I firmly believe that the ability to speak is a protected right directly protected by the right to personal property. I don't believe we need a government to protect our right to speech on our own land.
Control over property does not give you absolute right of speech within its borders. To pull out the old Supreme Court analogy, by your logic, if you owned a theater, that would give you permission to attend a crowded performance, yell "Fire!" and watch the havoc unfold. That is absolutely ridiculous.
I also believe we can censor whoever we want, as long as we're on our own land.
Sure thing. I'll throw out another analogy. You are a restaurant owner who happens to actively dislike black people. You own the restaurant, and it is your "own land." Does it follow that you can "censor" - e.g., deny access, refuse service, etc. - black people from going to your restaurant? (Hint - read the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)
I'm not anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-transgendered, but I am pro-freedom.
Please understand that you being pro-freedom necessarily implies that other people have the right to enjoy their freedoms as well, such as freedom from your asshatted bigotry.
This brings up a fairly interesting, and much broader question of balancing the needs of few with the desires of many. Without having read the article (I would be loathe to break a Slashdot tradition), I imagine that the change in the control scheme was implemented to, well, make it better, or to accomodate the "New Game Enhancements," whatever that may mean. Let's say that these changes make the game experience better for 99.5% of subscription-paying players, and shut out entirely the remaining 0.5% comprised by the disabled players. Is this a problem?
It's difficult to argue that mandating accessibility requirements - especially such that would detract from the possible quality of the game for non-disabled gamers - is a great idea, particularly since we are talking about playing a game instead of something like wheelchair-accessible buildings. On the other hand, I can of course sympathize with someone who must be hard-pressed to engage in interactive entertainment due to his disability, and has now lost access to something he had previously enjoyed. What do you guys think?
That's absolutely ridiculous, provided that it was indeed the case that her work only took up 45 minutes of the day. Could you reasonably expect a sane person to sit at his / her desk five days a week, 8 hours every day, and do absolutely nothing for 7 hours and 15 minutes at a time?
I don't quite understand this logic. You are paying her to do her job, i.e. answer phones and do accounting. As long as that condition is satisfied, let her be. Your employees are people too, though by the hostile tone displayed throughout your post, it seems that there is certainly some bad blood there.
Good God, I never thought I'd live to see the day a legitimate Internet Accelerator was released. After all, these are precisely the programs that I see advertised via pop-ups on spyware- and malware-infested PCs: "BOOST YOUR DOWNLOAD SPEED 100%!!!! DOWNLOAD OUR INTERENT ACCELERATORX NOW FREE AND WIN A FREE IPOD AFTER PUNCHING THE PINK MONKEY BOXING PRESIDENT BUSH!!!!"
Over here at UC Berkeley, there is a different policy. At the beginning of every semester, new students receive a free "BeSecure" CD, which basically includes Windows XP SP2, all critical patches, Symantec Norton Antivirus and Firewall, and Mozilla Firefox. (The CD does include Mac stuff, though I am not sure what it includes, as I don't use a Mac).
The catch is that you have to install the CD in order to use the in-room broadband connection. You are not, however, required to use Firefox, though it is suggested - you can use IE, which, honestly, is pretty secure after all the patches + Norton Firewall have been installed.
In talking to the people on my floor, however, I've found that despite not being forced to use IE, most people did switch over to Firefox eventually. Simply put, it's just a better program, and after demonstrating all the plugins etc. to the people on my floor, I was able to get them to realize this;D
I would think that at this point, most of the movies that get distributed via BitTorrent, P2P etc. are not captured by a lone guy sitting in a packed theater.
I mean, say your buddy is the guy who sets up the movie in the theater, and sits there while it runs. You make nice with him, and he allows you to film the movie in relative security, rather than you sitting in audience, waiting to get busted by your neighbor or wandering security guys.
From my experience, anyway, it doesn't take much to convince a guy working a menial job like that to do something that may jeopardize his employment. Yeah, it's a broad generalization, but hey, it's consistent.
I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy (if not more so), but I do believe that we should look at some numbers for US before wholly condemning the organization...yet again;). I mean, after all, a single country, such as Australia, is not necessarily indicative of burning/buying patterns in US...although it seems that similar trends can be seen in numerous other regions...and after exercising common sense...and...
