Let me advise you that this is not as good a defense as you think. I did the same thing, and a company that I tried to quit from sent the "debt" (that I did not renew and tried to cancel) into collection, which to this day shows up on my credit record. I don't know if what they did is legal, but I can tell you it's been a huge pain in my ass to try to get this cleared up.
They say "you knowingly signed up and agreed to XYZ unless you canceled, so just because your credit card has expired, doesn't mean you don't owe us." And when you put it that way, I think they're right.
There's alot of replies to my original post that there is a distinction between M and AO. Also some distinction between what is an adult. For me, old enough to enlist in the armed forces means old enough to drink, smoke, swear, fuck and play violent video games -- in otherwards 17+ == adult in my book. I know you need parental consent to enlist in the army at 17, but I'm pretty sure once you're in, you get the same training and killing opportunities if you're 17 or 18.
As for porn, I cannot BELIEVE that people on/. are advocating restricting porn to people you would allow violent video games too. George Carlin said he'd much rather for kids to watch a movie of 2 people making love than 2 people trying to kill each other. Seriously, if a kid is old enough for violent video games, he's old enough for porn too.
Seriously: They should sell adult games the same way they sell adult magazines -- clearly labelled and with a wrapper around them, unless they're in an adults only area. I have no problem saying that GTA 3 was completely inappropriate for 7 year olds. But JT is just determined to undermine his cause by being such an asshole. I am sympathetic to the basic premise, some games are inappropriate for children -- but I don't agree that legislation is the way to fix it, and I don't agree that game companies are liable for the actions of idiots, and I certainly don't agree that you should welch on your offers.
Helium has a pretty unique formula, as well as paying people based on peer review of their answers. I've been there for about a month, and made $1.50. Of course if I can lure more readers there, I'll make more $$. Specifically though, I like the way the answers "battle" against each other, so when you go there you can see the answers ranked in order of "goodness."
The West Bengal government says the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanographic study (the most exhaustive study of climate in the region) is insufficient to prove climate change. Says Atanu Raha, director of the Sunderban Biosphere Reserve, "Accretion and erosion are natural phenomena. Things like a rise in temperature or an increase in sea level have to be studied over hundreds of years. A 30-year study is not enough to come to a conclusion that the climate is changing."
Raha, who has studied satellite images of the last 20 years, says just as some islands have gone down in the sea, vast land areas like Thakuran char and New Island have emerged out of the sea because of silt deposits.
So we move Titan and put it in orbit at 93 million miles from the sun, in the same orbital path as the Earth, but on the opposite side of the sun. Do I have to do ALL the thinking here!?!?
But Seriously -- someday we'll really do this. Or at least try
More widely used than you'd know
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
In an informal survey on my IM list, more people are using Fedora than any other distro. Not that that's good or bad, but considering all the hype for Ubuntu recently, I'm happy to see Fedora getting a little love. It's been my workstation of choice since FC2.
And I've felt guilty about the fact that some people who should not be taking distance learning are signing up for courses. I've also been irritated by the repeat calls to the helpdesk on topics that it is reasonable to expect a "distance learner" to know how to do.
As a result we developed an information literacy class that is a required component for taking a Distance Learning class, and it is of course contained within our (home grown) Distance Learning platform. If you have not passed IL, you can't get to any of your other classes.
Because we've got a home grown app, we were able to put in alot of specific things (how to submit an assignment, how to send an email to a specific address, how to upload a file, how to download a file and then find it again). It's the way of things. You can't blame the users if they are incompetent. You either have to ensure they are competent, or block them from using the system, and give them an opportunity to learn and demonstrate their competancy
I'm astonished that it's not as simple as several vendors make the UI, several vendors make the DB's, hook them up on a closed network which of course requires physical security, but there will always be human element). When a person votes, the UI computers broadcast the votes over the networks, to the multiple DBs (I say 3). I leave out the authorization part of this equation because it obviously COULD be done.
The UI program issues the voter a paper receipt, to be used in the event of a recount. He she then visually verifies his/her receipt, and can at any time verify his/her vote against any or all of the DB's At the end of the night, the 3 separate DB tabulations should all be exactly the same.
