Checking a book out from the library isn't a fair analysis. That's like comparing a bicycle with a borrowed car.
Compare a $30 book that provides eight hours of entertainment with a $10 (or less) movie that provides a couple hours of entertainment. Or a $30 book with a $20 DVD or $18 CD or a $50 game or a $15 MMORPG subscription.
In my experience, MUDs are more clique-ish than MMORPGs and can often consist of much more inane chatting than game playing. Also, a lot of the good MUDS are not actually free and require a monthly fee.
Of course, I've yet to find an MMORPG that held my interest for more than six weeks before cancelling it.
Slashdot should do one really amusing and clever April Fool joke each year. Much better than posting two dozen really pathetic ones. Or just have a special section each year where people can submit their April Fools spottings.
No kidding. April Fools is the worst day of the year on Slashdot. Slashdot treats April Fools day like that stupid gross uncle you always have around who thinks it's still funny to do the "hey, pull my finger!" gag.
It's just stupid, juvinile, uninteresting and retarded.
I like humor as much as the next guy, but there's never any humor in Slashdot April Fool's stories.
Well there is nothing stopping you about lying about the information on the Whois information. If they think this is going to solve any problems with criminals they are just fooling them self.
There is everything stopping you.
If you provide false information to your registrar and someone notifies them of a problem regarding your site, they will send you a notice. If you do not respond to that notice, they will immediately nullroute your domain. I used to use incorrect information for my mailing address and phone number because my site is very public and I would prefer not to have people showing up at my door.
Someone, known to be a troublemaker who was then banned from my site, contacted my registrar and made some flimsy complaint to stir up trouble. The registrar logged the complaint, but did nothing directly regarding it. What they did, however, was nullroute my domain because the complaint caused them to look up my whois data and that proved to be false information. They then nullrouted my domain without any further notice. I was only lucky enough to have done a whois of my own on my domain that very day and noticed it; corrected it before the world's DNS servers were updated.
And when the government sends a subpeona to the 'third party' for your name, it takes an extra 5 minutes for them to track you down. I'm sorry, but if you are hosting something bad enough (or spamming millions of messages I guess) for the FBI or whoever to come after you, a third party registrar isn't going to help much.
Ah, the sound of the point skipping over heads.
It may take the government an extra five minutes to track you down by sending a subpeona to whoever posesses your legitimate information - but Joe Public can't. Personally, I am not concerned with Johnny Law getting my information as he can do it whenver he wants with none to little effort. It's the other six billion people on the planet that I would like to make finding my information slightly more difficult for than typing "whois mydomain.com".
if you hide behind an anon domain 99.99% its because you are up to no good
And the same is probably true if you lock your briefcase, luggage, car or house. If you ain't got nuthin' to hide, whatcha' care about yer privassy for, you pinko commie...
There is a world of difference between, say, the police serving your registrar, webhost or colocation service and some unstable troublemaker typing your domain into a whois interface and getting your name, phone number, address and email address with three seconds of work.
Of course, I'm pretty sure they all charge you something like $10 (per month or year) for the right to have the "privacy" service. I'm not going to pay as much to protect my contact info as I did to register the damn domain, so.. meh.
Debian is a constantly evolving beast. If you want the risk-taking, break-neck insta-release applications and upgrades that all the other distros have, install UNSTABLE. If you want reliable, but very up-to-date, use TESTING. If you want extremely stable above all else, go with STABLE. Or for that matter, just compile and install things manually if you want.
People who whine about "but Debian releases so slowly!" are morons. You have three major choices in what you want your flavor to be when it comes to Debian. Flavors that reflect the same choices available elsewhere on the net. The only difference is that Debian has a nice process for labeling how stable they feel each collection of products is. Think of STABLE/TESTING/UNSTABLE as a series of filters and nothing more.
Whining about it is like whining about "but I like chocolate!" when you have a box of fucking neopolitan right in front of you.
