Offshoring is a particular type of outsourcing. It doesn't particularly matter to the employee whether the job goes to China, or the firm across the street - it's still not going to them.
And manufacturing jobs might be able to be offshored, but the type of jobs he's talking about aren't manufacturing. You're not going to ship your house to India to get its pipes refitted.
One problem is that patents are filed and granted for "inventions" that has too low technical merits. By raising the standard requirements for patents this may help things a bit.
No, it probably wouldn't. There is already a standard requirement for patents that the invention be not "obvious...to one having ordinary skill in the art". That means that if you come up with a mechanism for something (say, one-click-shopping) if a programmer of ordinary skill could figure out how to do it, given the specifications, then your mechanism should not be patented. Even if you succeed in getting your patent granted, that doesn't mean nobody else can use one-click shopping. It means nobody else can use your particular method of it, so artificially increasing the complexity of your mechanism to bypass the obvious test doesn't get you anything, since all you have is a patent on an overly-complex mechanism, and any competent programmer will just use a simpler one to get the task done.
This seems to me as a good standard. The problem is, its not applied. Either the people processing patents don't know what is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, or they simply don't care. Changing the standard won't help. Enforcing it might.
What is to stop this technology being used to filter out political writtings that they don't want people to be able to access?
The fact that this is a government project, and thus, won't work.
Also, the fact that the very attempt is impossible (without serious tradeoffs).
Seriously. I rent a server in the US. I can SSH to that server. Unless they block all encrypted traffic (goodbye to any commercial internet venture, along with thousands of IT people who use SSH for work daily) they cannot block anything that the US doesn't block. And if the US does block it, well, there are servers for rent all around the world. Censoring the internet is not possible. At best, you can make it inconvenient for the ignorant.
Were Australia not building up a filter service to allow customers to block porn sites a while ago? What is to stop this technology being used to filter out political writtings that they don't want people to be able to access?
The fact that this is a government initiative, and this, won't work.
Actually, if all you want is a big table, MySQL is probably a good choice. It's generally very fast. However, as soon as you start getting a complex database schema, you're probably starting to look at other RDBMSs. MySQL provides a lot of advanced features with InnoDB, but then, InnoDB has just been bought by their biggest competitor. If you're needing any of those features (foreign keys, transactions, etc), then I'd be going with PostGreSQL, because, really, I don't think the InnoDB team is going to be releasing any fixes/upgrades to their MySQL engine any time soon.
The problem with this law isn't it's intent, or even it's procedures. But it's using the wrong system to do the right job.
In the adult world, we have courts to arbitrate situations of libel and slander. Children aren't really held to the same standards as adults unless the circumstances are exceptional, and realistically, they shouldn't be. The courts are an inappropriate system to control this behaviour.
On the other hand, schools are institutions designed (ostensibly at least) for education. They are not designed for settling these sort of disputes. They certainly don't, and shouldn't have, the power to act on things that happen outside school. This sort of legislation is turning schools into mini-governments, ones without all the checks and balances of a real one.
There needs to be controls put on these sorts of actions, but its outside the purview of the schooling system, and the adult court system is overkill. Something needs to be done, but tacking the responsibility onto a system ill-suited for the job isn't going to accomplish anything. If you want the problem to be solved, you'll need to solve it from the ground up, not look for quick fixes.
"freaking out," yeah, okay. Maybe "quite concerned about possible sweeping actions and measures without any substantial proof" might be a better way to put it.
Well, maybe you should take that up with the person the article was quoting. An editorial is when a writer inserts their own opinions in the article, not when they quote someone else who may have a particular bias.
No, it doesn't. It proves that PS3 owners are planning to buy Blu-Ray discs. It doesn't mean they bought the system because it plays Blu-Ray. They might have decided to buy it because of the games/feature of the system, and now are deciding to go Blu-Ray because they already have a player. If I was actually planning on investing in HD video, that's the situation I'd be in. I'd be buying PS3 because they still have the Final Fantasy franchise, and then I'd buy Blu-Ray because I already had a player.
