Visiting and/or updating rapturefail.org, and hoping that Harold Camping's followers take to heart the open letter on that site:
Many of you will be tempted to go back to the scriptures in search of new clues for a new date. Let me plead with you to consider instead the importance of solid, basic, principles of reading and interpreting the Bible and stop looking for hidden or secret “truths.” In particular, let me encourage you always to be suspect of any major emphases in any person’s teachings that are founded on allegorical teachings. In particular, be very careful around those who push numerological interpretations. Numerology has some basis in truth, but it is highly subjective and should be approached very humbly, very cautiously, and definitely with a “less-is-more” attitude. The Bible is not a puzzle to be unraveled or a set of hidden numerical clues. What God says He says openly. Live in the clear passages of the Bible and be very suspect of those who claim to have discovered major truths in some of the more obscure portions.
You seem to assume that "science" gives mankind an escape from presuppositions. But that's easily demonstrated not to be true. There are no such thing as "brute facts", whose Truth somehow transcends interpretation. There are only interpreted facts.
Everyone has faith. Even a non-religious person presupposes certain things. For instance:
That their mind is operating in a rational fashion
That what they perceive actually exists, and is not an invented artifact of their own mind
That nature is uniform, such that certain things which have always operated in a certain way (gravity, the speed of light, etc.) will continue to do so
etc. Such things are necessary in order to even begin thinking. Like the religious person who grounds their beliefs on the scientifically-unprovable faith in a deity, the non-religious scientist grounds his beliefs on his own scientifically-unprovable presuppositions.
Everyone does it. Your argument can't be "I have science while you have only faith." It has to be "My unprovable presuppositions are more valid than your unprovable presuppositions for the following reasons..."
> I don't think the guy has a legal leg to stand on. Amazon removed an illegal book, and the guy still has his annotations, useless or not.
Why was the parent modded "funny"? He has a good point. You can debate and/or sue over whether Amazon should have (or legally could) remove your copy of "1984" from your Kindle. Whether or not you have notes that reference that book is beside the point. Granted, your notes may be of greatly reduced value if they contain phrases like "This is a really good paragraph", but still, I doubt you can go after Amazon for that.
What if you had a garden gnome stolen from your yard? You could prosecute the thief for the theft. You could not also go after him for $100,000 because "I buried a treasure in the yard and made notes to where it was buried. The notes told me to go to the gnome, turn west, and go 50 feet. Now that the gnome has been moved, my notes are useless!"
No, what they reveal is the tremendous accuracy of today's modern translations compared to the papyrii and codeces of antiquity. After all, consider the state of Christianity in the first few centuries A.D. - a bunch of "heretics", hated by the Jews, persecuted by the Romans, and driven underground. It was in that environment that the gospels and letters of Paul, Peter, John, etc. were copied, distributed, re-copied, distributed some more, etc.
Were there transcription errors? Sure. You try copying something the size of the Bible in secret, by hand, while fearing for your life! But we can reconstruct the original readings of the books of the NT with tremendous accuracy.
Your insistence that Christians must equate "the literal word of God" with "infallible transcriptions, every single time a book of the Bible is copied" is just plain wrong. That's not what most Christians believe. They believe that the method God used to preserve the text was to have it copied quickly and widely before any single organization could control the process and make "secret" alterations to the Scripture. (Conspiracy theorists who hint darkly about secret councils that burned books or suppressed certain ancient Christian beliefs tend to forget that, even if that was possible, there were no such organizations or counsels like that for many, many centuries . Compare that with Uthman Ibn Affan, who decided which copy of the Qur'an would be canonical, then gathered together and burning all other copies that differed from the official version. Christianity has nothing like that.
After all, we all know that it would not have been possible to have such mature artistic works like Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov, and Casablanca without the addition of explicit sexual imagery. And it's clear that such immature games as Half-Life, Zork, Monkey Island, System Shock and Civilization were kept from becoming true works of art by not containing pornographic content.
.
