Re:Infant mortality is good for the third world
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
Effort should be put into reducing world population as quickly as possible.
Sure, but increasing infant mortality is hardly any more humane than mass executions. I think the solution is to decrease the birth rate, not to increase infant mortality. Here's how:
Start with women's rights. There is a strong correlation between women's rights and reduced birth rate.
Improve access to birth control, and speak out against religious beliefs that oppose it. This should be a no-brainer!
Improve care of the elderly, because a big motivation to bear many children is to ensure you'll be taken care of when you're old.
Educate people. Educate them about environmental impact of population. Educate them about birth control. (While you're at it, educate them about AIDS.)
It would be wonderful if the world population were reduced to 2 billion by 2099. Earth could then become a paradise.
Good! Then I assume you're committed to doing your part, and you won't have any children.
Uh, right. That's the old "media conspiracy against poor victimized conservatives" argument. Source for your statistic, please? If anything, the media works for corporate interest, though that may be more by the publishers and editors than by the reporters themselves.
Another way of saying what you said is that "conservatives don't know what's going on in the world." Maybe journalists start out as a random distribution, but turn more liberal as they investigate what's going on in the world, when they see the bigger picture, and they realize just who's been lying to them all along. At least one journalist friend of mine started out fairly right-wing, but is that way no more.
And don't forget, not all liberals are Democrats. And anyway, political positions are much more complex than the one-dimensional liberal-vs.-conservative model we in America are fed each day.
For a while, I've considered the idea of "buskware" or "tokenware". Freely-available software (or other IP), and anyone who wants to can donate a quarter ($0.25) by clicking a button somewhere. I'd bet you'd get more income than most shareware, which requires a larger commitment, i.e. a few dollars. I think most people would donate a quarter for a really useful program or Web page.
To do this, we'd need widespread digital cash, integrated into all major browsers, able to handle small transactions. A few years off.
I have an educational Web site with thousands of daily visitors, ad-free by choice. Judging from email, many are very grateful. If even a tenth of them gave me a quarter, running the Web site would be quite a bit easier. It could still keep its primary goal of being accessible to all, and unpolluted by ads.
(Not sure this post really merits a response, but:)
These are the people that invented HTTP/1.1 in the first place. It has been in development for years, and software developers have implemented what's been ready so far, but all the details hadn't been finalized. Those years were spent ironing out every last little contradiction, ambiguity, and other problem that could be found in the spec, so that we'll be able to use it as long as possible into the future. Your "market" has been looking to these people to make the decisions, because anyone who writes network software knows we need standards, and anyone who's developed much software at all knows that underlying systems must be planned carefully, or they'll fall apart sooner rather than later. The people who made HTTP/1.1 include connections with all the major players in the "market".
By the way, if you think the W3C and IETF are irrelevant, you don't know much about the Internet. And random, vague political bashing doesn't score much in the brains department.
Bullshit, *I* didn't agree to anything! And you didn't either. Don't let them make you believe otherwise.
Their claim is invalid for the following reasons:
I didn't agree to anything. They can't unilaterally impose conditions on me.
As some have pointed out, this statement only comes up after the query.
As others have pointed out, people with domain names never agreed to this. It's their information, and they're ostensibly paying NSI for a service.
NSI is a regulated monopoly, supposedly in place to serve the public. Any changes they make are probably subject to regulatory review. And they're already in trouble with the government.
Any one of these would invalidate their claim, even if they fixed the others! (Remember this, in case they fix any.) I don't think their claim could ever stand a chance in court.
So does anyone want a CGI script that's a whois gateway? Install it on your site to automatically violate NSI's claim. It would force them to either openly ignore you or take you to court, where they'd have no case. If anyone wants to snub NSI like this, ask me and I'll write a simple whois gateway for you.
On another front, it really seems to me that if all the sysadmins are pissed off at NSI, we could all start pointing our DNS's to an alternate root DNS server (maybe in addition to NSI). What, exactly, is stopping us from doing this? Even if only half the sysadmins did it, the others would follow suit so as not to lose access to all those alternate domains.
I keep hearing complaints of how "difficult" the Unix command line is to learn, "once you venture outside of the GUI."
