Sorry, your method isn't working, it's hideously broken. All you get with career bureaucrats is career politicians and playing office politics and bribery and corruption and doofuses like ashcroft covering up naked statues so the boobs don't bite him. Then you get airplanes smacking into towers and presidents sending off secrets to red china and stuff like that. You get high level assassinations but "we think this one brane dead loser guy did it, he just turned into supersniper with a 6 dollar rifle with maladjusted sights". You get anthrax manufactured in US military biowarfare labs getting mailed to congressional leaders just coincidently the same week sieg heil legislation gets passed, yet they have "no clue". A coincidence, ya right. uh huh, sure it was. Your FBI bosses took real FBI agents following real leads about real terrorists off the terrorism hunt as soon as they got some good stuff. funny the good stuff all started to point to white guys inssuits, not ay-rabs in robes. Gee, wonder why that was? Ordered off, ordered to shut up about it and forget about it. That order came directly from the top where the supposed "experienced leaders" are. That's high level corruption and TREASON, that's just not stealing a swingline or even pork barrel politics, that's some serious stuff there going on. yet, seems like their orders keep being followed. Wonder why that is?
Nope-this system as it is now fails it, the proof is all around you. Just having older more bureaucratically entrenched guys means you got more guys who learned to shut up, ignore high level crimes, and *wait out their pension*. I've heard it from too many cops, you don't rock the boat because YOU'LL BLOW YOUR PENSION. I've heard that over and over, both from cops and dudes I know in the military. Never ever ever ever rock the boat or you get screwed, no advancement, no pension, or if it's really important, you have an 'accident" and I don't want to hear it don't happen, I know otherwise. If there wasn't a pension to blow, just MAYBE we would have more honesty in government, less high crimes and misdemeanors.
Ten years is plenty, if you can't do your job in ten years, go do something else, you just can't do it. The US people are sick of paying for crappy corrupt government full of liars and cowards, people more concerned over their pension or being in a position to have their hand stuck out behind them to receive bags of untraceable cash. Service to government doesn't mean service to your personal pension. Service to government means you always do the right thing for *all the people*, not just follow your political bosses orders and cover up for them without thinking.
And I would have NO problem including a caveat that you couldn't be in a position to lobby or act as a purchasing agent back to government once you were out. The quicker we get to "the people" running government, the quicker we'll have a lot more people interested. Here's what civilians say - "government, ehh, what can you do, you can't fight city hall" IT'S MOSTLY TRUE, because it's an "us versus them" situation, and there's no incentive for government to clean itself up, and they are the only ones that can order and enforce a cleanup, so they WON'T EVER DO IT.
Anyway, the point is moot like I said, your job is "secure", not a single government agency or job will be eliminated, we'll just keep adding to the surveillance and command and control until you get the corrupt big brother government you want. It's 7/8ths there now, what's another 1/8th and some more high technology into the mix? Sooner it happens the sooner it will crash, then good riddance.
Anyway, this rant is a waste of typing mostly. People outside government know what I mean, people inside will all take it personally and be in denial of it. Same ole same ole. "Us versus them". The deal is, civvies didn't start that, government did. Remember, I'm just a "fxxxxxxcivvie", I've heard it enough to know it's a commonly used noun.
Interesting times, carry on, it's just symbols on a screen
well, this is just wishful thinking anyway, I know we aren't in any danger of it happening.
With that said, nope, once you start making exceptions to a rule, it ceases to be a rule. Then you are right back where you started from. Public employee A says B gets to stay longer, but his job is as important, because they are..pick something.."helping to clean the environment" or "defending the glorius fatherland from barbarians" or something or "providing quality leadership and charisma and shellacked hair" yadayada and so on.
It wouldn't work to have exceptions.
The entire premise of the start of the US as an organized government was it was supposed to be completely different than any other attempt ever made. Not a clone or a rehash or another example of some failed system alreadytried and discarded, something *new* and really different.. All other nations have had career employees, and all of them have failed, and I think that's the major reason why, you get an "us versus them" societal schism develop.
When you are supposed to have a government "of and for the people", then "the people" need to run it, not a separate socio economic class of careerists, who have a quite clear and overwhelming negative conflict of interest in maintaining a small efficient government as a goal, because it's not in their interest if they can benefit from *not doing that*, which they do now, in spades. There is NO government employee who would support drastically reducing government because then their job would/could possibly be in jeopardy, and they also, in the system we have now, retain the privelege of voting for themselves while "in service", of voting for more government, and more expensive government, and to continue larger and more expensive government, so it's a double conflict of interest. To me, I think that's *exactly* why we have bloated, corrupt and inefficient government now-zero incentive for the ones in charge to change it. None. Whereas, were we to eliminate even the possibility of it becoming a career, they would be encouraged greatly to make sure they kept up a pattern of eficiency and honesty, because pretty soon they'd be back as full time *civvie* tax payers, competing for jobs and benefits in the *civvie* world. No carved in stone, required by law government safety net then,nope, they'd get the same exact deal everyone else has, so they'd be watching out for themselves in the future, which means they would be striving for cheaper better government NOW all the time they are working, because it then becomes *in their best long term interest*, as opposed to how it is now, which is backwards from that.
If it was up to me, I'd ban any for profit or non profit corporate campaign contributions, and limit named human individuals to 100$ maximum total political donations per calendar year, and make accepting a bribe by a public official be life in prison.
I'd also like to see a ten year maximum public service law. No single human could serve more than ten years total, any mixture of elected, appointed or hired on position in the government. No pensions, no career bureaucrats, no career politicians. The only exceptions would be bonafide veteran war casualities, full medical care, and a pension for their survivors, but zip nada to anyone else.
I started thinking indoor movies were a rip when they stopped double features and cartoons in front of the movies. That's held on in the few remaining outdoor theaters though, double features anyway.
The only thing that saved them for me was air conditioning inside the theaters. I like the better sound systems in movies though, that's about the only improvement I've seen.
If we dropped 3 months off summer vacations in the public schools, 14 year olds would be finishing high school and entering college. 17 and 18 year olds would be getting degrees. A lot of homeschoolers are in this situation now, because they studyyear round. The earlier you learn something, the better.
As to staying amused in your spare time? Man, I have yet to find a teenager who couldn't find something to do, there's too much energy there. Getting put in that alpha state with TV just turns kids into consumer robots, it hypnotises them. That's why it's so easy to remember commercials, you are quite literally in an enhanced state for brainwashing just zombieing out in front of the tube.
And maybe if we fed our children honest food that wasn't shipped completely dead, preserved, stripped of most of it's enzymatic and nutrional aspects that it started out with, and wasn't made up of half artifical chemicals, they might not need to be force drugged when they suffer neurological disorders from their enhanced "food monopoly approved" "diets".
Technically it seems like a group of you could have arrested your bosses who gave you the illegal order. Knowledge of a felony im progress, then being told to ignore it? Isn't that accessory after the fact, and RICO, and suborning an officer? There's probably both some state and federal elected official ethics violations as well. Probably some more too, those I can think of right off the top.
No matter.... it's way more common than not, every cop I have ever met has told me about crimes being committed by fatcats that they get told to ignore.
At a minimum perhaps just some decent leaks to the media might have helped in that case. Perhaps anyway.
