Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice. Australian politicians are simply trying to censor Internet for the purpose of suppressing their political opponents, and doing it in the name of the children. It's pure black nasty evil, that's what it is. But what else can you expect when you give a penal colony self-governance ?
I concur with the first four of those statements, but I was deliberately erring on the side of charity.
As for the latter statement, I shall treat it with the disdain it deserves. Just to refresh your memory, though, the majority of states in Australia are pretty much untainted by the convict legacy, and our government's policies (such as they are) may be easily traced to their origin in the UK and latterly the USA, since our redoubtable Prime Minister and his toadies appear to have acquired a taste for lingual stimulation of rectal orifices of their counterparts from those nations.
The problem is that internet technology was rolled out too soon, too quickly, and without proper public education.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is mostly rolled out with very bad default settings. There's no doubt that most WAPs can be secured pretty much adequately, but the average consumer will very rarely tweak it at all once he/she has managed to establish a connection.
Of course this is in France where you can buy porn in any newsstand (and even see the covers!) and see actual boobies on prime time tv.
Indeed: when I arrived in Australia as a migrant in 1987, I very quickly came to the conclusion that people here are in general very prudish about nudity by comparison with accepted norms in France, or even the UK for that matter.
All it means is that Australians are not necessarily perverts; prigs would be a better word.
Some people don't understand the technology, but think they are qualified to make decisions about laws governing that technology. Some People are idiots.
Unfortunately, it appears that here in Australia, we have a disproportionately large number of idiots in our putatively elected government.
A survey by the Australia Institute called "regulating youth access to pornography" dated 2003 found that 84 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls had been accidentally exposed to pornographic material
Now here's an interesting case for a basic statistics class.
Self selecting sample [Y/N] Accidentally? [Y/N] (Get real. Closer to 50/50, and I might believe that...)
I could go on, but I don't want to bore anyone. After all, even the grave yawns for a statistician...;-)
Absolutely. The most effective firewall that I have is a not wireless four port home router that sits between the cable modem and my NAT box.
There's something to be said for that. Often the more basic hardware routers appear to be more effective as a firewall for a home user (one who can't be bothered with more elaborate precautions) than more ostensibly sophisticated software solutions, especially since it is usually unwise to stack firewalls.
Actually, it doesn't really matter if it is wireless or not, provided you have it set up so there are no unwanted passengers on your connection.
That, unfortunately, appears to be the watchword for everything pertaining to MS products in general. I have come across any number of situations where the software should "just work" where it just wouldn't, without giving any useful way of fixing the problem.
One such instance is a recent installation of MSOffice on my wife's Mac (she wanted to use EndNote, so Open/NeoOffice was no longer a good option) where the installation supposedly went fine, but the software threw the "an error has occurred [OK]" dialog box when she attempted to run it. That stupid OK button is about the most offensive thing a software designer can do to you...
If Evolution could talk to Exchange the same way that Outlook does...
... you would probably find he life of your first-born child is forfeit, the contents of your address book distributed to every spammer on the planet, and the hairs of your nether regions infested with a plurality of fleas.
Evolution is actually not that bad at dealing with Exchange. For the rest of us, Thunderbird is just fine.
"TCO" is a pretty well known term in a business environment (which is probably why so few people on Slashdot have heard of it outside Linux-Windows fluff articles).
Indeed, but insisting on quoting figures for Linux server "sales" indicates only a deliberate intent to mislead, since the majority of Linux servers out there are running on distros downloaded free of charge. Yes, I do know about RedHat Enterprise stuff, but I don't know anybody who uses it...
Come on. Ripping a CD is easier and less time consuming than buying the songs in iTMS.
Agreed. And if you know what you're doing, you'll often get a better sounding compressed file.
An aside, though: in some countries (like here in Australia) copying any CD is still illegal, no matter what the purpose. Most of us ignore this, of course, but the law is the law, and if I must be a common criminal, then so be it. I'm certainly not going to pay twice for the same recording, except when buying extra copies of stuff I happen to like for gifts.
I wholeheartedly agree that artists in many cases get shafted.
However, that is not really the issue which Sony is attempting to defend. Sony is attempting to defend an action which essentially transfers ownership of _your_ computer to itself. And it is that which prompted the legal slap, and rightly so, for what it's worth.
The fact that Sony seems to be unable to learn that lesson is another issue, and apparently one's only recourse seems to be to boycott their recordings. In my case, that seems incredibly easy to do, since I own a vanishingly small number of them.
Come on, do you really think a HP 48 series calculator would not survive a blast from a nuke?