Seriously, this article is a joke. You want a mature game? (And I use the word "mature" in its ordinary meaning, not as a synonym for "titillating"). Write good stories. I just finished Thief Gold (again), and was easily able to dismiss the clunky late-90's-style graphics and immerse myself in the fantastic story that unfolds for the player throughout its 13 missions. I'm starting Thief 2 now, where the storytelling got even better. Compare that with Crysis - while visually gorgeous, it told a very tired, worn-out story. (I get to play as a space-marine? With futuristic weapons? Wow! And I'm fighting aliens who are coming to earth? Amazing!)
.
Gamemakers: I'm not looking for more violence. Really, I'm not. Shooting bad guys is fine, but I don't wistfully dream about a future game where I'll be able to murder housewives and their children. And I'm not looking for more sexual imagery in my games. I want a story, with a beginning, plot development, and an end. I don't want an open-ended game where I have to create my own story because you were too cheap to hire good writers - I want you to pay what it takes to get some writers to write a fantastic tale that I can immerse myself in. Don't make it pornographic. Don't make it a blood-fest. Just make it compelling. Then you'll have a mature game.
When will computer manufacturers learn that they don't have the expertise to design cool, sleek products like a cell phone? They should leave that to other companies like Appl...
er...
nuts, why doesn't this "Add Comment" form have a "Cancel" button?
Following up on my own posting (and again, IANAL), here's the type of thing that the 5th amendment is designed to protect you against:
The act of producing documents in response to a subpoena may communicate incriminating facts "in two situations: (1) 'if the existence and location of the subpoenaed
papers are unknown to the government'; or (2) where production would 'implicitly authenticate' the documents." Id. (quoting United States v. Fox, 721 F.2d 32, 36 (2d
Cir.1983)).
In this case, #1 doesn't help the defendant because the government knows that the files they're looking for are on the Z: drive of the defendant's computer. #2 doesn't save him either because he already authenticated the documents when an ICE agent viewed them at the border crossing. Thus, no 5th amendment protection.
One other point: the prosecution assumes the defendant knows the password to the encrypted Z: drive (a PGPDisk volume). That's a reasonable assumption (it IS his computer), and it's enough to tilt the balance in their favor and get this court ruling.
Where it would get interesting would be if the defendant claims that he doesn't know the password. ("My friend created and opened the Z: drive on my laptop, but I don't know how to access it once it's closed again"). Or whether he claims he forgot it.
Those are desperate claims, but still... he's pretty much either got to co-operate (and therefore reveal (again) the child porn on his laptop), or find some way to continue not to provide the password on any legal grounds he can.
IANAL, but if I understand what I'm reading, here's how it works. (Lawyers, please correct me where I'm wrong):
The 5th amendment protects you from making testimonial statements that would incriminate you. What is testimony, then? It's basically saying something that the prosecutors don't know, or something that isn't self-evidently true. (The police and prosecutors may THINK you robbed the bank, but they can't compel you to admit on the witness stand that you did so, because that would be self-incriminating testimony from you that would clinch the case.)
In this case, however, the prosecution is well aware that the defendant has the information they want: namely, the password to the encrypted drive. They know this because he typed it in previously, in front of ICE agents. Therefore, by providing them the unencrypted contents of the drive, he is not providing new "testimony" - that is, when the defendant reveals that he does indeed know the password, it's nothing new. The prosecution already knows he owns the computer and that he knows how to access the hidden drive. Thus, the 5th amendment can't be used by the defendant to save himself from having to give the contents of the drive to the authorities.
If I'm not mistaken, the authorities can compel a defendant to open a locked safe when they know that person knows where the key is (or what the combination is). I believe the same thing is happening here.
Now, what if hypothetically he had a TrueCrypt hidden container on the drive? And what if the authorities were pretty sure that such a container existed, but couldn't be sure? Could they compel him to testify whether or not there IS a hidden container in the drive? I don't believe so - that would probably tilt the balance into "testimony", which would be protected by the 5th amendment. Ditto in the case of a file called "MYSTUFF.DAT" that the authorities think is probably a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, but can't be sure about. They can't force the defendant to confirm that suspicion.
