Your television is standing in your living room right now spewing out copies of things you don't want to hear. You even pay for this service if you use cable. Should we say that television stations don't have the right to broadcast information and commercials we don't want to hear? No, of course not. We simply change the station or turn it off, or even better, find an alternative without so much garbage.
For a more apt analogy, should we ban Jehovah's Witnesses and door-to-door salespeople from going around the neighborhood? What about parents who go door to door looking for a lost child, or starting up a neighborhood watch program? Isn't it simpler for citizens to decide if they want to answer the door, or if too many people come by, to put up a "no soliciting" sign, than to rely on beaurocrats and lawyers to decide what "unwanted solicitation" means?
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
I'm glad to see we have our priorities straight, and the dangerous people are being kept away from the rest of us.
Laws against spam trouble me. While I am just as annoyed as the next guy to receive unsolicited offers in my email, should the government really have a place in controlling how I am allowed to send emails? Besides the fact that governmental regulations on technology are often outdated and change too slowly, there are some grave consequences of allowing these laws.
Laws always have loopholes, but to use these you need lawyers, so email would become yet another medium flooded by corporate advertising.
More importantly, this opens the door for tougher regulations on email, such as restricting encryption (killing privacy) or content (censoring).
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought? If you don't want them, you can simply ignore me. Why is email a different medium, then? If you don't want an email, don't open it. Or set up a filtering system whereby you only see the email you want. I believe this is the angle we should take against spam.
There are two kinds of paper trails. One is a readable ballot that must be submitted into the ballot box, and the other is a sort of receipt to let you know whom you voted for.
The first kind is acceptable, and I believe the open voting consortium has this idea correct: the machine should print out a barcode, that can then be verified by another scanning machine. This barcode must then be submitted into the ballot box.
The second kind is flawed for two reasons. First, there is no way to verify that what the computer printed is actually what's recorded on the bar code, or what has been submitted electronically. Second, and more importantly, it provides an easy way for proving whom you voted for. I could tell all of my employees to bring in their receipts, and those who vote for candidate A will receive benefits. Yes, this is illegal, but we shouldn't make it any easier.
Come on guys, this is so obviously propoganda. The guy spends a month trying to find a way to crash mozilla, when it took me 2 minutes on google to find a way to crash IE:
i want assure you this no spam i found you email by search web i son very important buznes man who in some politcal truble now rite and need you help get money out bank
in case you no believe you go see please his site
SCO
we are still resolving this, and so far I think we may have some really, really good news (some bad - but mostly excellent news)
Then the latest post on the obituary thread:
For right now I'm going to close this thread.
As Matt and I have said we, the accusing party, and the appropriate law enforcement have been looking into the allegations made against Sal. The money collected from the donation drive is safely in the clubs posession. There's no reason to be concerned.
The reason for closing it has nothing to do with the actions or postings of any LOC members, random people on the accuser's side have been joining the site and posting nasty hate posts. Not only is that innapropriate but it makes our part in the investigation more difficult.
If anyone pertaining to this case has statements they wish to make, make them with the administration in private. Joining our club for the purpose of posting these statements is not appropriate and will not be allowed.
I have no problem with registering. If all I have to do is register an email address (heck, even a free hotmail address that i reserve only for spam) and my name, and maybe even my address, and I can get top quality news reporting without having to pay for the newspaper, then by all means I'm for it.
The reason why the NY Times is one of the best papers in the world is because they can afford to pay their employees what they deserve. If my registration helps up the amount of money they can get from their advertisers, then I'm all for it. People deserve to be paid for their hard work.
That said, I do believe they need to have better results on google, and don't agree with paying $3 for their archives that I can get at my local library for free.
So why would a government wants MS to cut price, instead of putting more effort to fight for piracy? Is it cheaper that way?
But you see, they are fighting piracy. If everyone starts pirating this starter edition rather than the full edition, then the amount of money lost to piracy will be significantly lower, or so the Thai government can claim.
