Why is it crackpot sites always look really shabby. I think it's a government plot to disuade us from looking at them, so we don't see the REAL ones THAT are OUT THERE. RIGHT NOW!
(sorry, had to emulate the style so everyone knew what I was refering to!)
To prevent that situation you'd need to ensure that a small minority doesn't get total control, and there are rules to prevent manipulation of the system. You'd also need a free and independent press to cover the issues to the public fairly and without bias. Ain't ever going to happen in todays world, to many have a vested interest in the status quo.
In fact, no communist state stands today that is not a totalitarian shithole, China included.
The cold war put an end to that. A capitalist environment fares much better in an arms race, as the arms race benefits the economy, as opposed to draining it. The cold war broke the USSRs back, they simply couldn't keep up with all the missiles everyone else was pointing at them.
The lack of proper elections in all the main communist states does lead to the problems you describe. However, communism, like capitalism is an economic system. Democracy and communism have no reason why they cannot exist. Just as there are many examples of capitalist dictatorships in the world.
"pure/pristine communism" people like you realize that the two keep ending up together because communism naturally breeds totalitarianism?
No they don't! That's just bad logic. Just because there have been a few large scale examples of that happening, it doesn't mean that one is causation of the other.
I liked the people like me part! Who are you grouping together with me? The commies? Well, sorry, I'm not one. I'm just a bit more prepared to examine other ideas than the ones I am fed during my upbringing, i.e. breaking from the "party line". Sorry for being an individual!
capitalist democracies like the United States and many European countries have made sure that the power in the government is spread very thinly and that as much of it as possible is in the hands of the people.
That is so self-deluded, I don't know where to begin! The leader of one of these countries has a lot of power. They can start mini-wars, and now hi-tech assassinations are all the rage.
The two party system is a complete mockery if the word "democracy" and the will of the people can be summed up as the 5-yearly choice between the advertising campaigns and media spin of two large corporate-backed power groups. The winner of this will then spend the next term making life easy for their campaign contributiors (legitimised bribery) and not listening to the will of the people. Members of the political party have to toe the party line on certain issues, in order to fit-in. You can't divide every issue into two choices and expect those choices to be split across the parties in a way that everyone is happy with. A vote for a third party is generally a waste of time, and 9 times out of 10, people vote for the opposing canditate of someone they don't like. Often for silly reasons, such as their haircut, looks, or how their parents voted.
Hardly a great advertisment for the western way. Capitalism seems to work to a point, but the rich are just getting far too rich, and the poor are getting far to poor at the moment for me to agree with you that it "works".
how do you judge ones worth? by how much money they make.. how high up the ladder they have gone?
Of course not, but they are a factor in the overall equation, as they are a direct result of your productivity and usefulness. But I dare say that the people on welfare are not the most productive to society. Perhaps the US (I presume) does it differently, but in the UK disability benefit is completely separate to unemployment benefit. The people on unemployment are "available for work", so to speak.
Many do not for various ecconomic reasons, such as actually being better off on welfare than they would be in work. For a minimum wage job, it's often not worth the financial cost of the transport to work, plus food and anything else to get you through the day (costs more to eat away from home). Or, here you also lose any housing benefit when you return to work. Another large problem are people on welfare working casual labor for cash, abusing the system.
Welfare needs reform to address these problems.
I'm not saying that welfare or similar should be stopped (I never did). I'm just pointing out a potential long term problem in it's effects on our genetic evolution. That is all dependent on how relevant your own genetic make up is in relation to whether you are on welfare or not. There are other factors, such as the environment you grow up in.
whos going to make your shoes for.35 cents an hour
We are talking about welfare/evolution in our respective countries. This isn't relevant to this discussion.
No one is going to accept that wage here, the cost and relative standard of living here could not be supported on that wage, you could work every hour of the day and not come close to what you would get on welfare.
In some countries, they are not as prosperous as ours. That money may just be enough to get through daily life, for the average person. Is it my fault that the standard of living, and the relative value of their currency differs to ours? How is it relevant to whether providing welfare on the issue of our genetic evolution?
im sure you have made a ton of contributions to society
I work, obey the sensible laws (grin), treat everyone decently, don't lie, basically don't shit on other peoples doorsteps. I reckon I'm doing not too badly.
Of course. Welfare is reverse-evolution; it supports the weak and useless. Give them more money based on the number of children they have, you create a huge potential problem. But the alternative is having them starve to death, or turn to crime. It's a tough question.
The same is true for medicine. The weak are supposed to get ill and die. Tragic, but that's Darwinian Evolution for you. By curing them, and if they have children, their crappy imune systems get passed on to the next generation. Eventually everyone will require constant heathcare assistance.
