"Similar to if I was standing in the middle of Best Buy shouting that their support sucks, they'll sell you accessories you don't need, and their salespeople will try their best to take advantage of you. It may be true, but I can still expect to be escorted out of the building by security. If I were to say the same thing in a public street to anybody passing by, there's jack that BB can do about it. They don't approve, but I'm not on their property, so they're SOL."
They could refuse to let you back in their store...that's the equivalent of what the school did with this kid.
Except of course that it warns you about it and asks if you want to continue before it installs - not something that trojans are known for doing. Of course it doesn't call itself a "rootkit," but it tells you that it is about to install software on your computer and asks if you agree or not.
My laptop has a 1.3GHz processor with 512 mb of ram (not top of the line any more, but still pretty damn far from a 486) and there is a very noticeable difference. I ended up uninstalling Open Office shortly after I got it and returning to MS Office. Files that would open virtually instantaneously with MS Office would commonly take 30+ seconds to open with Open Office.
There's a similar perception in the U.S. When I used to tell people that I went to a catholic highschool they usually reacted with something along the lines of "Oh, were you expelled from public school?" Please...if you had been expelled from public school, my catholic highschool wouldn't take you. Think about it; with more applicants than classroom seats, why would they be admitting students who had already been expelled from one school?
"Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs."
It only says he is forcing students to take down blogs with personal information. It never says that he is banning ALL blogging. Think about it for two seconds; if they are blogging anonymously, how would the school ever be able to punish them for it anyway?
I also do "nano" work, and I wondered about this too. The problem with laying single molecules down on gold surfaces is that they tend to diffuse around the surface (or even sink into it) over time even at room temperature, and it happens much faster if the gold is heated. How do they know it's rolling?
One of the things that a lot of people seem to overlook is that many of the printers on the EFF list of "known offenders" are very high-end, expensive printers - the sort of thing that's the size of a small desk and costs $20,000. It's entirely believable that many of them would have built in batteries, etc.
It's also important to keep that in mind when discussing how reasonable it would be for companies/whoever to maintain lists of serial numbers. A lot of people are saying "What if I just pay cash at Best Buy and never send in the warranty card? How would they know who I was even if they had the serial number? But many of these aren't the sort of thing that are even available at regular stores like Best Buy, and it would be very strange indeed for someone to pay cash for their $20,000 printer and/or not register the warranty.
Here you go: http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
" Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those whoflagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity's ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships. "
"Freedom of Religion is less welcome on Slashdot than a racially mixed wedding at a Klan meeting."
Actually, most slashdotters are all about freedom of religion; which is why we tend to get so upset when people try to impose their religious beliefs on others. Mr. Card, for example, is well known for his belief that the government should outlaw homosexuality because god doesn't like it.
That is religious intolerance - when you try to force everyone else to behave the way your religion says they should behave, with no justification other than your personal views on what god wants. When people like Card try to force others to conform to his religious beliefs, he is the one who is infringing on the religious freedoms of others. Don't you dare try to portray us as not supporting freedom of religion simply because we don't want blatantly religious beliefs codified into laws.
This is so true. When I called the phone company to get service for my new apartment it was damn hard to get the service rep to just give me a basic line. They kept trying to sell me -caller ID -call waiting -phone insurance (I had never even heard of this before) -a service plan that would cover them coming to my apartment to inspect the building's wiring
I ended up taking the bill from $30/month to $18/month by rejecting the extra "features", and it was easy to tell that the service rep on the phone wasn't at all happy about it.
Fair enough. But as a someone who isn't a computer scientist but paid attention in elementary school when they taught us the metric prefixes, if someone told me that I needed a megabyte of memory for a file and it ended up taking 1048576 bytes I would wonder why they underestimated the memory requirement by 48576 bytes.