You need to be very careful drawing conclusions from statistics. They only say exactly precisely what they are saying. There's usually more than one scenario that fits the facts.
I'm assuming the "register_globals" referred to is an old default setting for PHP, long known to be a major security hole. Turning it (along with magic quotes) off is one of the first things I do when setting up PHP on a new system. It's a bit two-faced for them claiming that they may not support Mozilla due to security concerns, while simultaneously saying that they're only just changing a default behaviour nefarious for security flaws.
Poor choice of words. "Advertised" is probably better than "guarantees". At the very least, they don't mention any limits in their promotions, and generally won't give you any hard information on them once you've signed up.
That's fine for campus networks. AFAIK, they're not selling their services to customers guaranteeing unlimited bandwidth, then throttling the connection when their customers actually try and use what was promised. Cable companies, on the other hand, do.
That's pretty much the way every ISP in Australia works. I'm on a 20GB a month plan, and if I exceed that, my speed drops to dialup speeds until the end of my billing cycle. You can also choose other options that let you pay for excess data at a per-GB rate, if you prefer it that way. Some ISPs have peering discounts, where transfers between others on the same ISP (or other ISPs in a peering agreement) don't count towards the totals, or where using mirrors provided by the ISP themselves don't count (My ISP mirrors a whole ton of software patches that you can download without impacting your quota, including many Linux distros and packages). Some ISPs even have peak/off-peak plans, where you have, say 10GB of data to use during peak times, and 20GB to use during off-peak.
That said, a lot of the more complicated plans (especially the peak/off-peak) are being phased out as the consumer-base of broadband becomes less and less technically knowledgeable. It turns out consumers generally want the plain and simple plans as opposed to all these complicated choices.
That's nice for you. You happen to be an informed consumer. Unfortunately, you're one of a rare breed. Average consumers don't know squat about DRM key revocations on next-gen media; all they know is that BlueRay is "better" than DVD, so they go out and buy it, without knowing how much control the media companies have over their new purchase.
Due to the ignorance of the average consumer, DRM products become widespread, and, within a few years, become a defacto standard. Now it's too late, both for the educated consumer, and the ignorant one who suddenly realizes how screwed they are when their players key is revoked every six months. Because of their purchasing patterns, the DRMed media has become entrenched and there are no alternatives on the market.
The vast majority of viruses require user intervention to run and infect a machine, and aren't considered news (or at least, not individually).
The most damaging (and thus, most reported) viruses don't. I believe the NetBlaster and RedAlert were actual viruses, and spread by vulnerabilities in services enabled by default on standard windows builds.
1) They left the doors to the house UNLOCKED
This does not make going in and stealing the property any more legal.
No, but if the doors had been locked, she probably still would have had her stuff. These weren't thieves, these were people taking stuff they thought was being given away free. If the doors were looked, they would probably have shrugged and come back another time, not broken in and nicked her stuff.
You'd be committing perjury with every one you sent. And you can bet the government would be much more likely to prosecute individuals pointing out their own stupidity/corruption than they would corporations actually exploiting the law.
The "generic" top level TLDs however (.com,.net, and.org), are indeed irrelevant.
Speak for yourself. It's just that the American method for handing out domain names didn't have any criteria attached to it. To get a.com.au name, you need to have an ABN (Australian Business Number), or an ACN (Australian Company Number) - that is, you have to be commercial. To get a.org.au, you need to be a registered charity or non-profit..net wasn't really well enforced - it's under the same conditions as.com. The problem with that is that there was no TLD for individuals, but I believe they have.id.au now to cover that base.
The current TLD system *can* work, its just that the US didn't bother to try and make it (and you guys were, after all, the first country on, so you were bound to make mistakes), and you can't really fix it up retroactively, with millions of sites already registered. But don't dump the system just because you guys didn't get it to work - it's working fine for other parts of the world.
