pornographers "don't deserver a voice"? I sincerely hope you are just trolling.
He wasn't suggesting that those groups be forcibly silenced. He was just saying it's a waste of an ISP's money to provide something which most users don't understand and on which many of those who do understand have given up. I'd rather have my ISP put money and resources into the services I (and my family) DO use.
This was a joke referring to the arcane english unit of mass, the 'slug'. Also poking fun at (us) americans. Tis no flamebait (Tis a remorseless eating machine)
Well, if we're discussing standards of measurement and quoting the Simpsons, let me tell you this: The metric system is the tool of the devil! My cars gets 50 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
I hadn't thought about this for years, but looking back, I learned a lot about mechanics from the Construx Power Pack. It was a small and relatively unobtrusive piece of equipment, but as I recall you could put it in basically any wheeled vehicle you'd built and make it move backwards and forwards. What was really educational about it was that you could use different types of gears connected to different types of wheels to achieve different speeds....
I couldn't quite get from the article exactly how Bionicle tells its story - whether it's a book that parents read to kids, or a video, or what. But nonetheless I think it's a fantastic idea.
The problem with TV and movies for kids is that they're passive entertainment. They give the audience everything and require no effort in return. When you read a book, you have to do some work - first digesting the words and turning the sentences into ideas, and then picturing those ideas and letting the story develop in your head.
But that process can be a little rough on kids who are used to passive entertainment, and can drive them away from books - a one-way ticket to academic problems throughout your education. It seems to me that the Bionicle toy the article talks about gives the kids the means to get "hands-on" experience with the story and characters, letting it play out on the living room floor as well as in their heads. Building the characters themselves can bring them even closer to the stories.
Of course, in step with the great Lego tradition, once the story's over, they can make up their own stories and characters - but maybe this system will inspire them to write the new stories down. That's another skill you need in school.
Why not just have the machine "print" out the log to the parallel/serial and have the other end connected to a machine that just reads what is sent over the parallel/serial and logs it?
That's an excellent idea, but I'd still be afraid that if the main server got rooted, you could do some kind of DOS to the log box just by sending it too much crap. I think to really do this in a foolproof way, I'd want to keep the logs on a medium that could ONLY be destroyed or erased by accessing it in meatspace....
Isn't there a a fine if you call someone after being asked to be put on the do-not-call list?
Can you prove it? It's you saying "I told them to put me on the do-not-call list" versus them saying "S/he said no such thing!" Most cell phone users don't have the means to tape every phone call. Even if you could, you'd have to make sure your request was worded quite right as to make them legally obliged to do it. I'm not a fan of government programs solving every problem, but it seems to me that some 3rd party has to be the maintainer of the do-not-call list.
Re:Does anyone remember the 80's Mario cartoon?
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The New Zelda
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I do remember that Fridays were Zelda...
On my radio show last Saturday my friend and I were going through a CD of tv themes, and we found the Super Mario Brothers Super Show theme, and we had an on-air discussion in which I attacked the Zelda cartoon as being typical early 90's cartoon crap. Every episode ended with Link being about to kiss Zelda, and then for some reason he wouldn't be able to. Even at age 10 I thought it was insulting to my intelligence.
My cohosts disagreed entirely, but I wonder if they even watched it....
You don't see world-renound lecturers shouting out scathing political commentaries to hords of screaming fans who paid $139 for a seat.
I pay several thousand dollars a year to see world-reknowned lecturers talk about a wide variety of topics. It's called college.
You don't see scientists mobbed by teenagers when they step out of thier stretched limos.
Actually, the best professors at my University, in subject areas from philosophy to physics, have to deal with a crowd of enthusiastic students who want questions answered or ideas critiqued every time they walk out of an office or into a classroom.
Exactly. I've been going up and down the comments hoping someone would post an additional link, and they haven't. In my experience, unless it's military top secret, which the Reuters/CNN article indicates it's not, most computer science researchers have the desire for peer attention and basical technical knowhow required to put up a web site boasting about their accomplishments.
They very well maybe legit, and if they are this is a really cool achievement, but if they're not, it won't be the first time I've been disappointed by science stories in the mainstream media.
However, it is a valid method of logging to have syslog print to a printer; it means that if a cracker breaks into your system, you still have a log even if he deletes/modifies the log files.
It seems like there should be another way of doing that without killing a million trees a day. Maybe you could have a dedicated logging box. Every time another box makes a syslog call it could send it out as a little HTTP POST to the logging box. Of course, once the logging box gets cracked, you're no better off than you were before. Maybe there's money to be made in a "log farm" that writes all posted data to a medium that can't be rewritten immediately even if the machines get rooted - tape might be a good choice. Or make a device that punches holes in paper but in a compressed readable-only-by-machine format that saves trees.
I'll add these to my list of Things I'd Do If I Had The Time And Weren't A Lazy Fsck.
That's the same cynicism that's at the heart of the "benevolent dictatorship" attitude of modern government. We're too dumb to know what we want, so we need a politican class (hereditary, even) to rule over us.