Yes, this might take a bit more time per person to vote, but I think in the long run it will speed the process by eliminating lines.
My one concern is the issue of voter coercion. With a receipt, someone could threaten you to make you vote a certain way, and then demand proof. Perhaps the receipt should be destroyed after teh voter verifies the DB's recorded his/her votes correctly.
I saw that typo too, and I started to wonder that if THAT slipped QA, what else did? A typo itself is not a big deal. The fact that it passed testing and was shipped with a type IS a big deal
Step 1 -- Create your own game review blog
Step 2 -- Buy games and write reviews on blog with adwords, amazon ads, etc
Step 3 -- Sell games on ebay
Step 4 -- Deduct games as expenses on your income tax
Step 5 -- profit!
Children (especially girls) who show aptitude at math are treated as if they are social misfits, and their social missteps are toerated more than in "normal" children. Kids who are good at maath are frequently "taught" via positive reinforcement to be social misfits by society.
One question I always ask in interviews -- "Tell me about some code that you wrote that wasn't for work or school." As an example, I wrote "voting fraud" program to You need to show that you'll be a great employee because you love the job. If you're going for an IT position, you should be proud of your home network. If you're a coder, you should talk about the program/package that you wrote just for fun. Whatever you do, on your resume have examples of how you do it for the love of it -- Write about your MythTV, write about your web site, write about your spam filter implementation....write about SOMETHING that shows you're in the field because you LOVE it, not because you're looking for a job.
We've been using Amazon's S3. It has a great API, pretty easy to use. I was concerned about storing sensitive data there, but we worked out a good encryption scheme (that I won't detail) and now I'm able to really restore everything from anywhere with no notice. My city could sink into the ocean and I could be in Topeka, and I could bring things back up as long as I had a credit card.
Great analysis. They also completely ignore the people who are travelling with DSL or some other linux on a thumb drive, and working that way. Some colleagues are also doing this with Ubunutu, but I don't like the bloat. But clearly people have been doing this for a while -- so the idea of carrying just your settings with you is really primitive -- why not carry your whole OS?
In my mind, there's no question that this is the REAL future of computing. Why would you carry a computer anywhere, except for a portable to work in weird places? Otherwise you just need to carry your env. Eventually of course, every computer will be networked -- and then you'll just log in and your settings will be downloaded, but till then, you can even carry Windows on your thumb drive if you so choose. So what's so special about carrying your settings?
If your ISP will not give you an address in a non-dynamic space, then it's your fault for accepting their response.
Yes, and those Amish girls were asking for it
I'm sure in your neo-conservative world, you believe that only people who can afford it should be able to send email. Sometimes people make decisions for financial reasons. It's cheaper to sign up with an ISP who
"The average mail administrator is in WAY over his/her head"
Maybe in your social circle.
I guess you don't understand that by definition, people who read/. are not the average mail administrators. The internet is dominated by idiots, and most of them run Exchange. Although I can see WHY you don't understand that...or the meaning of the word "average" either:) If we were all leet like you, there would BE no spam. Besides, social circle and mail administrator are words that are never used together.
Here's the thing -- you cannot tell when a "dynamic" ip address become released to static. You only know what the blocks are. IP blacklisting is so 1996, DomainKeys is the future of spam fighting. Yet Spamhaus never advocated domainkeys. In fact they never advocated ANYTHING that would have minimized people's reliance on their service. They may have been in it for the public good initially, but IMHO, in the end Spamhaus loved the power. The amount of ambivalence here should be a good indication that they certainly did not have a universal mandate. And considering the draconian rules they imposed, I would think that they would have wanted a bit more of a mandate.
The argument that "admins choose to use Spamhaus" is like saying "old people chose to use phishing sites." The average mail administrator is in WAY over his/her head (present company included) and are usually willing to take a "default" option that makes 90% of his/her users happy. Spamhaus said (paraphrase mine, please feel free to correct) "we have a list of ip addresses that we consider spammers, even though we have not applied a rigorous test to each individual address. It's good enough for our needs, but your needs may vary." The problem with this is that they purport to be EXPERTS on spam. Is the average admin going to refuse the service that claims to be the considered "best practices" of spam experts?