Suppose you're a teenager or college student. You do some silly prank and it includes a picture of yourself and your friends. You tell your friend you don't want the picture going on the net. For whatever reason, he/she posts it up anyways. Nothing illegal.
You were an idiot. You got hit with consequences. Big deal, you deserved it
Or suppose the names of a doctor's patients were to leak onto the Internet.
Then the doctor is likely to be in breach of privacy laws. Sue the doctor, not archive.org.
Or that you're a company and an ex-employee posts information that is defamous or incorrect about your company.
That's what libel laws are for. Sue the ex-employee, not archive.org.
Or that you post an angry rant on the net, you've grown past it and then delete from your site.
You were an idiot. See above.
Welcome to the world of personal responsibility!
But it is, as I understand, very difficult to have the information removed from caches on search engine and archive sites.
No, you generally just need to contact them and ask for it to be removed.
One problem is that the computing disciplines have become intermingled and are often used interchangeably. Let me outline my definitions:
Computer Science: This is the theoretical, researchoriented discipline. It deals with developing new algorithms, optimization and that side of things. Software Development: This is the application side of Computer Science. It takes the algorithms developed by CompSci and makes useful applications out of them. Information Technology: This is the techie discipline. Building computers, setting up networks, administrating systems. I'm not sure why it got that name, but it seems to have.
The problem that this guy has is that he has conflated Computer Science and Software Development. And it used to be the case that they were pretty much mixed - if you wanted to program, you needed to understand all the theoretical stuff yourself. But in these days of large, freely-available libraries and modular software design, the two have become very distinct disciplines.
It's not that Computer Science is dying out; it's that it has subdivided into two separate disciplines, and of the two, there is a much greater demand for Software Developers than Computer Scientists.
Doing so pisses off customers. No one single ISP wants to be the first to do this, for fear of customers jumping ship to a more tolerant competitor. Unless some pressure is put on the industry from above (fines for spammy ISPs, etc) then this is never going to be implemented on a wide scale. Some small, forward-thinking ISPs will take steps, but the big ISPs catering to your average Joes will not.
Personally, I like my ISPs solution. Port 25 is blocked by default, but you can logon to your control panel and turn that filtering off if you want to. Those stupid enough to get zombied are usually also too clueless to turn the filter off - even if they wanted to. Granted, that doesn't prevent zombies, but it does reduce spam.
Well, why does "satanic" have to be "bad" here? We can make it about other deities if it makes you more comfortable, but let me run with this for a bit...
In the situation you describe, then you needn't choose a side. But that situation wasn't the one that the ancient Jews Jesus was talking to recognized - their theogony was "God = good, Satan and pagan gods = bad", and Jesus spoke to them with the common understanding of that assumption.
If you're theogony posits a belief in multiple Gods, all approximately equal, then you obviously wouldn't have responded like the Pharisees did "Jesus is an agent of Satan!", and Jesus wouldn't have responded the way he did. It wasn't until after Jesus' death that Christianity spread to other cultures that did have such a theogony.
If you want to discuss the nature of God and Satan, but don't want to use the Bible as a source, where does that leave us? Pretty much in the realm of pure speculation. Sure, discounting everything the Bible says, God and Satan could both be equally powerful forces at war without morality. But, discounting everything the Bible says, God and Satan could also just be two puddles of goo.
But that means I would have to know Jesus personally for years...no, I mean actually go out for coffee with him, work with him, play a game with him.
You don't think reading his autobiographies would help you get to know him, or understanding his life's work?
Jesus -- or God, or any deity -- would have to gain my trust in that way, and then, it would be trust and friendship, maybe love, but not worship.
Your attitude is the same one that, Biblically, caused the fall of man - that acknowledging something else as superior is unpleasant or undesirable. Hypothetically speaking, if there was a God who created the universe with a word, who stood outside of time, knew all things and was all powerful, who created you and knew you before you were born, who is goodness personified - why would you expect to be able to dictate the terms of that relationship? If God is worthy of worship, why would you not worship Him?