I disagree. I read once that true democracy is a system whereby "51 percent of people get to play soccer with the other 49 percent's teddy bears," and it's true. Even if decisions that affect me are made by a large number of people, those decisions can violate my rights just as much as if the decision were made by one dictator.
The US Constitution describes a system whereby written law is the arbiter of most disputes, with human judgement filling in the blanks. That's the system I want to live in. I shouldn't be allowed to use force to stop you from practicing your religion or watching your pr0n, and I shouldn't be able to elect somebody ELSE to do the same thing.
Governments ask money, but they repay this in services...
Governments do not ask for anything. When my church wanted to build a new community center, they asked the parishioners and the surrounding community for money, and they got it. When my city government wanted to build a new ballpark, they did not ask for my money. They took it from my employer before I even got it. Had my employer not given it to them, as is their right since I don't live and work in the same city, I would have given it to them. Had I not given it to them either, the money would have been taken from me by physical force. When you ask someone for something while holding a gun to their head, it isn't much of a question.
That is a very good point. I am quite open to the idea of abolishing IP restrictions, although I haven't been totally convinced yet, and I'm more concerned with "winnable" arguments, like getting poor Dmitry out of prison and letting me watch DVDs on my Linux box.
One key point: it's important to keep in mind the moral distinction between absolute power over an idea I create myself and absolute power over another person. Slaves are PEOPLE, and as such have certain rights my HelloWorld.c does not have.
This "fear" of the GPL taking freedom and rights away from authors of code is bizare and unfounded.
I don't fear the GPL doing that at all. I like the GPL, and I think that someday it will be the dominant paradigm in software development. I don't think of it as a virus, or as Pac-Man, or whatever dumb thing Bill Gates is saying this week. What I fear is Bradley Kuhn's implication that the GPL should be mandatory for all software developers. That's the only place I differ with him. I think outlawing proprietary software is a REALLY bad idea.
Free Software advocates want less force-based coercion in society, not more. To claim otherwise is simply Orwellian.
I'd agree that that's what MOST Free Software advocates want, judging by their writing. I was responding to certain comments by one advocate, Bradley Kuhn, which I found frighteningly contrary to that idea.
I feel indebted to the FSF for a lot of the software they've provided me and the effect it has had on my personal and professional life. However, I have to take issues with some of Mr. Kuhn's responses....
However, programmers don't deserve any "rights" that infringe on the freedoms of others. Often in society, we decide that the right to act a certain way should be limited because it infringes on the freedom of others.
This is a path that leads to less freedom, not more, I fear. Yes, most of us believe that the government should intervene in acts of violence or acts that violate other people's rights to life or property. But Kuhn is implying here that proprietary software should be illegal, and that's dangerous....
For example, in the USA, white people used to have the right to own slaves. As a society, we eventually decided that this right was too restrictive on the freedom of the people who served as slaves. Because of that decision, it is now illegal to own slaves in the USA.
Legalized slavery meant that slaves were considered a person's property, and were protected as such by the government. If a slave ran away, the government could force him/her back to the owner. Helping a slave escape was considered theft and punished as such. Abolishing slavery only forced state governments to STOP infringing on people's freedom. This is an important distinction.
Today, some argue that the "right to choose your own software license" is the greatest software freedom. By contrast, I think that, like slavery, it is an inappropriate power, not a freedom.
So the alternative is what? The right to choose the terms forced upon everyone who wants to develop software? At the risk of being overdramatic, I'd call that the right to tyranny.
Can't these guys see what has happened whenever government force has gotten involved in software licensing? You don't have to look too hard. Jon Johansen and 2600. Dmitry Sklyarov. Edward Felten. And most frightening of all, Microsoft's vague threats about what should be done with software that "threatens the American way".
Let Free Software succeed on its own merits, as I believe it will. Don't use the gun. There is no real freedom down that path.
Java is still second only to C++ in popularity. It has slightly more SourceForge projects than Perl, and is the only language to crack the top 25.
Couldn't there be other factors at work in there? Aren't there a lot of things that, although they have been done adequately in other languages, get rewritten in Java because of the platform-independency? It seems like that factor means Java will have a larger raw number of "active" development projects for the time being than, say, Perl, which might get used only for projects that are immediately necessary. I wish I could say this more clearly. I am so tired right now....
I don't see how anyone with a conscience could decide to intentionally try to destroy methods with which people can protect their privacy.
That's the paradox that's inherent in almost all of the cryptology field. If you want to make cryptography better, trying to break cryptography is a great way to go about it. It's better if the good guys do it first. If anyone ever figures out a polynomial-time algorith to factor a big number, it's going to fsck up a whole lot of the world's cryptosystems, but whoever figures it out is going to be a well-known name in the crypto community.
The same applies to steganography, IMHO. SOMEONE has to break it - it might as well be me.
Maybe we shouldn't own the info infrastructure forever. There are private entities that are much better equipped to manage it than the government. I think that this would be a good starting point, though.
