Yes! They can and they do. But, perhaps most inersting, is that their governments and laws are not swayed by the opinion of Slashdotters. Weird eh?
Thank God. Sometimes I think there is more inbreeding at Slashdot than in the British Royal Family.
I can just imagine if Slashdot was a government. They would ban Microsoft, everyone would have to have linux, although there would be a sect of the government pushing for BSD. Government TV would only show Wierd Science and Real Genius, back to back, and forever! And every pending bill would have 10 amendments attached by anonyomous cowards. Wait, that last part sounds like the USA government.
I don't know why they don't just have their own internet, why have any gateways to the rest of the world at all?
They have a population large enough to support it, and that way, if there's stuff they don't like, they have someone to drag out of his bed and murder in front of his children in the middle of the night.
This is what I was thinking. France had their own internet before anyone else. I believe it was government owned. People used it for purposes the government approved, you could find out what was playing at the local theater and the like.
China is a HUGE country. They could easily have thier own intranet. Ban the internet. Then they would control content like they did with newspapers and other forms of media.
...we are working on Freenet and supporting efforts like Freenet-China. We are also beefing up Freenet's security to more effectively thwart Chinese censorship, allowing extremely vulnerable users set up a "global darknet", where they only communicate directly with people they trust.
There is a philosophical question under all this. Do people have an inherent right to have any and all information free? I don't think anyone wants ALL information floating around free. What most would consider freedom advocates will still want all spam shut down. Somwhere a little to the right of that, some will want websites teaching how to make bombs shut down. A little more to the right, some will want porn shut down.
So the question arises, should countries, with their own values, be able to determine what content their people are exposed to? For example, can China declare communism is best, and ban all websites promoting capitalism? Can Iran declare western film evil, and ban all websites with western film content?
China is the world's leading censor of the Internet, filtering web sites, blogs, e-mail, and online forums for sensitive political content, according to a study released Thursday
With all this work to ban websites, why doesn't China just ban the internet. I am sure they could pass a law making it illegal, shutting down all ISP's.
Shutting down a specific website is alot of work, and someone will get through if they really want to. Someone will find a proxy, or find some website that will pass along the data.
I am suprised China does not declare the internet "not useful" and just bans it. They can tell the people to use "traditional" sources of information like newspapers.
Social Contract, per definition, is between people.
A social contract is between ALL people, the whole society. It is why we can punish people, even if they disagree with a law.
I won't adblock a server/ad that's generally nice or doesn't get in the way of my browsing... think google or other text-based adverts
Are the adblock programs smart enough to know what to block, and what not to block? How do they learn? Do they have some algorithm. It is a big, large web out there.
Have adblock programs ever blocked content you want?? I am assuming they block third party content, like a banner originating from a different IP address than the one you are surfing. If that is the case, won't it ban all content from third parties? Or does it have a list of advertising domains, and blocks those?
What gets me is that arguably, social cotract was first violated by offending websites and ad-server ppl in general, with things like popups, glaringly bad animation... Not to mention the EVIL doubleclick and their "we will track your ass... try and avoid us, punk" attitude
I agree 100% with everything you wrote. The advertising can be annoying.
But the problem is something different than advertising. It is a content problem. I remember when the web first went live (in the early 1990's). I can't remember any advertising. I can't remember any spam. NONE!! I don't remember websites with only one purpose, to send you to a different website. Now these websites use tricks to get a high return on google, and there are so many, it is hard finding legitimate websites. I'll give you an example- there is only one bangbus website, but there are 1000 websites trying to lead you to bangbus, each probably getting a penny for a refferal. I'll give you one more example, a better. Try doing a search for alaskan crab fishing jobs. They pay between $20,000 and $100,000 for 3-4 weeks of work. And they can't get enough people because of the high-risk nature of the work (I think over 100 die each year, tides get to be 100 feet high, you are 100 miles from shore, it is ice cold, you are wet, people lose fingers easily while trying to grab the big cages in the ocean filled with crabs). Anyways, I did a search, and outside of the State of Alaska, there is not one website I could find in the first 500 returns by google that was not selling "Make $200,000 in Alaska fish industry, send $29.99 for my book". It is all bullshit. I tried to search using words like "blog" or "experiance", I tried to limit the search to "site:edu". Then I tried searching for cruise jobs... it is even worse.
The problem is THERE ARE TOO MANY JUNK WEBSITES.