In this case, the defendant was sunk because of his prior, freely-given revelation that 1) there was an encrypted drive on his PC and 2) he knew how to access it. By giving that information up, he gave up the farm. It's too late to plead the 5th.
Give HdTach a try. My WinXP computer was plagued with "bursts" of slowness a few months back - everything's fine, then suddenly everything is at a standstill for 10 seconds... then it's fine again.
HdTach's graph of my drive show severe drops in the HDD sequential speed, which were not present in the reference graph for a similar model of hard drive. Diagnosis: hard drive on the verge of failure. With a new hard drive, the problem was solved.
> So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product
> if it isn't free, because it can't be done.
Your premise is flawed. Pirates obviously do value the product even if it's not free, which they show by taking the time and effort to get it.
You seem to be quite confident that huge companies with highly-skilled marketing, accounting, and product research divisions "just don't get it", as if the ideas you present have never crossed their minds. But in fact the article spends a whole section or two discussing the issues that you refer to. For example:
The argument [of economic loss] is straightforward and both intuitively and logically sound: for every pirated copy of a product, there is some potential loss of income to the producer of that product. This is not the same as saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale. What it actually means is that firstly some proportion of the people who are pirating a game would have bought it in the absence of piracy. Equally as important however is the fact that even those who would never have paid the full purchase price for one reason or another may still have paid some lower amount to purchase and play the game which they pirated. This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they've clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly 'worthless', consumers won't bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it's free or not. Even if a game only gives the pirate a few hours of enjoyment, that's still worth something. In the absence of piracy they may have purchased the game at a discount several months after its release, or bought it second-hand for example. So the existence of piracy results in some loss of income to PC game developers, publishers, retailers and even other consumers.
> If you use regular Skype, or if you use Skype or TOM-Skype for voice > (rather than text) communication, you are still secure.
Following up on my own comment, I should point out that you are not secure if you are having a text chat with someone who uses TOM-Skype, even if you yourself use the regular Skype.
According to the Skype Blog, this is a text filter that only applies to TOM-Skype. If you use regular Skype, or if you use Skype or TOM-Skype for voice (rather than text) communication, you are still secure.
Yeah, I know... I don't trust them either. But even the NYT article didn't uncover any snooping of the actual voice calls (although the phone numbers and names of those involved in the call [b]were[/b] being recorded.)
I tried using Zfone with Gizmo a year or two ago, since I trusted the inventor of PGP to provide a better security solution than Skype's proprietary secret encryption. Unfortunately (at least at that time), the voice quality and ability to handle NAT wasn't as good in Gizmo as it was in Skype. Wonder if they've improved it yet?
Yahoo is not the government. It has no obligation to respect your right to free speech. In fact, you give Yahoo the right to delete anything you upload if it contravenes Yahoo's difficult-to-discern standards. When Yahoo deletes publicly displayed content (or when TalkLeft does, for that matter) it is not playing a "governmental role," as this writer asserts. Substitute "managerial role," and the writer has a point.
None of the AP writer's observations are shocking. It has long been understood that freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. The electronic equivalent of the press is a website. If you want to participate in a privately owned website, you play by the owner's rules, whether or not they seem fair to you.
I would simply like to point out that this MySQL update is completely irrelevant because PostgreSQL has had (g_adams27, fill this part in before submitting) for a very long time, and MySQL is simply playing catchup.
...
And now I would like to strongly disagree with g_adams27, who obviously doesn't realize that MySQL is an excellent choice even compared with PostgreSQL, and I wish he'd stop making silly comparisons.
...
In response to that, I say: g_adams27, SHUT UP! You obviously don't recognize the fatal flaws that MySQL still has, in that it still can't (fill this part out later) even after years of development. PostgreSQL is obviously the superior option, and you can take your stupid MySQL advocacy somewhere else.
...
Oh, yeah? Well maybe YOU should shut up! I can't say I'm shocked at g_adams27' mean-spirited response, because that's typical of PostgreSQL jerks. MySQL is AWESOME, and YOU need to shut up, jerk!