Have you been following the FBI 9-11 and terrorist whistleblower cases? Ashcroft just got sued again over it, trying to cover up evidence. It's pretty interesting in how in several cases righteous agents just actually doping their job like they were supposed to be doing discovered high level shenanigans and immediately got taken off various cases, now the administration with it's appointed whitewash commission is claiming "surprise" about the attack, while at the same time ignoring those agents mostly, and saying "no hard evidence" and so on. And they'll drag those whistleblower suits out for years most likely, too...
Same ole same ole stuff, been going on forever, it never changes except it gets more common.
Mine has paid for itself over and over again. For years I used it as both a daily driver and in my side jobs of remodeling and landscaping. I only drive it a short distance now like to town once or twice a month because it has so many miles on it, but it's still nice to climb in it and have an "enterprise" class cockpit. It's just fun, and comfortable. Taken it all over so many places, done so much stuff with it I'll never get rid of it. One of these days I'll rebuild the engine or replace it. I'd like to make it a 4wd some time too, I've looked into it and it's doable for around 3 grand. The one I have is also a factory high top mini camper. I tore out the sink and water tank though, but I left in the furnace, stove, and refrigerator that are all propane powered with an onboard tank welded/bolted on up under the frame. Just had too many cool times with it. I want to make it 4wd so I can get back into amateur prospecting. Living in north georgia I am reasonable driving distance to places you can still get some good dust. We have a jeep, a cj7, that can get back in most anywhere, but it has severely limited cargo capacity. Probably in the meantime I might just get a towbar for the jeep and haul it with the van to the nearest campground, then use the jeep to get back into the good areas. Maybe, right now I'm busy as heck with this job and the new garden, finishing it off, and I got too many other infernal combustion devices to work on and fix..
I had a couple old ratty sportscars before, both "fix it again tony's". My fav was the 69 spyder with the tiny rear engine. Man that thing was fun and got decent mileage and the easiest car I ever owned to work on, bar none. It had around a 960 cc engine after I built it, went maybe 70 top speed, but got 50 MPG. I had both tops too, a removable fiberglass hardtop and the rag top. Big fun even though it was in no way a "performance" car. And I'm not really sure why but it was a for-real babe magnet for some reason. They thought it was "cute". That part didn't bother me one bit...
It depends on which state. A lot of states now have on the 2nd or 3rd felony conviction you get life. That's one of the reasons they have built so many prisons the past decade or so, and why we have such a high inmate population as a percentage of the entire population
Laws and crimes and what gets emphasized are entirely random now. for instance, we have multi millions of illegal immigrants. People who jump the border have committed a felony, yet it is almost universally ignored, they are allowed to live freely almost anyplace inside the US. At best if they find a huge group of them near the border they'll just be shipped back over, they rarely serve any jail time. We also have laws that make hiring an illegal immigrant a federal crime, with a 10,000$ fine per incident, but you never hear much of any arrests in those cases, even though the practice is blatant.
There's more, that's just a blatant example. Law enforcement is political, it's not any sort of even or fair, it's whatever the elite class wants that season. They give the orders, their enforcers click heels and jump to it. If they are ordered to ignore certain crimes, they will do so, even if they are aware of them.
I am not pro criminal, I just think the laws are terribly skewed and not enforced fairly across the board, and we have a variety of laws on the books now that are just ridiculous and shouldn't even be there. The US has a growth industry of gradually adding to laws that make more of the lower and middle classes "criminals". I think it's planned that way, to make a two class society eventually, technofeudalism. They are also apparently destroying as much of the middle class job structure as they can. Any job they can find that is exportable they will, any job that they can't exported they will import millions of illegals or too many legals to take those jobs. It's so completely obvious I won't even debate it with any debunkers now, the stats and realities are all over. It's been slow but verifiably steady, and the numbers increase yearly. Part of the plan, command and control, the same old dodge the old aristocrats have always pulled down through the ages.
As to recording in the cinema? I could care less, I've been boycotting movies for awhile now, and paid for music, I just quit. If a movie is free to copy, I might buy it. I have two here I got that the producer lets people make copies of. Music, again, if it's free over the radio by putting up with ads I occassionaly listen, but besides that, don't buy any-new. Used I will buy, it's just recycled, and the producers don't make another penny on it, but some guy at a yard sale will so I don't care, but even then not too much, a few examples of each a year. I even quit buying from the new but marked down bins, stopped that last year.
I think if enough people will stop placing so much importance on "entertainmnerts" of that sort, we'll see more sane pricing and reduce any demand for copying for profit. it's all I can do, tell people to boycott movies and music and professional sports and television fiction. it's gotten so ridiculous expensive it's stupid, and the time wasting aspects of it are lost to the wasters, I think in a lot of cases they don't realise how absuerdly addicted they get to it to the detriment of other more important things our society ignores too much. When you can get several million people in one weekend to go drop tens of millions of dollars all over the country to watch some new movie, with thousands in any random city you pick, and the same city can't get two dozen people to a community meeting to discuss local judicial corruption or the next multi million dollar school budget, etc, well, there's something wrong there in *general terms*. IMO anyway.
Rome when it was collapsing had it's bread and circuses to keep the people amused and occupied so they wouldn't pay attention to the rot that was collapsing their society around them.. We have the same thing now but people don't like to think they are droned out barbarians addicted to bre
man, I forgot about rust! You are correct, up there, cars just dissolve, and you can't take a nut off two in a row, one of them busts. Yep, remember it well, all my first wrenching was on rusty junkers. Such a long time now though I plum forogt. I grew up in michigan so I know about rust buckets and "winter cars", you stick your good car in the garage and driver some old bomb you don't care in the winter. I live in georgia now though and cars just don't rust much. I got a 75 chevy van got over 300 thou on it. It don't burn oil yet but it leaks it out the front seal. Only rust on it is where I had a small fender knock and it crumpled a little, just the crumpled part is rusty, I banged it back out some, done. Never been much of a body guy, if it runs and the doors and windows work I don't care really.
I don't like computerised stuff because a lot of it fails all at once and you got to get towed back. I like cars that start to go and give you a warning to get something fixed. It's bad enough I got HEI, had that go on me once,no notice, late at night, just stopped working driving down a semi main drag. PITA. Only time I needed it towed back. Never had to get towed with any of my point engines that I can recall. I just like cheap and simple, parts on new cars are ridiculous expensive and there's 5 times as many of them to do almost the same job. Some stuff about new cars I like, most I don't though.
Of course, I admit I am a curmudgeon... and a crank.....;)
because it's more fun to mod your H2 on the weekend than a 73 corolla? Chicks dig it? Because you never know when you are driving home and see a yardasle with a pile of SGIs at a yardaslwe for 10$?
I dunno, got to be some reason for the phenomenon though.
Mostly I think guys buy them for the ole lady to haul the kids around in and haul crap to the beach and mountains on the weekend, plus you can drag your camper or boat behind them easy. Then they get to driving it and get used to sitting up high and having tons of leg room, and before ya know it, it's a daily driver because it's so expensive it's the only thing you can afford that will do all that stuff. it's the vehicle equivalent of having a pda that plays movies, surfs, emails, does calendar and calculator, long distance and cell phone action, plus play your tunes, plus games, all in one package.
Besides that, I dunno. I like old detroit full size vans meselfs the best. Almost like a SUV, and it's because it's a universal do most anything vehicle.