...*pauses to think*...
God dammit, RIAA. I can't even think of ways to defend you. Stop lying to us, you bastards! Stop with the "you are destroying your favorite artists" Jewish-mom guilt trips! Even if it were true (which it is not), and our "favorite artists" (by whom they apparently mean Brittney Spears and her ilk) will be unable to buy yet another $2 million sports car, then I think I will still be able to soundly fall asleep at night.
*Sigh* As an act of protest, I'm going to go out and send an angry e-mail to RIAA, coloring it a vehement red. I am sure they will read it carefully and alter their corporate policies, thus ceasing to be a terrible cesspool of biomatter waste. *rolls eyes*
I don't like this one bit. Sure, the RIAA promises not to sue the users for sharing music files, but what's to stop them from quietly slipping your name to proper authorities and tell them that since you admitted to having illegal files on your computer, there's a good chance you might have software in addition to music. Ehh...I don't know.
Not to totally deride Hotmail, but after having used it for several years, I can honestly say that it's probably the worst out of all free e-mail providers in terms of controlling incoming spam. Yahoo Mail blocks out a good 80-90% of incoming unsolicited mail, and hushmail.com is even better at it - I haven't gotten a single spam during my 6 months with them (so far at least). Add to that the ease with which Hotmail passwords can be hacked (trivial even for script kiddies), and after some consideration you might want to look at another provider.
And hey, it's owned by Microsoft! Grab your pitchforks!:)
A fruit-related study from the UK, huh? What'll those crazy limeys come up with next?
I think I've just created the world's worst pun. Come on. Let's see who can match it.
You know, I gotta say - when it comes to things like modding cases, I am as hardcore staunch luddite as they come. In this case (no pun intended, of course), my usual "punk kids, get off my lawn" attitude towards mod-builders and their ilk has been replaced with more of a "That is so cool - oh, how I wish I wasn't horribly inept with tools" attitude.
If the builder succeeded in eliciting that kind of a response from me, I can only imagine what the people who are actually into this whole gig are saying. The collective drool is probably enough to unleash a biblical flood on a small country.
Yes, but let me ask you, would they have screamed as authentically as my poor friend did? Hmph! I think not. I also think you underestimate the inherent evilness of a prepubescent mind.:)
6 years of doing this. Now that's dedication. My interest in re-enacting scenes from Indiana Jones waned after a heated August afternoon with a bunch of friends, following which the guy who played an evil German had to be rushed to the hospital.
Nothing new here, really. This all harkens back to the classical skeptical argument first established by such oldies as Descartes and his "evil genius (demon)" argument. It runs, essentially, as such: Let me suppose there is a powerful evil demon whose sole aim is to confuse me, trick my intellect, and cloud my perceptions. Can I know that I am being deceived? Can I trust my reasoning, and, by extension, can I trust the world around me?
The argument has been updated by philosophers like Bertrand Russel. The more modern version is the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) argument which argues that it's possible that we could all very well be brains in vats, and the reality as we perceive it is nothing but a set of computer programming (ahem, Matrix). The skeptics proudly put this argument forth as proof of the fact that we cannot know anything, since we are not even sure that we truly exist.
But is this really a good argument? Let's examine this a bit and set two things as givens: 1. We cannot know that we are brains in vats - knowing this would obviously defeat the point of the deception. 2. The universe around us remains permanent and unchanging - this is largely for the same reason. If you wake up one day and see that the sky is green, the deception is gone.
So - reality vs. computer illusion - how can we distinguish between the two? Well, how do you distinguish between any two realities, objects, universes, etc.? You attempt to find a case for which the result in universe A = true, and the result in universe B = false (or at least different).
Now, keeping in mind that the constructed reality has to be stable and unchanging and exhibit all the parameters that we have come to expect from it, can we realistically perform any experiment that would yield different results in universe A and universe B? No. Thus - if absolutely no test can be performed that will yield different results in two sets of reality, those two realities are, for all intents and purposes, identical.
