I just read most of the article here and I'm left to wonder why you don't jump in with both feet and post in the forums too? Jon didn't do this on the earlier part of this interview, that would have been inappropriate. But in other articles I have seen him do just that. Occasionally I see some of the other authors posting individual comments, but jon is the only one I have ever seen wade into the comments on one of his articles and reply to every one he could; he doesn't have to, and I'm sure he knows it just invites more flame, but he does it, and I respect him for that.
She said when she was a student at Arizona State University in the late 1950s... Isn't that the real problem? This looks to be just political grandstanding, about issues she isn't prepared to understand, looked at through a viewpoint that's a half-century too old. And you know what? Older people vote, and older people will believe her when she says that: the atmosphere at Arizona universities as "not conducive to learning." The primary indication of this, McGrath said, is the high number of students dropping out after their freshman year. Actually, the reason a lot of students are dropping out after freshman year has little to do with the school, and a lot to do with American culture right now, which proclaims that you have to go to college. So people get there, and a good chunk decide it isn't for them. That's where her drop-out figures are coming from. According to that article, neither the students nor the administrators want this bill, and she's pressing ahead anyway. Legislating morality, indeed. She just needs an issue to get popular on, there's an election coming up.
I'm thinking the most likely way for them to be doing this is to offer a free receiving-account for every person who is willing to give their social security number (NOONE is supposed to use that but the SSA, but everyone does). Probably lastnamefirstinitialnumber@postoffice.gov or something like that. Or perhaps just number@postoffice.gov, to make it easier on them. Yes, very predictable. However, you charge for _sending_ an email. Being the post office, they could charge whatever they wanted, though they'd do better with it if they charged less than a stamp to do it. (snip) I wouldn't send anything other than 'Hi, Mom, how are you?' type letters though. Sending anything through a government agency that you don't want them to see is just asking for it. Not that I have anything to hide, I'm just really paranoid. A much better option would be to use it for a Hushmail type system. Tons of encryption built into the system. Anything from one @postoffice.gov address to another is guranteed secure, no one but the sender and recipient could ever see it, and it is treated the same as regular postal mail. People could use it for official mail, stuff that right now requires certified mail, stuff like that. If it got the same federal protections as regular mail and was electronically secure, people would use it.
The installer might not require it, but the manual I got with my copy of Redhat 5.2 (the first distro I ran) said I should set up a user account for myself before I started fooling around with the system. So I did, and probably saved myself a lot of grief. Yeah, yeah, I know, nobody reads those damn book things anyway:) It might be useful to have the requirement in the installer. I believe it also said something along the lines of "if you don't know why you would want to be in root, you probably don't want to be." The instructions, therefore, do exist, but how many follow them?
How would you propose that they go about making money from the/. source code? Comments are easy, methods for making them are included in cgi programming books as example programs. Logins are likewise straightforward. Administering them is a little more difficult, but still feasible. The real jewel of the code is the moderation system, but that is unneccessary for sites with a low volume. So who are they going to sell this code to, that doesn't already employ programmers to make their own cgi solution anyway? I doubt there is much of a market for this kind of thing.
They don't have to sue. I am a cs student (not a lawyer), but it seems like an injunction might be something they could try, at least in the US and maybe Canada. I didn't say it was feasible; in fact I said it would be stupid and not work. I was just kind of wondering out loud if they would realize that or not, never having had to deal with that network or its admins myself. It looks like this thread was already kind of hashed over, and the consensus is that it wouldn't work and they probably wouldn't try it anyway. As a followup, the point has been made that this kind of thing can be done because no contractual obligation exists between usenet nodes (is that the right word?). I wonder how long before big ISPs start trying to get mutual carry agreements with each other?
According to the FAQ that one gentleman posted, UUnet got this in 1997, and threatened legal action. That was stupid, infeasible, and generally clueless, and was laughed out in short order. However, the internet was not really Big Business then, with Big Pockets and Stupid Corporate Lawyers (tm). How stupid is @Home? Might they try a lawsuit? Yes, it would kill them and not work anyway, but stupidity knows few bounds...