But you still have no way to verify all the people who have access to your info at the vendors store, nor at the CC company. Encrypt it all you want, there's always some humans you have no idea of have access to the information.
Best bet is to have a dedicated CC just for online or casual store purchases, and transfer just enough funds to it to cover the cost of the purchase right before you actually make the purchase.
I get the point, I just been tippy toeing around the ultimate solution, because it's illegal to even mention it in passing lest yu get a vist from the authorities. If a co opted paid off blackmailed and bribed government gets so deep into the pockjets of transnational corporations that you become a slave, it is every freemans duty to "alter reality" using the tools of his choice. You got to ask yourself what the limits are, and that's it. If joe bigagco makes it illegal for me to grow my own non poisoned food, then I take that as an act of war. Food is a necesity, not entertainment. If some totality of government actions make YOU illegal no matter what you do and you notice you are no better than a slave, then, a freeman and a people who want to be free act accordingly. There's no profit, sense or righteousness living in a dictatorship, whether that dictatorship came about overnight, over a one months time, or over a single generations time. You really got to ask yourself and see what the corporate/government answer is, are they repesenting the people fairly, will they listen to your grievance honestly, or are they so corrupt that you can rationally conclude the system is too broken to repair. No one can answer that for another, so I won't even try, but that's my personal bottom line.
I've suggested many times here there needs to be a powerful IT union, I will say that again.
Here's another short of revolution,maybe a class action lawsuit against government in general,the patent office in particular and take a look at legislators and judges bank accounts, etc. Several hundred thousand free software developers suing the patent office for just destroying the ability to work, along those lines. I think you can also bring a civil suit under RICO if there appears to be industry collusion in the matter.
I don't code so there's not much I can do there, couldn't even join the suit, but if coders want to go there, arrange it with some groklaw volunteers and like the FSF or something. You just have to decide how much crap corporogovernment patent sandwhiches you will eat before you dare say out loud THIS IS CRAP AND WE AREN'T GOING TO KEEP EATING IT.
we had with the major ISPs going to block peoples email/port 25 whatever if they are found to be spam spewers, there won't be as much of a problem with zombies. Enoughs enough, we need to treat people on the net as human beings with opposable thumbs and at least some level of adult competence. A small fee to access the net is not a license to be a clueless dingbat hoser forever and ever and a day. Just block zombiefied machines until they are verified fixed. If I got nailed, so be it, I expect to be blocked until it's cleaned up. I have zero problems with that.
And like they are doing with the latest windows/explorer exploit du juor, see where the spammers/recipients are making their profit, in this latest case sending the hijacked data to some russian place, all the carriers block that domain from any traffic, as much as possible, from this end anyway.
Fighting SPAM is no one silver bullet, but the combination of the techniques would probably work well enough. I'd go even further, if there are nations, or more accurately at least large domains and subnets that just refuse to cooperate, blacklist them.
We need the sane, adult, polite and responsible internet, it makes no sense to let the nutjobs,the crooks and the clueless hijack the entire internet and spoil it for everyone else. And if it doesn't happen voluntariily with normal users all the way to various corporations all cooperating, then sure as crap various governments will step in and censor and restrict hell out of it. I don't think we really want that second option.
it wasn't a hardware failure, it was users failing to follow good computer advice, chronically. A hardware failure I can understand,it's happened to everyone, and not everyone is a tech there or could figure it out, but chronic non safe computing over and over again just because "you" insist on it, then "you" fix it. First coupla times free, after that, tough love, on your own then. The first time is swell, you didn't know. The second time is "please pay attention, I'll do this again,fix everything and spic and span it, and this is what you should do different, and etc..", the third time, to me, tell them they are on their own. Tough Love. They are still your relative/friend/co worker whatever, but comes a time you got to cut your losses.
really, that's about it. You help people until it becomes impossible to help them, then send them on their way to learn on their own. They can either do it themselves or go pay someone to do it, that's the two choices they got. The big thing to me is, you don't take abuse from people you are helping for free. A misunderstanding, a clarification, sure, but abuse? Not happening.
... then is not use patented software or closed source. Just keep using the alternatives. If it's new code, it shouldn't be affected.
to me, in a way, and this is an analogy and it's flawed but it's close enough-we've seen were firefighters just let some structure burn to the ground. It might be that the house had gas leaks and crappy wiring and was coated with a flammable paint, whatever. Fixing the house was never an option, as it would take more work then just rebuilding it. ignoring it let the house catch on fire. it would have been better to do a controlled demolition and then rebuild it correctly, but sometimes that isn't done, so the house burns. if it's too fast, they a lot of times just make sure it burns down all the way and doesn't jump over to next door, where the house is built correctly.
The time limit-eh, no control over that really. The best you can do is inspect a house before buying it, or build it yourself or in collaboration with like minded people who want quality over speed of building.
I don't think there's an easy answer, but there IS an easi-er answer, and that is to just start building your own, which FOSS is doing,in the totality, with the entire computing experience being the end goal gestalt, freer, better, easier, more secure, etc. and try to move away from-ignore, not associate with, not use, etc- from the neighborhood that has the crappy built houses that can catch fire easy, have no door locks, and the are so leaky the wind and rain and bugs and burglars can get inside with little effort. And paying serious folding money for that sort of construction and to live in that neighborhood is *nutz*. It's better to just move on, do it better, and accept the time limit as just reality and deal with it. Nothing really GOOD is all that instant or easy.
I garden. When I put in a new bed I go way out of my way to make sure it's designed well, that the ground is de-weeded in advance, that the soil has a good amount of tilth to it and has the correct minerals added, and so on, before I plant anything. Now I COULD just walk over to a generic patch of ground and stick a seed in there, but then I'd be struggling with endless weeds and wonder why the crop didn't do well because not enough fertiliser or from the wrong ph or something with the soil caused either too much or too little moisture retention, and etc, etc garden tech stuff.
My method takes longer,(I've actually had people stop and tell me I got the best looking garden in the county, shameless brag here;)) but it IS better in the long run to use a well thought out plan than to just kludge something up. Short run just slapping a seed in the ground is easier, but the results sucketh. And I've only gotten to be a good gardener from building on my own previous works and using the *freely shared ideas of others*, and I've had a garden every season now no matter where I have lived for 40 something years, lemme see, 48 years to be exact since my first little garden as a kid. So, ya, good stuff can take a long time, but I got close to what I have now after only a few years of gardening, but I still learn and implement new techniques and tricks, some I think up on my own, other ideas I go find someplace else, and still get the occassional FUBAR. I accept that reality. You can't get perfect, it don't exist, but you can get steadily better, especially if you try harder than the other guy and rely on skull sweat as much as grunt sweat. And it never bothered me that good stuff just takes time, time is *free*, it's handed to you free as soon as you get hatched. It's just what you do with it that's important.
They can be connected, but I was more addressing just the useability aspects. To me it IS more moral and ethical to share with others. Patenting thought and thought alone will never work in the long run. A short term patent on an actual built tangible product is a different matter. We as humans always shared thoughts in a lot of cases, but tangible products were treated differently, they got bought and sold and traded and it was a benfit to all. When we had examples of what we can now analogously mention as a patented and closed source intangibles as "things" system as regards "thought"-the old closed and secret guild systems with closed ideas to outsiders and only monks could read and write for the most part and copying was expensive and in some cases the commoners weren't even allowed to read and write-we had what are now called "the dark ages". It sucked mostly.