If you look at Jesus' life as a whole, and the things he said, I'd find that hard to credit. When asked what the most important commandment was, Jesus replied "Love the Lord your God", followed closely by "Love your neighbour as yourself". Even if the church has screwed up in its actions (and it has, and probably will in the future), it's still preaching that sort of message. If Jesus was a satanic agent trying to lead people astray, it seems he screwed it up.
I agree, when all you see is a pure display of power, you have no idea of the nature of that power. But if you listen to the message behind it, then you can get an idea of the nature of the power. And Jesus' message doesn't exactly sound like it's from Satan.
Let's say someone does walk on water, turn water into wine, multiply bread, and so on.
Well, can't Lucifer do all those things? If he can't, how do we know?
"When Jesus saw their faith, he said, 'Friend, your sins are forgiven.'"
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, 'Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" (Luke 5)
The Pharisees saw what Jesus did, and recognized who he was claiming to be. After the passage above, Jesus goes on to say (this is a paraphrasing) "OK, it's easy to say 'I forgive your sins' - nobody can tell if he's forgiven or not. But if you want proof of my authority - Get up and walk". And the paralytic does. Jesus' claimed forgiveness of sins, and backed it up by showing a physical, empirical demonstration of his authority.
There is also an example of people coming to the conclusion you suggest:
"And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, 'He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.'
So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: 'How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.'" (Mark 3)
Basically, Jesus says that he's not from Satan, because he's working against Satan's interests in the world. Furthermore, he says that the only way he could drive out demons, was if he was stronger than Satan.
Hell, eternal suffering, flames and torture: these scenes are there to scare people into obedience by rather crude methods
That's your analysis, based on your assumption that it isn't true. A Christian analysis, based on the assumption that hell is true (and the Bible is generally written to those who do believe that), is that those descriptions exist as a warning, to save people from Hell, not as a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Offshoring is a particular type of outsourcing. It doesn't particularly matter to the employee whether the job goes to China, or the firm across the street - it's still not going to them.
And manufacturing jobs might be able to be offshored, but the type of jobs he's talking about aren't manufacturing. You're not going to ship your house to India to get its pipes refitted.
One problem is that patents are filed and granted for "inventions" that has too low technical merits. By raising the standard requirements for patents this may help things a bit.
No, it probably wouldn't. There is already a standard requirement for patents that the invention be not "obvious...to one having ordinary skill in the art". That means that if you come up with a mechanism for something (say, one-click-shopping) if a programmer of ordinary skill could figure out how to do it, given the specifications, then your mechanism should not be patented. Even if you succeed in getting your patent granted, that doesn't mean nobody else can use one-click shopping. It means nobody else can use your particular method of it, so artificially increasing the complexity of your mechanism to bypass the obvious test doesn't get you anything, since all you have is a patent on an overly-complex mechanism, and any competent programmer will just use a simpler one to get the task done.
This seems to me as a good standard. The problem is, its not applied. Either the people processing patents don't know what is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, or they simply don't care. Changing the standard won't help. Enforcing it might.
What is to stop this technology being used to filter out political writtings that they don't want people to be able to access?
The fact that this is a government project, and thus, won't work.
Also, the fact that the very attempt is impossible (without serious tradeoffs).
Seriously. I rent a server in the US. I can SSH to that server. Unless they block all encrypted traffic (goodbye to any commercial internet venture, along with thousands of IT people who use SSH for work daily) they cannot block anything that the US doesn't block. And if the US does block it, well, there are servers for rent all around the world. Censoring the internet is not possible. At best, you can make it inconvenient for the ignorant.
Were Australia not building up a filter service to allow customers to block porn sites a while ago? What is to stop this technology being used to filter out political writtings that they don't want people to be able to access?
The fact that this is a government initiative, and this, won't work.