Really, voting for a third party is not throwing away your vote. Look at it this way: Most people only think of the two major parties. If they don't like either cantidate, they will generally pick the lesser of the two evils. So both cantidates get a lot of "gotta-vote-for-somebody" votes, running up their tally. This is why the two big parties don't want other parties to get on the ballot as easily, and have enacted legislation to that effect. Now, throw your mostly-undecided vote to a third party that you agree with more (I'll probably do Reform (but not Buchanan) or Libertarian). Instead of running up the tallies for the big two, you throw your vote away. Or so it appears. When the votes are counted, yours probably won't decide the election. Now the losing party is going to look around and say, "If we could have pulled in some of those $numberofvotes from the third parties, we might have won." So they start trying to see which parts of that platform they can incorporate into their own, to maybe get your vote next time. Even when we lose, we win, at least a little bit. I will not vote for Gore or Bush. But in 4 years, I might vote Republican or Democrat if one of them wakes up to issues I care about. Unlikely, I admit.
While we're discussing airlines, many airlines are cancelling up to half of their flights on New Years Eve Day... I doubt that the airlines are worried. It seems much more likely that people aren't buying tickets, so they have no need for a lot of flights.
Re:Y2K starts where the first computer has problem
on
When Does Y2K Begin?
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· Score: 1
The first computer had problems 10 years ago, as far as I know. US passports last for 10 years, so I think they had problems when they started giving out the ones that expire in 2000. At least, that's what I heard, it may be an internet legend...
I won't call you stupid. I'll call Ebert and his crony stupid. They're so used to sci-fi being for children (witness the insanity that was SW:TPM) that they seem to have not thought about this movie being for adults. Over the lifespan of an effectively immortal robot, people will die. If the robot became attached to them, he has to come to terms with that, and that's called "character development", something you rarely see in movies anymore. If the movie treated this in a somewhat mature fashion, it would add to the experience, not detract from it. Sorry for not sugar-coating the world for you, Ebert. Who listens to movie critics anyway?
According to the article, he is still the main administrator for.au, and Melbourne IT only has a 5 year license. In 2001, it expires, and it would serve them right for him to grant the contract to someone else, since they have since disobeyed his explicit wishes and raised prices on these domain names. Or at least renegotiate the contract so they have to follow his wishes about pricing. I find it ironic that Gerrand "thinks Elz should be honoured" for his position, but won't honor Elz with his own actions. What an ass.
About 9 million jews got killed during WWII, but how many native americans are there left (When the first colonists arrived there were roughly some 20 million of them). The Monroe-clause any-one? What the hell does any of these have to do with surveilance cameras? For one, 20 million is on the high side of reasonable. And most of them died of disease, which was an unforseeable consequence of contact, they didn't understand germ theory back then. The Monroe Doctrine has even less contact with this topic. Set your threshold to 1, and ignore the anonymous trolls.
The potential for this is great, Yes, there are fears, that perhaps one day all these cameras will be joined and controlled by one big computer, and it can track your movement from Detroit to London, sure sure. You will not be alive by then, so stop worrying. You watch too much TeeVee. I may not be alive by then, you're right. It is, however, my duty to give my children a world they would want to live in. We don't own the planet, we're just tennants; if we let it get screwed up we're hurting our own descendants. Frankly, I could handle being watched. I can take just about anything done to/me/. But if you start messing with my family you are stepping over the line, and I will not sit quietly by.
Suppose the cue stick were to accidentally slip out of your hands while you were kung-fuing it around the bar, and accidentally hit the camera, wouldn't that be funny?;) If I knew cameras were watching me, I would put on a show. Or I would find some way to play games with them; having a friend come in and pretend to mug me comes to mind. I don't really think this kind of system would work in America, people here are too damn wierd. And you know that within a week of these things going up it would be a game for punk highschool kids to spraypaint them or something. I grew up in a rural area where every kid had a bb gun, these things would have been priority one targets.