Ditto any schemes to help people who unable to have children for various reasons. The idea in evolution is, if you can't reproduce, your defective genes get filtered out. Without the filtration, within a few thousand years ALL people will need medical assistance to have children.
Ditto sexual desire and birth control. To have many children requires a lot of the first, and none of the second. Some of the offspring would carry on the high sexual desire trait, which for any successful species is extremeley useful. If sex is no longer reproductive, we may eventially remove the sex drive from the human psyche, because there is no need for it.
All of these could take thousands of years to be seen. What's the alternative? Stop making scientific progress? Eugenics? If you come up with one that's morally sound, don't forget to tell the world!
No one will do this, however, because the likelihood of using today's technologies and encodings in 50 years (Europe) or 95 years (US and subjugated countries) is pretty freaking small.
Yeah! And the likelyhood of someone still using COBAL code with two-digit date systems, written over 30 years ago is also small. But it happened.
If the law states the copyright will expire, then the technology should provide the means to follow the law.
the Associated Press style manual dictated using generic terms instead of trademarks, unless you were specifically intending to reference the trademarked product.
Probably because the Press using those words isn't getting paid for the free plug, and may also be getting paid advertisments elsewhere in the publication for competing products. The Associated Press is a guide for published words, not written English as a whole.
The childrens TV show "Blue Peter" on the BBC refers to sellotape as "sticky-back plastic", because the BBC doesn't contain advertising. You can even "google" for the term and most of the results will be relating to the show. This goes back a long time, it's an old show (it started in black & white).
As a child I always wondered what this mythical "stick-back plastic" was, as you never saw it in the shops. Consequently, I never made anything they suggested.
Why does everyone assume that the only alternative to capitalism is communism?
What annoys me more is why people think of the USSR whenever communism is mentioned. The cold-war propaganda has imbred into us "communism BADDDD", when the problem there really was a totalitairian government. The USSR is not a pristine example of communism, and as long as we associate the two, it makes it impossible for any political change away from the corrupt and anti-citizen, pro-multinational shit hole most of the world suffers under, with the wonderful added delusion of democracy.
In Russia when a first Russian printer started to print the copies of Apostol (deeds of Apostols),
the hand copiers hated him and made his life really terrible...
Much like the p2p distribution of media will outdate traditional media like CDs, DVDs etc. Welcome to progress.
(2) Steady yellow indications shall have the following meanings:
(i) Traffic, except pedestrians, facing a steady circular yellow or yellow arrow signal is thereby warned that the related green movement is being terminated or that a red indication will be exhibited immediately thereafter when vehicular traffic shall not enter the intersection.
Note that the word "thereafter" appears after the mention of red, refering at that point to you being unable to enter the intersection, not while the yellow is showing.
Like most laws, it's very badly worded. It would be explained in two short sentances that a child could understand, but no! The lawmakers can't do that. It would be far to sensible!;-)
I notice that you completely ignore the portion of my comment
That's easy! It's slashdot; no one follows external links! If you had cut & pasted it in, you would have gotten a response.:-)
If you are not already in the intersection, and the light turns yellow, you are to stop.
No wonder there are so many accidents on the road, people get into arguments about what you are supposed to do for everything!
The sole purpose of the yellow light before red is to warn the red is coming. So, if you can stop safely before the giveway line, then you should. You don't have to, but unless you are in a hurry (grin) you should as it's safer. Beats slamming on the breaks and skidding if it does hit red before you get there.
If you get ticketed for going through, the ticket will be for going through a red light, not a yellow. It's unlucky, depends on how the cop felt that day, and how you spoke to them. If you are pleasant to them, but not a kiss-ass, and come off as respectable, then you'll maybe get away with a warning. Be in any way nasty or agressive to them, they'll get their own back on you. As someone said, it's your word against theirs.
I have no idea how one could roll back the digital odo in a 2003 Jetta
The digital ones are usually easier, from what I've heard. It's done through the engine diagnostic system, via a serial wire. Much easier than stripping the dash down.
There are legal situations where you may want to change the millage, so I guess that's why they put in the software backdoor to do it. If the speedo breaks in an old car, you might get a replacement from a car breakers yard that is completely wrong. Same for the engine diag computers, but the manufacturers love just replacing them for "new ones" (they recondition them themselves), especially when it's under waranty. Easy money...
Exactly! The whole argument is stupid. You should pay by the gallon, not the mile. Large ineffiecent vehicles cause more damage to the roads and the environment. They also take up more space in congested road and are more likely to cause a fatality in a crash due to their larger mass and tougher bodys.
