ^_~
So... basically you're saying that by posting "data" that they could have fabricated with apparently publicly available information (which they could probably find by googling for posts just like yours), this suggests the hack might be legit? I'm not buying it. If they wanted to provide "proof," they'd post a sampling of entries of actual customer data.
This is probably just a stunt by some disgruntled/bored kid somewhere.
Really? I've been a T-Mobile customer for a little over 2 years now, and I've never had a problem with them. Of course, I've only had to call customer service twice. Both times they were friendly, quick, and helpful. One time I was having call dropping issues that turned out to be problems with my handset, but they tried to get to the bottom of it without assuming it was my fault. The other time I was going overseas and wanted to unlock my phone so I could use a local SIM card... The CSR immediately offered to email me the unlock code for my phone (which was still under the 2-year subsidized contract) and agreed that using a local SIM was a great way to save money while traveling.
So... HAH, my anecdotal report meets yours in battle! I'm sure there are plenty of people with both good and bad experiences.
As much as we'd all like to claim that "malicious hacking" is called "cracking," really, it's only the open source community that knows or cares about the difference. It's a futile battle... and there are far more important things to get bent out of shape about.
I think he means it's (vaguely) hard to spell out the URL of the site to someone who doesn't know of it. Say it out loud: "slash-dot-dot-org" Er... "/..org?" What? If you add in the protocol scheme it's even worse: "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org." Ugh. (Ok, so no one would add on the http:/// prefix when telling someone a URL... but it's still kinda funny.)
I don't really agree with that. Aside from the usual, cliched "two wrongs don't make a right" tripe... what gives you the right to be a dick? Companies have obligations to their creditors and shareholders before anything else -- as required by law, even. The whole fascination/worship of the CEO position is weird, but it seems everyone these days seems to think that the executive team is orders of magnitude more important than the rest of the people who work at the company. Lame? Yeah. Deal with it. Or start your own company.
So sure, companies don't show much in the way of obligation to their workers beyond the paycheck and whatever current benefits they're contractually obligated to provide. Why is that such a bad thing? Why does that somehow imply that workers should show a complete lack of ethics and undermine the company and/or do illegal things when they're unhappy? Grow up. We're not 8-year-olds throwing tantrums.
If you don't like your job or the terms by which you are compensated, renegotiate or find a new job. It's not personal; it's business. Can't find someone else who will hire you? Well, that's really your problem, not your current company's. I don't trust my employer to look out for my interest before that of the company's, but I'm not going to adopt the attitude that I'm somehow entitled to fuck them over if I'm the least bit unhappy.
(Disclaimer: I like my job, for the most part. My company treats workers pretty well, despite recent cost-cutting due to the recession, which, yes, has resulted in fewer perks. But that's ok. Life goes on.)