Another option is to get a Dvorak keyboard and see if that works better for you. A Dvorak keyboard is supposed to be much more efficient than the standard QWERTY keyboard. I changed to the Dvorak layout after the recent threads on slashdot. I went through a couple of days where I felt really dyslexic, but by the end of the week I was doing good. Now I can switch back and forth with hardly a thought, mainly because I still find it more natural to code or html in qwerty. Also, I have found that wrist pain is not an issue when I am lifting regularly. I've been too busy for a while, but even a daily set of a hundred pushups seems to do it for me.
...Describing e-mail as "the day's evolutionary hybrid of traditional telephone line communications and regular postal service mail," Yeah, ok, it's an Appeals court, a state one. But apparently, in New York, the court is prepared to view email as similar enough to postal mail to get some of the same legal protections. Tampering with postal mail goes into federal jurisdiction, and carries some fines, maybe jailtime. Are they prepared to give those protections to email as well? Privacy may have just received a small boost.
By posting this, I shall undoubtedly be subjected to the wrath of the many vocal zealots who make up a majority of the HURD community I've never been a zealot for anything, but I understand it's a requirement to being a Real Geek (tm). Where do I sign up to be a HURD zealot? I know next to nothing about HURD, therefore I have all the qualifications!
Unfortunatly the major parties have managed to literally fix the voting system into a position where they cannot lose. The combination of compulsory voting (fines imposed if you dont) with a preferential system means that while you vote for a conservative party... I have vaguely heard of this before. Doesn't India have something similar? Compulsory voting, anyway. The right to speak includes the ability to not speak, the right to vote should operate the same way. I'm curious, though. What is the state of the Australian Constitution? Do you even have one, or do you have something more similar to the British system of laws upon laws upon laws, back to the Magna Carta or so? Does the premise of judicial review exist Down Under? Could an appeal of some kind to the court system get this law ousted (the parties obviously aren't going to do it, legislatively)? An independant judicial system seems to be one of the few saving graces in America right now.
But nothing like that *ever* could be allowed to show to the "outside world", could it? Actually, I test software at work. We routinely see data fields come in with bizarre default values. Our software releases are internally named after cartoon characters. And last week, I saw a webpage that will eventually have instructions at the top of the page. That text isn't written yet, so the asp writer put in a big long quote, from Cicero, in Latin. I do the same kinds of things in programming assignments for school. Naming an int that holds the enumerated error code 'eorrr', for instance. I think it is a normal geek thing to enjoy word and name games, not just a liberal-arts/geek thing.
you wouldn't buy a car called the Giant Atomic Catastrophe or the Unimaginably Huge Fireball, would you? Hell yeah I would. Heh, I would probably/name/ my car the Giant Atomic Catastrophe, and paint it on the side. Thanks, that's a good idea. Actually, both of those sound like good names for bands...
You could just picture the writer trying to keep a straight face when he interviewed all these ultraserious name-gurus. My favorite quote: "But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby." That cracks me up. Someone should write some perl scripts to scan the dictionary and randomly chop words together. Call it GNUName or something; hell, that's probably already trademarked.
Seriously, the Church of Scientology is a nasty group of people. I don't know how comfortable I am with a connection between them and the software platform virtually everyone has to use at some point. OK, I don't like the CoS's practices. But the fact that a software writer happens to be a Scientologist has no bearing on his program's utility. Do you seriously think that using a program written by a Scientologist's company will harm you in some way? Maybe it will give you Scientologist germs, and you might catch Scientology and turn into one yourself! Oh no! heh. If it's the best tool for the job, use it.
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I just read most of the article here and I'm left to wonder why you don't jump in with both feet and post in the forums too?