You know, it's the damnedest thing. I started the post meaning to write about something completely different, but somehow veered in a completely wrong direction. Ah well. Go philosophy:)
It's been said before, but before we talk about computers becoming superior to the human mind, how about creating an AI that's *equal* to the human mind?
In other words, there's no point in talking about the future where computers rule supreme etc. if we still have no way for a computer to recognize, say, a table from a picture of a table if it does not comply with a series of previously-specified standards. I know it's a horrible analogy but jeez, it's 3:18 AM.
...Which reminds me. Why am I still up? *sighs* Damn you, caffeine.
Completely off-topic, but I have to say this - EGAD, MY EYES ARE BURNING! Can't we keep the pleasant classic Slashdot design? There's no need to create a nausea-inducing neon style just because you can. Please. Help me.
Voting apathy is indeed a serious issue, especially here in US. Whenever I go to vote to my local station, instead of seeing a great deal of people, I'm lucky if there's another person there. I've checked out other voting stations just out of interest, and even talked to the volunteers who work those days, and they all told me the same thing - people are just not voting.
This, of course, greatly empowers the people who do vote, since their votes count proportionally higher. Does this go against the "everybody gets one vote" principle? Perhaps. Worse yet, a number of people seem content treating elections - even presidential - as a game. A number of my friends voted for Nader during the last election, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get even 5% (he got something like 3%, as far as I recall), and not even necessarily supporting his program. Their justifications was that, "Well, I don't like either Bush or Gore, so I'm going to vote Green." If even a fraction of those who threw their vote away for Nader voted for Al Gore, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
Just ramblings, of course, and now I've gone completely off-topic. Ah well:)
Ya know, it's stuff like this that makes a lot of the Middle Eastern folk want to crash planes into our buildings:-/
*Disclaimer - it's just a joke. Get over it.
Gah. I keep forgetting that bringing up Linux in any way that could be (mis)construed as negative on Slashdot all but warrants a "Troll" moderation. Blimey.
Congratulations, you've succeeded on running Linux on a lesser box. Superb. Apart from the "wow thy fellow geeks" factor, this doesn't seem to have any practical applications - and don't tell me about those who can now get an Xbox and run Linux on it, because God knows that the vast majority of people who run Linux don't need more computers:)
Although I might be underestimating the "wow thy fellow geeks" factor here...;D
This has probably already been mentioned somewhere in the hundreds of responses, but to all those guys saying that WordPerfect is absolutely dead - no. It really isn't.
I work as the computer guy as a large law office. We have 4 partners, 25 practicing attorneys, and about 60 paralegals and secretaries. Every single one of the staff that does anything with computers has WordPerfect installed on his/her computer. Why? Some of the reasons have, again, already been mentioned - precise formatting and the reveal codes are invaluable when you are working on legal documents that *have* to be formatted just right, or they are automatically rejected by the Board. I am not exaggerating here - a large portion of incoming documents to the WCAB (that's Workers' Compensation Appeals Board; our office deals exclusively with that area of law representation) is scanned automatically and, of course, if the formatting is even a bit off, the document is not recognized properly.
One of the attorneys insisted on using MS Office, because she was used to it. Everybody in the office vociferously advised against it, but she's a real ball-buster, and she got her way after all. Just a couple of weeks later, Word screwed up the formatting on an Objection (a fact that went undetected at our office), she missed the deadline, and lost big $. She promptly threw out the MS Office package out the window and went back to good old WordPerfect.
To sum up. I don't claim that WordPerfect is immensely popular, or that it rivals the customer base of that of MS Word. I know that's not true. However, I do know for a fact that at least 75% of all law offices still use WordPerfect as the de facto word processor and are *very* unlikely to give it up in the near future.
Am I the only one who is really disappointed by this? Granted, it's better than Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue the last time around, but it isn't exactly a resounding win. To be honest, I don't really know what I'm complaining about, exactly...but I just have this feeling of unease that I can't shake. Who knows, maybe all those "the reign of machines is coming" doom-sayers are onto something?:-/
Slashdot Mirror
I firmly believe that the ability to speak is a protected right directly protected by the right to personal property. I don't believe we need a government to protect our right to speech on our own land.