...
Well, g_adams27, maybe you should take your TOY MySQL and go play with your dollies, while us REAL sysadmins use a REAL RDBMS to do REAL work! Idiot.
...
And now, allow me, g_adams27, to step in to the middle of this debate and simply point out that you're BOTH right, and that MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly good choices.
Anyone that's done much exploration of spam filtering already knows the basic architecture of self-learning filters. This article has nothing new.
Which might be why the article is completely different than your one-sentence summary of it.
Bayesian filtering is briefly mentioned as a solution in the introduction of the article, before the author gets into the real meat of his suggestions on improving that baseline - spam-reporting mailboxes that are automatically processed and passed to SpamAssassin and Razor, improving the implementation of whitelists and blacklists, mail filtering for easier manual processing, and generating reports to determine which techniques are working and which aren't.
Seriously, go read the article. I'm glad the author wrote it; that Perl script for processing an IMAP mailbox looks quite handy.
> But look at all the block the Bush Administration has put on various technologies around cloning.
> I'm not for cloning entire people, but cloning body parts - which reduces the rate of rejection to
> practically nil - is a wonderful idea. I needed a bone graft once and it didn't take from some other
> donor. It would've been nice if that could've been cloned from me.
Amen, brother! Just like you, when I read the question "Where are the Flying Cars", the first thing that popped into my mind was "It's that stupid Bush and his refusal to clone body parts!". Great minds think alike, huh?
If you just don't feeling like replaying your game to get back to where you were, you can often find saved games from somewhere else. That's especially true for linear games, like FPS's. Just for example, here's a collection of Half-Life 2 saved games. With some work, you could probably also find (for example) Oblivion saved games that might at least put you near where you want to be.
Wanna see what all the MST3K fuss is about? Old episodes (just about all of them, except for those that are commercially available) can be found at the Digital Archive Project. Old episodes of the show encouraged viewers to "keep circulating the tapes", and the DAP guys are doing just that. For legal purposes they pull down any episodes whenever Rhino decides to package and sell them, but otherwise, just about everything is there.
Most episodes were encoded years ago in MPEG4 format, but there's an impressive (and growing) number available in higher quality DVD format.
> The refusal of all the major retailers to sell AO games amounts to nothing more than censorship.
Do you understand what censorship is? Here are three examples:
When the US government tells you that you are not allowed to play a certain video game, that's censorship.
When a retailer decides not to stock a certain video game, that's censorship (of a kind).
When parents tell their child that they are not allowed to play a certain video game, that's censorship.
Only one of those is illegal. Do you know which one it is?
Frankly, I'm not sure what you'd propose as an alternative. Do you want the government to require that retailers who sell any video games must sell all video games out there, regardless of their rating, sexual content, violence level, or even based on whether it's any fun or not? And you think that's an improvement over the free market where a company decides on its own which products to sell? While you're at it, maybe you should get the government to force all video retailers to carry all NC-17 videos. And maybe they should also require all booksellers to sell all X-rated books and magazines that exist.
> We should get rid of the "sex is bad" crowd
Right! We need to censor those guys! Er... hang on...
The story's link to the translated version of the decision doesn't work - probably because Google is only translating the <frameset> document, not the inner frames.
> This law, quite frankly, is a load of ****.
> It just doesn't accomplish anything. Sure, I can freeze my report
> but any thief worth his salt will steal the passcode if/when he steals my identity.
You might have a point if it was simply possible for a thief to call up the 3 credit bureaus and say "Hi, my name is, uh, Mephistophocles and could you give me my credit report freeze code PIN? Great, thanks, bye."
Fortunately, it's not that simple. Here in NC, to enact a freeze, you have to contact all three credit bureaus by certified mail, and identify yourself as the person who is freezing/unfreezing his own credit report. So, to make your scheme work, an identity thief would have to:
Make sure that whatever you do, you can't gain control of your own credit report again. To do that, he'd need to...
get the registered address on your 3 credit reports changed from your address to his (and it can't be a P.O. Box either). But before he can do that, he'd have to...
identify himself to the credit bureaus by impersonating you. To do that, he'd have to know a number of random facts about you - where you have your mortgage, where you lived 10 years ago, what credit cards you have. In short, he'd have to already have a copy of your credit report in hand (which he would get from... where now?)