The tax savings from the efficient cars should be used as incentive for encouraging better cars on the road.
Legislate that the access to the records be public property, viewable to anyone easily over the internet.
Like the other checks and balances in other forms of citizen survielence (e.g. court orders & wiretaps), there will always be a hidden way in for those with the correct credentials.
Or, just take a car with a large fuel tank, fill it up and syphon-off at home.
Then they would have to track how much fuel each vehicle takes, and work out if you have removed some from the tank or not. The administration behind this, and all the other concerns in this thread, show this scheme to be the misguided dream that it is.
Most of the revenue from the system would end up being used just to run the system. Jobs for the boys, everyone else loses out. Including the state of the road network.
That is a brilliant idea. You need physical access if you want to change any important parts of the OS, but with physical access most other means of security are irrelevant anyway. Good enough for the home user, I don't think savage dogs are needed at my home!
To make this work well, you'd probably want to create solid aliases in the shell (thru shell builtin's) to the important binaries on the CD. Then, when the user uses "ps", they will get the real thing and not an alternative hidden somewhere earlier in the PATH. Or perhaps have the shell contain an implicit PATH entry first to the CD-ROM bin directory that cannot be removed or prepended. Don't allow aliases to exist for any of the binaries in that location.
For ultimate convience, use a CD-RW for the system disk, but have both a CD-RW drive and a CD-ROM drive. If you want to change the system, boot up with the disk in the CD-RW drive. Some sort of packet-written disk would make the whole thing transparent, as you can just overwrite a single file if you want. Kind of a OS "read-only" tab.
With some clever tricks, you could even hot-swap the disk between the drives, no reboot required.
They can scramble the harddrive and keep infecting other computers.
That's only the case for e-mail viruses. We are talking about the whole malware field here, including worms that do sit and scan looking for targets. A look in any Apache server log can show this, ditto netbios in your firewall logs.
Most people now are more aware of the risks in e-mail due to the high profile cases of the past few years. Whether this is actually resulting in less attachments being opened is a different matter, but there must be some improvement.
It's kinda puzzling that we HAVEN'T seen one like that.
Computer viruses have the same problem as real ones. If one is too powerful, it will kill the host before they can infect lots of people.
If a PC virus trashes the host, it can't be used to perform remote hacks on other machines. Without live hosts out there infecting other hosts, the virus would kill itself. The most successful virus would be one that you don't even know you have.
99% of Windows users have no way of knowing if they're compromised!!
Woopiedoo. What percentage of Linux users installed Tripwire or similar first when they built their box? How will those who didn't notice that they are compromised?
Anti-intrusion systems should be built into the OS. "This binary has been tampered with, refusing to run it" is what we need, but somewhere in a happy medium between that and the "trusted computing" that is creating fear amoungst the geek comunity.
I thought the same. It currently does go back through the pages as described already and it has done for as long as I can remember.
Each press of it takes you back to where you were. The same is true for the IE style Explorer windows, where there is also an "Up" button available. Each functions as you would expect.
If they really want to do some work with back buttons, sort out the problems with frames and scripted web pages first!
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell they are Kings because they aren't all covered in shit.
How to spot an Urban Legend
Why is it crackpot sites always look really shabby. I think it's a government plot to disuade us from looking at them, so we don't see the REAL ones THAT are OUT THERE. RIGHT NOW!
(sorry, had to emulate the style so everyone knew what I was refering to!)
To prevent that situation you'd need to ensure that a small minority doesn't get total control, and there are rules to prevent manipulation of the system. You'd also need a free and independent press to cover the issues to the public fairly and without bias. Ain't ever going to happen in todays world, to many have a vested interest in the status quo.
You make some interesting points...
The cold war put an end to that. A capitalist environment fares much better in an arms race, as the arms race benefits the economy, as opposed to draining it. The cold war broke the USSRs back, they simply couldn't keep up with all the missiles everyone else was pointing at them.
The lack of proper elections in all the main communist states does lead to the problems you describe. However, communism, like capitalism is an economic system. Democracy and communism have no reason why they cannot exist. Just as there are many examples of capitalist dictatorships in the world.
"pure/pristine communism" people like you realize that the two keep ending up together because communism naturally breeds totalitarianism?
No they don't! That's just bad logic. Just because there have been a few large scale examples of that happening, it doesn't mean that one is causation of the other.
I liked the people like me part! Who are you grouping together with me? The commies? Well, sorry, I'm not one. I'm just a bit more prepared to examine other ideas than the ones I am fed during my upbringing, i.e. breaking from the "party line". Sorry for being an individual!
capitalist democracies like the United States and many European countries have made sure that the power in the government is spread very thinly and that as much of it as possible is in the hands of the people.