Actually, if all you want is a big table, MySQL is probably a good choice. It's generally very fast. However, as soon as you start getting a complex database schema, you're probably starting to look at other RDBMSs. MySQL provides a lot of advanced features with InnoDB, but then, InnoDB has just been bought by their biggest competitor. If you're needing any of those features (foreign keys, transactions, etc), then I'd be going with PostGreSQL, because, really, I don't think the InnoDB team is going to be releasing any fixes/upgrades to their MySQL engine any time soon.
The problem with this law isn't it's intent, or even it's procedures. But it's using the wrong system to do the right job.
In the adult world, we have courts to arbitrate situations of libel and slander. Children aren't really held to the same standards as adults unless the circumstances are exceptional, and realistically, they shouldn't be. The courts are an inappropriate system to control this behaviour.
On the other hand, schools are institutions designed (ostensibly at least) for education. They are not designed for settling these sort of disputes. They certainly don't, and shouldn't have, the power to act on things that happen outside school. This sort of legislation is turning schools into mini-governments, ones without all the checks and balances of a real one.
There needs to be controls put on these sorts of actions, but its outside the purview of the schooling system, and the adult court system is overkill. Something needs to be done, but tacking the responsibility onto a system ill-suited for the job isn't going to accomplish anything. If you want the problem to be solved, you'll need to solve it from the ground up, not look for quick fixes.
"freaking out," yeah, okay. Maybe "quite concerned about possible sweeping actions and measures without any substantial proof" might be a better way to put it.
Well, maybe you should take that up with the person the article was quoting. An editorial is when a writer inserts their own opinions in the article, not when they quote someone else who may have a particular bias.
No, it doesn't. It proves that PS3 owners are planning to buy Blu-Ray discs. It doesn't mean they bought the system because it plays Blu-Ray. They might have decided to buy it because of the games/feature of the system, and now are deciding to go Blu-Ray because they already have a player. If I was actually planning on investing in HD video, that's the situation I'd be in. I'd be buying PS3 because they still have the Final Fantasy franchise, and then I'd buy Blu-Ray because I already had a player.
You need to be very careful drawing conclusions from statistics. They only say exactly precisely what they are saying. There's usually more than one scenario that fits the facts.
I'm assuming the "register_globals" referred to is an old default setting for PHP, long known to be a major security hole. Turning it (along with magic quotes) off is one of the first things I do when setting up PHP on a new system. It's a bit two-faced for them claiming that they may not support Mozilla due to security concerns, while simultaneously saying that they're only just changing a default behaviour nefarious for security flaws.
"and often render poorly (or not at all) on anything other then IE"
Because that has a whole lot to do with the admins, or the webserver they run...
Poor choice of words. "Advertised" is probably better than "guarantees". At the very least, they don't mention any limits in their promotions, and generally won't give you any hard information on them once you've signed up.
That's fine for campus networks. AFAIK, they're not selling their services to customers guaranteeing unlimited bandwidth, then throttling the connection when their customers actually try and use what was promised. Cable companies, on the other hand, do.
That's pretty much the way every ISP in Australia works. I'm on a 20GB a month plan, and if I exceed that, my speed drops to dialup speeds until the end of my billing cycle. You can also choose other options that let you pay for excess data at a per-GB rate, if you prefer it that way. Some ISPs have peering discounts, where transfers between others on the same ISP (or other ISPs in a peering agreement) don't count towards the totals, or where using mirrors provided by the ISP themselves don't count (My ISP mirrors a whole ton of software patches that you can download without impacting your quota, including many Linux distros and packages). Some ISPs even have peak/off-peak plans, where you have, say 10GB of data to use during peak times, and 20GB to use during off-peak.
That said, a lot of the more complicated plans (especially the peak/off-peak) are being phased out as the consumer-base of broadband becomes less and less technically knowledgeable. It turns out consumers generally want the plain and simple plans as opposed to all these complicated choices.