Control over property does not give you absolute right of speech within its borders. To pull out the old Supreme Court analogy, by your logic, if you owned a theater, that would give you permission to attend a crowded performance, yell "Fire!" and watch the havoc unfold. That is absolutely ridiculous.
I also believe we can censor whoever we want, as long as we're on our own land.
Sure thing. I'll throw out another analogy. You are a restaurant owner who happens to actively dislike black people. You own the restaurant, and it is your "own land." Does it follow that you can "censor" - e.g., deny access, refuse service, etc. - black people from going to your restaurant? (Hint - read the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)
I'm not anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-transgendered, but I am pro-freedom.
Please understand that you being pro-freedom necessarily implies that other people have the right to enjoy their freedoms as well, such as freedom from your asshatted bigotry.
This brings up a fairly interesting, and much broader question of balancing the needs of few with the desires of many. Without having read the article (I would be loathe to break a Slashdot tradition), I imagine that the change in the control scheme was implemented to, well, make it better, or to accomodate the "New Game Enhancements," whatever that may mean. Let's say that these changes make the game experience better for 99.5% of subscription-paying players, and shut out entirely the remaining 0.5% comprised by the disabled players. Is this a problem?
It's difficult to argue that mandating accessibility requirements - especially such that would detract from the possible quality of the game for non-disabled gamers - is a great idea, particularly since we are talking about playing a game instead of something like wheelchair-accessible buildings. On the other hand, I can of course sympathize with someone who must be hard-pressed to engage in interactive entertainment due to his disability, and has now lost access to something he had previously enjoyed. What do you guys think?
Since there is a 33% chance that this study itself is wrong, I hereby scoff and dismiss it!
That's absolutely ridiculous, provided that it was indeed the case that her work only took up 45 minutes of the day. Could you reasonably expect a sane person to sit at his / her desk five days a week, 8 hours every day, and do absolutely nothing for 7 hours and 15 minutes at a time?
I don't quite understand this logic. You are paying her to do her job, i.e. answer phones and do accounting. As long as that condition is satisfied, let her be. Your employees are people too, though by the hostile tone displayed throughout your post, it seems that there is certainly some bad blood there.
Good God, I never thought I'd live to see the day a legitimate Internet Accelerator was released. After all, these are precisely the programs that I see advertised via pop-ups on spyware- and malware-infested PCs: "BOOST YOUR DOWNLOAD SPEED 100%!!!! DOWNLOAD OUR INTERENT ACCELERATORX NOW FREE AND WIN A FREE IPOD AFTER PUNCHING THE PINK MONKEY BOXING PRESIDENT BUSH!!!!"
What an age we live in!
from the another-game-another-dissapointment dept.
Most of my disappointment on Slashdot comes from cringing at the numerous spelling and grammar errors.
His page explaining the Slashdot Effect appears to have been slashdotted. Oh, the irony.
Over here at UC Berkeley, there is a different policy. At the beginning of every semester, new students receive a free "BeSecure" CD, which basically includes Windows XP SP2, all critical patches, Symantec Norton Antivirus and Firewall, and Mozilla Firefox. (The CD does include Mac stuff, though I am not sure what it includes, as I don't use a Mac).
;D
The catch is that you have to install the CD in order to use the in-room broadband connection. You are not, however, required to use Firefox, though it is suggested - you can use IE, which, honestly, is pretty secure after all the patches + Norton Firewall have been installed.
In talking to the people on my floor, however, I've found that despite not being forced to use IE, most people did switch over to Firefox eventually. Simply put, it's just a better program, and after demonstrating all the plugins etc. to the people on my floor, I was able to get them to realize this
I would think that at this point, most of the movies that get distributed via BitTorrent, P2P etc. are not captured by a lone guy sitting in a packed theater.
I mean, say your buddy is the guy who sets up the movie in the theater, and sits there while it runs. You make nice with him, and he allows you to film the movie in relative security, rather than you sitting in audience, waiting to get busted by your neighbor or wandering security guys.
From my experience, anyway, it doesn't take much to convince a guy working a menial job like that to do something that may jeopardize his employment. Yeah, it's a broad generalization, but hey, it's consistent.