...we get X amount of free software per year, which is really a boon for our computer services department. We recently got our budget cut in half (management isn't comprised of the brightest of individuals), so the financial aspect is really appealing.
while this argument shows why you favor Microsoft over Apple, if the financial burden is so large, why not consider upgrading to linux or a *bsd? With the new latest KDE and Gnome desktops coupled with OpenOffice it's not too difficult for an average college student to learn how to use the system. Instead of spending the money upgrading the operating system, software, and virus protection [at least] every few years, why not invest the money into small seminars teaching such useful tools as LaTeX and the Gimp.
I'm not trying to start a war of the OS's, but since you have apples available anyway for all the media applications (photoshop, quark, etc.) why not just get rid of windows for the desktop applications? (ignoring the fact that your staff is windows trained, the students are windows trained, and it's nice to blame network problems on novell or microsoft).
yup, i totally missed that line. nonetheless, it's noteworthy that the OVC is not trying to be a replacement for Diebold-type systems, but rather is stressing a different attitude towards eVoting (besides the idea that it should work!).
No mention of an open-source voting project currently gathering a lot of support. Their idea is to keep what people trust about voting, and just computerize the parts that will make the process easier and more accessable.
I agree with HTML and CSS, but I'd stear away from javascript, besides the simple "paste this code into your html to get a rollover", because i've found javascript to be more confusing to new programmers than the java language itself. Reason? types. Because javascript (and vbscript, and perl) uses types internally, a programmer who's never had to deal with them will have an extremely difficult time learning basic things, like why 1+1=2, but "1"+"1"="11" (where "1" comes from the fact that they typed the number 1 into a web form).
First of all, I want to note that OS X is one of the sexiest, sleekest, user-friendliest environments ever created.
But here's a short, unofficial, quick point by point comparison of OS X vs. linux that may be insightful [yeah mods, i'm talking to you!]
1) Flexibility
OS X will run on ppc architectures, and that's it, while linux can run on just about any architecture.
2) Usabilitiy
OS X is much easier to install than most linux distros (especially gentoo), and provides a consistent, pretty user interface. Linux can be setup to be just as usable, but it takes quite a bit of work (again, i'm only talking about gentoo).
3) Drivers
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
4) Security
Because OS X is a *BSD, it is presumably just as secure as linux.
5) Cost
Upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3: $129 [1]
Upgrading from anything to linux: free (if you use a cdrw) or the cost of a cdr.
6) Speed
I don't know where you got this information that OS X works exponentially better and is way faster. The only info I can find is in [2] where linux performed better on a mysql benchmark suite.
7) Stability
the gentoo linux version is still in beta, so presumably OS X is much more stable. exponentially better? debatable.
8) Philosophy
there are mac zealots and gentoo zealots alike - do you think cocoa is the best gui environment ever created? do you think portage is the best package management ever created? Do you think software should be free, or do you think you should support quality software/hardware with a reasonable [or reasonably expensive] cost?
9) Software
Without a doubt, OS X has better, more professional software. In terms of f/oss, i believe linux has better software, although they're pretty close. the more people that use linux, and submit feature requests/bug reports, however, will undoubtedly increase the quality of linux software.
I was about ready to tear the kid's head off too, and then I read the blurb. Although I don't think he would ever win a lawsuit, I do think that, if they knew that he was plagarizing earlier, they should have kicked him out instead of letting him wade through 3 years of school and then opening up the history of his plagarizing.
The analogy to that would be seeing a burglar in your house, and sitting there as he took almost everything (and he knows that you're there watching and not saying anything about it). When he goes to take the last valuable item in your house, THEN you pull out your gun and shoot him in the face.
Now granted, what the kid did was stupid, and his excuse is lame ("I didn't know it was wrong"). But if they knew that he had been plagarizing the past 3 years (as the article incinuates), then they should have kicked him out immediately. Doing otherwise does kind of look like extortion, or rather making someone pay money under false pretenses.