It probably would, but it doesn't seem to survive the rigours of occasionally being lent out to my fellow-researchers who don't speak RPN. I don't know how they manage it, but they seem to lock it up or crash it every time. That's one of the reasons I mostly use the TI-89 these days...
I fail to see how this is very much different from what some others are offering. For instance, Logitech offers quite good USB headsets with the equivalent of 2 hours of Skype calls to landline phones in many countries. (Incidentally, if anybody's interested, they work very nicely with Linux too.)
Yes and no. Agreed, Legalese is denser than code, but it has it has its shortcomings when it comes to the application, as the parent suggested, of Common Sense.
Sony has definitely proved how 'not' to do things.
It's just a pity they're unlikely to learn from this lesson. Given what we've all seen from their record, all they'll do is come up with some other equally dubious strategem.
Hell, no! I love my slide rules (yes, plural). How else do you prove you're a Real Geek(tm) other than by beating a host of Casio jockeys to a solution?
OK, to be fair, I mostly use a TI-89 or a HP48GX, but from time to time I like to get out the old gadget (a) to prove to myself that I can still use it, and (b) just as a contingency for when that rectum drops the bomb on us, and I feel a pressing need to work out the square root of pi...
If the recording companies really want us to stop copying their discs, perhaps they should stop sending mixed messages to us.
For instance, Sony, while on the one hand decrying copying of its CDs to mag tape spent several years selling Walkmen for the express purpose of playing music thus copied, not to mention supplying the blank media to do so.
They also need to stop sending mixed messages to our legislators, who, needless to say, roll over to corporate demands at the drop of a hat. Here in Australia, for instance, it is illegal to copy a CD that you have purchased with your own hard-earned dollars on to your iPod. Apple fails to mention that in the little booklet that comes with the gadget. Legally speaking, you are supposed to pay again for the second copy, despite the fact that you only listen to one at a time. Thousands of us don't, of course, including myself, and are militantly unrepentant. This is clearly a case of a failure of the legal system to keep pace with technology, and sooner or later some form of rationalisation has to take place.
I don't understand why you associate not paying attention with low grades or with cheating.
I don't. But my area of study is molecular biology, and you can take it from me that you *never* see students in any of the lectures I've attended browsing on the internet or whatever. Not because they get frowned at; it's nobody else's problem. Quite simply, they will very quickly be left behind if they don't devote their attention to the subject at hand.
Maybe the situation is different in computer "science" classes (the quotation marks are not a jibe, they are simply a reflection that although I used to be a sysprog, I have been made to realise that computing is no more a science than macrame), but ultimately, you are only cheating yourself if you don't make best use of your class or lecture time.
Slashdot Mirror
Not nice. ;-)
I concur with the first four of those statements, but I was deliberately erring on the side of charity.
As for the latter statement, I shall treat it with the disdain it deserves. Just to refresh your memory, though, the majority of states in Australia are pretty much untainted by the convict legacy, and our government's policies (such as they are) may be easily traced to their origin in the UK and latterly the USA, since our redoubtable Prime Minister and his toadies appear to have acquired a taste for lingual stimulation of rectal orifices of their counterparts from those nations.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is mostly rolled out with very bad default settings. There's no doubt that most WAPs can be secured pretty much adequately, but the average consumer will very rarely tweak it at all once he/she has managed to establish a connection.
OK. I don't like the results. I can't see any opportunity to pick new representatives appearing in the near future, if at all.
Well, not legal ones, anyway. It's just a thought, but maybe Osama Bin Laden has the right idea...
*ducks*
Thanks very much. (Not.) While you're at it, you might cite a link to this one just to make everybody's life complete...
Indeed: when I arrived in Australia as a migrant in 1987, I very quickly came to the conclusion that people here are in general very prudish about nudity by comparison with accepted norms in France, or even the UK for that matter.
All it means is that Australians are not necessarily perverts; prigs would be a better word.
Unfortunately, it appears that here in Australia, we have a disproportionately large number of idiots in our putatively elected government.
It's not my fault, so don't blame me. :-)
Now here's an interesting case for a basic statistics class.
Self selecting sample [Y/N]
Accidentally? [Y/N] (Get real. Closer to 50/50, and I might believe that...)
I could go on, but I don't want to bore anyone. After all, even the grave yawns for a statistician... ;-)
There's something to be said for that. Often the more basic hardware routers appear to be more effective as a firewall for a home user (one who can't be bothered with more elaborate precautions) than more ostensibly sophisticated software solutions, especially since it is usually unwise to stack firewalls.