Debian packages damn-near everything and has the latest kernels, the latest versions of all your favorite applications. And those that aren't apt-gettable, you can compile yourself or get as an RPM and install with one of the numerous utilities.
Debian is constantly evolving. It's not a bunch of static CD-based releases that have no activity in-between. Debian is a different beast today than it was yesterday. And will be different tomorrow. And the day after. And so on. Because packages are constantly being submitted, promoted, refined, debugged.
If you want the latest, go with unstable. If you want modern but tested, go with testing. If you want serious stability, go with the stable branch. How hard is that? It's called stable for a reason. If we go around cramming the latest of everything into the Stable branch just so people will think there is progress (much like jumping version numbers in an application to compete with other products that have higher version numbers), then it's no longer fucking stable now, is it?
I might not want to run Debian on the desktop, but it's the only linux distro I'd choose for operating a production server. I've been running Debian for five years as my production server (web, email, database). So simple to install. So simple to upgrade and update. I can't imagine dealing with Gentoo or Mandrake or something in this regard. They may be fine desktop solutions. Maybe even decent small-time server solutions.. but in my environment where even an hour of downtime is a significant pain in the ass, I'll stick with my trusty Debian.
Of course, Slashdot runs Debian. I run Debian. Lots of important services are run on Debian. I wouldn't bother using anything else, other than on a desktop.
Of course, what happens if you move your reciever around or something else causes a period of affected reception? The transmitter has no way of knowing what packets of data you did or did not recieve, unless your reciever has a transmitter of its own... and one powerful enough to transmit back to the reciever, without interferring in its broadcast (or the other recievers) so that it would know whether to resend content - and to which recievers which packets should be resent.
I suppose it depends on what content is being transmitted, too. If it's just audio, who cares if you miss a handful of packets.
Or until you're required to take an implant in order to get a driver's license or state identification card. Or until ATMs only function if you have a tag in you. There are many businesses today which refuse to accept cash. It's only a matter of time before we truly become cashless. Once we do, you may need to "opt in" for that tag to do anything related to identifying yourself or engaging in any sort of transaction - be it paying for your coffee in the morning, paying cab fare, tipping your waitress, buying a book, getting a newspaper, getting a pack of condoms, filling up your gas tank, registering at a university and paying for tuition... You name it.
No, actually, they'll just break in and search for the data they want and never tel you they were there.
The government recently admitted in a letter that they committed a sneak-and-peek (without warrant or notification to the property owner) of the home of the lawyer in Oregon who was suspected of having something to do with the bombing in Spain. Because his fingerprints were supposedly found on some plastic sack there.
This is a right granted to the authorities by the PATRIOT ACT. So there you go, for all those "yeah, well show us one single example of this having ever happened!".
All this will do is convince companies to move their headquarters outside of NY
More likely, it'll convince them to stop offering employees the option to telecommute. I've noticed that telecommuting is fizzling out as control-freak managers feel powerless when they don't have their employees ten feet away from them in a dimly lit cubicle punching code and commuting for three hours a day.
Of course, upper-levels still seem to do a lot of telecommuting - but not so much for everyone else.
Typically you pay a portion of taxes for the time you spent in each state. If you spend 50% of your time in each of two states, they usually have you pay 50% of your taxes in each. But that's if you are PHYSICALLY there.
This sounds as if you could end up paying full income tax in the state your company is in, plus full taxes in your own state - because your local state will consider you a full-time resident (since you do live there full time).
Not only that, but . . . how is New York offering him any representation for the taxes he pays there? He isn't a resident. He doesn't use their services. He doesn't commute. He doesn't have anything to do with anything there - other than it is where his employer is based.
For that matter, shouldn't companies overseas who contract with American companies to provide, say - tech support - have to pay American federal income taxes? I don't see how that would be any different from this scenerio whatsoever...
I'd sure hate to be stuck paying 56% in state income taxes, before even coming to my federal and county income taxes!