All this intangible IP patent and closed source copyright action now does is to try and reintroduce the dark ages with a modern skin on it and try to apply it to modern technology. Thought prohibition didn't work very well back then,it slowed human advance by centuries basically, and we are now seeing it's starting to impact modern civilisation as well.
"Thoughts" are the genesis of tools and processes, tools are what gets the "real work" done. The easier/cheaper/faster we get thoughts out to as many people as possible, the quicker/cheaper/better real tools and processes can be devised to allow real work to be done so we all benefit and profit from it.
It's time to end thought prohibition. Good thinkers who can think of original thoughts benefit just as much from sharing with other thinkers, because no one has a lock on being the only thinker. We build from each others thoughts. Advances don't come about from restricting the advances of others. Good thinkers are also smart enough to DO something practical with their thoughts, and with other peoples thoughts. The wright bros built a successful plane, but they didn't invent the gasoline engine, and they didn't invent cracking and distillation to even have gasoline from crude. They didn't invent the way to build a fabric skin to use for the wings. They just used a combination of others thoughts and did something practical and tangible with it, and society more or less benefited from it.
We can slow it down and keep all thoughts restricted and regulated, and make it even more complex daily, or we can speed it up immensely and allow thoughts to just get out there. That's the only two basic choices we really have as humans in organised society.
long time ago I used to help people fix their cars for free when I had some spare time. One lady I did a complete 4 wheel brake job for. Couple weeks later she comes back to me mad as a wet hen because her engine didn't run well, it had developed a carb problem and it was "all my fault because it ran fine before I worked on it". It didn't matter to her that the brakes got zero to do with it, it was still my fault to her way of thinking.
I do NOT fix peoples cars now, or even offer advice beyond telling them (anyone, this is true facts now) to just buy older cars without ridiculous computer crap on them and just replace the engine or transmission or whatever when it gets completely worn out. Much cheaper and better for them and less hassle for me.
Better and more widespread use of https, and have a way so that pages must be validated quickly and automatically, perhaps even with a md5 checksum type arrangement as a backup, before they can be downloaded and displayed.
That and just a complete rethink of OS and browsers and "the internet". For another example for another problem, I'd like to see a totally non-commercial email system, no commercial email used in it whatsoever, and your email addy was treated as importantly as your physical address at your home, or like your telco number. You'd have an option, email like it is now, or be inside a commercial free and registered email system that cost folding money per year per email addy and refused any email into it from outside, or any emailto leave the system. A large but closed system where every email addy was tied to a real human being with a real name with a real IP for verification. You could still try to use the wild wild west anarchy chaos email system we have now, but also opt in to the closed, verified and much more secure and hassle free email system.
Same thing with the net, anarchy and chaos with hacks, attacks and bogusness, or only visit sites that are verified and secure and conformed to some decent standards that have those issues as of paramount importance, as opposed to blinkenlights eye candy insecure.
I tell you, I just detest that I even have to run javascript to view some pages, I usually skip them. I'm not running an active x machine, but I feel the same way about that too, it's useful, but so easily used for bogusness that it's rapidly lost any universal advantage, IMO.
As to moz and firefox, I don'tknow on firefox but I don't see a way to disallow small invisible webbugs on moz. That would help. Maybe it's there and I just don't see it though,could just be me I admit, all I see is deny by domain. I want deny for a variety of reasons, size and visibility being a big one. Or conversely, just the ability to chose a single image to view, select it, the page doesn't jump away to refresh the whole deal just that particular image loads. And no downloading images in general but failing to display, I mean it can see an object and only allow it to be downloaded on a case by case basis if you choose that option. Nowadays when you click on an URL you have no idea what you will be downloading unless you view source in advance, which is nuts.
Really, this is GOOD. Let the big companies keep getting hosed by the patent system. Let them see how patenting IP and having closed source propietary software will constantly hose the ability to "do your work" and just keep costing money and money and money and money and be a serious PITA to actually DO anything. Eventually, doing anything even remotely fun, interesting, or productive will be so expensive that the system will crash and burn under it's own bloat. Let it become unprofitable to use patents and restrictive copyrights. Let them keepdoing what they are doing. The lawyers and licensing fees alone will start to make companies just stop being involved with it, eventually it might even get through to some legislators noggins that the patent and copyright system is completely broken and has been broken for a long time. It won't end until joe user all the way to joe big company needs to have a lawyer on a tether with them all the time, and just have their paychecks direct deposited to the lawyers account, and the lawyers cut you a small chump change allowance.
In other words, let it burn! I feel the same way about this as I do vulnerable windows machines. The quicker it gets to a ridiculous level of unusability level the quicker it can be fixed with a REAL fix which is a total replacement system, because sure as snot they won't fix it until then, just keep applying patches that just make it worse, because they refuse to address the core issue, which is intangible thoughts shouldn't be patented in the first place. It was an INSANE precedent to let the first intangible anything get patented.
Talk about illogical, how about basic reading comprehension here. You need all of the above. You need the ability to do math in your head, on paper or blackboard, and with a calculator or program with a computer.
As to lawn mowing, GLAD you brought that up so I can refute your claims. I am a mowing guru. I have some serious leet skills when it comes to mowing and trimming and clearing. If it existed you could say I have a PhD in that discipline. That's basically what I do for a living, and you know what? I have close to a dozen different mowers I use working, some that are worth in the mid 5 figures range and weigh multiple tons and are capable of mowing entire large trees down to ground level, right down to a SCYTHE that runs on strict manpower that I use to trim some very steep and rough areas where about nothing else will work, because you can't get to it with a machine. I use the *right tool for the right job*.
If it's a security flaw it has to be reported to users or potential users doesn't it? California is a big place, and there has got to be more than one person running windows and explorer there, so someone needs to be notified, so that makes it "news" and as such a ton of laws protect that. And since when does running a news story that's stamped with a date change anything? If on such and such a date such and such happened to be true, I don't see how anyone can be sued for reporting it. We've seen tons of other exploits reported on before, including sites affected, going back for years and years. I think there's high level pressure going on here someplace why the sites aren't mentioned. It was the first thing I noticed when I read this story yesterday evening, the story was weird because of it and I looked at several places, none of them have the normal info you see with a security news story. Any reporter could just use words like "potential" "alleged" "on going investigation", "this is a preliminary report, security analysts are digging in deeper to determine the validity of the claims" and etc.
Not reporting it is just way too suspicious to me.
this is just generic, I don't know your familuy situation exactly, but for what it's worth,the advice is to stop fixing their computers and let them drag the boxes to the shop and pay for it to be cleaned. I'd say in a business situation the same thing if that apploies to anyone else. The concept is stolen from the way the experts advise to deal with a family member who is an addict to booze or drugs, called "tough love". Right now you are acting like an "enabler" by fixing it when it gets hosed, leaving them with the impression that "it's not that bad", when it really IS that bad, they can't see or admit to the elephant in the living room, so just stop being an enabler.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! that's a good one too! this whole subthread is a gas!
Over to the last place I lived in north georgia is a store, I forget the real name of it now, but it was a combo pawn shop with mostly guns and a liquor store, so I called it "booze-n-bullets".