Jon didn't do this on the earlier part of this interview, that would have been inappropriate. But in other articles I have seen him do just that. Occasionally I see some of the other authors posting individual comments, but jon is the only one I have ever seen wade into the comments on one of his articles and reply to every one he could; he doesn't have to, and I'm sure he knows it just invites more flame, but he does it, and I respect him for that.
I'm suprised that they didn't try for W, H, O, I and S as well. ;)
AOL/Time Warner/EMI already owns 'O' and 'I'.
She said when she was a student at Arizona State University in the late 1950s...
Isn't that the real problem? This looks to be just political grandstanding, about issues she isn't prepared to understand, looked at through a viewpoint that's a half-century too old. And you know what? Older people vote, and older people will believe her when she says that:
the atmosphere at Arizona universities as "not conducive to learning." The primary indication of this, McGrath said, is the high number of students dropping out after their freshman year.
Actually, the reason a lot of students are dropping out after freshman year has little to do with the school, and a lot to do with American culture right now, which proclaims that you have to go to college. So people get there, and a good chunk decide it isn't for them. That's where her drop-out figures are coming from.
According to that article, neither the students nor the administrators want this bill, and she's pressing ahead anyway. Legislating morality, indeed. She just needs an issue to get popular on, there's an election coming up.
I'm thinking the most likely way for them to be doing this is to offer a free receiving-account for every person who is willing to give their social security number (NOONE is supposed to use that but the SSA, but everyone does). Probably lastnamefirstinitialnumber@postoffice.gov or something like that. Or perhaps just number@postoffice.gov, to make it easier on them. Yes, very predictable. However, you charge for _sending_ an email.
Being the post office, they could charge whatever they wanted, though they'd do better with it if they charged less than a stamp to do it. (snip)
I wouldn't send anything other than 'Hi, Mom, how are you?' type letters though. Sending anything through a government agency that you don't want them to see is just asking for it. Not that I have anything to hide, I'm just really paranoid.
A much better option would be to use it for a Hushmail type system. Tons of encryption built into the system. Anything from one @postoffice.gov address to another is guranteed secure, no one but the sender and recipient could ever see it, and it is treated the same as regular postal mail. People could use it for official mail, stuff that right now requires certified mail, stuff like that. If it got the same federal protections as regular mail and was electronically secure, people would use it.
The installer might not require it, but the manual I got with my copy of Redhat 5.2 (the first distro I ran) said I should set up a user account for myself before I started fooling around with the system. So I did, and probably saved myself a lot of grief. Yeah, yeah, I know, nobody reads those damn book things anyway :) It might be useful to have the requirement in the installer. I believe it also said something along the lines of "if you don't know why you would want to be in root, you probably don't want to be." The instructions, therefore, do exist, but how many follow them?
How would you propose that they go about making money from the /. source code? Comments are easy, methods for making them are included in cgi programming books as example programs. Logins are likewise straightforward. Administering them is a little more difficult, but still feasible. The real jewel of the code is the moderation system, but that is unneccessary for sites with a low volume. So who are they going to sell this code to, that doesn't already employ programmers to make their own cgi solution anyway? I doubt there is much of a market for this kind of thing.
They don't have to sue. I am a cs student (not a lawyer), but it seems like an injunction might be something they could try, at least in the US and maybe Canada. I didn't say it was feasible; in fact I said it would be stupid and not work. I was just kind of wondering out loud if they would realize that or not, never having had to deal with that network or its admins myself. It looks like this thread was already kind of hashed over, and the consensus is that it wouldn't work and they probably wouldn't try it anyway.
As a followup, the point has been made that this kind of thing can be done because no contractual obligation exists between usenet nodes (is that the right word?). I wonder how long before big ISPs start trying to get mutual carry agreements with each other?