That is so self-deluded, I don't know where to begin! The leader of one of these countries has a lot of power. They can start mini-wars, and now hi-tech assassinations are all the rage.
The two party system is a complete mockery if the word "democracy" and the will of the people can be summed up as the 5-yearly choice between the advertising campaigns and media spin of two large corporate-backed power groups. The winner of this will then spend the next term making life easy for their campaign contributiors (legitimised bribery) and not listening to the will of the people. Members of the political party have to toe the party line on certain issues, in order to fit-in. You can't divide every issue into two choices and expect those choices to be split across the parties in a way that everyone is happy with. A vote for a third party is generally a waste of time, and 9 times out of 10, people vote for the opposing canditate of someone they don't like. Often for silly reasons, such as their haircut, looks, or how their parents voted.
Hardly a great advertisment for the western way. Capitalism seems to work to a point, but the rich are just getting far too rich, and the poor are getting far to poor at the moment for me to agree with you that it "works".
Of course not, but they are a factor in the overall equation, as they are a direct result of your productivity and usefulness. But I dare say that the people on welfare are not the most productive to society. Perhaps the US (I presume) does it differently, but in the UK disability benefit is completely separate to unemployment benefit. The people on unemployment are "available for work", so to speak.
Many do not for various ecconomic reasons, such as actually being better off on welfare than they would be in work. For a minimum wage job, it's often not worth the financial cost of the transport to work, plus food and anything else to get you through the day (costs more to eat away from home). Or, here you also lose any housing benefit when you return to work. Another large problem are people on welfare working casual labor for cash, abusing the system.
Welfare needs reform to address these problems.
I'm not saying that welfare or similar should be stopped (I never did). I'm just pointing out a potential long term problem in it's effects on our genetic evolution. That is all dependent on how relevant your own genetic make up is in relation to whether you are on welfare or not. There are other factors, such as the environment you grow up in.
whos going to make your shoes for .35 cents an hour
We are talking about welfare/evolution in our respective countries. This isn't relevant to this discussion.
No one is going to accept that wage here, the cost and relative standard of living here could not be supported on that wage, you could work every hour of the day and not come close to what you would get on welfare.
In some countries, they are not as prosperous as ours. That money may just be enough to get through daily life, for the average person. Is it my fault that the standard of living, and the relative value of their currency differs to ours? How is it relevant to whether providing welfare on the issue of our genetic evolution?
im sure you have made a ton of contributions to society
I work, obey the sensible laws (grin), treat everyone decently, don't lie, basically don't shit on other peoples doorsteps. I reckon I'm doing not too badly.
The same is true for medicine. The weak are supposed to get ill and die. Tragic, but that's Darwinian Evolution for you. By curing them, and if they have children, their crappy imune systems get passed on to the next generation. Eventually everyone will require constant heathcare assistance.
Ditto any schemes to help people who unable to have children for various reasons. The idea in evolution is, if you can't reproduce, your defective genes get filtered out. Without the filtration, within a few thousand years ALL people will need medical assistance to have children.
Ditto sexual desire and birth control. To have many children requires a lot of the first, and none of the second. Some of the offspring would carry on the high sexual desire trait, which for any successful species is extremeley useful. If sex is no longer reproductive, we may eventially remove the sex drive from the human psyche, because there is no need for it.
All of these could take thousands of years to be seen. What's the alternative? Stop making scientific progress? Eugenics? If you come up with one that's morally sound, don't forget to tell the world!
Ah, so the Klingons imported most of their smart people and ideas from other cultures? ;-)
Yeah! And the likelyhood of someone still using COBAL code with two-digit date systems, written over 30 years ago is also small. But it happened.
If the law states the copyright will expire, then the technology should provide the means to follow the law.
Probably because the Press using those words isn't getting paid for the free plug, and may also be getting paid advertisments elsewhere in the publication for competing products. The Associated Press is a guide for published words, not written English as a whole.
The childrens TV show "Blue Peter" on the BBC refers to sellotape as "sticky-back plastic", because the BBC doesn't contain advertising. You can even "google" for the term and most of the results will be relating to the show. This goes back a long time, it's an old show (it started in black & white).
As a child I always wondered what this mythical "stick-back plastic" was, as you never saw it in the shops. Consequently, I never made anything they suggested.
What annoys me more is why people think of the USSR whenever communism is mentioned. The cold-war propaganda has imbred into us "communism BADDDD", when the problem there really was a totalitairian government. The USSR is not a pristine example of communism, and as long as we associate the two, it makes it impossible for any political change away from the corrupt and anti-citizen, pro-multinational shit hole most of the world suffers under, with the wonderful added delusion of democracy.