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Sorry, your method isn't working, it's hideously broken. All you get with career bureaucrats is career politicians and playing office politics and bribery and corruption and doofuses like ashcroft covering up naked statues so the boobs don't bite him. Then you get airplanes smacking into towers and presidents sending off secrets to red china and stuff like that. You get high level assassinations but "we think this one brane dead loser guy did it, he just turned into supersniper with a 6 dollar rifle with maladjusted sights". You get anthrax manufactured in US military biowarfare labs getting mailed to congressional leaders just coincidently the same week sieg heil legislation gets passed, yet they have "no clue". A coincidence, ya right. uh huh, sure it was. Your FBI bosses took real FBI agents following real leads about real terrorists off the terrorism hunt as soon as they got some good stuff. funny the good stuff all started to point to white guys inssuits, not ay-rabs in robes. Gee, wonder why that was? Ordered off, ordered to shut up about it and forget about it. That order came directly from the top where the supposed "experienced leaders" are. That's high level corruption and TREASON, that's just not stealing a swingline or even pork barrel politics, that's some serious stuff there going on. yet, seems like their orders keep being followed. Wonder why that is?
Nope-this system as it is now fails it, the proof is all around you. Just having older more bureaucratically entrenched guys means you got more guys who learned to shut up, ignore high level crimes, and *wait out their pension*. I've heard it from too many cops, you don't rock the boat because YOU'LL BLOW YOUR PENSION. I've heard that over and over, both from cops and dudes I know in the military. Never ever ever ever rock the boat or you get screwed, no advancement, no pension, or if it's really important, you have an 'accident" and I don't want to hear it don't happen, I know otherwise. If there wasn't a pension to blow, just MAYBE we would have more honesty in government, less high crimes and misdemeanors.
Ten years is plenty, if you can't do your job in ten years, go do something else, you just can't do it. The US people are sick of paying for crappy corrupt government full of liars and cowards, people more concerned over their pension or being in a position to have their hand stuck out behind them to receive bags of untraceable cash. Service to government doesn't mean service to your personal pension. Service to government means you always do the right thing for *all the people*, not just follow your political bosses orders and cover up for them without thinking.
And I would have NO problem including a caveat that you couldn't be in a position to lobby or act as a purchasing agent back to government once you were out. The quicker we get to "the people" running government, the quicker we'll have a lot more people interested. Here's what civilians say - "government, ehh, what can you do, you can't fight city hall" IT'S MOSTLY TRUE, because it's an "us versus them" situation, and there's no incentive for government to clean itself up, and they are the only ones that can order and enforce a cleanup, so they WON'T EVER DO IT.
Anyway, the point is moot like I said, your job is "secure", not a single government agency or job will be eliminated, we'll just keep adding to the surveillance and command and control until you get the corrupt big brother government you want. It's 7/8ths there now, what's another 1/8th and some more high technology into the mix? Sooner it happens the sooner it will crash, then good riddance.
Anyway, this rant is a waste of typing mostly. People outside government know what I mean, people inside will all take it personally and be in denial of it. Same ole same ole. "Us versus them". The deal is, civvies didn't start that, government did. Remember, I'm just a "fxxxxxxcivvie", I've heard it enough to know it's a commonly used noun.
Interesting times, carry on, it's just symbols on a screen
well, this is just wishful thinking anyway, I know we aren't in any danger of it happening.
.."helping to clean the environment" or "defending the glorius fatherland from barbarians" or something or "providing quality leadership and charisma and shellacked hair" yadayada and so on.
With that said, nope, once you start making exceptions to a rule, it ceases to be a rule. Then you are right back where you started from. Public employee A says B gets to stay longer, but his job is as important, because they are..pick something
It wouldn't work to have exceptions.
The entire premise of the start of the US as an organized government was it was supposed to be completely different than any other attempt ever made. Not a clone or a rehash or another example of some failed system alreadytried and discarded, something *new* and really different.. All other nations have had career employees, and all of them have failed, and I think that's the major reason why, you get an "us versus them" societal schism develop.
When you are supposed to have a government "of and for the people", then "the people" need to run it, not a separate socio economic class of careerists, who have a quite clear and overwhelming negative conflict of interest in maintaining a small efficient government as a goal, because it's not in their interest if they can benefit from *not doing that*, which they do now, in spades. There is NO government employee who would support drastically reducing government because then their job would/could possibly be in jeopardy, and they also, in the system we have now, retain the privelege of voting for themselves while "in service", of voting for more government, and more expensive government, and to continue larger and more expensive government, so it's a double conflict of interest. To me, I think that's *exactly* why we have bloated, corrupt and inefficient government now-zero incentive for the ones in charge to change it. None. Whereas, were we to eliminate even the possibility of it becoming a career, they would be encouraged greatly to make sure they kept up a pattern of eficiency and honesty, because pretty soon they'd be back as full time *civvie* tax payers, competing for jobs and benefits in the *civvie* world. No carved in stone, required by law government safety net then,nope, they'd get the same exact deal everyone else has, so they'd be watching out for themselves in the future, which means they would be striving for cheaper better government NOW all the time they are working, because it then becomes *in their best long term interest*, as opposed to how it is now, which is backwards from that.
..not a surprise at all.
If it was up to me, I'd ban any for profit or non profit corporate campaign contributions, and limit named human individuals to 100$ maximum total political donations per calendar year, and make accepting a bribe by a public official be life in prison.
I'd also like to see a ten year maximum public service law. No single human could serve more than ten years total, any mixture of elected, appointed or hired on position in the government. No pensions, no career bureaucrats, no career politicians. The only exceptions would be bonafide veteran war casualities, full medical care, and a pension for their survivors, but zip nada to anyone else.
I started thinking indoor movies were a rip when they stopped double features and cartoons in front of the movies. That's held on in the few remaining outdoor theaters though, double features anyway.
The only thing that saved them for me was air conditioning inside the theaters. I like the better sound systems in movies though, that's about the only improvement I've seen.
If we dropped 3 months off summer vacations in the public schools, 14 year olds would be finishing high school and entering college. 17 and 18 year olds would be getting degrees. A lot of homeschoolers are in this situation now, because they studyyear round. The earlier you learn something, the better.
As to staying amused in your spare time? Man, I have yet to find a teenager who couldn't find something to do, there's too much energy there. Getting put in that alpha state with TV just turns kids into consumer robots, it hypnotises them. That's why it's so easy to remember commercials, you are quite literally in an enhanced state for brainwashing just zombieing out in front of the tube.
And maybe if we fed our children honest food that wasn't shipped completely dead, preserved, stripped of most of it's enzymatic and nutrional aspects that it started out with, and wasn't made up of half artifical chemicals, they might not need to be force drugged when they suffer neurological disorders from their enhanced "food monopoly approved" "diets".
Technically it seems like a group of you could have arrested your bosses who gave you the illegal order. Knowledge of a felony im progress, then being told to ignore it? Isn't that accessory after the fact, and RICO, and suborning an officer? There's probably both some state and federal elected official ethics violations as well. Probably some more too, those I can think of right off the top.
No matter.... it's way more common than not, every cop I have ever met has told me about crimes being committed by fatcats that they get told to ignore.
At a minimum perhaps just some decent leaks to the media might have helped in that case. Perhaps anyway.