It's silly and arrogant of computer scientists to arbitrarily change the meaning of something that's as well-established as the metric prefixes and expect the rest of the world to go along with it just because it's convenient for their binary mathematics. What if the oil industry decided to redefine a gallon as being exactly 4 liters? Would automobile manufacturers be lying to people is they still advertised their cars as having 15 gallon gas tanks, rather than 14.195 gallon tanks?
I'd say you've got it backwards. The prefixes "kilo," "mega," and "giga" have all had well-defined definitions in science and engineering for hundreds of years. If you asked someone from 1850 what a megabyte was, he would tell you that it's a million bytes - even though he wouldn't be able to tell you what a byte was. That's the nice thing about words: they have meanings. If you start arbitrarily changing the definition of words (or in this case, prefixes) language becomes substantially less useful.
As far as I can tell, some computer scientist back in the early days of computing said "Hey, 2^10 is 1024...that's pretty close to 1000. Why don't we define 2^10 bytes as a kilobyte? It's only off by 24..." and the other computer scientists decided to go along with it rather than follow well-established conventions.
Being able to service your keyboard is nice and all, but when you consider that PCKeyboard.com keyboards start at $100 and you can easily get a OEM keyboard for $10 or less, I don't think that the economics really make sense.
"I never cease to be
astonished by the levels of tolerance people have for gore and violence, so much so I can barely sit through what
qualifies for an R rating these days, but they have no tolerance whatsoever for the natural and wonderful act of
sex."
Most parents probably don't really worry that their kids will actually go out and carjack people or shoot police officers. They do, however, worry about their kids having sex. I'm not saying it makes sense, but that's probably why people get upset about one and not the other.
I've been playing video games since the Atari 2600/286 PC, and guess what: the industry has always been like this. 90% of the video games ever released are derivative, unoriginal, poorly thought-out crap. The ratio of good games/crap hasn't changed substantially in 20 years. Fortunately the industry manages to produce more than enough fun, original games to keep people interested.
The software that this guy sold was packaged as an email greeting card that you email to the person you intend to spy upon. The trojan spying software secretly installs itself when the person reads the card. How could you possibly believe that there wasn't an implicit understanding on the part of the seller that it would be used for illegal purposes? Especially when it was explicitly marketed as being handy for illegal purposes?
This has been around for a while. These "electricity shooting" weapons usually use ultra-violet lasers to ionize a column of air to the target, which acts as a conducting pathway for the electricity. So yes, you can actually aim it with some degree of accuracy.
This is nonsense. A manager cannot carry out his basic function of monitoring employees and facilitating them in their work if he doesn't understand what they are doing. When an employee tells his manager "I wasn't able to complete the task that was assigned to me because of X," the manager needs to be familiar enough with X to know if it's a reasonable excuse or not.
When a manager doesn't understand what his employees are doing he will not be able to evaluate them effectively or fairly. Suppose you have a number of employees. One employee usually takes longer than the others to finish his tasks, while another usually takes less time. Is the slow employee lazy while the fast employee is especially hard-working? Or is the slow employee always tackling the most challenging tasks while the fast employee always works on the easiest tasks? How are you going to know which one to choose when it's time to recommend one of them for a promotion, or when word comes down that the company is downsizing and you need to eliminate one of your team members?
You say that a manager should be able to settle disputes and allocate resources among department members. How is he supposed to do that if he doesn't understand the job they're trying to do? If two employees can't agree on how to do something, how is he supposed to decide which one is correct? Flip a coin? What if two employees each claim that they need a particular limited resource? How will you evaluate which one needs it the most?
Actually, almost anywhere else is substantially cheaper. I live in a city of 200,000+ people (pretty far from "Podunk") and a non-matinée ticket costs $6.00-$6.50, depending on which theater you go to. There are also a few theaters where you can see older (but not yet out on DVD) movies for around $2.00/ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends. Some students have successfully sued schools for violating their own written policies in disciplinary cases.
