Would you mind explaining to me hwo Markoff's "tactics" weren't the best thing to happen to an otherwise unemployable "computer guy with criminal record"?
Certainly, and in five words or less: "Freedom Downtime," download and watch.
You both miss the OP's point. Archive.org respects robots.txt files that ask them not to spider a site. Other archival services may not be so friendly, regardless of whether you're using a META tag, an HTTP header, or a robots.txt file.
Is Firefox modular enough to break out valuable, reusable parts and implement something new out of them?
Quite simply, I think this depends on the developer community. For the most part, Firefox plugins tend to be "niche" in nature; that is, they appeal to a core group of users instead of a broad audience. Two examples that I can think of quickly are:
User Agent Switcher (Only applies to geeks who want to misrepresent their User-Agent, like me)
Certainly there are more mainstream plugins - Bugmenot has its own plugin now and it's likely more popular than either of my two examples above - but I think it's going to take a critical mass plugin to really make a splash. Greasemonkey might be that plugin, eventually; "the recent security issue may have temporarily impeded its penetration into the user base," say analysts everywhere. I for one have not installed Greasemonkey, although I find its potential quite interesting.
The cool thing is, Firefox provides the ability for anyone to create a plugin, register and host it "officially" through the Mozilla/Firefox update site, etc. And Firefox tracks each plugin individually, giving you the option to visit its web page, update it automatically, uninstall it easily and without the BS that accompanies IE plugin variants such as the dreaded (and often persistent) BHOs.
In short, Firefox has supplied a sandbox large enough for all of the neighborhood kids to play in, and they've even hired a referee to make sure that everyone plays nice. It's just a matter of time until someone brings the killer-app toy to the sandbox.
Maybe Sony should just have those "independent promoters" run eDonkey clients instead. It'd be much cheaper.
Cheaper than what..? Paying shills to call up radio stations with fake requests, and then suggesting that "the same couple of girls" should be getting drunk, or going to clubs, or getting in a hot tub before calling the radio stations?
If you didn't think the music industry was evil, think again.
These laws are passed for a reason; becuase they reflect community standards.
First, this is a blatant troll. For example, the Taliban forbade women from getting an education. Now that the Taliban have for the most part been defeated in Afghanistan, Afghani women are pursuing all sorts of educations, jobs, and are even walking around without burqas on their heads. If it was all about community standards, these women would never dare such things, lest the rest of the community notice and take action against them.
"Community standards" had nothing to do with it; the standards were set by a fairly small group of lunatics who happened to have a lot of guns. The same can be said of places like North Korea, Iraq, Sudan, and (dare I say it) perhaps even the United States. The FCC, backed by the federal government, which happens to have a lot more firepower than you or I, decides what is or isn't OK on television. As in several other above-listed states, the relatively small group with the superior firepower are the ones who set the rules, communities be damned.
Community standards are hogwash, anyway. I live in the deep south, the Bible belt. I know people who are staunch conservatives, or republicans, or Bush-Frist voters, or whatever you want to call them. These are the guys who go to that annual rally (I forget what it's called) where they profess their faith to God and their wives, and denounce pornography and infidelity. Yet I run into these guys at the strip clubs, at the liquor stores, you name it. All of the "sins" they're supposedly dead-set against, they more often than not participate in themselves.
Your average Bible-belter will vote against gambling, but then you'll find him in the casinos in Tunica or Biloxi. He'll vote against a state lottery, but darned if you don't run into him buying Powerball tickets at the gas station. He'll write to the FCC complaining about Janet Jackson, but as you drive past the adult bookstore, you see his car parked outside. He set the so-called "community standards" when he voted, but he doesn't even follow them himself. That's your average "community standards" progenitor.
Look no further than the Parents' Television Council for evidence of this. The PTC - which as you may recall from prior articles here is responsible for some 98% of all complaints to the FCC - proudly hosts on their own website the offensive clips from television shows they complain about. Even (gasp) children can surf by and find the stuff that's so offensive, they don't want their children to see it. How's that for irony?
For several months they hosted a video clip at http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/clips/WithoutaTrace_o rgy.wmv which was ranked #2 and #3 in Google on a search for "teen orgy party." (They removed it after I wrote to them about their hypocrisy, but you can still find references to its existence.) The trend is ongoing; for example, they're currently hosting the video of the Paris Hilton Carl's Jr. commercial which they describe as "extremely graphic and sexually explicit."
Earth to Parents Television Council, your website is fully accessible to any child who has internet access, why are you hosting "extremely graphic and sexually explicit" content there? Fucking hypocrites.
Who are you to advocate breaking them?
A human being who has tasted freedom, who knows about life without oppression, who understands the value of the right to read and speak freely, and who hates seeing women all covered up.