That's nice for you. You happen to be an informed consumer. Unfortunately, you're one of a rare breed. Average consumers don't know squat about DRM key revocations on next-gen media; all they know is that BlueRay is "better" than DVD, so they go out and buy it, without knowing how much control the media companies have over their new purchase.
Due to the ignorance of the average consumer, DRM products become widespread, and, within a few years, become a defacto standard. Now it's too late, both for the educated consumer, and the ignorant one who suddenly realizes how screwed they are when their players key is revoked every six months. Because of their purchasing patterns, the DRMed media has become entrenched and there are no alternatives on the market.
The vast majority of viruses require user intervention to run and infect a machine, and aren't considered news (or at least, not individually).
The most damaging (and thus, most reported) viruses don't. I believe the NetBlaster and RedAlert were actual viruses, and spread by vulnerabilities in services enabled by default on standard windows builds.
1) They left the doors to the house UNLOCKED
This does not make going in and stealing the property any more legal.
No, but if the doors had been locked, she probably still would have had her stuff. These weren't thieves, these were people taking stuff they thought was being given away free. If the doors were looked, they would probably have shrugged and come back another time, not broken in and nicked her stuff.
You'd be committing perjury with every one you sent. And you can bet the government would be much more likely to prosecute individuals pointing out their own stupidity/corruption than they would corporations actually exploiting the law.
The "generic" top level TLDs however (.com, .net, and .org), are indeed irrelevant.
.com.au name, you need to have an ABN (Australian Business Number), or an ACN (Australian Company Number) - that is, you have to be commercial. To get a .org.au, you need to be a registered charity or non-profit. .net wasn't really well enforced - it's under the same conditions as .com. The problem with that is that there was no TLD for individuals, but I believe they have .id.au now to cover that base.
Speak for yourself. It's just that the American method for handing out domain names didn't have any criteria attached to it. To get a
The current TLD system *can* work, its just that the US didn't bother to try and make it (and you guys were, after all, the first country on, so you were bound to make mistakes), and you can't really fix it up retroactively, with millions of sites already registered. But don't dump the system just because you guys didn't get it to work - it's working fine for other parts of the world.
Suppose you're a teenager or college student. You do some silly prank and it includes a picture of yourself and your friends. You tell your friend you don't want the picture going on the net. For whatever reason, he/she posts it up anyways. Nothing illegal.
You were an idiot. You got hit with consequences. Big deal, you deserved it
Or suppose the names of a doctor's patients were to leak onto the Internet.
Then the doctor is likely to be in breach of privacy laws. Sue the doctor, not archive.org.
Or that you're a company and an ex-employee posts information that is defamous or incorrect about your company.
That's what libel laws are for. Sue the ex-employee, not archive.org.
Or that you post an angry rant on the net, you've grown past it and then delete from your site.
You were an idiot. See above.
Welcome to the world of personal responsibility!
But it is, as I understand, very difficult to have the information removed from caches on search engine and archive sites.
No, you generally just need to contact them and ask for it to be removed.
One problem is that the computing disciplines have become intermingled and are often used interchangeably. Let me outline my definitions:
Computer Science: This is the theoretical, researchoriented discipline. It deals with developing new algorithms, optimization and that side of things.
Software Development: This is the application side of Computer Science. It takes the algorithms developed by CompSci and makes useful applications out of them.
Information Technology: This is the techie discipline. Building computers, setting up networks, administrating systems. I'm not sure why it got that name, but it seems to have.
The problem that this guy has is that he has conflated Computer Science and Software Development. And it used to be the case that they were pretty much mixed - if you wanted to program, you needed to understand all the theoretical stuff yourself. But in these days of large, freely-available libraries and modular software design, the two have become very distinct disciplines.
It's not that Computer Science is dying out; it's that it has subdivided into two separate disciplines, and of the two, there is a much greater demand for Software Developers than Computer Scientists.
Doing so pisses off customers. No one single ISP wants to be the first to do this, for fear of customers jumping ship to a more tolerant competitor. Unless some pressure is put on the industry from above (fines for spammy ISPs, etc) then this is never going to be implemented on a wide scale. Some small, forward-thinking ISPs will take steps, but the big ISPs catering to your average Joes will not.