"Similar to if I was standing in the middle of Best Buy shouting that their support sucks, they'll sell you accessories you don't need, and their salespeople will try their best to take advantage of you. It may be true, but I can still expect to be escorted out of the building by security. If I were to say the same thing in a public street to anybody passing by, there's jack that BB can do about it. They don't approve, but I'm not on their property, so they're SOL."
They could refuse to let you back in their store...that's the equivalent of what the school did with this kid.
Except of course that it warns you about it and asks if you want to continue before it installs - not something that trojans are known for doing. Of course it doesn't call itself a "rootkit," but it tells you that it is about to install software on your computer and asks if you agree or not.
Any time I start to believe in the goodness of humanity I just type /list into IRC. That always clears it right up.
You mean you actually gave them real information???
My laptop has a 1.3GHz processor with 512 mb of ram (not top of the line any more, but still pretty damn far from a 486) and there is a very noticeable difference. I ended up uninstalling Open Office shortly after I got it and returning to MS Office. Files that would open virtually instantaneously with MS Office would commonly take 30+ seconds to open with Open Office.
And this sort of thing, ladies and gents, is why I don't pay for slashdot.
There's a similar perception in the U.S. When I used to tell people that I went to a catholic highschool they usually reacted with something along the lines of "Oh, were you expelled from public school?" Please...if you had been expelled from public school, my catholic highschool wouldn't take you. Think about it; with more applicants than classroom seats, why would they be admitting students who had already been expelled from one school?
Like parant said, RTFA.
"Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs."
It only says he is forcing students to take down blogs with personal information. It never says that he is banning ALL blogging. Think about it for two seconds; if they are blogging anonymously, how would the school ever be able to punish them for it anyway?
I also do "nano" work, and I wondered about this too. The problem with laying single molecules down on gold surfaces is that they tend to diffuse around the surface (or even sink into it) over time even at room temperature, and it happens much faster if the gold is heated. How do they know it's rolling?
One of the things that a lot of people seem to overlook is that many of the printers on the EFF list of "known offenders" are very high-end, expensive printers - the sort of thing that's the size of a small desk and costs $20,000. It's entirely believable that many of them would have built in batteries, etc.
It's also important to keep that in mind when discussing how reasonable it would be for companies/whoever to maintain lists of serial numbers. A lot of people are saying "What if I just pay cash at Best Buy and never send in the warranty card? How would they know who I was even if they had the serial number? But many of these aren't the sort of thing that are even available at regular stores like Best Buy, and it would be very strange indeed for someone to pay cash for their $20,000 printer and/or not register the warranty.
Here you go: http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
" Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those whoflagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity's ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships. "
"Freedom of Religion is less welcome on Slashdot than a racially mixed wedding at a Klan meeting."
Actually, most slashdotters are all about freedom of religion; which is why we tend to get so upset when people try to impose their religious beliefs on others. Mr. Card, for example, is well known for his belief that the government should outlaw homosexuality because god doesn't like it.
That is religious intolerance - when you try to force everyone else to behave the way your religion says they should behave, with no justification other than your personal views on what god wants. When people like Card try to force others to conform to his religious beliefs, he is the one who is infringing on the religious freedoms of others. Don't you dare try to portray us as not supporting freedom of religion simply because we don't want blatantly religious beliefs codified into laws.
This is so true. When I called the phone company to get service for my new apartment it was damn hard to get the service rep to just give me a basic line. They kept trying to sell me
-caller ID
-call waiting
-phone insurance (I had never even heard of this before)
-a service plan that would cover them coming to my apartment to inspect the building's wiring
I ended up taking the bill from $30/month to $18/month by rejecting the extra "features", and it was easy to tell that the service rep on the phone wasn't at all happy about it.
Check U.S. Title 17, Chapter 1, section 106.
Fair enough. But as a someone who isn't a computer scientist but paid attention in elementary school when they taught us the metric prefixes, if someone told me that I needed a megabyte of memory for a file and it ended up taking 1048576 bytes I would wonder why they underestimated the memory requirement by 48576 bytes.