The thing I don't get with Tor is why someone would need that much encryption, unless they were transferring something illegal like copyrighted material.
In some places, discussing things like "democracy" and "freedom" is illegal. In some places, it's verboten for women to bare their necks or ankles (much less anything else) in public. In some places, it's illegal to read books that involve sexual behavior, or criticize the government, or any number of other things.
Are you still convinced that a network of potential "illegal" uses is such a bad thing?
I am not trolling here, but exactly which mainstream sites (which I assume you meant by "Joe SixPack") rely on ActiveX?
Assuming you use IE at all, go to Tools > Internet Options > Security, define a custom level for the Internet zone if you haven't already, and set all of the ActiveX settings to "prompt." You'd probably be surprised how many of the sites you visit on a day to day basis start throwing up dialogs asking whether or not it's okay to run this or that.
I'm not saying that the sites don't function when you hit the "No" button on the "Do you want to allow software such as ActiveX controls and plug-ins to run?" dialog. And, to Microsoft's credit, when you go to the trouble of setting the ActiveX preferences to "prompt," the default button on the dialog is "No" so it's easy to hit the space bar to kill the modal and view the page without any junk.
But so much of what Joe Sixpack comes to expect from the websites he uses - stock tickers, sports score displays, interactive this or that, etc. - depends on ActiveX. For a lot of users, the sites just aren't the same without all of the ActiveX controls. I agree with you that it would be much better to use Java, or perhaps Flash (though it has its own issues) to make these features work. But the site developers have gone with ActiveX and likely won't change without a serious reason.
The enhancements will build on the Security Zones feature in current versions of IE that allows customers to prevent untrusted Web sites from invoking ActiveX controls.
Sounds to me like ActiveX will still be enabled by default, they're just going to improve on the ability to block it on a per-domain basis instead of a per-zone basis. This isn't enough. IMO, ActiveX is the biggest (non-bug) avenue by which users become infected with all sorts of shit. It needs to be outright disabled out of the box if IE is going to get serious about security.
The conundrum is that so many sites now require ActiveX that if IE were to ship with it disabled, Joe Sixpack's favorite websites wouldn't work.
So what? My city owns several, they're operated by the parks commission along with other parks in the city. The city golf courses have greens fees like any other golf course; that is, the city makes money by owning and operating the courses. I imagine yours probably does, too.
Normally, the break ins involve Windows (in fact, Windows has some 40% of https space, Yet, has more than 95 % fo the thefts). But here windows is only 1 out of the 4. Solaris accounts for the other 3.
There were no "break ins" involved in this incident. Employees at Bank of America and Wachovia were looking up customer records and selling them at $10 a pop. The guy they sold the information to turned around and re-sold it to collection agencies and law offices. Basically this is a case of social engineering done by some wanna-be private investigator.
Computers weren't the weak link and no OS is at fault.
Before I try going to the post office and getting a glazed look from a postal grunt, does anyone know of a way to block all "Resident" mail, a complete opt-out of litter mills that don't even know my name?
The short answer is that it's not possible without a lot of effort on your part, perhaps more time than you spend filtering through the mail. The long answer is that you can cut junk mail to a trickle if you're willing to take the time. See Stopping Junk Postal Mail and ignore the Adwords on the right side, they're trying to charge $30 for mostly the same info.
With my web browser, I have never found the need to use tabs. In fact, tabs have often confused me because I wind up having two or three firefox windows each with a variety of tabs, and they aren't organized well.
My suggestion would be to retrain yourself so that you never left-click on links anymore. Instead, right-click them and choose "Open Link in New Tab" (or, in Firefox, right-click the link and then press the T key, which does the same thing). This prevents the "randomness" of some links opening in new tabs and others opening in new windows. After many years of left-clicking, it'll take some time to retrain yourself, but after a few days you'll be doing it without a second thought.
I very rarely get so many tabs open that I need a new window. In fact, I think the only time it happened is when I was checking prices on a digital camera at about 25 different online stores. When I finally narrowed it down to 2 or 3 places, I opened a new window, one tab for each shopping cart, so that I could see what each one charged for shipping.
According to the organizations (JD Power, Consumer reports) who do objective studies of such things, the Prius has been more reliable, with higher owner satisfaction, that almost any other model.
Are those the same organizations who create a near-infinite number of "classes" of automobiles, so that manufacturers can claim nearly all of their models were "best in their class?" The same organizations who hand out the same award to multiple parties (e.g. both RoadRunner and BellSouth were awarded best ISP customer service)? Consumer Reports isn't so bad, but whatever honors JD Power hands out should be taken with a grain of salt.
Are Slashdot readers aware of any practical inexpensive tracking system that can be applied to domestic animals?