That being said, I don't feel sympathy for the kid. You lost money? Too bad, you shouldn't have been plagarizing. You're 21 years old, you should know better.
Well, like calling President Bush an idiot, for example. You're allowed to do that.
Well, it depends. If you're an American citizen, then you can probably say that, but otherwise (even if you have a valid visa), this could be grounds for Johnny Ashcroft to invoke the Patriot Act and put you into prison without a lawyer while they investigate your possible terrorist connections. I mean, you've gotta be a (pick one) {terrorist, communist, hippie, traitor} to even think about critisizing the current administration, whose only goal is to bring the great freedoms we enjoy as americans to the entire world.
Calling one set of evidence "shit", while calling another set of evidence "valid" may work for most of us, but when dealing with conspiracy theorists, there's a real "us vs. them" attitude, where any evidence you can produce from "them" (nasa, government, media) is invalid because it's part of the conspiracy.
Some evidence that conspiracists (except the real crazy ones) would have to believe is if you took them to a rocket launching so they could see people taking off with their own eyes.
What helps these theories are people like David Copperfield, who make us see things with our own eyes that we know must be manufactured, but can't figure out how. Another thing that helps the theorists is the fact that there are and always have been conspiracies (think Watergate) that have been uncovered, which means there probably are/have been conspiracies which have been covered up. Of course, most of us just won't believe these until some [crazy] conspiracy theorist uncovers "valid" evidence, and CNN reports it.
The way new technologies are introduced in the common household is by first making them similar to an existing item and not providing much else. Take, for example, the modern computer. In its infancy it was very similar to a typewriter, and most households that had a computer would use it as such. We still have terms like "desktop" and "page" that make people feel more comfortable when they become acquainted with computers for the first time.
Similarly, these new ID cards are very much like existing social security cards, NI cards, drivers licenses, and credit cards, except with hightened security (the iris scans). How long will it be before people become so used to the cards that they carry them everywhere they go, and even have a short pseudonym for them ("do you have you irisID?") ?
This, in and of itself, is not very scary, but it opens the door for a national identification system that is required of every citizen, and where the amount of information kept in a centralized location can scale to your hearts discontent.
Maybe you're not old enough to remember what happened in Germany in the early 1940's, but this was the common consensus of just about everyone at the time. People seriously thought, "This kind of thing would never happen here, our government would never show their true face and prune out all those with [insert difference here]".
Similarly, today Americans believe that "our government would never imprison people based on their race, because we live in a free land, and our goverment would not get so currupt." They probably don't remember the internment camps after Pearl Harbor, and most of us are unaware that our current administration is planning more such camps right now: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision
Such an ID system allows Big Brother easier access to these taxpaying, legal, citizens whenever public fear is hightened.
Like most linux geeks, I too believe that linux is much more secure than windows, but when asked why, I can only give some rant about how the open source methodology is superior and promotes faster response times to vulnerabilities. Either that, or I point to all the recent windows virus outbreaks.
But if linux were on every desktop, I'll bet you'd be getting a few emails every day with attachments like "your_paper.sh" that most of us would trivially delete, but many would stupidly run (and these are the same users who would login as root to check their email).
It wouldn't be fair to use instances like this (albeit they're not common yet) to show that linux is more vulnerable than windows.
Therefore, I believe that by quantifying the vulnerabilities and response time, Forrester is on the right track, they just need to take into consideration this response, and find a better method of quantifying the data.
I can use the mouse wheel to change the volume on xmms by catching M4 and M5 buttons (i.e. the scroll wheel events) on the root window, which is very handy for headphones and downloaded MP3s.
This can be done more simply, and in any wm, by using xmms-itouch.
Slashdot Mirror
Your television is standing in your living room right now spewing out copies of things you don't want to hear. You even pay for this service if you use cable. Should we say that television stations don't have the right to broadcast information and commercials we don't want to hear? No, of course not. We simply change the station or turn it off, or even better, find an alternative without so much garbage.