According to the FAQ that one gentleman posted, UUnet got this in 1997, and threatened legal action. That was stupid, infeasible, and generally clueless, and was laughed out in short order. However, the internet was not really Big Business then, with Big Pockets and Stupid Corporate Lawyers (tm). How stupid is @Home? Might they try a lawsuit? Yes, it would kill them and not work anyway, but stupidity knows few bounds...
Really, voting for a third party is not throwing away your vote. Look at it this way:
Most people only think of the two major parties. If they don't like either cantidate, they will generally pick the lesser of the two evils. So both cantidates get a lot of "gotta-vote-for-somebody" votes, running up their tally. This is why the two big parties don't want other parties to get on the ballot as easily, and have enacted legislation to that effect.
Now, throw your mostly-undecided vote to a third party that you agree with more (I'll probably do Reform (but not Buchanan) or Libertarian). Instead of running up the tallies for the big two, you throw your vote away. Or so it appears.
When the votes are counted, yours probably won't decide the election. Now the losing party is going to look around and say, "If we could have pulled in some of those $numberofvotes from the third parties, we might have won." So they start trying to see which parts of that platform they can incorporate into their own, to maybe get your vote next time. Even when we lose, we win, at least a little bit. I will not vote for Gore or Bush. But in 4 years, I might vote Republican or Democrat if one of them wakes up to issues I care about. Unlikely, I admit.
While we're discussing airlines, many airlines are cancelling up to half of their flights on New Years Eve Day...
I doubt that the airlines are worried. It seems much more likely that people aren't buying tickets, so they have no need for a lot of flights.
The first computer had problems 10 years ago, as far as I know. US passports last for 10 years, so I think they had problems when they started giving out the ones that expire in 2000. At least, that's what I heard, it may be an internet legend...
I won't call you stupid. I'll call Ebert and his crony stupid. They're so used to sci-fi being for children (witness the insanity that was SW:TPM) that they seem to have not thought about this movie being for adults. Over the lifespan of an effectively immortal robot, people will die. If the robot became attached to them, he has to come to terms with that, and that's called "character development", something you rarely see in movies anymore. If the movie treated this in a somewhat mature fashion, it would add to the experience, not detract from it. Sorry for not sugar-coating the world for you, Ebert. Who listens to movie critics anyway?
According to the article, he is still the main administrator for .au, and Melbourne IT only has a 5 year license. In 2001, it expires, and it would serve them right for him to grant the contract to someone else, since they have since disobeyed his explicit wishes and raised prices on these domain names. Or at least renegotiate the contract so they have to follow his wishes about pricing.
I find it ironic that Gerrand "thinks Elz should be honoured" for his position, but won't honor Elz with his own actions. What an ass.
About 9 million jews got killed during WWII, but how many native americans are there left (When the first colonists arrived there were roughly some 20 million of them). The Monroe-clause any-one?
What the hell does any of these have to do with surveilance cameras? For one, 20 million is on the high side of reasonable. And most of them died of disease, which was an unforseeable consequence of contact, they didn't understand germ theory back then. The Monroe Doctrine has even less contact with this topic. Set your threshold to 1, and ignore the anonymous trolls.
The potential for this is great, Yes, there are fears, that perhaps one day all these cameras will be joined and controlled by one big computer, and it can track your movement from Detroit to London, sure sure. You will not be alive by then, so stop worrying. You watch too much TeeVee. /me/. But if you start messing with my family you are stepping over the line, and I will not sit quietly by.
I may not be alive by then, you're right. It is, however, my duty to give my children a world they would want to live in. We don't own the planet, we're just tennants; if we let it get screwed up we're hurting our own descendants. Frankly, I could handle being watched. I can take just about anything done to
Suppose the cue stick were to accidentally slip out of your hands while you were kung-fuing it around the bar, and accidentally hit the camera, wouldn't that be funny? ;) If I knew cameras were watching me, I would put on a show. Or I would find some way to play games with them; having a friend come in and pretend to mug me comes to mind. I don't really think this kind of system would work in America, people here are too damn wierd. And you know that within a week of these things going up it would be a game for punk highschool kids to spraypaint them or something. I grew up in a rural area where every kid had a bb gun, these things would have been priority one targets.