Regardless, there's plenty of solid evidence that religion is linked to real life violence, discrimination and altered behavior. There's far more incidents of such citing than there are even *remotely* "game related" violence.
The average age of the supreme court is 70. At least one of them is practically an invalid. Not exactly the group most (or at all) qualified to comprehend and judge technology.
Fortunately, good old religion never causes people to do strange things like this. If we must restrict by age or ban entirely games, movies and pencil and paper RPGs, then we must ban bibles of every religion as well.
There are countless recent events where people have directly claimed that religion and/or religious material lead them to the violent acts they took.
There's the guy who held a gun store up by knife point so he could use the stolen gun to go rescule Terri Schaivo. He said, to the gun store owner, that god was with him and that he was either with god or against him in rescuing Terri.
Then there's all the people in the last couple of years who have chopped off their children's arms and legs, filled a little girl's stomach full of bleach and then sat on her until she died (for having sex), stoned a girl to death, chained a girl to a treat as punishment for sex and that guy who offed his wife, child and himself because he believed the end is near. All in the name of religion.
Any time some conservative or religious nutcase tries to tell you all of these other things must be controlled, suggest to him that the same applies to his own propaganda and that he should settle up his own house before hypocritically lobbing grenades into the camp of others.
Re:My problem with this.
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them. If it makes our country safer, sure,
Does anyone else hear the rustle of Ben Franklin rolling over in his grave?
Re:Is Skype [dev'd outside of USA] exempt?
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 1
Regardless of where your company is, you have to own telephone numbers inside the country. If your VoIP company's headquarters were in India and they had customers in America, they'd have to buy/lease telephone numbers in America (how else would people call you?). And you can bet that they can and will tap those phone numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a fair analogy.
Checking a book out from the library isn't a fair analysis. That's like comparing a bicycle with a borrowed car.
Compare a $30 book that provides eight hours of entertainment with a $10 (or less) movie that provides a couple hours of entertainment. Or a $30 book with a $20 DVD or $18 CD or a $50 game or a $15 MMORPG subscription.
In my experience, MUDs are more clique-ish than MMORPGs and can often consist of much more inane chatting than game playing. Also, a lot of the good MUDS are not actually free and require a monthly fee.
Of course, I've yet to find an MMORPG that held my interest for more than six weeks before cancelling it.
In Korea, only the elderly fool April.
In Soviet Russia, Fools April YOU!
That's a pretty lame attempt at an April Fools joke. Couldn't you even be bothered to hide the "extreme tracker" link after the MPAA image?!
Slashdot should do one really amusing and clever April Fool joke each year. Much better than posting two dozen really pathetic ones. Or just have a special section each year where people can submit their April Fools spottings.
No kidding. April Fools is the worst day of the year on Slashdot. Slashdot treats April Fools day like that stupid gross uncle you always have around who thinks it's still funny to do the "hey, pull my finger!" gag.
It's just stupid, juvinile, uninteresting and retarded.
I like humor as much as the next guy, but there's never any humor in Slashdot April Fool's stories.
Well there is nothing stopping you about lying about the information on the Whois information. If they think this is going to solve any problems with criminals they are just fooling them self.
There is everything stopping you.
If you provide false information to your registrar and someone notifies them of a problem regarding your site, they will send you a notice. If you do not respond to that notice, they will immediately nullroute your domain. I used to use incorrect information for my mailing address and phone number because my site is very public and I would prefer not to have people showing up at my door.
Someone, known to be a troublemaker who was then banned from my site, contacted my registrar and made some flimsy complaint to stir up trouble. The registrar logged the complaint, but did nothing directly regarding it. What they did, however, was nullroute my domain because the complaint caused them to look up my whois data and that proved to be false information. They then nullrouted my domain without any further notice. I was only lucky enough to have done a whois of my own on my domain that very day and noticed it; corrected it before the world's DNS servers were updated.
