There should be a giant online cemetery where a person's online presence can retire when the body withers. Oh, wait... we already have one and it's called the Wayback Machine. Maybe there just needs to be more explicit cooperation with it about things like forum user profiles and social networking accounts? And maybe better funding?
Dogmatists simply can't conceive that anyone else would behave or perceive differently than them. They are the mold from which everyone else must de rigeur be cast.
I dunno about that, but I can tell you that Ghostery blocks "Rapleaf" by default. If there was really something sinister there, I'd expect to see it quietly whitelisted.
What makes you so bloody certain that it "works"? That the form and captcha simply appear at face value to be responsive? I actually entered an e-mail address which, if the process is actually "working" as expected, should have generated an e-mail challenge to verify that I owned said account and wasn't pranking an account I don't own. I've received no such challenge yet.
For all I know that form is simply a means to collect the e-mail addresses of people who they intend to data-mine even more intensely, precisely because of their stated intention to opt out. After all, only people who have valuable things to hide would ever feel compelled to opt out, right?
I wasn't giving it undue weight; I know it's more likely to be maimed some other way. It just seemed to me to have non-zero probability, not non-existent.
Regardless whether you liked the article's tone and focus or not, it's obvious we'll be reading more about it later, including the physics behind it. Since we already have obsessed storm and tornado chasers, I predict that some rich dudes with their own private planes will outfit them with gear and start flying them right into lightning storms just to see what happens.:-)
Not so fast, mister cynic. First the article says "one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes" and then shortly afterward "thunderstorms produce about a billion or so lightning bolts annually".
So that's one million "dark lightning" incidents every year, and how many global aircraft flights? Avoidance of thunderstorms or not, odds are it's been happening and we didn't know to look for symptoms until now.
You ruined your own argument halfway through the rant. It's not about "Fuck the terrorists. We don't negotiate. Ever." It's about reacting knee-jerk to terrorism by altering values, restricting freedoms, and generally making the society more closely resemble the repression of the terrorists' own culture. So actually the "country as a whole" did in fact give into terrorism. We have the Patriot Act (still) and a whole tanker fleet full of other repressive and invasive institutions and programs that either didn't exist at all beforehand or were mere shadows of what they are now.
The terrorists did win, regardless of per capita casualty stats. Our society now looks a bit more like their ideal than it did in 2000, not the other way around.
What MIT has done here is exactly the same behavior.
It's not the physical file that is being resold; it's not even the particular arrangement of bits that the file contains that is being resold. What is being resold is the license to use the file and its contents.
Driving traffic isn't always evil, but drivel like this doesn't offer much value in return for it! There's no value in speculating about whether he did or didn't. Does Slashdot aspire to become the Enquirer tabloid of tech news? Now there's a question worth some speculation!:-)
Doesn't invalidate my point that trying to foment discussion about it here is point-less and serves no purpose except to drive traffic, does it? I have misgivings about helping drive the traffic by commenting.
If someone had objective evidence, as opposed to an opinion or a feeling, that Kamphius had masterminded or participated in the campaign, then they would have already come forward publicly. They certainly would not withhold the information and then suddenly be inspired to reveal their secret just because Slashdot decides to speculate about it. Asking the question here just generates traffic but does nothing at all to answer it.
If even one of the production crew had been a real Trekkie with half a clue, they could have contacted James Cawley and the Phase II/New Voyages crew and rented their elaborate sets and maybe even their assistance for a fraction of what it cost them... AND it would've had dramatically better production values.
I first read this days ago. I have a thought: why not finish the impeachment and prosecutorial jobs we should have started with a few still-living warmongers rather than raging over the spilled milk of a dead one?
Bush is still alive and can still be impeached and indicted. Dennis Kucinich and others in Congress - and millions of American citizens - tried to begin the process and failed. Guess what stood in the way? Eric Holder, primarily. You should recognize the name of that obstructionist stick-in-the-mud from other news.