He could do all that. Or he could move on to an easier target who hasn't already frozen his credit file. Which do you think is more likely?
It's not perfect legislation, but it is very good legislation. I'm sure glad NC is one of the states offering it.
> We ALL now how much better "protected" we are after our politicians pass NEW LAWS
> to protect us! What is it, something like 20,000 separate laws "controlling" the
> ownership and use of guns, yet we still get VaTech?
What a bizarre conflation of two extremely different types of legislation! That's got to be the strangest justification for not passing new laws that I've seen in a long time.
Let me conflate this legislation with another law that's not as wildly dissimilar as gun control laws. Namely, the national Do-Not-Call list. Is it perfect? No. Has it drastically reduced the number of unwatnted phone solicitations we get? Yes.
Legislators often don't pass decent consumer protection laws because of the influence of special interest groups (in cases like this, usually banks). When they actually do feel the heat and pass decent laws that put consumers' interest over special interests, we should stand up and cheer - not complain about other bad laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Visiting and/or updating rapturefail.org, and hoping that Harold Camping's followers take to heart the open letter on that site:
You seem to assume that "science" gives mankind an escape from presuppositions. But that's easily demonstrated not to be true. There are no such thing as "brute facts", whose Truth somehow transcends interpretation. There are only interpreted facts.
Everyone has faith. Even a non-religious person presupposes certain things. For instance:
etc. Such things are necessary in order to even begin thinking. Like the religious person who grounds their beliefs on the scientifically-unprovable faith in a deity, the non-religious scientist grounds his beliefs on his own scientifically-unprovable presuppositions.
Everyone does it. Your argument can't be "I have science while you have only faith." It has to be "My unprovable presuppositions are more valid than your unprovable presuppositions for the following reasons..."
> I don't think the guy has a legal leg to stand on. Amazon removed an illegal book, and the guy still has his annotations, useless or not.
Why was the parent modded "funny"? He has a good point. You can debate and/or sue over whether Amazon should have (or legally could) remove your copy of "1984" from your Kindle. Whether or not you have notes that reference that book is beside the point. Granted, your notes may be of greatly reduced value if they contain phrases like "This is a really good paragraph", but still, I doubt you can go after Amazon for that.
What if you had a garden gnome stolen from your yard? You could prosecute the thief for the theft. You could not also go after him for $100,000 because "I buried a treasure in the yard and made notes to where it was buried. The notes told me to go to the gnome, turn west, and go 50 feet. Now that the gnome has been moved, my notes are useless!"
No, what they reveal is the tremendous accuracy of today's modern translations compared to the papyrii and codeces of antiquity. After all, consider the state of Christianity in the first few centuries A.D. - a bunch of "heretics", hated by the Jews, persecuted by the Romans, and driven underground. It was in that environment that the gospels and letters of Paul, Peter, John, etc. were copied, distributed, re-copied, distributed some more, etc.
Were there transcription errors? Sure. You try copying something the size of the Bible in secret, by hand, while fearing for your life! But we can reconstruct the original readings of the books of the NT with tremendous accuracy.
Your insistence that Christians must equate "the literal word of God" with "infallible transcriptions, every single time a book of the Bible is copied" is just plain wrong. That's not what most Christians believe. They believe that the method God used to preserve the text was to have it copied quickly and widely before any single organization could control the process and make "secret" alterations to the Scripture. (Conspiracy theorists who hint darkly about secret councils that burned books or suppressed certain ancient Christian beliefs tend to forget that, even if that was possible, there were no such organizations or counsels like that for many, many centuries . Compare that with Uthman Ibn Affan, who decided which copy of the Qur'an would be canonical, then gathered together and burning all other copies that differed from the official version. Christianity has nothing like that.