I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy (if not more so), but I do believe that we should look at some numbers for US before wholly condemning the organization...yet again ;). I mean, after all, a single country, such as Australia, is not necessarily indicative of burning/buying patterns in US...although it seems that similar trends can be seen in numerous other regions...and after exercising common sense...and...
...*pauses to think*...
God dammit, RIAA. I can't even think of ways to defend you. Stop lying to us, you bastards! Stop with the "you are destroying your favorite artists" Jewish-mom guilt trips! Even if it were true (which it is not), and our "favorite artists" (by whom they apparently mean Brittney Spears and her ilk) will be unable to buy yet another $2 million sports car, then I think I will still be able to soundly fall asleep at night.
*Sigh* As an act of protest, I'm going to go out and send an angry e-mail to RIAA, coloring it a vehement red. I am sure they will read it carefully and alter their corporate policies, thus ceasing to be a terrible cesspool of biomatter waste. *rolls eyes*
I don't like this one bit. Sure, the RIAA promises not to sue the users for sharing music files, but what's to stop them from quietly slipping your name to proper authorities and tell them that since you admitted to having illegal files on your computer, there's a good chance you might have software in addition to music. Ehh...I don't know.
Not to totally deride Hotmail, but after having used it for several years, I can honestly say that it's probably the worst out of all free e-mail providers in terms of controlling incoming spam. Yahoo Mail blocks out a good 80-90% of incoming unsolicited mail, and hushmail.com is even better at it - I haven't gotten a single spam during my 6 months with them (so far at least). Add to that the ease with which Hotmail passwords can be hacked (trivial even for script kiddies), and after some consideration you might want to look at another provider.
:)
And hey, it's owned by Microsoft! Grab your pitchforks!
A fruit-related study from the UK, huh? What'll those crazy limeys come up with next? I think I've just created the world's worst pun. Come on. Let's see who can match it.
You know, I gotta say - when it comes to things like modding cases, I am as hardcore staunch luddite as they come. In this case (no pun intended, of course), my usual "punk kids, get off my lawn" attitude towards mod-builders and their ilk has been replaced with more of a "That is so cool - oh, how I wish I wasn't horribly inept with tools" attitude.
If the builder succeeded in eliciting that kind of a response from me, I can only imagine what the people who are actually into this whole gig are saying. The collective drool is probably enough to unleash a biblical flood on a small country.
Yes, but let me ask you, would they have screamed as authentically as my poor friend did? Hmph! I think not. I also think you underestimate the inherent evilness of a prepubescent mind. :)
6 years of doing this. Now that's dedication. My interest in re-enacting scenes from Indiana Jones waned after a heated August afternoon with a bunch of friends, following which the guy who played an evil German had to be rushed to the hospital.
Ahh...good times.
Nothing new here, really. This all harkens back to the classical skeptical argument first established by such oldies as Descartes and his "evil genius (demon)" argument. It runs, essentially, as such: Let me suppose there is a powerful evil demon whose sole aim is to confuse me, trick my intellect, and cloud my perceptions. Can I know that I am being deceived? Can I trust my reasoning, and, by extension, can I trust the world around me?
:)
The argument has been updated by philosophers like Bertrand Russel. The more modern version is the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) argument which argues that it's possible that we could all very well be brains in vats, and the reality as we perceive it is nothing but a set of computer programming (ahem, Matrix). The skeptics proudly put this argument forth as proof of the fact that we cannot know anything, since we are not even sure that we truly exist.
But is this really a good argument? Let's examine this a bit and set two things as givens:
1. We cannot know that we are brains in vats - knowing this would obviously defeat the point of the deception.
2. The universe around us remains permanent and unchanging - this is largely for the same reason. If you wake up one day and see that the sky is green, the deception is gone.
So - reality vs. computer illusion - how can we distinguish between the two? Well, how do you distinguish between any two realities, objects, universes, etc.? You attempt to find a case for which the result in universe A = true, and the result in universe B = false (or at least different).
Now, keeping in mind that the constructed reality has to be stable and unchanging and exhibit all the parameters that we have come to expect from it, can we realistically perform any experiment that would yield different results in universe A and universe B? No. Thus - if absolutely no test can be performed that will yield different results in two sets of reality, those two realities are, for all intents and purposes, identical.