Have you been following the FBI 9-11 and terrorist whistleblower cases? Ashcroft just got sued again over it, trying to cover up evidence. It's pretty interesting in how in several cases righteous agents just actually doping their job like they were supposed to be doing discovered high level shenanigans and immediately got taken off various cases, now the administration with it's appointed whitewash commission is claiming "surprise" about the attack, while at the same time ignoring those agents mostly, and saying "no hard evidence" and so on. And they'll drag those whistleblower suits out for years most likely, too...
Same ole same ole stuff, been going on forever, it never changes except it gets more common.
Mine has paid for itself over and over again. For years I used it as both a daily driver and in my side jobs of remodeling and landscaping. I only drive it a short distance now like to town once or twice a month because it has so many miles on it, but it's still nice to climb in it and have an "enterprise" class cockpit. It's just fun, and comfortable. Taken it all over so many places, done so much stuff with it I'll never get rid of it. One of these days I'll rebuild the engine or replace it. I'd like to make it a 4wd some time too, I've looked into it and it's doable for around 3 grand. The one I have is also a factory high top mini camper. I tore out the sink and water tank though, but I left in the furnace, stove, and refrigerator that are all propane powered with an onboard tank welded/bolted on up under the frame. Just had too many cool times with it. I want to make it 4wd so I can get back into amateur prospecting. Living in north georgia I am reasonable driving distance to places you can still get some good dust. We have a jeep, a cj7, that can get back in most anywhere, but it has severely limited cargo capacity. Probably in the meantime I might just get a towbar for the jeep and haul it with the van to the nearest campground, then use the jeep to get back into the good areas. Maybe, right now I'm busy as heck with this job and the new garden, finishing it off, and I got too many other infernal combustion devices to work on and fix..
I had a couple old ratty sportscars before, both "fix it again tony's". My fav was the 69 spyder with the tiny rear engine. Man that thing was fun and got decent mileage and the easiest car I ever owned to work on, bar none. It had around a 960 cc engine after I built it, went maybe 70 top speed, but got 50 MPG. I had both tops too, a removable fiberglass hardtop and the rag top. Big fun even though it was in no way a "performance" car. And I'm not really sure why but it was a for-real babe magnet for some reason. They thought it was "cute". That part didn't bother me one bit...
%^)
It depends on which state. A lot of states now have on the 2nd or 3rd felony conviction you get life. That's one of the reasons they have built so many prisons the past decade or so, and why we have such a high inmate population as a percentage of the entire population
Laws and crimes and what gets emphasized are entirely random now. for instance, we have multi millions of illegal immigrants. People who jump the border have committed a felony, yet it is almost universally ignored, they are allowed to live freely almost anyplace inside the US. At best if they find a huge group of them near the border they'll just be shipped back over, they rarely serve any jail time. We also have laws that make hiring an illegal immigrant a federal crime, with a 10,000$ fine per incident, but you never hear much of any arrests in those cases, even though the practice is blatant.
There's more, that's just a blatant example. Law enforcement is political, it's not any sort of even or fair, it's whatever the elite class wants that season. They give the orders, their enforcers click heels and jump to it. If they are ordered to ignore certain crimes, they will do so, even if they are aware of them.
I am not pro criminal, I just think the laws are terribly skewed and not enforced fairly across the board, and we have a variety of laws on the books now that are just ridiculous and shouldn't even be there. The US has a growth industry of gradually adding to laws that make more of the lower and middle classes "criminals". I think it's planned that way, to make a two class society eventually, technofeudalism. They are also apparently destroying as much of the middle class job structure as they can. Any job they can find that is exportable they will, any job that they can't exported they will import millions of illegals or too many legals to take those jobs. It's so completely obvious I won't even debate it with any debunkers now, the stats and realities are all over. It's been slow but verifiably steady, and the numbers increase yearly. Part of the plan, command and control, the same old dodge the old aristocrats have always pulled down through the ages.
As to recording in the cinema? I could care less, I've been boycotting movies for awhile now, and paid for music, I just quit. If a movie is free to copy, I might buy it. I have two here I got that the producer lets people make copies of. Music, again, if it's free over the radio by putting up with ads I occassionaly listen, but besides that, don't buy any-new. Used I will buy, it's just recycled, and the producers don't make another penny on it, but some guy at a yard sale will so I don't care, but even then not too much, a few examples of each a year. I even quit buying from the new but marked down bins, stopped that last year.
I think if enough people will stop placing so much importance on "entertainmnerts" of that sort, we'll see more sane pricing and reduce any demand for copying for profit. it's all I can do, tell people to boycott movies and music and professional sports and television fiction. it's gotten so ridiculous expensive it's stupid, and the time wasting aspects of it are lost to the wasters, I think in a lot of cases they don't realise how absuerdly addicted they get to it to the detriment of other more important things our society ignores too much. When you can get several million people in one weekend to go drop tens of millions of dollars all over the country to watch some new movie, with thousands in any random city you pick, and the same city can't get two dozen people to a community meeting to discuss local judicial corruption or the next multi million dollar school budget, etc, well, there's something wrong there in *general terms*. IMO anyway.
Rome when it was collapsing had it's bread and circuses to keep the people amused and occupied so they wouldn't pay attention to the rot that was collapsing their society around them.. We have the same thing now but people don't like to think they are droned out barbarians addicted to bre
man, I forgot about rust! You are correct, up there, cars just dissolve, and you can't take a nut off two in a row, one of them busts. Yep, remember it well, all my first wrenching was on rusty junkers. Such a long time now though I plum forogt. I grew up in michigan so I know about rust buckets and "winter cars", you stick your good car in the garage and driver some old bomb you don't care in the winter. I live in georgia now though and cars just don't rust much. I got a 75 chevy van got over 300 thou on it. It don't burn oil yet but it leaks it out the front seal. Only rust on it is where I had a small fender knock and it crumpled a little, just the crumpled part is rusty, I banged it back out some, done. Never been much of a body guy, if it runs and the doors and windows work I don't care really.
;)
I don't like computerised stuff because a lot of it fails all at once and you got to get towed back. I like cars that start to go and give you a warning to get something fixed. It's bad enough I got HEI, had that go on me once,no notice, late at night, just stopped working driving down a semi main drag. PITA. Only time I needed it towed back. Never had to get towed with any of my point engines that I can recall. I just like cheap and simple, parts on new cars are ridiculous expensive and there's 5 times as many of them to do almost the same job. Some stuff about new cars I like, most I don't though.
Of course, I admit I am a curmudgeon... and a crank.....
because it's more fun to mod your H2 on the weekend than a 73 corolla? Chicks dig it? Because you never know when you are driving home and see a yardasle with a pile of SGIs at a yardaslwe for 10$?
I dunno, got to be some reason for the phenomenon though.
Mostly I think guys buy them for the ole lady to haul the kids around in and haul crap to the beach and mountains on the weekend, plus you can drag your camper or boat behind them easy. Then they get to driving it and get used to sitting up high and having tons of leg room, and before ya know it, it's a daily driver because it's so expensive it's the only thing you can afford that will do all that stuff. it's the vehicle equivalent of having a pda that plays movies, surfs, emails, does calendar and calculator, long distance and cell phone action, plus play your tunes, plus games, all in one package.
Besides that, I dunno. I like old detroit full size vans meselfs the best. Almost like a SUV, and it's because it's a universal do most anything vehicle.