Combine the natural power of a tree with the functionality of a chain. Throw in a collar for good measure, and you've got synergy.
If the dog can't run off, he can't run off and get lost. I'm not trying to be a dick about this, but unless chaining a dog is illegal in her area, your sister should consider the obvious option. Occam's razor, and all. So long as food and water bowls are within easy reach, and kept in the same place, the dog shouldn't have a problem.
We all know that teachers like to pass-the-buck, but that's ridiculous. If four hours of television destroys all that your eight hours of class time imparts on a child, then you're a crappy teacher, district or administration.
I don't know where you live, but around here, high school teachers (that is, those who would be teaching 14-17 year olds) don't get eight hours of class time a week, let alone every day. Four hours of television a day can easily counteract what's being taught to the student one hour a day, five days a week.
Say you spend an hour talking about the tenets of free speech, and how the freedom to criticize elected officials is guaranteed by the Constitution. Then the student goes home and watches an hour of TV news, pumping fear-stories about "There is a website publishing pictures that could help terrorists attack us!" (cryptome.org) and "One website claims that the Microsoft software you use could be insecure and get you infected with a virus! What?! These people must be crazy!" (slashdot.org).
Maybe they run a story about how a group of people dared - dared, since questioning the government is now officially unAmerican - to confront Republican Senator Bill Frist while he was parked illegally, buying shoes next to a known Democratic lobbying organization's headquarters. And it's the protestors who are being criticized, nevermind the fact that the Senator is parked illegally, or that he chose to shop right next to his opponents' HQ. No, the story is that "poor Bill Frist got protested." Damned "liberal" media again!
Or they show video footage of people in a "Free Speech Zone," with a subtle comment about how those protestors are really are getting riled up, maybe they're violent, thank God they're caged up inside the chain-link fence of the "Free Speech Zone." And that video clip of people in a "Free Speech Zone" negates what you tried to impart to your students, the fact that the entire United States of America is a free speech zone, that the term "Free Speech Zone" didn't come about until the Bush administration, and that you don't necessarily need a permit to assemble peaceably.
Perspectives can be altered. Easily. Especially in younger minds. I hope that by age 17, most Americans have developed enough critical thinking skills to make their own determinations, but at 14, I'd bet that most teens base their decisions upon what their parents say and what they've learned to be the "popular opinion." And popular opinions don't come from the History Teacher.
I'm not a teacher by profession (though I'm happy to impart knowledge about any topic with which I'm familiar, anytime, to anyone, of any age) - I don't have it in me to do that day in and day out - but I have enormous amounts of respect for those who are.
Slashdot Mirror
You both miss the OP's point. Archive.org respects robots.txt files that ask them not to spider a site. Other archival services may not be so friendly, regardless of whether you're using a META tag, an HTTP header, or a robots.txt file.
User Agent Switcher (Only applies to geeks who want to misrepresent their User-Agent, like me)
Farkit (Only applies to Fark users, like me)
Certainly there are more mainstream plugins - Bugmenot has its own plugin now and it's likely more popular than either of my two examples above - but I think it's going to take a critical mass plugin to really make a splash. Greasemonkey might be that plugin, eventually; "the recent security issue may have temporarily impeded its penetration into the user base," say analysts everywhere. I for one have not installed Greasemonkey, although I find its potential quite interesting.
The cool thing is, Firefox provides the ability for anyone to create a plugin, register and host it "officially" through the Mozilla/Firefox update site, etc. And Firefox tracks each plugin individually, giving you the option to visit its web page, update it automatically, uninstall it easily and without the BS that accompanies IE plugin variants such as the dreaded (and often persistent) BHOs.
In short, Firefox has supplied a sandbox large enough for all of the neighborhood kids to play in, and they've even hired a referee to make sure that everyone plays nice. It's just a matter of time until someone brings the killer-app toy to the sandbox.
If you didn't think the music industry was evil, think again.
"Community standards" had nothing to do with it; the standards were set by a fairly small group of lunatics who happened to have a lot of guns. The same can be said of places like North Korea, Iraq, Sudan, and (dare I say it) perhaps even the United States. The FCC, backed by the federal government, which happens to have a lot more firepower than you or I, decides what is or isn't OK on television. As in several other above-listed states, the relatively small group with the superior firepower are the ones who set the rules, communities be damned.
Community standards are hogwash, anyway. I live in the deep south, the Bible belt. I know people who are staunch conservatives, or republicans, or Bush-Frist voters, or whatever you want to call them. These are the guys who go to that annual rally (I forget what it's called) where they profess their faith to God and their wives, and denounce pornography and infidelity. Yet I run into these guys at the strip clubs, at the liquor stores, you name it. All of the "sins" they're supposedly dead-set against, they more often than not participate in themselves.
