You don't believe in "chilling effects?" Threats regarding non-disclosure often include themselves in their subject matter... "you can't disclose X, Y, and Z, and you also can't disclose that you can't disclose X, Y, and Z"... and the threat can be sufficiently onerous to be credible.
I think you overrate the intimidating power of nominally legitimate instruments of judicial power, and underestimate the power of simply dragging someone through the courts for years on end. The process is its own punishment, and the threat of the process is quite often enough.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
All of that means that you're buying your discounted hardware with your personal information and your willing agreement to be another statistic in their advertising numbers.
I suspect that's a fair trade for a lot of people, considering how little they actually value their privacy.
Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.
If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.
TBH, we grub all kinds of dirt out of the ground and make the highest of high tech with it, so your statement is misleading. It's not strictly a dark ages thing. More like a "civilization on Earth" thing.
If you have a meaningful argument, that wasn't it.
True. Oldtimers like me don't really look back fondly on the birthday of the Web.
We did just fine with FTP and Gopher and NNTP. The 'net had a moderately high intellectual entry barrier. It was hard, and it was complicated. It was its own intelligence test. We didn't have to suffer fools gladly; fools couldn't even work the doorknob, let alone enter and sully us with their foolishness.
If I'm going to bravely cheer the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, I may as well applaud the first day of the September that Never Ended. Damn dirty AOL'ers.
Berners-Lee is an Englishman, a Londoner for God's sake. You'd think he'd know the history of his own city and country.
You're right. The Magna Carta was practically signed at swordpoint. And, more importantly, it wasn't a charter of rights for all humanity: it was principally a charter of the rights and powers of the nobility: the barons on the non-pointy end of the swords. In this sense, perhaps the megacorp oligarchs could get a Magna Carta, but it wouldn't make a damn sniff of difference to us peasants.
At the very end of the 5 1/4" floppy era, the "High-Density" floppy used the same data rate, tracking, and recording density as the 8" 1.2M floppies. They were, in fact, 1.2M 5 1/4" floppies. Which is why their formatted capacity was different from 3.5" "high-density" equivalent, 1.44M.
Other than electrical needs (as 8" floppies often had their spindle motors directly powered by 120VAC line current), the high-density 5 1/4"s were used as a drop-in replacement for 8" floppies in the hobbyist retrocomputing community. (Not collectors, though; they'd want to keep the gear as cherry as possible.)
I'm wounded. I'm a troll, but not that kind; I'm the kind that lurks in caves or under bridges, but harmless because sunlight is an existential threat to me.
I wasn't really kidding, either. Those were my exact thoughts 30 years ago as I sat at my Z-100 computer logged into my local DEC machine (across the flight line) through a 300 baud acoustic modem, manually updating the system's HOSTS file from the latest "master copy" I FTP'd down from ISI.Good time... good times.
(Yes, I'm capitalizing HOSTS because that's what it was called on the pre-historic TOPS-20 system I was using. I also thought that commie-pinko "unix" thing was also going to be a fad.)
I'd be more inclined to believe GPP if I saw all this material in a Powerpoint presentation. It just loses some of its credibility and impact without one of Microsoft's standard templates framing it.
But that's OK, it's an evil kitten and its death provides more material for future powerpoint slides.
What... when you add a new slide to your powerpoint presentation, where do you think the bits and pixels come from? Evil kitten ectoplasm, that's where.
This just in: Satoshi Nakamoto, the famous Japanese man, was recently discovered to have changed his name from Momomoto, and can thus swallow his own nose.
Ridiculous, incredible, too far gone to ever be believed.
In other news, Leah McGrath Goodman is actually a cabbage.
The bullet-point presentation was always about presenting evidence and alternatives for an executable decision. Classically, in a hierarchical organization where the receipients of the presentation are the functional leadership who are empowered to make and enforce operational decisions but expect their minions to gather "decision-grade information" and present it in a minimal-overhead, maximal-efficiency format.
It was never about collaboration or exploration. It gets used like that, but it's a terrible fit. It was never intended to encourage discussion. A well-crafted slide deck ends all conversation because all the facts are in. If the leader has to ask questions, or another participant questions your facts or your conclusion, your presentation was sub-optimal.
A bullet-point presentation is supposed to be the shortest path to an incontrovertible and non-debatable decision.