For a more apt analogy, should we ban Jehovah's Witnesses and door-to-door salespeople from going around the neighborhood? What about parents who go door to door looking for a lost child, or starting up a neighborhood watch program? Isn't it simpler for citizens to decide if they want to answer the door, or if too many people come by, to put up a "no soliciting" sign, than to rely on beaurocrats and lawyers to decide what "unwanted solicitation" means?
ahh Virginia...
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
I'm glad to see we have our priorities straight, and the dangerous people are being kept away from the rest of us.
Laws against spam trouble me. While I am just as annoyed as the next guy to receive unsolicited offers in my email, should the government really have a place in controlling how I am allowed to send emails? Besides the fact that governmental regulations on technology are often outdated and change too slowly, there are some grave consequences of allowing these laws.
Laws always have loopholes, but to use these you need lawyers, so email would become yet another medium flooded by corporate advertising.
More importantly, this opens the door for tougher regulations on email, such as restricting encryption (killing privacy) or content (censoring).
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought? If you don't want them, you can simply ignore me. Why is email a different medium, then? If you don't want an email, don't open it. Or set up a filtering system whereby you only see the email you want. I believe this is the angle we should take against spam.
can we get a screenshot?
/.? shame shame shame on you money grubbing osnd folk
why the fsck did I just see a get the facts add on
There are two kinds of paper trails. One is a readable ballot that must be submitted into the ballot box, and the other is a sort of receipt to let you know whom you voted for.
The first kind is acceptable, and I believe the open voting consortium has this idea correct: the machine should print out a barcode, that can then be verified by another scanning machine. This barcode must then be submitted into the ballot box.
The second kind is flawed for two reasons. First, there is no way to verify that what the computer printed is actually what's recorded on the bar code, or what has been submitted electronically. Second, and more importantly, it provides an easy way for proving whom you voted for. I could tell all of my employees to bring in their receipts, and those who vote for candidate A will receive benefits. Yes, this is illegal, but we shouldn't make it any easier.
what's a sig?
Come on guys, this is so obviously propoganda. The guy spends a month trying to find a way to crash mozilla, when it took me 2 minutes on google to find a way to crash IE:
t en-things-to-do-in-cleveland-before-youre-dead/
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/09/14/
-ben
A search for "amazon" gives me the ad:
How to Cheat Amazon
and a search for "used books" doesn't even show amazon on the first page of results.
so either:
1) they're being fair and not taking advantage of their position (yet)
2) they're not business savvy enough
DEAR SIR,
:(
i want assure you this no spam i found you email by search web i son very important buznes man who in some politcal truble now rite and need you help get money out bank
in case you no believe you go see please his site SCO
PLEASE TO HEAR YOU RESPONSE.
N!GTXBALU GNTEMBI
darn filter won't let me submit in all caps
Exactly 100% of your statements are false. If a simple google query can show something, then link to the simple google query.
moron.
From an admin on the obituary thread:
we are still resolving this, and so far I think we may have some really, really good news (some bad - but mostly excellent news)
Then the latest post on the obituary thread:
For right now I'm going to close this thread.
As Matt and I have said we, the accusing party, and the appropriate law enforcement have been looking into the allegations made against Sal. The money collected from the donation drive is safely in the clubs posession. There's no reason to be concerned.
The reason for closing it has nothing to do with the actions or postings of any LOC members, random people on the accuser's side have been joining the site and posting nasty hate posts. Not only is that innapropriate but it makes our part in the investigation more difficult.
If anyone pertaining to this case has statements they wish to make, make them with the administration in private. Joining our club for the purpose of posting these statements is not appropriate and will not be allowed.
I have no problem with registering. If all I have to do is register an email address (heck, even a free hotmail address that i reserve only for spam) and my name, and maybe even my address, and I can get top quality news reporting without having to pay for the newspaper, then by all means I'm for it.
The reason why the NY Times is one of the best papers in the world is because they can afford to pay their employees what they deserve. If my registration helps up the amount of money they can get from their advertisers, then I'm all for it. People deserve to be paid for their hard work.