I say let it come down. If there is a need, something else will replace it (in fact, I'm SURE some dilligent person has already copied all the IP's and has such a service in mind already). I suspect that we'll find out how useless Spamhaus actually has been in the last few years. As they themself say:
Spamhaus.org's Spam Advisory List, the Spamhaus Block List, blocks 50 Billion spams per day across the Internet...the vast majority of those 50 Billion spams are highly illegal, spam for drugs, extreme pornography, scams and bank phishes.
I think I'd rather see if some other method can be more effective at stopping that spam. While Spamhaus existed, there was no way for the average admin to tell if there was a more effective method. Speaking as a mail administrator who HAS stopped using Spamhaus, I can honestly say, I don't miss it at all, and I get much fewer false positives. My current local filtering efforts appear to be at LEAST as good as Spamhaus, and I am not blocking all the small businesses I was before.
You don't need any financial resources to learn computer science, except for a teacher.
We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipments. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz. what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.
E.W. Dijkstra
If you really want to learn computer science, tell your math teachers you want a class like this one or one on the Theory of Computation. Make sure you tell them you want to learn the pumping lemma! Computer Science is Math. If you want to learn about COMPUTERS, as opposed to computer science, then you don't want to learn computer science, you want to learn IT. If you want to learn to program, just pick up any "learn bad coding habits in 24 days" book, and get cracking. I personally recommend letting C be your first language, because you'll think everything else is so much nicer after that.
As far as money goes, when John Dillinger was asked why he robbed banks, he said "because that's where the money is."
The reason football teams have booster clubs is because they work. The same thing will work for high tech, and they have more money. Try to get some local company with smart people to get involved. They will have financial resources and expertise that you don't. I answered an ad in the local newspaper to help the students at my local high school organize a computer club. Organize the club, get local businesses to contribute, get local developers/database guys to come and lecture. Pretty soon, you'll have a club with enough going on to ask for a real class.
The club also answers your question: "If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?" Working on learning something with a group is a great way to learn things. Get the club going, and then say "this month we're going to learn foobar!"
...most of Germany at the time actually liked Hitler and supported his war...
Leaving aside the veracity of that statement, it seems like you're not making your point or living in a wonderland. Although Bush's current approval numbers are down, he won the 2004 election (no point in debating 2000 -- there is no conclusive result). Are you saying that because he won the election his actions are justified..
But this is defensible. If a Iraq were to end up as big a success story as Germany after American occupation, you'd have to say the US was completely justified. And that could happen. Only history can judge men -- when you try to judge a man in the present, you don't have enough information.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me advise you that this is not as good a defense as you think. I did the same thing, and a company that I tried to quit from sent the "debt" (that I did not renew and tried to cancel) into collection, which to this day shows up on my credit record. I don't know if what they did is legal, but I can tell you it's been a huge pain in my ass to try to get this cleared up.
They say "you knowingly signed up and agreed to XYZ unless you canceled, so just because your credit card has expired, doesn't mean you don't owe us." And when you put it that way, I think they're right.
At least legally.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_tee_pre_perc ap-health-teenage-pregnancy-per-capita
There's alot of replies to my original post that there is a distinction between M and AO. Also some distinction between what is an adult. For me, old enough to enlist in the armed forces means old enough to drink, smoke, swear, fuck and play violent video games -- in otherwards 17+ == adult in my book. I know you need parental consent to enlist in the army at 17, but I'm pretty sure once you're in, you get the same training and killing opportunities if you're 17 or 18.
/. are advocating restricting porn to people you would allow violent video games too. George Carlin said he'd much rather for kids to watch a movie of 2 people making love than 2 people trying to kill each other. Seriously, if a kid is old enough for violent video games, he's old enough for porn too.
As for porn, I cannot BELIEVE that people on
Seriously: They should sell adult games the same way they sell adult magazines -- clearly labelled and with a wrapper around them, unless they're in an adults only area. I have no problem saying that GTA 3 was completely inappropriate for 7 year olds. But JT is just determined to undermine his cause by being such an asshole. I am sympathetic to the basic premise, some games are inappropriate for children -- but I don't agree that legislation is the way to fix it, and I don't agree that game companies are liable for the actions of idiots, and I certainly don't agree that you should welch on your offers.