Actually, it doesn't really matter if it is wireless or not, provided you have it set up so there are no unwanted passengers on your connection.
Only if they're _very_ quick at rebuilding...
That, unfortunately, appears to be the watchword for everything pertaining to MS products in general. I have come across any number of situations where the software should "just work" where it just wouldn't, without giving any useful way of fixing the problem.
One such instance is a recent installation of MSOffice on my wife's Mac (she wanted to use EndNote, so Open/NeoOffice was no longer a good option) where the installation supposedly went fine, but the software threw the "an error has occurred [OK]" dialog box when she attempted to run it. That stupid OK button is about the most offensive thing a software designer can do to you...
... you would probably find he life of your first-born child is forfeit, the contents of your address book distributed to every spammer on the planet, and the hairs of your nether regions infested with a plurality of fleas.
Evolution is actually not that bad at dealing with Exchange. For the rest of us, Thunderbird is just fine.
Yes, but of course Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTOs. :-)
Indeed, but insisting on quoting figures for Linux server "sales" indicates only a deliberate intent to mislead, since the majority of Linux servers out there are running on distros downloaded free of charge. Yes, I do know about RedHat Enterprise stuff, but I don't know anybody who uses it...
It does. It's along the lines of
Heh... I more often tend to find myself wanting a "-1 wtf is this guy on about?" mod.
Agreed. And if you know what you're doing, you'll often get a better sounding compressed file.
An aside, though: in some countries (like here in Australia) copying any CD is still illegal, no matter what the purpose. Most of us ignore this, of course, but the law is the law, and if I must be a common criminal, then so be it. I'm certainly not going to pay twice for the same recording, except when buying extra copies of stuff I happen to like for gifts.
However, that is not really the issue which Sony is attempting to defend. Sony is attempting to defend an action which essentially transfers ownership of _your_ computer to itself. And it is that which prompted the legal slap, and rightly so, for what it's worth.
The fact that Sony seems to be unable to learn that lesson is another issue, and apparently one's only recourse seems to be to boycott their recordings. In my case, that seems incredibly easy to do, since I own a vanishingly small number of them.
It probably would, but it doesn't seem to survive the rigours of occasionally being lent out to my fellow-researchers who don't speak RPN. I don't know how they manage it, but they seem to lock it up or crash it every time. That's one of the reasons I mostly use the TI-89 these days...
I fail to see how this is very much different from what some others are offering. For instance, Logitech offers quite good USB headsets with the equivalent of 2 hours of Skype calls to landline phones in many countries. (Incidentally, if anybody's interested, they work very nicely with Linux too.)
Yes and no. Agreed, Legalese is denser than code, but it has it has its shortcomings when it comes to the application, as the parent suggested, of Common Sense.
It's just a pity they're unlikely to learn from this lesson. Given what we've all seen from their record, all they'll do is come up with some other equally dubious strategem.
Hell, no! I love my slide rules (yes, plural). How else do you prove you're a Real Geek(tm) other than by beating a host of Casio jockeys to a solution?
OK, to be fair, I mostly use a TI-89 or a HP48GX, but from time to time I like to get out the old gadget (a) to prove to myself that I can still use it, and (b) just as a contingency for when that rectum drops the bomb on us, and I feel a pressing need to work out the square root of pi...
For instance, Sony, while on the one hand decrying copying of its CDs to mag tape spent several years selling Walkmen for the express purpose of playing music thus copied, not to mention supplying the blank media to do so.
They also need to stop sending mixed messages to our legislators, who, needless to say, roll over to corporate demands at the drop of a hat. Here in Australia, for instance, it is illegal to copy a CD that you have purchased with your own hard-earned dollars on to your iPod. Apple fails to mention that in the little booklet that comes with the gadget. Legally speaking, you are supposed to pay again for the second copy, despite the fact that you only listen to one at a time. Thousands of us don't, of course, including myself, and are militantly unrepentant. This is clearly a case of a failure of the legal system to keep pace with technology, and sooner or later some form of rationalisation has to take place.
I don't. But my area of study is molecular biology, and you can take it from me that you *never* see students in any of the lectures I've attended browsing on the internet or whatever. Not because they get frowned at; it's nobody else's problem. Quite simply, they will very quickly be left behind if they don't devote their attention to the subject at hand.
Maybe the situation is different in computer "science" classes (the quotation marks are not a jibe, they are simply a reflection that although I used to be a sysprog, I have been made to realise that computing is no more a science than macrame), but ultimately, you are only cheating yourself if you don't make best use of your class or lecture time.