Personally, I like my ISPs solution. Port 25 is blocked by default, but you can logon to your control panel and turn that filtering off if you want to. Those stupid enough to get zombied are usually also too clueless to turn the filter off - even if they wanted to. Granted, that doesn't prevent zombies, but it does reduce spam.
Well, why does "satanic" have to be "bad" here? We can make it about other deities if it makes you more comfortable, but let me run with this for a bit...
In the situation you describe, then you needn't choose a side. But that situation wasn't the one that the ancient Jews Jesus was talking to recognized - their theogony was "God = good, Satan and pagan gods = bad", and Jesus spoke to them with the common understanding of that assumption.
If you're theogony posits a belief in multiple Gods, all approximately equal, then you obviously wouldn't have responded like the Pharisees did "Jesus is an agent of Satan!", and Jesus wouldn't have responded the way he did. It wasn't until after Jesus' death that Christianity spread to other cultures that did have such a theogony.
If you want to discuss the nature of God and Satan, but don't want to use the Bible as a source, where does that leave us? Pretty much in the realm of pure speculation. Sure, discounting everything the Bible says, God and Satan could both be equally powerful forces at war without morality. But, discounting everything the Bible says, God and Satan could also just be two puddles of goo.
But that means I would have to know Jesus personally for years...no, I mean actually go out for coffee with him, work with him, play a game with him.
You don't think reading his autobiographies would help you get to know him, or understanding his life's work?
Jesus -- or God, or any deity -- would have to gain my trust in that way, and then, it would be trust and friendship, maybe love, but not worship.
Your attitude is the same one that, Biblically, caused the fall of man - that acknowledging something else as superior is unpleasant or undesirable. Hypothetically speaking, if there was a God who created the universe with a word, who stood outside of time, knew all things and was all powerful, who created you and knew you before you were born, who is goodness personified - why would you expect to be able to dictate the terms of that relationship? If God is worthy of worship, why would you not worship Him?
If you look at Jesus' life as a whole, and the things he said, I'd find that hard to credit. When asked what the most important commandment was, Jesus replied "Love the Lord your God", followed closely by "Love your neighbour as yourself". Even if the church has screwed up in its actions (and it has, and probably will in the future), it's still preaching that sort of message. If Jesus was a satanic agent trying to lead people astray, it seems he screwed it up.
I agree, when all you see is a pure display of power, you have no idea of the nature of that power. But if you listen to the message behind it, then you can get an idea of the nature of the power. And Jesus' message doesn't exactly sound like it's from Satan.
Let's say someone does walk on water, turn water into wine, multiply bread, and so on.
Well, can't Lucifer do all those things? If he can't, how do we know?
"When Jesus saw their faith, he said, 'Friend, your sins are forgiven.'"
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, 'Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" (Luke 5)
The Pharisees saw what Jesus did, and recognized who he was claiming to be. After the passage above, Jesus goes on to say (this is a paraphrasing) "OK, it's easy to say 'I forgive your sins' - nobody can tell if he's forgiven or not. But if you want proof of my authority - Get up and walk". And the paralytic does. Jesus' claimed forgiveness of sins, and backed it up by showing a physical, empirical demonstration of his authority.
There is also an example of people coming to the conclusion you suggest:
"And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, 'He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.'
So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: 'How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.'" (Mark 3)
Basically, Jesus says that he's not from Satan, because he's working against Satan's interests in the world. Furthermore, he says that the only way he could drive out demons, was if he was stronger than Satan.
Hell, eternal suffering, flames and torture: these scenes are there to scare people into obedience by rather crude methods
That's your analysis, based on your assumption that it isn't true. A Christian analysis, based on the assumption that hell is true (and the Bible is generally written to those who do believe that), is that those descriptions exist as a warning, to save people from Hell, not as a threat.