But you still have no way to verify all the people who have access to your info at the vendors store, nor at the CC company. Encrypt it all you want, there's always some humans you have no idea of have access to the information.
Best bet is to have a dedicated CC just for online or casual store purchases, and transfer just enough funds to it to cover the cost of the purchase right before you actually make the purchase.
I get the point, I just been tippy toeing around the ultimate solution, because it's illegal to even mention it in passing lest yu get a vist from the authorities. If a co opted paid off blackmailed and bribed government gets so deep into the pockjets of transnational corporations that you become a slave, it is every freemans duty to "alter reality" using the tools of his choice. You got to ask yourself what the limits are, and that's it. If joe bigagco makes it illegal for me to grow my own non poisoned food, then I take that as an act of war. Food is a necesity, not entertainment. If some totality of government actions make YOU illegal no matter what you do and you notice you are no better than a slave, then, a freeman and a people who want to be free act accordingly. There's no profit, sense or righteousness living in a dictatorship, whether that dictatorship came about overnight, over a one months time, or over a single generations time. You really got to ask yourself and see what the corporate/government answer is, are they repesenting the people fairly, will they listen to your grievance honestly, or are they so corrupt that you can rationally conclude the system is too broken to repair.
No one can answer that for another, so I won't even try, but that's my personal bottom line.
I've suggested many times here there needs to be a powerful IT union, I will say that again.
Here's another short of revolution,maybe a class action lawsuit against government in general,the patent office in particular and take a look at legislators and judges bank accounts, etc. Several hundred thousand free software developers suing the patent office for just destroying the ability to work, along those lines. I think you can also bring a civil suit under RICO if there appears to be industry collusion in the matter.
I don't code so there's not much I can do there, couldn't even join the suit, but if coders want to go there, arrange it with some groklaw volunteers and like the FSF or something. You just have to decide how much crap corporogovernment patent sandwhiches you will eat before you dare say out loud THIS IS CRAP AND WE AREN'T GOING TO KEEP EATING IT.
we had with the major ISPs going to block peoples email/port 25 whatever if they are found to be spam spewers, there won't be as much of a problem with zombies. Enoughs enough, we need to treat people on the net as human beings with opposable thumbs and at least some level of adult competence. A small fee to access the net is not a license to be a clueless dingbat hoser forever and ever and a day. Just block zombiefied machines until they are verified fixed. If I got nailed, so be it, I expect to be blocked until it's cleaned up. I have zero problems with that.
And like they are doing with the latest windows/explorer exploit du juor, see where the spammers/recipients are making their profit, in this latest case sending the hijacked data to some russian place, all the carriers block that domain from any traffic, as much as possible, from this end anyway.
Fighting SPAM is no one silver bullet, but the combination of the techniques would probably work well enough. I'd go even further, if there are nations, or more accurately at least large domains and subnets that just refuse to cooperate, blacklist them.
We need the sane, adult, polite and responsible internet, it makes no sense to let the nutjobs,the crooks and the clueless hijack the entire internet and spoil it for everyone else. And if it doesn't happen voluntariily with normal users all the way to various corporations all cooperating, then sure as crap various governments will step in and censor and restrict hell out of it. I don't think we really want that second option.
it wasn't a hardware failure, it was users failing to follow good computer advice, chronically. A hardware failure I can understand,it's happened to everyone, and not everyone is a tech there or could figure it out, but chronic non safe computing over and over again just because "you" insist on it, then "you" fix it. First coupla times free, after that, tough love, on your own then. The first time is swell, you didn't know. The second time is "please pay attention, I'll do this again,fix everything and spic and span it, and this is what you should do different, and etc..", the third time, to me, tell them they are on their own. Tough Love. They are still your relative/friend/co worker whatever, but comes a time you got to cut your losses.
really, that's about it. You help people until it becomes impossible to help them, then send them on their way to learn on their own. They can either do it themselves or go pay someone to do it, that's the two choices they got. The big thing to me is, you don't take abuse from people you are helping for free. A misunderstanding, a clarification, sure, but abuse? Not happening.
... then is not use patented software or closed source. Just keep using the alternatives. If it's new code, it shouldn't be affected.
;)) but it IS better in the long run to use a well thought out plan than to just kludge something up. Short run just slapping a seed in the ground is easier, but the results sucketh. And I've only gotten to be a good gardener from building on my own previous works and using the *freely shared ideas of others*, and I've had a garden every season now no matter where I have lived for 40 something years, lemme see, 48 years to be exact since my first little garden as a kid. So, ya, good stuff can take a long time, but I got close to what I have now after only a few years of gardening, but I still learn and implement new techniques and tricks, some I think up on my own, other ideas I go find someplace else, and still get the occassional FUBAR. I accept that reality. You can't get perfect, it don't exist, but you can get steadily better, especially if you try harder than the other guy and rely on skull sweat as much as grunt sweat. And it never bothered me that good stuff just takes time, time is *free*, it's handed to you free as soon as you get hatched. It's just what you do with it that's important.
to me, in a way, and this is an analogy and it's flawed but it's close enough-we've seen were firefighters just let some structure burn to the ground. It might be that the house had gas leaks and crappy wiring and was coated with a flammable paint, whatever. Fixing the house was never an option, as it would take more work then just rebuilding it. ignoring it let the house catch on fire. it would have been better to do a controlled demolition and then rebuild it correctly, but sometimes that isn't done, so the house burns. if it's too fast, they a lot of times just make sure it burns down all the way and doesn't jump over to next door, where the house is built correctly.
The time limit-eh, no control over that really. The best you can do is inspect a house before buying it, or build it yourself or in collaboration with like minded people who want quality over speed of building.
I don't think there's an easy answer, but there IS an easi-er answer, and that is to just start building your own, which FOSS is doing,in the totality, with the entire computing experience being the end goal gestalt, freer, better, easier, more secure, etc. and try to move away from-ignore, not associate with, not use, etc- from the neighborhood that has the crappy built houses that can catch fire easy, have no door locks, and the are so leaky the wind and rain and bugs and burglars can get inside with little effort. And paying serious folding money for that sort of construction and to live in that neighborhood is *nutz*. It's better to just move on, do it better, and accept the time limit as just reality and deal with it. Nothing really GOOD is all that instant or easy.
I garden. When I put in a new bed I go way out of my way to make sure it's designed well, that the ground is de-weeded in advance, that the soil has a good amount of tilth to it and has the correct minerals added, and so on, before I plant anything. Now I COULD just walk over to a generic patch of ground and stick a seed in there, but then I'd be struggling with endless weeds and wonder why the crop didn't do well because not enough fertiliser or from the wrong ph or something with the soil caused either too much or too little moisture retention, and etc, etc garden tech stuff.
My method takes longer,(I've actually had people stop and tell me I got the best looking garden in the county, shameless brag here
They can be connected, but I was more addressing just the useability aspects. To me it IS more moral and ethical to share with others. Patenting thought and thought alone will never work in the long run. A short term patent on an actual built tangible product is a different matter. We as humans always shared thoughts in a lot of cases, but tangible products were treated differently, they got bought and sold and traded and it was a benfit to all. When we had examples of what we can now analogously mention as a patented and closed source intangibles as "things" system as regards "thought"-the old closed and secret guild systems with closed ideas to outsiders and only monks could read and write for the most part and copying was expensive and in some cases the commoners weren't even allowed to read and write-we had what are now called "the dark ages". It sucked mostly.