That said, I do believe they need to have better results on google, and don't agree with paying $3 for their archives that I can get at my local library for free.
Check out distrowatch Fedora has 1100 hits per day
I bet that's only because they're the only distro shipping gnome 2.8!
So why would a government wants MS to cut price, instead of putting more effort to fight for piracy? Is it cheaper that way?
But you see, they are fighting piracy. If everyone starts pirating this starter edition rather than the full edition, then the amount of money lost to piracy will be significantly lower, or so the Thai government can claim.
bash: sig: command not found
...we get X amount of free software per year, which is really a boon for our computer services department. We recently got our budget cut in half (management isn't comprised of the brightest of individuals), so the financial aspect is really appealing.
while this argument shows why you favor Microsoft over Apple, if the financial burden is so large, why not consider upgrading to linux or a *bsd? With the new latest KDE and Gnome desktops coupled with OpenOffice it's not too difficult for an average college student to learn how to use the system. Instead of spending the money upgrading the operating system, software, and virus protection [at least] every few years, why not invest the money into small seminars teaching such useful tools as LaTeX and the Gimp.
I'm not trying to start a war of the OS's, but since you have apples available anyway for all the media applications (photoshop, quark, etc.) why not just get rid of windows for the desktop applications? (ignoring the fact that your staff is windows trained, the students are windows trained, and it's nice to blame network problems on novell or microsoft).
yup, i totally missed that line. nonetheless, it's noteworthy that the OVC is not trying to be a replacement for Diebold-type systems, but rather is stressing a different attitude towards eVoting (besides the idea that it should work!).
thanks for catching my error.
No mention of an open-source voting project currently gathering a lot of support. Their idea is to keep what people trust about voting, and just computerize the parts that will make the process easier and more accessable.
Open Voting Consortium
I agree with HTML and CSS, but I'd stear away from javascript, besides the simple "paste this code into your html to get a rollover", because i've found javascript to be more confusing to new programmers than the java language itself. Reason? types. Because javascript (and vbscript, and perl) uses types internally, a programmer who's never had to deal with them will have an extremely difficult time learning basic things, like why 1+1=2, but "1"+"1"="11" (where "1" comes from the fact that they typed the number 1 into a web form).
But here's a short, unofficial, quick point by point comparison of OS X vs. linux that may be insightful [yeah mods, i'm talking to you!]
1) Flexibility
OS X will run on ppc architectures, and that's it, while linux can run on just about any architecture.
2) Usabilitiy
OS X is much easier to install than most linux distros (especially gentoo), and provides a consistent, pretty user interface. Linux can be setup to be just as usable, but it takes quite a bit of work (again, i'm only talking about gentoo).
3) Drivers
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
4) Security
Because OS X is a *BSD, it is presumably just as secure as linux.
5) Cost
Upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3: $129 [1]
Upgrading from anything to linux: free (if you use a cdrw) or the cost of a cdr.
6) Speed
I don't know where you got this information that OS X works exponentially better and is way faster. The only info I can find is in [2] where linux performed better on a mysql benchmark suite.
7) Stability
the gentoo linux version is still in beta, so presumably OS X is much more stable. exponentially better? debatable.
8) Philosophy
there are mac zealots and gentoo zealots alike - do you think cocoa is the best gui environment ever created? do you think portage is the best package management ever created? Do you think software should be free, or do you think you should support quality software/hardware with a reasonable [or reasonably expensive] cost?
9) Software
Without a doubt, OS X has better, more professional software. In terms of f/oss, i believe linux has better software, although they're pretty close. the more people that use linux, and submit feature requests/bug reports, however, will undoubtedly increase the quality of linux software.
I was about ready to tear the kid's head off too, and then I read the blurb. Although I don't think he would ever win a lawsuit, I do think that, if they knew that he was plagarizing earlier, they should have kicked him out instead of letting him wade through 3 years of school and then opening up the history of his plagarizing.