Much like the p2p distribution of media will outdate traditional media like CDs, DVDs etc. Welcome to progress.
I can cover that...here is the relevant part:
Note that the word "thereafter" appears after the mention of red, refering at that point to you being unable to enter the intersection, not while the yellow is showing.
Like most laws, it's very badly worded. It would be explained in two short sentances that a child could understand, but no! The lawmakers can't do that. It would be far to sensible! ;-)
I notice that you completely ignore the portion of my comment
That's easy! It's slashdot; no one follows external links! If you had cut & pasted it in, you would have gotten a response. :-)
No wonder there are so many accidents on the road, people get into arguments about what you are supposed to do for everything!
The sole purpose of the yellow light before red is to warn the red is coming. So, if you can stop safely before the giveway line, then you should. You don't have to, but unless you are in a hurry (grin) you should as it's safer. Beats slamming on the breaks and skidding if it does hit red before you get there.
If you get ticketed for going through, the ticket will be for going through a red light, not a yellow. It's unlucky, depends on how the cop felt that day, and how you spoke to them. If you are pleasant to them, but not a kiss-ass, and come off as respectable, then you'll maybe get away with a warning. Be in any way nasty or agressive to them, they'll get their own back on you. As someone said, it's your word against theirs.
Is there a member of the Bush family in charge there as well? Oil good! Environment bad!
The digital ones are usually easier, from what I've heard. It's done through the engine diagnostic system, via a serial wire. Much easier than stripping the dash down.
There are legal situations where you may want to change the millage, so I guess that's why they put in the software backdoor to do it. If the speedo breaks in an old car, you might get a replacement from a car breakers yard that is completely wrong. Same for the engine diag computers, but the manufacturers love just replacing them for "new ones" (they recondition them themselves), especially when it's under waranty. Easy money...
The tax savings from the efficient cars should be used as incentive for encouraging better cars on the road.
Like the other checks and balances in other forms of citizen survielence (e.g. court orders & wiretaps), there will always be a hidden way in for those with the correct credentials.
Then they would have to track how much fuel each vehicle takes, and work out if you have removed some from the tank or not. The administration behind this, and all the other concerns in this thread, show this scheme to be the misguided dream that it is.
Most of the revenue from the system would end up being used just to run the system. Jobs for the boys, everyone else loses out. Including the state of the road network.
That is a brilliant idea. You need physical access if you want to change any important parts of the OS, but with physical access most other means of security are irrelevant anyway. Good enough for the home user, I don't think savage dogs are needed at my home!
To make this work well, you'd probably want to create solid aliases in the shell (thru shell builtin's) to the important binaries on the CD. Then, when the user uses "ps", they will get the real thing and not an alternative hidden somewhere earlier in the PATH. Or perhaps have the shell contain an implicit PATH entry first to the CD-ROM bin directory that cannot be removed or prepended. Don't allow aliases to exist for any of the binaries in that location.
For ultimate convience, use a CD-RW for the system disk, but have both a CD-RW drive and a CD-ROM drive. If you want to change the system, boot up with the disk in the CD-RW drive. Some sort of packet-written disk would make the whole thing transparent, as you can just overwrite a single file if you want. Kind of a OS "read-only" tab.
With some clever tricks, you could even hot-swap the disk between the drives, no reboot required.
Please find reply to that link here
That's only the case for e-mail viruses. We are talking about the whole malware field here, including worms that do sit and scan looking for targets. A look in any Apache server log can show this, ditto netbios in your firewall logs.
Most people now are more aware of the risks in e-mail due to the high profile cases of the past few years. Whether this is actually resulting in less attachments being opened is a different matter, but there must be some improvement.
Computer viruses have the same problem as real ones. If one is too powerful, it will kill the host before they can infect lots of people.
If a PC virus trashes the host, it can't be used to perform remote hacks on other machines. Without live hosts out there infecting other hosts, the virus would kill itself. The most successful virus would be one that you don't even know you have.
Woopiedoo. What percentage of Linux users installed Tripwire or similar first when they built their box? How will those who didn't notice that they are compromised?
Anti-intrusion systems should be built into the OS. "This binary has been tampered with, refusing to run it" is what we need, but somewhere in a happy medium between that and the "trusted computing" that is creating fear amoungst the geek comunity.
Each press of it takes you back to where you were. The same is true for the IE style Explorer windows, where there is also an "Up" button available. Each functions as you would expect.
If they really want to do some work with back buttons, sort out the problems with frames and scripted web pages first!