In that case, they're still not nude... because "upskirt" pretty much requires the presence of a skirt. And if you're wearing a skirt, you're not nude.
I gotta wonder about the meaning of "partially nude", though. Unless you're completely burqa'd up, you're showing SOME naked flesh. Why isn't that partially nude? Or does "partially nude" mean "we know it when we see it"?
Other than the high likelihood that you're either an anonymous troll or an ignorant blowhard (or both), you need to explain why the Constitution has one damn thing to do with this.
Or did you sleep through the part of Civics class where they discussed the Contitution's protection of rights extends to limiting the actions of government... and absolutely no further. Private action (such as a non-governmental employer) are not in any fashion constrained by the basic protections of the Constitution. Laws, almost certainly. But since you named the Constitution explicitly, you need to be called on it explicitly.
If we wanted a Doom analogy for TFA situation, I'd argue it'd be like you can get full DOOM for free, but you have to buy ammo for any weapon above the normal shotgun from the publisher. Say, 50 cents for 150 minigun bullets or 100 plasma rounds or 2 BFG shots or a few rockets.
Which would suck super, considering how many rockets I had to fire to kill the cyberdemon at the end if Ep 2.
Dammit. Now I'm going to have to find, dust off, and install my Doom collection CD.
Slashdot Mirror
For companies, they're basically pirate ships populated by people who think of themselves as laws unto themselves, as glorious buccaneers .
Ok. Who else read this sentence and visualized the Crimson Permanent Assurance sailing the Bounding Main (Street)?
I had to smile, even though the real topic is depressing as hell.
You don't believe in "chilling effects?" Threats regarding non-disclosure often include themselves in their subject matter... "you can't disclose X, Y, and Z, and you also can't disclose that you can't disclose X, Y, and Z"... and the threat can be sufficiently onerous to be credible.
I think you overrate the intimidating power of nominally legitimate instruments of judicial power, and underestimate the power of simply dragging someone through the courts for years on end. The process is its own punishment, and the threat of the process is quite often enough.
-- Nineteen Eighty-Four
Clueless troll is clueless. And also punctuates poorly.
So "this one is deterministic" seems like a weak complaint.
By your standards, this PRNG isn't so bad.
"Now" is an expensive luxury. Don't be surprised it's priced rather luxuriously.
All of that means that you're buying your discounted hardware with your personal information and your willing agreement to be another statistic in their advertising numbers.
I suspect that's a fair trade for a lot of people, considering how little they actually value their privacy.
Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.
The code? It's a piece of BASH scripting. With a crippling syntax error ("if" without closing "fi").
If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.
TBH, we grub all kinds of dirt out of the ground and make the highest of high tech with it, so your statement is misleading. It's not strictly a dark ages thing. More like a "civilization on Earth" thing.
If you have a meaningful argument, that wasn't it.
True. Oldtimers like me don't really look back fondly on the birthday of the Web.
We did just fine with FTP and Gopher and NNTP. The 'net had a moderately high intellectual entry barrier. It was hard, and it was complicated. It was its own intelligence test. We didn't have to suffer fools gladly; fools couldn't even work the doorknob, let alone enter and sully us with their foolishness.
If I'm going to bravely cheer the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, I may as well applaud the first day of the September that Never Ended. Damn dirty AOL'ers.
Berners-Lee is an Englishman, a Londoner for God's sake. You'd think he'd know the history of his own city and country.
You're right. The Magna Carta was practically signed at swordpoint. And, more importantly, it wasn't a charter of rights for all humanity: it was principally a charter of the rights and powers of the nobility: the barons on the non-pointy end of the swords. In this sense, perhaps the megacorp oligarchs could get a Magna Carta, but it wouldn't make a damn sniff of difference to us peasants.
At the very end of the 5 1/4" floppy era, the "High-Density" floppy used the same data rate, tracking, and recording density as the 8" 1.2M floppies. They were, in fact, 1.2M 5 1/4" floppies. Which is why their formatted capacity was different from 3.5" "high-density" equivalent, 1.44M.
Other than electrical needs (as 8" floppies often had their spindle motors directly powered by 120VAC line current), the high-density 5 1/4"s were used as a drop-in replacement for 8" floppies in the hobbyist retrocomputing community. (Not collectors, though; they'd want to keep the gear as cherry as possible.)