You may be right. I guess the best thing is for cities and states to try different levels of regulation and let people "vote with their feet". As a college senior, I can say broadband availability will play a major role in my choice of location when I graduate, and the same goes for my equally addicted friends.
The railways, by the way, were well on their way out before the Interstates. The Interstates were a response to the millions of cars on the road already.
Agreed, but regulation did a lot to make the railroads unprofitable. Also, roads don't come free, and my feeling is that if car owners and (especially) the trucking companies wanted an interstate highway system, they should have paid for it themselves.
Also, think back to the late 1800's, and the monopolies the railroads had. They wrote the book on predatory practices!
In some areas. In my hometown of Philadelphia, there are very few neighborhoods that weren't served by two railroads in that era, railroads that were constantly trying to outdo each other. And in a lot of situations, they also had their monopolies granted to them by the government instead of by free markets. Regardless, as evil as they may have been, in 1976 we turned around and realized that in our frenzy of regulation, we had destroyed a safe, clean, and efficient technology. So Uncle Sam took over the entire Northeastern railroad industry and ran it until 1981 or so, when deregulation (in the form of, if I remember correctly, the Staggers Act and Northeast Rail Service Act) allowed Conrail to turn a profit. Not long after, they had weaned themselves off government dependence. But this is way offtopic. (However, I should suggest that if you ever think Slashdot is nerdy, you check out some railroad discussion forums. We're just downright scary.)
Would that be the same interstate highway system that forced the safer and more efficient railroad industry to pay for its own economic destruction?
When you use government force to fund something, you're inevitably hurting something else that would otherwise compete with it. I want a TRULY free market governing my broadband, not a different set of reregulations every year that grant monopolies to campaign contributors.
I don't think any network will need to cover a regular chess game live. Even golf moves faster.
Actually, ESPN (the biggest all-sports channel in the USA) has shown chess before. I was flipping channels in the middle of the night and I had to get up and walk around to make sure I wasn't dreaming it. And yes, it was really slow, but they were covering 3 or 4 games at once so the commentators could have things to say.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the Federal government shall be the arbiter of questions of medical ethics? And where does it say that the decision shall rest with the President himself?
This shouldn't have been an issue. It shouldn't have been W's decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't thought about this for years, but looking back, I learned a lot about mechanics from the Construx Power Pack. It was a small and relatively unobtrusive piece of equipment, but as I recall you could put it in basically any wheeled vehicle you'd built and make it move backwards and forwards. What was really educational about it was that you could use different types of gears connected to different types of wheels to achieve different speeds....
The problem with TV and movies for kids is that they're passive entertainment. They give the audience everything and require no effort in return. When you read a book, you have to do some work - first digesting the words and turning the sentences into ideas, and then picturing those ideas and letting the story develop in your head.
But that process can be a little rough on kids who are used to passive entertainment, and can drive them away from books - a one-way ticket to academic problems throughout your education. It seems to me that the Bionicle toy the article talks about gives the kids the means to get "hands-on" experience with the story and characters, letting it play out on the living room floor as well as in their heads. Building the characters themselves can bring them even closer to the stories.
Of course, in step with the great Lego tradition, once the story's over, they can make up their own stories and characters - but maybe this system will inspire them to write the new stories down. That's another skill you need in school.
Just my $0.02.
My cohosts disagreed entirely, but I wonder if they even watched it....
They very well maybe legit, and if they are this is a really cool achievement, but if they're not, it won't be the first time I've been disappointed by science stories in the mainstream media.
I'll add these to my list of Things I'd Do If I Had The Time And Weren't A Lazy Fsck.
The US Constitution describes a system whereby written law is the arbiter of most disputes, with human judgement filling in the blanks. That's the system I want to live in. I shouldn't be allowed to use force to stop you from practicing your religion or watching your pr0n, and I shouldn't be able to elect somebody ELSE to do the same thing.
One key point: it's important to keep in mind the moral distinction between absolute power over an idea I create myself and absolute power over another person. Slaves are PEOPLE, and as such have certain rights my HelloWorld.c does not have.
Can't these guys see what has happened whenever government force has gotten involved in software licensing? You don't have to look too hard. Jon Johansen and 2600. Dmitry Sklyarov. Edward Felten. And most frightening of all, Microsoft's vague threats about what should be done with software that "threatens the American way".
Let Free Software succeed on its own merits, as I believe it will. Don't use the gun. There is no real freedom down that path.
The same applies to steganography, IMHO. SOMEONE has to break it - it might as well be me.
But now NT CAN!
We're toast!
When you use government force to fund something, you're inevitably hurting something else that would otherwise compete with it. I want a TRULY free market governing my broadband, not a different set of reregulations every year that grant monopolies to campaign contributors.
Now I can wear a t-shirt of whatever team is winning at the moment and say I've had it since before they were big!
You're preaching to the converted, my friend. :)
This shouldn't have been an issue. It shouldn't have been W's decision.