After all, we all know that it would not have been possible to have such mature artistic works like Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov, and Casablanca without the addition of explicit sexual imagery. And it's clear that such immature games as Half-Life, Zork, Monkey Island, System Shock and Civilization were kept from becoming true works of art by not containing pornographic content.
.
Seriously, this article is a joke. You want a mature game? (And I use the word "mature" in its ordinary meaning, not as a synonym for "titillating"). Write good stories. I just finished Thief Gold (again), and was easily able to dismiss the clunky late-90's-style graphics and immerse myself in the fantastic story that unfolds for the player throughout its 13 missions. I'm starting Thief 2 now, where the storytelling got even better. Compare that with Crysis - while visually gorgeous, it told a very tired, worn-out story. (I get to play as a space-marine? With futuristic weapons? Wow! And I'm fighting aliens who are coming to earth? Amazing!)
.
Gamemakers: I'm not looking for more violence. Really, I'm not. Shooting bad guys is fine, but I don't wistfully dream about a future game where I'll be able to murder housewives and their children. And I'm not looking for more sexual imagery in my games. I want a story, with a beginning, plot development, and an end. I don't want an open-ended game where I have to create my own story because you were too cheap to hire good writers - I want you to pay what it takes to get some writers to write a fantastic tale that I can immerse myself in. Don't make it pornographic. Don't make it a blood-fest. Just make it compelling. Then you'll have a mature game.
The link in the story goes to page two of the article. Here's Page 1 instead.
When will computer manufacturers learn that they don't have the expertise to design cool, sleek products like a cell phone? They should leave that to other companies like Appl...
er...
nuts, why doesn't this "Add Comment" form have a "Cancel" button?
Following up on my own posting (and again, IANAL), here's the type of thing that the 5th amendment is designed to protect you against:
In this case, #1 doesn't help the defendant because the government knows that the files they're looking for are on the Z: drive of the defendant's computer. #2 doesn't save him either because he already authenticated the documents when an ICE agent viewed them at the border crossing. Thus, no 5th amendment protection.
One other point: the prosecution assumes the defendant knows the password to the encrypted Z: drive (a PGPDisk volume). That's a reasonable assumption (it IS his computer), and it's enough to tilt the balance in their favor and get this court ruling.
Where it would get interesting would be if the defendant claims that he doesn't know the password. ("My friend created and opened the Z: drive on my laptop, but I don't know how to access it once it's closed again"). Or whether he claims he forgot it.
Those are desperate claims, but still... he's pretty much either got to co-operate (and therefore reveal (again) the child porn on his laptop), or find some way to continue not to provide the password on any legal grounds he can.
IANAL, but if I understand what I'm reading, here's how it works. (Lawyers, please correct me where I'm wrong):
The 5th amendment protects you from making testimonial statements that would incriminate you. What is testimony, then? It's basically saying something that the prosecutors don't know, or something that isn't self-evidently true. (The police and prosecutors may THINK you robbed the bank, but they can't compel you to admit on the witness stand that you did so, because that would be self-incriminating testimony from you that would clinch the case.)
In this case, however, the prosecution is well aware that the defendant has the information they want: namely, the password to the encrypted drive. They know this because he typed it in previously, in front of ICE agents. Therefore, by providing them the unencrypted contents of the drive, he is not providing new "testimony" - that is, when the defendant reveals that he does indeed know the password, it's nothing new. The prosecution already knows he owns the computer and that he knows how to access the hidden drive. Thus, the 5th amendment can't be used by the defendant to save himself from having to give the contents of the drive to the authorities.
If I'm not mistaken, the authorities can compel a defendant to open a locked safe when they know that person knows where the key is (or what the combination is). I believe the same thing is happening here.
Now, what if hypothetically he had a TrueCrypt hidden container on the drive? And what if the authorities were pretty sure that such a container existed, but couldn't be sure? Could they compel him to testify whether or not there IS a hidden container in the drive? I don't believe so - that would probably tilt the balance into "testimony", which would be protected by the 5th amendment. Ditto in the case of a file called "MYSTUFF.DAT" that the authorities think is probably a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, but can't be sure about. They can't force the defendant to confirm that suspicion.