Another option is to get a Dvorak keyboard and see if that works better for you. A Dvorak keyboard is supposed to be much more efficient than the standard QWERTY keyboard.
I changed to the Dvorak layout after the recent threads on slashdot. I went through a couple of days where I felt really dyslexic, but by the end of the week I was doing good. Now I can switch back and forth with hardly a thought, mainly because I still find it more natural to code or html in qwerty.
Also, I have found that wrist pain is not an issue when I am lifting regularly. I've been too busy for a while, but even a daily set of a hundred pushups seems to do it for me.
...Describing e-mail as "the day's evolutionary hybrid of traditional telephone line communications and regular postal service mail,"
Yeah, ok, it's an Appeals court, a state one. But apparently, in New York, the court is prepared to view email as similar enough to postal mail to get some of the same legal protections. Tampering with postal mail goes into federal jurisdiction, and carries some fines, maybe jailtime. Are they prepared to give those protections to email as well? Privacy may have just received a small boost.
By posting this, I shall undoubtedly be subjected to the wrath of the many vocal zealots who make up a majority of the HURD community
I've never been a zealot for anything, but I understand it's a requirement to being a Real Geek (tm). Where do I sign up to be a HURD zealot? I know next to nothing about HURD, therefore I have all the qualifications!
Unfortunatly the major parties have managed to literally fix the voting system into a position where they cannot lose.
The combination of compulsory voting (fines imposed if you dont) with a preferential system means that while you vote for a conservative party...
I have vaguely heard of this before. Doesn't India have something similar? Compulsory voting, anyway. The right to speak includes the ability to not speak, the right to vote should operate the same way.
I'm curious, though. What is the state of the Australian Constitution? Do you even have one, or do you have something more similar to the British system of laws upon laws upon laws, back to the Magna Carta or so? Does the premise of judicial review exist Down Under? Could an appeal of some kind to the court system get this law ousted (the parties obviously aren't going to do it, legislatively)? An independant judicial system seems to be one of the few saving graces in America right now.
But nothing like that *ever* could be allowed to show to the "outside world", could it?
Actually, I test software at work. We routinely see data fields come in with bizarre default values. Our software releases are internally named after cartoon characters. And last week, I saw a webpage that will eventually have instructions at the top of the page. That text isn't written yet, so the asp writer put in a big long quote, from Cicero, in Latin.
I do the same kinds of things in programming assignments for school. Naming an int that holds the enumerated error code 'eorrr', for instance. I think it is a normal geek thing to enjoy word and name games, not just a liberal-arts/geek thing.
you wouldn't buy a car called the Giant Atomic Catastrophe or the Unimaginably Huge Fireball, would you? /name/ my car the Giant Atomic Catastrophe, and paint it on the side. Thanks, that's a good idea.
Hell yeah I would. Heh, I would probably
Actually, both of those sound like good names for bands...
In Latin:
novus -a -um [new, fresh, young; fresh, inexperienced; revived, refreshed; novel, unusual, extraordinary];
You could just picture the writer trying to keep a straight face when he interviewed all these ultraserious name-gurus. My favorite quote:
"But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby."
That cracks me up.
Someone should write some perl scripts to scan the dictionary and randomly chop words together. Call it GNUName or something; hell, that's probably already trademarked.
Seriously, the Church of Scientology is a nasty group of people. I don't know how comfortable I am with a connection between them and the software platform virtually everyone has to use at some point.
OK, I don't like the CoS's practices. But the fact that a software writer happens to be a Scientologist has no bearing on his program's utility. Do you seriously think that using a program written by a Scientologist's company will harm you in some way? Maybe it will give you Scientologist germs, and you might catch Scientology and turn into one yourself! Oh no! heh. If it's the best tool for the job, use it.