All this intangible IP patent and closed source copyright action now does is to try and reintroduce the dark ages with a modern skin on it and try to apply it to modern technology. Thought prohibition didn't work very well back then,it slowed human advance by centuries basically, and we are now seeing it's starting to impact modern civilisation as well.
"Thoughts" are the genesis of tools and processes, tools are what gets the "real work" done. The easier/cheaper/faster we get thoughts out to as many people as possible, the quicker/cheaper/better real tools and processes can be devised to allow real work to be done so we all benefit and profit from it.
It's time to end thought prohibition. Good thinkers who can think of original thoughts benefit just as much from sharing with other thinkers, because no one has a lock on being the only thinker. We build from each others thoughts. Advances don't come about from restricting the advances of others. Good thinkers are also smart enough to DO something practical with their thoughts, and with other peoples thoughts. The wright bros built a successful plane, but they didn't invent the gasoline engine, and they didn't invent cracking and distillation to even have gasoline from crude. They didn't invent the way to build a fabric skin to use for the wings. They just used a combination of others thoughts and did something practical and tangible with it, and society more or less benefited from it.
We can slow it down and keep all thoughts restricted and regulated, and make it even more complex daily, or we can speed it up immensely and allow thoughts to just get out there. That's the only two basic choices we really have as humans in organised society.
OK man, you got me! Great troll!
long time ago I used to help people fix their cars for free when I had some spare time. One lady I did a complete 4 wheel brake job for. Couple weeks later she comes back to me mad as a wet hen because her engine didn't run well, it had developed a carb problem and it was "all my fault because it ran fine before I worked on it". It didn't matter to her that the brakes got zero to do with it, it was still my fault to her way of thinking.
I do NOT fix peoples cars now, or even offer advice beyond telling them (anyone, this is true facts now) to just buy older cars without ridiculous computer crap on them and just replace the engine or transmission or whatever when it gets completely worn out. Much cheaper and better for them and less hassle for me.
Better and more widespread use of https, and have a way so that pages must be validated quickly and automatically, perhaps even with a md5 checksum type arrangement as a backup, before they can be downloaded and displayed.
That and just a complete rethink of OS and browsers and "the internet". For another example for another problem, I'd like to see a totally non-commercial email system, no commercial email used in it whatsoever, and your email addy was treated as importantly as your physical address at your home, or like your telco number. You'd have an option, email like it is now, or be inside a commercial free and registered email system that cost folding money per year per email addy and refused any email into it from outside, or any emailto leave the system. A large but closed system where every email addy was tied to a real human being with a real name with a real IP for verification. You could still try to use the wild wild west anarchy chaos email system we have now, but also opt in to the closed, verified and much more secure and hassle free email system.
Same thing with the net, anarchy and chaos with hacks, attacks and bogusness, or only visit sites that are verified and secure and conformed to some decent standards that have those issues as of paramount importance, as opposed to blinkenlights eye candy insecure.
I tell you, I just detest that I even have to run javascript to view some pages, I usually skip them. I'm not running an active x machine, but I feel the same way about that too, it's useful, but so easily used for bogusness that it's rapidly lost any universal advantage, IMO.
As to moz and firefox, I don'tknow on firefox but I don't see a way to disallow small invisible webbugs on moz. That would help. Maybe it's there and I just don't see it though,could just be me I admit, all I see is deny by domain. I want deny for a variety of reasons, size and visibility being a big one. Or conversely, just the ability to chose a single image to view, select it, the page doesn't jump away to refresh the whole deal just that particular image loads. And no downloading images in general but failing to display, I mean it can see an object and only allow it to be downloaded on a case by case basis if you choose that option. Nowadays when you click on an URL you have no idea what you will be downloading unless you view source in advance, which is nuts.
Really, this is GOOD. Let the big companies keep getting hosed by the patent system. Let them see how patenting IP and having closed source propietary software will constantly hose the ability to "do your work" and just keep costing money and money and money and money and be a serious PITA to actually DO anything. Eventually, doing anything even remotely fun, interesting, or productive will be so expensive that the system will crash and burn under it's own bloat. Let it become unprofitable to use patents and restrictive copyrights. Let them keepdoing what they are doing. The lawyers and licensing fees alone will start to make companies just stop being involved with it, eventually it might even get through to some legislators noggins that the patent and copyright system is completely broken and has been broken for a long time. It won't end until joe user all the way to joe big company needs to have a lawyer on a tether with them all the time, and just have their paychecks direct deposited to the lawyers account, and the lawyers cut you a small chump change allowance.
In other words, let it burn! I feel the same way about this as I do vulnerable windows machines. The quicker it gets to a ridiculous level of unusability level the quicker it can be fixed with a REAL fix which is a total replacement system, because sure as snot they won't fix it until then, just keep applying patches that just make it worse, because they refuse to address the core issue, which is intangible thoughts shouldn't be patented in the first place. It was an INSANE precedent to let the first intangible anything get patented.
Talk about illogical, how about basic reading comprehension here. You need all of the above. You need the ability to do math in your head, on paper or blackboard, and with a calculator or program with a computer.
As to lawn mowing, GLAD you brought that up so I can refute your claims. I am a mowing guru. I have some serious leet skills when it comes to mowing and trimming and clearing. If it existed you could say I have a PhD in that discipline. That's basically what I do for a living, and you know what? I have close to a dozen different mowers I use working, some that are worth in the mid 5 figures range and weigh multiple tons and are capable of mowing entire large trees down to ground level, right down to a SCYTHE that runs on strict manpower that I use to trim some very steep and rough areas where about nothing else will work, because you can't get to it with a machine. I use the *right tool for the right job*.
If it's a security flaw it has to be reported to users or potential users doesn't it? California is a big place, and there has got to be more than one person running windows and explorer there, so someone needs to be notified, so that makes it "news" and as such a ton of laws protect that. And since when does running a news story that's stamped with a date change anything? If on such and such a date such and such happened to be true, I don't see how anyone can be sued for reporting it. We've seen tons of other exploits reported on before, including sites affected, going back for years and years. I think there's high level pressure going on here someplace why the sites aren't mentioned. It was the first thing I noticed when I read this story yesterday evening, the story was weird because of it and I looked at several places, none of them have the normal info you see with a security news story. Any reporter could just use words like "potential" "alleged" "on going investigation", "this is a preliminary report, security analysts are digging in deeper to determine the validity of the claims" and etc.
Not reporting it is just way too suspicious to me.
this is just generic, I don't know your familuy situation exactly, but for what it's worth,the advice is to stop fixing their computers and let them drag the boxes to the shop and pay for it to be cleaned. I'd say in a business situation the same thing if that apploies to anyone else. The concept is stolen from the way the experts advise to deal with a family member who is an addict to booze or drugs, called "tough love". Right now you are acting like an "enabler" by fixing it when it gets hosed, leaving them with the impression that "it's not that bad", when it really IS that bad, they can't see or admit to the elephant in the living room, so just stop being an enabler.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! that's a good one too! this whole subthread is a gas!
Over to the last place I lived in north georgia is a store, I forget the real name of it now, but it was a combo pawn shop with mostly guns and a liquor store, so I called it "booze-n-bullets".