I first read this days ago. I have a thought: why not finish the impeachment and prosecutorial jobs we should have started with a few still-living warmongers rather than raging over the spilled milk of a dead one?
Bush is still alive and can still be impeached and indicted. Dennis Kucinich and others in Congress tried to begin the process and failed. Guess what stood in the way? Eric Holder, primarily.
This tactic of hoarding information and claiming copyright - aka Divine mandate - is called shamanism. It's a very VERY old tactic. Copyright is just a new twist on the tactic that lets opportunists without a Divine birthright get in on the action.
Information has always been a commodity, for better or worse and "right" or wrong.
Maybe, but as someone else said, *somebody* would have to be willing and able to sift through all of this deafening noise to ween out the tiny nuggets of actual truth. There aren't many somebodies like that. Then, even assuming the nuggets are retrieved, who is actually going to listen? The dogma in people's heads is even more deafening.
None of this will necessarily mean history gets told any more accurately. It will just get revised differently. Since people are eager to "embellish" their resumes, these "life review" autobiographies will be chock full of all sorts of tall tales to make even Mark Twain grimace. What makes us think that behavior starts and stops with former Presidents? Facts have always been as malleable as Silly Putty in the hands of people with motives that make the raw facts inconvenient. That class of people just happens to include nearly every person that has ever lived.
Only good old "peer review" will straighten these Life Reviews out and make them truly worth preserving.
So this here is why we have copyright, to protect the inane misguided ramblings of those who have nothing constructive to say but are desperate for people to listen to them. So we call it "art" and give them a monopoly on their inanity for several generations.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked the Philippines was an island chain, not a territory in Africa. Don't you just sound credible?
There should be a giant online cemetery where a person's online presence can retire when the body withers. Oh, wait... we already have one and it's called the Wayback Machine. Maybe there just needs to be more explicit cooperation with it about things like forum user profiles and social networking accounts? And maybe better funding?
Dogmatists simply can't conceive that anyone else would behave or perceive differently than them. They are the mold from which everyone else must de rigeur be cast.
I dunno about that, but I can tell you that Ghostery blocks "Rapleaf" by default. If there was really something sinister there, I'd expect to see it quietly whitelisted.
And BTW, that page relies on no less than 10 external "trackers", according to Ghostery:
AppNexus
DoubleClick
Google +1
Google AdWords Conversion
Google Analytics
HubSpot
MixPanel
Outbrain
ScoreCard Research Beacon
SnapEngage
People are quite likely collecting data on your choice to opt out....
What makes you so bloody certain that it "works"? That the form and captcha simply appear at face value to be responsive? I actually entered an e-mail address which, if the process is actually "working" as expected, should have generated an e-mail challenge to verify that I owned said account and wasn't pranking an account I don't own. I've received no such challenge yet.
For all I know that form is simply a means to collect the e-mail addresses of people who they intend to data-mine even more intensely, precisely because of their stated intention to opt out. After all, only people who have valuable things to hide would ever feel compelled to opt out, right?
I wasn't giving it undue weight; I know it's more likely to be maimed some other way. It just seemed to me to have non-zero probability, not non-existent.
Regardless whether you liked the article's tone and focus or not, it's obvious we'll be reading more about it later, including the physics behind it. Since we already have obsessed storm and tornado chasers, I predict that some rich dudes with their own private planes will outfit them with gear and start flying them right into lightning storms just to see what happens. :-)
Not so fast, mister cynic. First the article says "one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes" and then shortly afterward "thunderstorms produce about a billion or so lightning bolts annually".
So that's one million "dark lightning" incidents every year, and how many global aircraft flights? Avoidance of thunderstorms or not, odds are it's been happening and we didn't know to look for symptoms until now.