The analogy to that would be seeing a burglar in your house, and sitting there as he took almost everything (and he knows that you're there watching and not saying anything about it). When he goes to take the last valuable item in your house, THEN you pull out your gun and shoot him in the face.
Now granted, what the kid did was stupid, and his excuse is lame ("I didn't know it was wrong"). But if they knew that he had been plagarizing the past 3 years (as the article incinuates), then they should have kicked him out immediately. Doing otherwise does kind of look like extortion, or rather making someone pay money under false pretenses.
That being said, I don't feel sympathy for the kid. You lost money? Too bad, you shouldn't have been plagarizing. You're 21 years old, you should know better.
-Vendal Thornheart^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
-Ben Taitelbaum
Well, like calling President Bush an idiot, for example. You're allowed to do that.
Well, it depends. If you're an American citizen, then you can probably say that, but otherwise (even if you have a valid visa), this could be grounds for Johnny Ashcroft to invoke the Patriot Act and put you into prison without a lawyer while they investigate your possible terrorist connections. I mean, you've gotta be a (pick one) {terrorist, communist, hippie, traitor} to even think about critisizing the current administration, whose only goal is to bring the great freedoms we enjoy as americans to the entire world.
-1 Overly Sarcastic
Some evidence that conspiracists (except the real crazy ones) would have to believe is if you took them to a rocket launching so they could see people taking off with their own eyes.
What helps these theories are people like David Copperfield, who make us see things with our own eyes that we know must be manufactured, but can't figure out how. Another thing that helps the theorists is the fact that there are and always have been conspiracies (think Watergate) that have been uncovered, which means there probably are/have been conspiracies which have been covered up. Of course, most of us just won't believe these until some [crazy] conspiracy theorist uncovers "valid" evidence, and CNN reports it.
The way new technologies are introduced in the common household is by first making them similar to an existing item and not providing much else. Take, for example, the modern computer. In its infancy it was very similar to a typewriter, and most households that had a computer would use it as such. We still have terms like "desktop" and "page" that make people feel more comfortable when they become acquainted with computers for the first time.
Similarly, these new ID cards are very much like existing social security cards, NI cards, drivers licenses, and credit cards, except with hightened security (the iris scans). How long will it be before people become so used to the cards that they carry them everywhere they go, and even have a short pseudonym for them ("do you have you irisID?") ?
This, in and of itself, is not very scary, but it opens the door for a national identification system that is required of every citizen, and where the amount of information kept in a centralized location can scale to your hearts discontent.
Maybe you're not old enough to remember what happened in Germany in the early 1940's, but this was the common consensus of just about everyone at the time. People seriously thought, "This kind of thing would never happen here, our government would never show their true face and prune out all those with [insert difference here]". Similarly, today Americans believe that "our government would never imprison people based on their race, because we live in a free land, and our goverment would not get so currupt." They probably don't remember the internment camps after Pearl Harbor, and most of us are unaware that our current administration is planning more such camps right now: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision
Such an ID system allows Big Brother easier access to these taxpaying, legal, citizens whenever public fear is hightened.
Like most linux geeks, I too believe that linux is much more secure than windows, but when asked why, I can only give some rant about how the open source methodology is superior and promotes faster response times to vulnerabilities. Either that, or I point to all the recent windows virus outbreaks.
But if linux were on every desktop, I'll bet you'd be getting a few emails every day with attachments like "your_paper.sh" that most of us would trivially delete, but many would stupidly run (and these are the same users who would login as root to check their email).
It wouldn't be fair to use instances like this (albeit they're not common yet) to show that linux is more vulnerable than windows.
Therefore, I believe that by quantifying the vulnerabilities and response time, Forrester is on the right track, they just need to take into consideration this response, and find a better method of quantifying the data.
I can use the mouse wheel to change the volume on xmms by catching M4 and M5 buttons (i.e. the scroll wheel events) on the root window, which is very handy for headphones and downloaded MP3s.
This can be done more simply, and in any wm, by using xmms-itouch.