You know, it's the damnedest thing. I started the post meaning to write about something completely different, but somehow veered in a completely wrong direction. Ah well. Go philosophy
It's been said before, but before we talk about computers becoming superior to the human mind, how about creating an AI that's *equal* to the human mind?
In other words, there's no point in talking about the future where computers rule supreme etc. if we still have no way for a computer to recognize, say, a table from a picture of a table if it does not comply with a series of previously-specified standards. I know it's a horrible analogy but jeez, it's 3:18 AM.
...Which reminds me. Why am I still up? *sighs* Damn you, caffeine.
Completely off-topic, but I have to say this - EGAD, MY EYES ARE BURNING! Can't we keep the pleasant classic Slashdot design? There's no need to create a nausea-inducing neon style just because you can. Please. Help me.
*eyes pop*
Voting apathy is indeed a serious issue, especially here in US. Whenever I go to vote to my local station, instead of seeing a great deal of people, I'm lucky if there's another person there. I've checked out other voting stations just out of interest, and even talked to the volunteers who work those days, and they all told me the same thing - people are just not voting.
:)
This, of course, greatly empowers the people who do vote, since their votes count proportionally higher. Does this go against the "everybody gets one vote" principle? Perhaps. Worse yet, a number of people seem content treating elections - even presidential - as a game. A number of my friends voted for Nader during the last election, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get even 5% (he got something like 3%, as far as I recall), and not even necessarily supporting his program. Their justifications was that, "Well, I don't like either Bush or Gore, so I'm going to vote Green." If even a fraction of those who threw their vote away for Nader voted for Al Gore, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
Just ramblings, of course, and now I've gone completely off-topic. Ah well
Ya know, it's stuff like this that makes a lot of the Middle Eastern folk want to crash planes into our buildings :-/
*Disclaimer - it's just a joke. Get over it.
Gah. I keep forgetting that bringing up Linux in any way that could be (mis)construed as negative on Slashdot all but warrants a "Troll" moderation. Blimey.
Congratulations, you've succeeded on running Linux on a lesser box. Superb. Apart from the "wow thy fellow geeks" factor, this doesn't seem to have any practical applications - and don't tell me about those who can now get an Xbox and run Linux on it, because God knows that the vast majority of people who run Linux don't need more computers :)
;D
Although I might be underestimating the "wow thy fellow geeks" factor here...
This has probably already been mentioned somewhere in the hundreds of responses, but to all those guys saying that WordPerfect is absolutely dead - no. It really isn't.
I work as the computer guy as a large law office. We have 4 partners, 25 practicing attorneys, and about 60 paralegals and secretaries. Every single one of the staff that does anything with computers has WordPerfect installed on his/her computer. Why? Some of the reasons have, again, already been mentioned - precise formatting and the reveal codes are invaluable when you are working on legal documents that *have* to be formatted just right, or they are automatically rejected by the Board. I am not exaggerating here - a large portion of incoming documents to the WCAB (that's Workers' Compensation Appeals Board; our office deals exclusively with that area of law representation) is scanned automatically and, of course, if the formatting is even a bit off, the document is not recognized properly.
One of the attorneys insisted on using MS Office, because she was used to it. Everybody in the office vociferously advised against it, but she's a real ball-buster, and she got her way after all. Just a couple of weeks later, Word screwed up the formatting on an Objection (a fact that went undetected at our office), she missed the deadline, and lost big $. She promptly threw out the MS Office package out the window and went back to good old WordPerfect.
To sum up. I don't claim that WordPerfect is immensely popular, or that it rivals the customer base of that of MS Word. I know that's not true. However, I do know for a fact that at least 75% of all law offices still use WordPerfect as the de facto word processor and are *very* unlikely to give it up in the near future.
Am I the only one who is really disappointed by this? Granted, it's better than Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue the last time around, but it isn't exactly a resounding win. To be honest, I don't really know what I'm complaining about, exactly...but I just have this feeling of unease that I can't shake. Who knows, maybe all those "the reign of machines is coming" doom-sayers are onto something? :-/