It's silly and arrogant of computer scientists to arbitrarily change the meaning of something that's as well-established as the metric prefixes and expect the rest of the world to go along with it just because it's convenient for their binary mathematics. What if the oil industry decided to redefine a gallon as being exactly 4 liters? Would automobile manufacturers be lying to people is they still advertised their cars as having 15 gallon gas tanks, rather than 14.195 gallon tanks?
I'd say you've got it backwards. The prefixes "kilo," "mega," and "giga" have all had well-defined definitions in science and engineering for hundreds of years. If you asked someone from 1850 what a megabyte was, he would tell you that it's a million bytes - even though he wouldn't be able to tell you what a byte was. That's the nice thing about words: they have meanings. If you start arbitrarily changing the definition of words (or in this case, prefixes) language becomes substantially less useful.
As far as I can tell, some computer scientist back in the early days of computing said "Hey, 2^10 is 1024...that's pretty close to 1000. Why don't we define 2^10 bytes as a kilobyte? It's only off by 24..." and the other computer scientists decided to go along with it rather than follow well-established conventions.
Being able to service your keyboard is nice and all, but when you consider that PCKeyboard.com keyboards start at $100 and you can easily get a OEM keyboard for $10 or less, I don't think that the economics really make sense.
"I never cease to be astonished by the levels of tolerance people have for gore and violence, so much so I can barely sit through what qualifies for an R rating these days, but they have no tolerance whatsoever for the natural and wonderful act of sex."
Most parents probably don't really worry that their kids will actually go out and carjack people or shoot police officers. They do, however, worry about their kids having sex. I'm not saying it makes sense, but that's probably why people get upset about one and not the other.
I've been playing video games since the Atari 2600/286 PC, and guess what: the industry has always been like this. 90% of the video games ever released are derivative, unoriginal, poorly thought-out crap. The ratio of good games/crap hasn't changed substantially in 20 years. Fortunately the industry manages to produce more than enough fun, original games to keep people interested.
The software that this guy sold was packaged as an email greeting card that you email to the person you intend to spy upon. The trojan spying software secretly installs itself when the person reads the card. How could you possibly believe that there wasn't an implicit understanding on the part of the seller that it would be used for illegal purposes? Especially when it was explicitly marketed as being handy for illegal purposes?
This has been around for a while. These "electricity shooting" weapons usually use ultra-violet lasers to ionize a column of air to the target, which acts as a conducting pathway for the electricity. So yes, you can actually aim it with some degree of accuracy.
Ownership is not a defense if the product is sold with the understanding that it will be used for illegal purposes.
This is nonsense. A manager cannot carry out his basic function of monitoring employees and facilitating them in their work if he doesn't understand what they are doing. When an employee tells his manager "I wasn't able to complete the task that was assigned to me because of X," the manager needs to be familiar enough with X to know if it's a reasonable excuse or not.
When a manager doesn't understand what his employees are doing he will not be able to evaluate them effectively or fairly. Suppose you have a number of employees. One employee usually takes longer than the others to finish his tasks, while another usually takes less time. Is the slow employee lazy while the fast employee is especially hard-working? Or is the slow employee always tackling the most challenging tasks while the fast employee always works on the easiest tasks? How are you going to know which one to choose when it's time to recommend one of them for a promotion, or when word comes down that the company is downsizing and you need to eliminate one of your team members?
You say that a manager should be able to settle disputes and allocate resources among department members. How is he supposed to do that if he doesn't understand the job they're trying to do? If two employees can't agree on how to do something, how is he supposed to decide which one is correct? Flip a coin? What if two employees each claim that they need a particular limited resource? How will you evaluate which one needs it the most?
Actually, almost anywhere else is substantially cheaper. I live in a city of 200,000+ people (pretty far from "Podunk") and a non-matinée ticket costs $6.00-$6.50, depending on which theater you go to. There are also a few theaters where you can see older (but not yet out on DVD) movies for around $2.00/ticket.