Too right ITMS != Itunes.
Helium has a pretty unique formula, as well as paying people based on peer review of their answers. I've been there for about a month, and made $1.50. Of course if I can lure more readers there, I'll make more $$. Specifically though, I like the way the answers "battle" against each other, so when you go there you can see the answers ranked in order of "goodness."
Are you an environmental scientist, or an environmental creationist? Do you look at all the evidence? Or just one piece, and make a conclusion? It seems odd to quote the bible to defend the Scientific Method, but in this case, the mighty words of Ecclesiastes have some words of wisdom: All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. Plus I couldn't resist the chance to post the first Bible link on /.
The West Bengal government says the Jadavpur University's School of Oceanographic study (the most exhaustive study of climate in the region) is insufficient to prove climate change. Says Atanu Raha, director of the Sunderban Biosphere Reserve, "Accretion and erosion are natural phenomena. Things like a rise in temperature or an increase in sea level have to be studied over hundreds of years. A 30-year study is not enough to come to a conclusion that the climate is changing."
Raha, who has studied satellite images of the last 20 years, says just as some islands have gone down in the sea, vast land areas like Thakuran char and New Island have emerged out of the sea because of silt deposits.
So we move Titan and put it in orbit at 93 million miles from the sun, in the same orbital path as the Earth, but on the opposite side of the sun. Do I have to do ALL the thinking here!?!?
But Seriously -- someday we'll really do this. Or at least try
I'd take it one step further: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=204463&cid=167 05323
In an informal survey on my IM list, more people are using Fedora than any other distro. Not that that's good or bad, but considering all the hype for Ubuntu recently, I'm happy to see Fedora getting a little love. It's been my workstation of choice since FC2.
As a result we developed an information literacy class that is a required component for taking a Distance Learning class, and it is of course contained within our (home grown) Distance Learning platform. If you have not passed IL, you can't get to any of your other classes.
Because we've got a home grown app, we were able to put in alot of specific things (how to submit an assignment, how to send an email to a specific address, how to upload a file, how to download a file and then find it again). It's the way of things. You can't blame the users if they are incompetent. You either have to ensure they are competent, or block them from using the system, and give them an opportunity to learn and demonstrate their competancy
You need to move to the new discussion system.
I'm astonished that it's not as simple as several vendors make the UI, several vendors make the DB's, hook them up on a closed network which of course requires physical security, but there will always be human element). When a person votes, the UI computers broadcast the votes over the networks, to the multiple DBs (I say 3). I leave out the authorization part of this equation because it obviously COULD be done.
The UI program issues the voter a paper receipt, to be used in the event of a recount. He she then visually verifies his/her receipt, and can at any time verify his/her vote against any or all of the DB's At the end of the night, the 3 separate DB tabulations should all be exactly the same.
Yes, this might take a bit more time per person to vote, but I think in the long run it will speed the process by eliminating lines.
My one concern is the issue of voter coercion. With a receipt, someone could threaten you to make you vote a certain way, and then demand proof. Perhaps the receipt should be destroyed after teh voter verifies the DB's recorded his/her votes correctly.
I saw that typo too, and I started to wonder that if THAT slipped QA, what else did? A typo itself is not a big deal. The fact that it passed testing and was shipped with a type IS a big deal
Step 1 -- Create your own game review blog Step 2 -- Buy games and write reviews on blog with adwords, amazon ads, etc Step 3 -- Sell games on ebay Step 4 -- Deduct games as expenses on your income tax Step 5 -- profit!
Children (especially girls) who show aptitude at math are treated as if they are social misfits, and their social missteps are toerated more than in "normal" children. Kids who are good at maath are frequently "taught" via positive reinforcement to be social misfits by society.
One question I always ask in interviews -- "Tell me about some code that you wrote that wasn't for work or school." As an example, I wrote "voting fraud" program to You need to show that you'll be a great employee because you love the job. If you're going for an IT position, you should be proud of your home network. If you're a coder, you should talk about the program/package that you wrote just for fun. Whatever you do, on your resume have examples of how you do it for the love of it -- Write about your MythTV, write about your web site, write about your spam filter implementation ....write about SOMETHING that shows you're in the field because you LOVE it, not because you're looking for a job.