In this case, the defendant was sunk because of his prior, freely-given revelation that 1) there was an encrypted drive on his PC and 2) he knew how to access it. By giving that information up, he gave up the farm. It's too late to plead the 5th.
I was hoping for Kwicky. :-(
Give HdTach a try. My WinXP computer was plagued with "bursts" of slowness a few months back - everything's fine, then suddenly everything is at a standstill for 10 seconds... then it's fine again.
HdTach's graph of my drive show severe drops in the HDD sequential speed, which were not present in the reference graph for a similar model of hard drive. Diagnosis: hard drive on the verge of failure. With a new hard drive, the problem was solved.
> So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product
> if it isn't free, because it can't be done.
Your premise is flawed. Pirates obviously do value the product even if it's not free, which they show by taking the time and effort to get it.
You seem to be quite confident that huge companies with highly-skilled marketing, accounting, and product research divisions "just don't get it", as if the ideas you present have never crossed their minds. But in fact the article spends a whole section or two discussing the issues that you refer to. For example:
> If you use regular Skype, or if you use Skype or TOM-Skype for voice
> (rather than text) communication, you are still secure.
Following up on my own comment, I should point out that you are not secure if you are having a text chat with someone who uses TOM-Skype, even if you yourself use the regular Skype.
According to the Skype Blog, this is a text filter that only applies to TOM-Skype. If you use regular Skype, or if you use Skype or TOM-Skype for voice (rather than text) communication, you are still secure.
Yeah, I know... I don't trust them either. But even the NYT article didn't uncover any snooping of the actual voice calls (although the phone numbers and names of those involved in the call [b]were[/b] being recorded.)
I tried using Zfone with Gizmo a year or two ago, since I trusted the inventor of PGP to provide a better security solution than Skype's proprietary secret encryption. Unfortunately (at least at that time), the voice quality and ability to handle NAT wasn't as good in Gizmo as it was in Skype. Wonder if they've improved it yet?
Yahoo is not the government. It has no obligation to respect your right to free speech. In fact, you give Yahoo the right to delete anything you upload if it contravenes Yahoo's difficult-to-discern standards. When Yahoo deletes publicly displayed content (or when TalkLeft does, for that matter) it is not playing a "governmental role," as this writer asserts. Substitute "managerial role," and the writer has a point.
None of the AP writer's observations are shocking. It has long been understood that freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. The electronic equivalent of the press is a website. If you want to participate in a privately owned website, you play by the owner's rules, whether or not they seem fair to you.
TalkLeft
I would simply like to point out that this MySQL update is completely irrelevant because PostgreSQL has had (g_adams27, fill this part in before submitting) for a very long time, and MySQL is simply playing catchup.
...
And now I would like to strongly disagree with g_adams27, who obviously doesn't realize that MySQL is an excellent choice even compared with PostgreSQL, and I wish he'd stop making silly comparisons.
...
In response to that, I say: g_adams27, SHUT UP! You obviously don't recognize the fatal flaws that MySQL still has, in that it still can't (fill this part out later) even after years of development. PostgreSQL is obviously the superior option, and you can take your stupid MySQL advocacy somewhere else.
...
Oh, yeah? Well maybe YOU should shut up! I can't say I'm shocked at g_adams27' mean-spirited response, because that's typical of PostgreSQL jerks. MySQL is AWESOME, and YOU need to shut up, jerk!
...
Well, g_adams27, maybe you should take your TOY MySQL and go play with your dollies, while us REAL sysadmins use a REAL RDBMS to do REAL work! Idiot.
...
And now, allow me, g_adams27, to step in to the middle of this debate and simply point out that you're BOTH right, and that MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly good choices.
Just doing my part to shorten this thread.
$200 + $120/year? Not "inexpensive" enough for me to stick onto my dog!
Which might be why the article is completely different than your one-sentence summary of it.