And when the government sends a subpeona to the 'third party' for your name, it takes an extra 5 minutes for them to track you down. I'm sorry, but if you are hosting something bad enough (or spamming millions of messages I guess) for the FBI or whoever to come after you, a third party registrar isn't going to help much.
Ah, the sound of the point skipping over heads.
It may take the government an extra five minutes to track you down by sending a subpeona to whoever posesses your legitimate information - but Joe Public can't. Personally, I am not concerned with Johnny Law getting my information as he can do it whenver he wants with none to little effort. It's the other six billion people on the planet that I would like to make finding my information slightly more difficult for than typing "whois mydomain.com".
if you hide behind an anon domain 99.99% its because you are up to no good
And the same is probably true if you lock your briefcase, luggage, car or house. If you ain't got nuthin' to hide, whatcha' care about yer privassy for, you pinko commie...
There is a world of difference between, say, the police serving your registrar, webhost or colocation service and some unstable troublemaker typing your domain into a whois interface and getting your name, phone number, address and email address with three seconds of work.
As I can tell, the goal is to make sure that anyone who has a tld that looks like they might be affiliated with the US gov't
.GOV.
Why should America be so special? Is every *.uk domain a government domain? Of course not. Hell, there's *.co.uk for commercial UK sites, afterall.
And the government already has a TLD for sites that are affiliated with the government. It's called -- gasp --
Of course, I'm pretty sure they all charge you something like $10 (per month or year) for the right to have the "privacy" service. I'm not going to pay as much to protect my contact info as I did to register the damn domain, so.. meh.
Exactly.
Debian is a constantly evolving beast. If you want the risk-taking, break-neck insta-release applications and upgrades that all the other distros have, install UNSTABLE. If you want reliable, but very up-to-date, use TESTING. If you want extremely stable above all else, go with STABLE. Or for that matter, just compile and install things manually if you want.
People who whine about "but Debian releases so slowly!" are morons. You have three major choices in what you want your flavor to be when it comes to Debian. Flavors that reflect the same choices available elsewhere on the net. The only difference is that Debian has a nice process for labeling how stable they feel each collection of products is. Think of STABLE/TESTING/UNSTABLE as a series of filters and nothing more.
Whining about it is like whining about "but I like chocolate!" when you have a box of fucking neopolitan right in front of you.
What do you mean by a "real release"?
Debian packages damn-near everything and has the latest kernels, the latest versions of all your favorite applications. And those that aren't apt-gettable, you can compile yourself or get as an RPM and install with one of the numerous utilities.
Debian is constantly evolving. It's not a bunch of static CD-based releases that have no activity in-between. Debian is a different beast today than it was yesterday. And will be different tomorrow. And the day after. And so on. Because packages are constantly being submitted, promoted, refined, debugged.
If you want the latest, go with unstable. If you want modern but tested, go with testing. If you want serious stability, go with the stable branch. How hard is that? It's called stable for a reason. If we go around cramming the latest of everything into the Stable branch just so people will think there is progress (much like jumping version numbers in an application to compete with other products that have higher version numbers), then it's no longer fucking stable now, is it?
I might not want to run Debian on the desktop, but it's the only linux distro I'd choose for operating a production server. I've been running Debian for five years as my production server (web, email, database). So simple to install. So simple to upgrade and update. I can't imagine dealing with Gentoo or Mandrake or something in this regard. They may be fine desktop solutions. Maybe even decent small-time server solutions.. but in my environment where even an hour of downtime is a significant pain in the ass, I'll stick with my trusty Debian.
Of course, Slashdot runs Debian. I run Debian. Lots of important services are run on Debian. I wouldn't bother using anything else, other than on a desktop.
Of course, what happens if you move your reciever around or something else causes a period of affected reception? The transmitter has no way of knowing what packets of data you did or did not recieve, unless your reciever has a transmitter of its own... and one powerful enough to transmit back to the reciever, without interferring in its broadcast (or the other recievers) so that it would know whether to resend content - and to which recievers which packets should be resent.