Is Unix really any harder than any other command line? Does anyone really think the Windows command line is any easier? Anything you can do from the Windows command line, you can do from the Unix command line just as easily (and often easier).
The key is that ideally, in Windows you never need to use the command line. But the same is true in Linux! It's not fair to propagate this tired "arcane command line" argument.
So is it just coincidence that the Hubble constant is about 1 over the age of the universe? (You can get it if you reduce the units km/sec/mpc down to 1/sec.)
you'd think that people who cared enough about their privacy to want to strong-encrypt their email would just install PGP on their local system and be done with it, rather than trusting a third party to take care of the encryption for them.
Not everyone has a local system to install PGP onto.
Who's this for? The same crowd that uses Yahoo mail, hotmail, etc. Joke all you want, but there are legitimate uses. Notably, for people who can't afford to own a computer and must do all online activity through browsers at libraries, schools, cafes, etc. You'd be surprised how many homeless people have an active online presence.
Granted, they'll never be secure as long as they trust this third party to handle their encryption. But it's a couple steps better than unencrypted Web-based email.
I'm really glad this is happening. With luck, all the other Web-based email services will add encryption too, at least in the mail that gets sent out. The sooner we have a critical mass of the email world using encryption, the sooner it will be considered standard.
With all due respect, Alan, please don't assume that all Americans fit that ugly stereotype. You shouldn't make categorical stereotypes based on the posting of this one kook, or even ten kooks. Don't forget, the kookiest are usually the most visible, whether it's making antisocial posts or bombing abortion clinics.
There are many Americans who don't buy all the crap the military-industrial-media complex feeds us, and are actually pretty good people, and agree with you 100% on all the important issues (like idiotic imperialist arrogant export controls). However, the general population doesn't control our government as much as one would think. Some of us are trying to change that, and moral support from elsewhere helps.
Feel free to criticize "the US government", "US foreign policy" (hey, I'm with ya), or even "some Americans", but not "Americans" as a whole.
I (an American) used to think this, but then I asked a Canadian friend of mine about it. She said she didn't really care, and that she'd never heard anyone in Canada make a fuss about it, and that people there called the US "America" too.
That's what she told me, anyway. I don't really care, I'm happy to call it whatever, but I hear plenty of non-Americans calling it America.
In the last letter, Fujitsu itemizes the costs "to recall the PCX phones in the marketplace if the source code has been compromised or is not safe."
Hmm, so their phones aren't secure if the source code is revealed. Sounds like their own fault to me. Sounds like the people writing the security software don't know what they're doing, right? ("Security through obscurity" is well-known to be ineffective protection-- search on that phrase for more info.)
If this is how Fujitsu's products work, I'll start advising security-conscious people not to buy Fujitsu.
Whenever you need "prior art", look in the archives of old research mailing lists, like the working groups of the IETF. They take into account all sorts of distant possibilities when designing protocols, etc.
Look in old newsgroup archives, at dejanews.
Everyone who posted an idea here, make sure you email your ideas to patent-prior-art@w3.org!! They won't get it if you just post a comment to Slashdot.
sound handling (which can be a BITCH to do realtime mixing)...
Hmm, I haven't programmed much sound, but what makes it so hard? It seems like you could have a thread that you pass any sound to (possibly in an optimal format), and the thread mixes in whatever sounds requests it gets real-time, and outputs to sound card/speakers. You still need to write the mixing code for that thread, but it seems straightforward, and general enough that you could use it in most apps.
But I'm probably missing something, I have little experience....
"Extreme remedies would punish Microsoft for being successful."
No, lack of extreme remedies would reward MS for being corrupt.
I mean, the Mafia's "successful" too. How exactly does "being successful" justify any and all means to get there? Where on earth did that twisted concept ever come from? To me, the Mafia and Microsoft are perfect examples of why an unrestrained free market doesn't work.
Bottom line? If the open-source community wishes to be taken seriously,
The open-source community IS taken seriously.
a) It needs to shed a LOT of its puerile arrogance,
Some individuals, maybe. Not most. Not the poster you respond to, either. In my experience, the OSS community is much less arrogant than the commercial software world.