Bayesian filtering is briefly mentioned as a solution in the introduction of the article, before the author gets into the real meat of his suggestions on improving that baseline - spam-reporting mailboxes that are automatically processed and passed to SpamAssassin and Razor, improving the implementation of whitelists and blacklists, mail filtering for easier manual processing, and generating reports to determine which techniques are working and which aren't.
Seriously, go read the article. I'm glad the author wrote it; that Perl script for processing an IMAP mailbox looks quite handy.
> But look at all the block the Bush Administration has put on various technologies around cloning.
> I'm not for cloning entire people, but cloning body parts - which reduces the rate of rejection to
> practically nil - is a wonderful idea. I needed a bone graft once and it didn't take from some other
> donor. It would've been nice if that could've been cloned from me.
Amen, brother! Just like you, when I read the question "Where are the Flying Cars", the first thing that popped into my mind was "It's that stupid Bush and his refusal to clone body parts!". Great minds think alike, huh?
If you just don't feeling like replaying your game to get back to where you were, you can often find saved games from somewhere else. That's especially true for linear games, like FPS's. Just for example, here's a collection of Half-Life 2 saved games. With some work, you could probably also find (for example) Oblivion saved games that might at least put you near where you want to be.
Wanna see what all the MST3K fuss is about? Old episodes (just about all of them, except for those that are commercially available) can be found at the Digital Archive Project. Old episodes of the show encouraged viewers to "keep circulating the tapes", and the DAP guys are doing just that. For legal purposes they pull down any episodes whenever Rhino decides to package and sell them, but otherwise, just about everything is there.
Most episodes were encoded years ago in MPEG4 format, but there's an impressive (and growing) number available in higher quality DVD format.
> The refusal of all the major retailers to sell AO games amounts to nothing more than censorship.
Do you understand what censorship is? Here are three examples:
Only one of those is illegal. Do you know which one it is?
Frankly, I'm not sure what you'd propose as an alternative. Do you want the government to require that retailers who sell any video games must sell all video games out there, regardless of their rating, sexual content, violence level, or even based on whether it's any fun or not? And you think that's an improvement over the free market where a company decides on its own which products to sell? While you're at it, maybe you should get the government to force all video retailers to carry all NC-17 videos. And maybe they should also require all booksellers to sell all X-rated books and magazines that exist.
> We should get rid of the "sex is bad" crowd
Right! We need to censor those guys! Er... hang on...
The story's link to the translated version of the decision doesn't work - probably because Google is only translating the <frameset> document, not the inner frames.
This link should work, though
> This law, quite frankly, is a load of ****.
> It just doesn't accomplish anything. Sure, I can freeze my report
> but any thief worth his salt will steal the passcode if/when he steals my identity.
You might have a point if it was simply possible for a thief to call up the 3 credit bureaus and say "Hi, my name is, uh, Mephistophocles and could you give me my credit report freeze code PIN? Great, thanks, bye."
Fortunately, it's not that simple. Here in NC, to enact a freeze, you have to contact all three credit bureaus by certified mail, and identify yourself as the person who is freezing/unfreezing his own credit report. So, to make your scheme work, an identity thief would have to:
He could do all that. Or he could move on to an easier target who hasn't already frozen his credit file. Which do you think is more likely?
It's not perfect legislation, but it is very good legislation. I'm sure glad NC is one of the states offering it.
> We ALL now how much better "protected" we are after our politicians pass NEW LAWS
> to protect us! What is it, something like 20,000 separate laws "controlling" the
> ownership and use of guns, yet we still get VaTech?
What a bizarre conflation of two extremely different types of legislation! That's got to be the strangest justification for not passing new laws that I've seen in a long time.
Let me conflate this legislation with another law that's not as wildly dissimilar as gun control laws. Namely, the national Do-Not-Call list. Is it perfect? No. Has it drastically reduced the number of unwatnted phone solicitations we get? Yes.
Legislators often don't pass decent consumer protection laws because of the influence of special interest groups (in cases like this, usually banks). When they actually do feel the heat and pass decent laws that put consumers' interest over special interests, we should stand up and cheer - not complain about other bad laws.