I didn't say anything of the sort. I said your argument failed. :-)
You ruined your own argument halfway through the rant. It's not about "Fuck the terrorists. We don't negotiate. Ever." It's about reacting knee-jerk to terrorism by altering values, restricting freedoms, and generally making the society more closely resemble the repression of the terrorists' own culture. So actually the "country as a whole" did in fact give into terrorism. We have the Patriot Act (still) and a whole tanker fleet full of other repressive and invasive institutions and programs that either didn't exist at all beforehand or were mere shadows of what they are now.
The terrorists did win, regardless of per capita casualty stats. Our society now looks a bit more like their ideal than it did in 2000, not the other way around.
What MIT has done here is exactly the same behavior.
It's not the physical file that is being resold; it's not even the particular arrangement of bits that the file contains that is being resold. What is being resold is the license to use the file and its contents.
Driving traffic isn't always evil, but drivel like this doesn't offer much value in return for it! There's no value in speculating about whether he did or didn't. Does Slashdot aspire to become the Enquirer tabloid of tech news? Now there's a question worth some speculation! :-)
Doesn't invalidate my point that trying to foment discussion about it here is point-less and serves no purpose except to drive traffic, does it? I have misgivings about helping drive the traffic by commenting.
If someone had objective evidence, as opposed to an opinion or a feeling, that Kamphius had masterminded or participated in the campaign, then they would have already come forward publicly. They certainly would not withhold the information and then suddenly be inspired to reveal their secret just because Slashdot decides to speculate about it. Asking the question here just generates traffic but does nothing at all to answer it.
Better yet perhaps some JavaScript to block egomaniacal social network ramblings about the wonders of the hosts file?
You mean like eating the beets and then walking?
If even one of the production crew had been a real Trekkie with half a clue, they could have contacted James Cawley and the Phase II/New Voyages crew and rented their elaborate sets and maybe even their assistance for a fraction of what it cost them... AND it would've had dramatically better production values.
I first read this days ago. I have a thought: why not finish the impeachment and prosecutorial jobs we should have started with a few still-living warmongers rather than raging over the spilled milk of a dead one?
Bush is still alive and can still be impeached and indicted. Dennis Kucinich and others in Congress - and millions of American citizens - tried to begin the process and failed. Guess what stood in the way? Eric Holder, primarily. You should recognize the name of that obstructionist stick-in-the-mud from other news.
I first read this days ago. I have a thought: why not finish the impeachment and prosecutorial jobs we should have started with a few still-living warmongers rather than raging over the spilled milk of a dead one?
Bush is still alive and can still be impeached and indicted. Dennis Kucinich and others in Congress tried to begin the process and failed. Guess what stood in the way? Eric Holder, primarily.
This tactic of hoarding information and claiming copyright - aka Divine mandate - is called shamanism. It's a very VERY old tactic. Copyright is just a new twist on the tactic that lets opportunists without a Divine birthright get in on the action.
Information has always been a commodity, for better or worse and "right" or wrong.
Maybe, but as someone else said, *somebody* would have to be willing and able to sift through all of this deafening noise to ween out the tiny nuggets of actual truth. There aren't many somebodies like that. Then, even assuming the nuggets are retrieved, who is actually going to listen? The dogma in people's heads is even more deafening.
I'm being pessimistic again, aren't I?
Touche, a silver lining!
None of this will necessarily mean history gets told any more accurately. It will just get revised differently. Since people are eager to "embellish" their resumes, these "life review" autobiographies will be chock full of all sorts of tall tales to make even Mark Twain grimace. What makes us think that behavior starts and stops with former Presidents? Facts have always been as malleable as Silly Putty in the hands of people with motives that make the raw facts inconvenient. That class of people just happens to include nearly every person that has ever lived.
Only good old "peer review" will straighten these Life Reviews out and make them truly worth preserving.
So this here is why we have copyright, to protect the inane misguided ramblings of those who have nothing constructive to say but are desperate for people to listen to them. So we call it "art" and give them a monopoly on their inanity for several generations.
Even that is considerably cheaper than in years/decades past. Last I checked they were $75 and lasted at most two years.