I, too, am sick of MS's whining about a situation it brought on itself. It knows that; its whining is merely a PR strategy to maximize profits, as is everything else it does.
b) Members need to learn to control their desire to immediately demolish MS, or at least consider the consequences,
It is controlled. It exists for a reason. The consequences have been well-considered by people who know what they're talking about and have decades of industry experience. Getting rid of MS means that S/W development will no longer be held back like it has been for 15 years. It will also mean that billions of dollars won't be continuously and needlessly sucked from our economy into Bill Gate's pocket.
c) and it needs to find people who write coherently.
It has them, lots of them. Many others are coders, not professional writers-- they know what they're talking about, even though their grammer may be bad. You should learn to absorb ideas from writings that are imperfect, you would surely learn a lot.
James (Don't know that the AC's post merited a response, I just felt like it.)
Yup, that's what I've always thought, especially the Web.
Because they can't buy it, and they need it most
on
Linux in South Africa
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· Score: 1
(Whoops, found this old miscommunication I thought I'd clear up.)
No, no, I didn't mean it that way. I meant at least moderately affluent; I never thought that "moderately affluent" could be taken as a slur. For that matter, I don't think "poor" is a slur either. And the "trying to appear that way" refers to Russia. I like the Russians I know, but the country's having trouble and the government keeps pretending nothing's wrong. I worry that national pride might prevent them from taking (perceived) charity.
Hmm, I don't really want to open up a flamey topic, but...
Most companies beholden to shareholders make decisions based purely on the blind profit motive. Any other morals fall by the wayside. Would Red Hat have any mechanism in place to prevent this? If not, then it is once again up to the community to keep them in check.:P
Now, I like the direction Red Hat's taken lately, and I'm NOT saying they have any bad intentions. (Hey, we don't even know if they're really going public!) I'm just concerned that if they do go public, the current employees may not be able to prevent the company from moving towards the maximum profit, which may be very much at odds with the Linux community.
Then again, their source is all open (so far), so that may give us an out.
I don't know what the CPU+bandwidth costs them to serve a domain name, but I'm sure it's less than $1-2/year. They've been ripping us off in a big way ever since they started charging. And they'll continue ripping us off now, for $9/year.
If we (the Internet community) had been allowed to start our own non-profit DNS registry, we'd have done it a lot cheaper and Network Solutions would have gone away a long time ago.
My own complaint was when I bought 4.1 whenever that came out, and had a lot of install problems (their install scripts were buggy). When I emailed RH for support, they just said "check the mailing lists and newsgroups". This after loudly proclaiming install support all over their Web site and other advertisements. I did check the mailing lists and newsgroups, but never got the system working smoothly (my first Linux).
So my first impression of Red Hat was that they put a lot more money into marketing and sales than into good technology and support, which is indeed the MS business model.
I've heard their installs are a lot better now, and I know they've done some good development too. My only experience with them was a major letdown, but maybe I was just unlucky.
James
Because they can't buy it, and they need it most
on
Linux in South Africa
·
· Score: 1
I suspect it's because these countries are struggling with deep economic problems, and there's no way in hell they could afford to buy software for their schools. England, Germany, Russia, Canada, and Japan are either moderately affluent, or are trying to appear so.
I hope that giving computer resources to schools will result in well-educated children, who may then be able to tackle the problems facing their countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but increasing infant mortality is hardly any more humane than mass executions. I think the solution is to decrease the birth rate , not to increase infant mortality. Here's how:
It would be wonderful if the world population were reduced to 2 billion by 2099. Earth could then become a paradise.
Good! Then I assume you're committed to doing your part, and you won't have any children.
Mass media is excessively liberal.
Uh, right. That's the old "media conspiracy against poor victimized conservatives" argument. Source for your statistic, please? If anything, the media works for corporate interest, though that may be more by the publishers and editors than by the reporters themselves.
Another way of saying what you said is that "conservatives don't know what's going on in the world." Maybe journalists start out as a random distribution, but turn more liberal as they investigate what's going on in the world, when they see the bigger picture, and they realize just who's been lying to them all along. At least one journalist friend of mine started out fairly right-wing, but is that way no more.
And don't forget, not all liberals are Democrats. And anyway, political positions are much more complex than the one-dimensional liberal-vs.-conservative model we in America are fed each day.