I suppose it depends on what content is being transmitted, too. If it's just audio, who cares if you miss a handful of packets.
Or until you're required to take an implant in order to get a driver's license or state identification card. Or until ATMs only function if you have a tag in you. There are many businesses today which refuse to accept cash. It's only a matter of time before we truly become cashless. Once we do, you may need to "opt in" for that tag to do anything related to identifying yourself or engaging in any sort of transaction - be it paying for your coffee in the morning, paying cab fare, tipping your waitress, buying a book, getting a newspaper, getting a pack of condoms, filling up your gas tank, registering at a university and paying for tuition... You name it.
No, actually, they'll just break in and search for the data they want and never tel you they were there.
The government recently admitted in a letter that they committed a sneak-and-peek (without warrant or notification to the property owner) of the home of the lawyer in Oregon who was suspected of having something to do with the bombing in Spain. Because his fingerprints were supposedly found on some plastic sack there.
This is a right granted to the authorities by the PATRIOT ACT. So there you go, for all those "yeah, well show us one single example of this having ever happened!".
All this will do is convince companies to move their headquarters outside of NY
More likely, it'll convince them to stop offering employees the option to telecommute. I've noticed that telecommuting is fizzling out as control-freak managers feel powerless when they don't have their employees ten feet away from them in a dimly lit cubicle punching code and commuting for three hours a day.
Of course, upper-levels still seem to do a lot of telecommuting - but not so much for everyone else.
Typically you pay a portion of taxes for the time you spent in each state. If you spend 50% of your time in each of two states, they usually have you pay 50% of your taxes in each. But that's if you are PHYSICALLY there.
This sounds as if you could end up paying full income tax in the state your company is in, plus full taxes in your own state - because your local state will consider you a full-time resident (since you do live there full time).
Not only that, but . . . how is New York offering him any representation for the taxes he pays there? He isn't a resident. He doesn't use their services. He doesn't commute. He doesn't have anything to do with anything there - other than it is where his employer is based.
For that matter, shouldn't companies overseas who contract with American companies to provide, say - tech support - have to pay American federal income taxes? I don't see how that would be any different from this scenerio whatsoever...
I'd sure hate to be stuck paying 56% in state income taxes, before even coming to my federal and county income taxes!
Regardless, there's plenty of solid evidence that religion is linked to real life violence, discrimination and altered behavior. There's far more incidents of such citing than there are even *remotely* "game related" violence.
The average age of the supreme court is 70. At least one of them is practically an invalid. Not exactly the group most (or at all) qualified to comprehend and judge technology.
Fortunately, good old religion never causes people to do strange things like this. If we must restrict by age or ban entirely games, movies and pencil and paper RPGs, then we must ban bibles of every religion as well.
There are countless recent events where people have directly claimed that religion and/or religious material lead them to the violent acts they took.
There's the guy who held a gun store up by knife point so he could use the stolen gun to go rescule Terri Schaivo. He said, to the gun store owner, that god was with him and that he was either with god or against him in rescuing Terri.
Then there's all the people in the last couple of years who have chopped off their children's arms and legs, filled a little girl's stomach full of bleach and then sat on her until she died (for having sex), stoned a girl to death, chained a girl to a treat as punishment for sex and that guy who offed his wife, child and himself because he believed the end is near. All in the name of religion.
Any time some conservative or religious nutcase tries to tell you all of these other things must be controlled, suggest to him that the same applies to his own propaganda and that he should settle up his own house before hypocritically lobbing grenades into the camp of others.
I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them. If it makes our country safer, sure,
Does anyone else hear the rustle of Ben Franklin rolling over in his grave?
Regardless of where your company is, you have to own telephone numbers inside the country. If your VoIP company's headquarters were in India and they had customers in America, they'd have to buy/lease telephone numbers in America (how else would people call you?). And you can bet that they can and will tap those phone numbers.