Your average Bible-belter will vote against gambling, but then you'll find him in the casinos in Tunica or Biloxi. He'll vote against a state lottery, but darned if you don't run into him buying Powerball tickets at the gas station. He'll write to the FCC complaining about Janet Jackson, but as you drive past the adult bookstore, you see his car parked outside. He set the so-called "community standards" when he voted, but he doesn't even follow them himself. That's your average "community standards" progenitor.
Look no further than the Parents' Television Council for evidence of this. The PTC - which as you may recall from prior articles here is responsible for some 98% of all complaints to the FCC - proudly hosts on their own website the offensive clips from television shows they complain about. Even (gasp) children can surf by and find the stuff that's so offensive, they don't want their children to see it. How's that for irony?
For several months they hosted a video clip at http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/clips/WithoutaTrace_
Earth to Parents Television Council, your website is fully accessible to any child who has internet access, why are you hosting "extremely graphic and sexually explicit" content there? Fucking hypocrites.
A human being who has tasted freedom, who knows about life without oppression, who understands the value of the right to read and speak freely, and who hates seeing women all covered up.
Are you still convinced that a network of potential "illegal" uses is such a bad thing?
I'm not saying that the sites don't function when you hit the "No" button on the "Do you want to allow software such as ActiveX controls and plug-ins to run?" dialog. And, to Microsoft's credit, when you go to the trouble of setting the ActiveX preferences to "prompt," the default button on the dialog is "No" so it's easy to hit the space bar to kill the modal and view the page without any junk.
But so much of what Joe Sixpack comes to expect from the websites he uses - stock tickers, sports score displays, interactive this or that, etc. - depends on ActiveX. For a lot of users, the sites just aren't the same without all of the ActiveX controls. I agree with you that it would be much better to use Java, or perhaps Flash (though it has its own issues) to make these features work. But the site developers have gone with ActiveX and likely won't change without a serious reason.
The conundrum is that so many sites now require ActiveX that if IE were to ship with it disabled, Joe Sixpack's favorite websites wouldn't work.
Why not just call the event "Perl Harbor," I think everyone would get the reference.
Where's "Debbie Does Dallas?" This list is rigged.
Computers weren't the weak link and no OS is at fault.
I very rarely get so many tabs open that I need a new window. In fact, I think the only time it happened is when I was checking prices on a digital camera at about 25 different online stores. When I finally narrowed it down to 2 or 3 places, I opened a new window, one tab for each shopping cart, so that I could see what each one charged for shipping.
Must have been a Catholic school... Nobody else masks acronyms.
If the dog can't run off, he can't run off and get lost. I'm not trying to be a dick about this, but unless chaining a dog is illegal in her area, your sister should consider the obvious option. Occam's razor, and all. So long as food and water bowls are within easy reach, and kept in the same place, the dog shouldn't have a problem.
Say you spend an hour talking about the tenets of free speech, and how the freedom to criticize elected officials is guaranteed by the Constitution. Then the student goes home and watches an hour of TV news, pumping fear-stories about "There is a website publishing pictures that could help terrorists attack us!" (cryptome.org) and "One website claims that the Microsoft software you use could be insecure and get you infected with a virus! What?! These people must be crazy!" (slashdot.org).
Maybe they run a story about how a group of people dared - dared, since questioning the government is now officially unAmerican - to confront Republican Senator Bill Frist while he was parked illegally, buying shoes next to a known Democratic lobbying organization's headquarters. And it's the protestors who are being criticized, nevermind the fact that the Senator is parked illegally, or that he chose to shop right next to his opponents' HQ. No, the story is that "poor Bill Frist got protested." Damned "liberal" media again!
Or they show video footage of people in a "Free Speech Zone," with a subtle comment about how those protestors are really are getting riled up, maybe they're violent, thank God they're caged up inside the chain-link fence of the "Free Speech Zone." And that video clip of people in a "Free Speech Zone" negates what you tried to impart to your students, the fact that the entire United States of America is a free speech zone, that the term "Free Speech Zone" didn't come about until the Bush administration, and that you don't necessarily need a permit to assemble peaceably.
Perspectives can be altered. Easily. Especially in younger minds. I hope that by age 17, most Americans have developed enough critical thinking skills to make their own determinations, but at 14, I'd bet that most teens base their decisions upon what their parents say and what they've learned to be the "popular opinion." And popular opinions don't come from the History Teacher.
I'm not a teacher by profession (though I'm happy to impart knowledge about any topic with which I'm familiar, anytime, to anyone, of any age) - I don't have it in me to do that day in and day out - but I have enormous amounts of respect for those who are.