For a while, I've considered the idea of "buskware" or "tokenware". Freely-available software (or other IP), and anyone who wants to can donate a quarter ($0.25) by clicking a button somewhere. I'd bet you'd get more income than most shareware, which requires a larger commitment, i.e. a few dollars. I think most people would donate a quarter for a really useful program or Web page.
To do this, we'd need widespread digital cash, integrated into all major browsers, able to handle small transactions. A few years off.
I have an educational Web site with thousands of daily visitors, ad-free by choice. Judging from email, many are very grateful. If even a tenth of them gave me a quarter, running the Web site would be quite a bit easier. It could still keep its primary goal of being accessible to all, and unpolluted by ads.
These are the people that invented HTTP/1.1 in the first place. It has been in development for years, and software developers have implemented what's been ready so far, but all the details hadn't been finalized. Those years were spent ironing out every last little contradiction, ambiguity, and other problem that could be found in the spec, so that we'll be able to use it as long as possible into the future. Your "market" has been looking to these people to make the decisions, because anyone who writes network software knows we need standards, and anyone who's developed much software at all knows that underlying systems must be planned carefully, or they'll fall apart sooner rather than later. The people who made HTTP/1.1 include connections with all the major players in the "market".
By the way, if you think the W3C and IETF are irrelevant, you don't know much about the Internet. And random, vague political bashing doesn't score much in the brains department.
Their claim is invalid for the following reasons:
Any one of these would invalidate their claim, even if they fixed the others! (Remember this, in case they fix any.) I don't think their claim could ever stand a chance in court.
So does anyone want a CGI script that's a whois gateway? Install it on your site to automatically violate NSI's claim. It would force them to either openly ignore you or take you to court, where they'd have no case. If anyone wants to snub NSI like this, ask me and I'll write a simple whois gateway for you.
On another front, it really seems to me that if all the sysadmins are pissed off at NSI, we could all start pointing our DNS's to an alternate root DNS server (maybe in addition to NSI). What, exactly, is stopping us from doing this? Even if only half the sysadmins did it, the others would follow suit so as not to lose access to all those alternate domains.
Is Unix really any harder than any other command line? Does anyone really think the Windows command line is any easier? Anything you can do from the Windows command line, you can do from the Unix command line just as easily (and often easier).
The key is that ideally, in Windows you never need to use the command line. But the same is true in Linux! It's not fair to propagate this tired "arcane command line" argument.
The Linux industry needs the Linux community a lot more than the other way around!
In his letter to Harvard, John Vranesevich accuses Packet Storm of posting images of "people engaged in homosexual activities".
Why, exactly, would that be any worse than people engaged in heterosexual activities?
In addition to his other stellar characteristics, it looks like JP is a homophobe.
People, we need to catch things like this. Homophobia should not be tolerated in the online community.
Cheers,
James, who is not homosexual but knows a whole lot of great people who are.
So is it just coincidence that the Hubble constant is about 1 over the age of the universe? (You can get it if you reduce the units km/sec/mpc down to 1/sec.)
Any astrophysicists here?
Keep dreaming, NSI. I didn't agree to nothin'. Don't tell me I did and expect me to believe you.
I'll copy and post any whois information anywhere I want.
Not everyone has a local system to install PGP onto.
Who's this for? The same crowd that uses Yahoo mail, hotmail, etc. Joke all you want, but there are legitimate uses. Notably, for people who can't afford to own a computer and must do all online activity through browsers at libraries, schools, cafes, etc. You'd be surprised how many homeless people have an active online presence.
Granted, they'll never be secure as long as they trust this third party to handle their encryption. But it's a couple steps better than unencrypted Web-based email.
I'm really glad this is happening. With luck, all the other Web-based email services will add encryption too, at least in the mail that gets sent out. The sooner we have a critical mass of the email world using encryption, the sooner it will be considered standard.
There are many Americans who don't buy all the crap the military-industrial-media complex feeds us, and are actually pretty good people, and agree with you 100% on all the important issues (like idiotic imperialist arrogant export controls). However, the general population doesn't control our government as much as one would think. Some of us are trying to change that, and moral support from elsewhere helps.