We've been using Amazon's S3. It has a great API, pretty easy to use. I was concerned about storing sensitive data there, but we worked out a good encryption scheme (that I won't detail) and now I'm able to really restore everything from anywhere with no notice. My city could sink into the ocean and I could be in Topeka, and I could bring things back up as long as I had a credit card.
In my mind, there's no question that this is the REAL future of computing. Why would you carry a computer anywhere, except for a portable to work in weird places? Otherwise you just need to carry your env. Eventually of course, every computer will be networked -- and then you'll just log in and your settings will be downloaded, but till then, you can even carry Windows on your thumb drive if you so choose. So what's so special about carrying your settings?
If your ISP will not give you an address in a non-dynamic space, then it's your fault for accepting their response. Yes, and those Amish girls were asking for it I'm sure in your neo-conservative world, you believe that only people who can afford it should be able to send email. Sometimes people make decisions for financial reasons. It's cheaper to sign up with an ISP who "The average mail administrator is in WAY over his/her head" Maybe in your social circle. I guess you don't understand that by definition, people who read /. are not the average mail administrators. The internet is dominated by idiots, and most of them run Exchange. Although I can see WHY you don't understand that...or the meaning of the word "average" either :) If we were all leet like you, there would BE no spam. Besides, social circle and mail administrator are words that are never used together.
Here's the thing -- you cannot tell when a "dynamic" ip address become released to static. You only know what the blocks are. IP blacklisting is so 1996, DomainKeys is the future of spam fighting. Yet Spamhaus never advocated domainkeys. In fact they never advocated ANYTHING that would have minimized people's reliance on their service. They may have been in it for the public good initially, but IMHO, in the end Spamhaus loved the power. The amount of ambivalence here should be a good indication that they certainly did not have a universal mandate. And considering the draconian rules they imposed, I would think that they would have wanted a bit more of a mandate.
The argument that "admins choose to use Spamhaus" is like saying "old people chose to use phishing sites." The average mail administrator is in WAY over his/her head (present company included) and are usually willing to take a "default" option that makes 90% of his/her users happy. Spamhaus said (paraphrase mine, please feel free to correct) "we have a list of ip addresses that we consider spammers, even though we have not applied a rigorous test to each individual address. It's good enough for our needs, but your needs may vary." The problem with this is that they purport to be EXPERTS on spam. Is the average admin going to refuse the service that claims to be the considered "best practices" of spam experts?
I say let it come down. If there is a need, something else will replace it (in fact, I'm SURE some dilligent person has already copied all the IP's and has such a service in mind already). I suspect that we'll find out how useless Spamhaus actually has been in the last few years. As they themself say :
I think I'd rather see if some other method can be more effective at stopping that spam. While Spamhaus existed, there was no way for the average admin to tell if there was a more effective method. Speaking as a mail administrator who HAS stopped using Spamhaus, I can honestly say, I don't miss it at all, and I get much fewer false positives. My current local filtering efforts appear to be at LEAST as good as Spamhaus, and I am not blocking all the small businesses I was before.As far as money goes, when John Dillinger was asked why he robbed banks, he said "because that's where the money is."
The reason football teams have booster clubs is because they work. The same thing will work for high tech, and they have more money. Try to get some local company with smart people to get involved. They will have financial resources and expertise that you don't. I answered an ad in the local newspaper to help the students at my local high school organize a computer club. Organize the club, get local businesses to contribute, get local developers/database guys to come and lecture. Pretty soon, you'll have a club with enough going on to ask for a real class.
The club also answers your question: "If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?" Working on learning something with a group is a great way to learn things. Get the club going, and then say "this month we're going to learn foobar!"
You're on your way.
...most of Germany at the time actually liked Hitler and supported his war... Leaving aside the veracity of that statement, it seems like you're not making your point or living in a wonderland. Although Bush's current approval numbers are down, he won the 2004 election (no point in debating 2000 -- there is no conclusive result). Are you saying that because he won the election his actions are justified..
But this is defensible. If a Iraq were to end up as big a success story as Germany after American occupation, you'd have to say the US was completely justified. And that could happen. Only history can judge men -- when you try to judge a man in the present, you don't have enough information.