I'm wounded. I'm a troll, but not that kind; I'm the kind that lurks in caves or under bridges, but harmless because sunlight is an existential threat to me.
I wasn't really kidding, either. Those were my exact thoughts 30 years ago as I sat at my Z-100 computer logged into my local DEC machine (across the flight line) through a 300 baud acoustic modem, manually updating the system's HOSTS file from the latest "master copy" I FTP'd down from ISI.Good time... good times.
So you invite everyone in the world to submit their domain name and IP address on postcards?
Yes. HOSTS files. Exchange HOSTS files. Manually merge and edit them.
TBH, I thought DNS was going to be a fad.
(Yes, I'm capitalizing HOSTS because that's what it was called on the pre-historic TOPS-20 system I was using. I also thought that commie-pinko "unix" thing was also going to be a fad.)
Wait, isn't that when it turned into a poorly-concealed marketing vehicle for its corporate owners?
I'd be more inclined to believe GPP if I saw all this material in a Powerpoint presentation. It just loses some of its credibility and impact without one of Microsoft's standard templates framing it.
But that's OK, it's an evil kitten and its death provides more material for future powerpoint slides.
What... when you add a new slide to your powerpoint presentation, where do you think the bits and pixels come from? Evil kitten ectoplasm, that's where.
This just in: Satoshi Nakamoto, the famous Japanese man, was recently discovered to have changed his name from Momomoto, and can thus swallow his own nose.
Ridiculous, incredible, too far gone to ever be believed.
In other news, Leah McGrath Goodman is actually a cabbage.
OK, this I could believe.
The bullet-point presentation was always about presenting evidence and alternatives for an executable decision. Classically, in a hierarchical organization where the receipients of the presentation are the functional leadership who are empowered to make and enforce operational decisions but expect their minions to gather "decision-grade information" and present it in a minimal-overhead, maximal-efficiency format.
It was never about collaboration or exploration. It gets used like that, but it's a terrible fit. It was never intended to encourage discussion. A well-crafted slide deck ends all conversation because all the facts are in. If the leader has to ask questions, or another participant questions your facts or your conclusion, your presentation was sub-optimal.
A bullet-point presentation is supposed to be the shortest path to an incontrovertible and non-debatable decision.
In that case, they're still not nude... because "upskirt" pretty much requires the presence of a skirt. And if you're wearing a skirt, you're not nude.
I gotta wonder about the meaning of "partially nude", though. Unless you're completely burqa'd up, you're showing SOME naked flesh. Why isn't that partially nude? Or does "partially nude" mean "we know it when we see it"?
I hate stupid subjective ambiguous laws.
I guess.
"You were trying to protect what used to be called 'modesty' in the olden days. You failed. So it's your fault."
As opposed to "You're nekkid. That's indecent exposure. So it's your fault. But we'll also arrest anyone taking pictures of you."
Other than the high likelihood that you're either an anonymous troll or an ignorant blowhard (or both), you need to explain why the Constitution has one damn thing to do with this.
Or did you sleep through the part of Civics class where they discussed the Contitution's protection of rights extends to limiting the actions of government... and absolutely no further. Private action (such as a non-governmental employer) are not in any fashion constrained by the basic protections of the Constitution. Laws, almost certainly. But since you named the Constitution explicitly, you need to be called on it explicitly.
System logging records the plung and unplug actions.
The mere fact you plugged something in without authorization of IT puts you on the investigation list.
That's assuming the USB sockets aren't disabled in software and sealed with epoxy. Except the keyboard and mouse, which are epoxied in place.
I'm not making this up.
More to the point, who could afford the cardboard box that looks good on his 1/2 billion dollar island?
Real estate like that, you don't just slap down any ol' appliance box.
If we wanted a Doom analogy for TFA situation, I'd argue it'd be like you can get full DOOM for free, but you have to buy ammo for any weapon above the normal shotgun from the publisher. Say, 50 cents for 150 minigun bullets or 100 plasma rounds or 2 BFG shots or a few rockets.
Which would suck super, considering how many rockets I had to fire to kill the cyberdemon at the end if Ep 2.
Dammit. Now I'm going to have to find, dust off, and install my Doom collection CD.