Feel free to criticize "the US government", "US foreign policy" (hey, I'm with ya), or even "some Americans", but not "Americans" as a whole.
Thanks!
That's what she told me, anyway. I don't really care, I'm happy to call it whatever, but I hear plenty of non-Americans calling it America.
Hmm, so their phones aren't secure if the source code is revealed. Sounds like their own fault to me. Sounds like the people writing the security software don't know what they're doing, right? ("Security through obscurity" is well-known to be ineffective protection-- search on that phrase for more info.)
If this is how Fujitsu's products work, I'll start advising security-conscious people not to buy Fujitsu.
James
Look in old newsgroup archives, at dejanews.
Everyone who posted an idea here, make sure you email your ideas to patent-prior-art@w3.org!! They won't get it if you just post a comment to Slashdot.
http://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/web/newopinions.ns f/f606ac175e010d64882566eb00658118/febd2452a8a4d79 b8825676900685b71?OpenDocument
Hmm, I haven't programmed much sound, but what makes it so hard? It seems like you could have a thread that you pass any sound to (possibly in an optimal format), and the thread mixes in whatever sounds requests it gets real-time, and outputs to sound card/speakers. You still need to write the mixing code for that thread, but it seems straightforward, and general enough that you could use it in most apps.
But I'm probably missing something, I have little experience....
James
No, lack of extreme remedies would reward MS for being corrupt.
I mean, the Mafia's "successful" too. How exactly does "being successful" justify any and all means to get there? Where on earth did that twisted concept ever come from? To me, the Mafia and Microsoft are perfect examples of why an unrestrained free market doesn't work.
James
The open-source community IS taken seriously.
a) It needs to shed a LOT of its puerile arrogance,
Some individuals, maybe. Not most. Not the poster you respond to, either. In my experience, the OSS community is much less arrogant than the commercial software world.
I, too, am sick of MS's whining about a situation it brought on itself. It knows that; its whining is merely a PR strategy to maximize profits, as is everything else it does.
b) Members need to learn to control their desire to immediately demolish MS, or at least consider the consequences,
It is controlled. It exists for a reason. The consequences have been well-considered by people who know what they're talking about and have decades of industry experience. Getting rid of MS means that S/W development will no longer be held back like it has been for 15 years. It will also mean that billions of dollars won't be continuously and needlessly sucked from our economy into Bill Gate's pocket.
c) and it needs to find people who write coherently.
It has them, lots of them. Many others are coders, not professional writers-- they know what they're talking about, even though their grammer may be bad. You should learn to absorb ideas from writings that are imperfect, you would surely learn a lot.
James
(Don't know that the AC's post merited a response, I just felt like it.)
Yup, that's what I've always thought, especially the Web.
No, no, I didn't mean it that way. I meant at least moderately affluent; I never thought that "moderately affluent" could be taken as a slur. For that matter, I don't think "poor" is a slur either. And the "trying to appear that way" refers to Russia. I like the Russians I know, but the country's having trouble and the government keeps pretending nothing's wrong. I worry that national pride might prevent them from taking (perceived) charity.
Most companies beholden to shareholders make decisions based purely on the blind profit motive. Any other morals fall by the wayside. Would Red Hat have any mechanism in place to prevent this? If not, then it is once again up to the community to keep them in check. :P
Now, I like the direction Red Hat's taken lately, and I'm NOT saying they have any bad intentions. (Hey, we don't even know if they're really going public!) I'm just concerned that if they do go public, the current employees may not be able to prevent the company from moving towards the maximum profit, which may be very much at odds with the Linux community.
Then again, their source is all open (so far), so that may give us an out.
James
If we (the Internet community) had been allowed to start our own non-profit DNS registry, we'd have done it a lot cheaper and Network Solutions would have gone away a long time ago.
James
So my first impression of Red Hat was that they put a lot more money into marketing and sales than into good technology and support, which is indeed the MS business model.
I've heard their installs are a lot better now, and I know they've done some good development too. My only experience with them was a major letdown, but maybe I was just unlucky.
James
I hope that giving computer resources to schools will result in well-educated children, who may then be able to tackle the problems facing their countries.
James