Oh, I promised to tell you what is comming next. People will hate this. Some websites are going to 100% flash for all content. They integrate their advertising in the flash. You either have to have flash turned on, or you can't use the website at all. The worst ones are where you get a 1 minute commercial flash before the website appears. Yahoo is now doing this with fantasy baseball stat tracker. You pay 7 dollars for this tool, it used to be a java applet, it is now flash. The stat tracker is a real time update of scores. The old java applet loaded quickly, and went straight to scores. The new flash now has a 30 seconds screen for GM cars, then it goes to scores.
So how long before Google and Microsoft start buying seats?
It was well known that M$ has purchased politicians. Remember when Clinton was in office, he ordered the department of justice to start anti-trust investigations against Microsoft. As soon as Bush was elected, he ordered Ashcroft to end those investigations.
One anti-trust law. Two administrations. Shouldn't the law be applied the same? Or did money get into the decisions?
Isn't this already the case? I mean... I know anyone can run for public office but how many people actually make it into important positions without funding from the usual places.
But there was hope the problem would be fixed. People like Senator John McCain wanted to limit how much money got in the political process. People like former Senator Paul Simon admited he spent over one year each term doing fund raising, and he felt compelled to anwser the phone from those groups which funded him. He said "how do you say no to someone who you are dependant on to stay in office"?
I would love to see an avarage person be able to run for office and have a chance for winning. I would love to see an avarage person get elected with no strings and no favors to groups. Someone who had 100% of his attention on his constituents.
Everyone knows that money elects people, not idea's. Campaigns hire people to run advertising. They have buzz words, speeches filled with little phrases perfect for a 10 second soundbyte on the news. They make more negative attack ads than advertising about ideas. And often those negative attacks can be ridiculous lies, but they work.
Right now, China can't buy commercial space on TV for promoting a candidate in a USA election. Who is to say they won't do just that with the internet? Or Isreal. Who is to say that Isreal won't secretly fund a candidate, then in return have weapons secrets leaked to them?
What congress is trying to do is make loopholes into compaign finance laws. By excluding the internet, members of congress are giving themseleves a place they can spend as much money as they want in elections. This is bad because the only people who will be able to run for office will be the very, very rich or those who are funded by corporations and groups. In effect, unless you are Ross Perot or funded by companies (the right) or unions (the left), you will not have the money to run.
I believe the avarage senate seat now costs over one million dollars. The president raised over $60,000,000 of hard money. The days of going door to door, meeting people is over. The days of long talks about what you believe and why is over. The new 30 second soundbyte is in, and the negative attack ads.
Try changing your DNS server from 'automatically assigned by the ISP' to a manual setting like 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.4... Won't make Comcast happy ( or I think, Verizon) but should allow you to browse as normal.
Thank you!!! It worked. I just hope I am not using a server for some porn site in the USSR. lol. Or maybe this is one of those times to not ask why it works.
And if this fix is so easy, why can't comcast get their stuff to work.
Its time to crush this 30 year old unholy alliance between the IRS and the 3 party tax prep companys. The tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.
The national sales tax has nothing to do with third party tax preperation services.
If you want to fix the tax system, how about closing the loopholes the rich use? Wouldn't that be a better place to start. To remove their tax shelters.
To be fair, democrats are doing it too. Look at John Edwards. Before he was elected to the Senate, he worked as a liability lawyer. He won a big case, and had $600,000 in taxes due. Instead, he formed a corporation and using tax laws, did not pay one penny. He kept all the money for himself. Republicans do it far more often then democrats, but that is only because most democrats are dirt poor.
Re:Read the fine print for your savings and checki
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Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 1
That would be your DNS. Make sure you've got the right servers registered, in your network settings. There are some public DNS servers out there too, I think. Damn, I'm really replying to this when I don't know what I'm talking about. Of course, that's the danger in asking such an offopic question is such a public forum
I figured it is DNS. I was able to get google, and since I can't connect to any website, I was using their cache. It appears Comcast has some hackers attacking them, they are calling it "pharming". They posion the DNS server. So I guess I am at the mercy of Comcast to fix their DNS server.
I really wish I had a list of IP addresses to the most common domains. So far, using google, I am searching "www.yahoo.com ip address" and then if I see something in the cache with an ip address, i copy and paste it.
So, on Slashdot, everyone will complain about the obvious privacy issues of having your personal information given away for marketing purposes. And, that's it. Now, if a Major Media Outlet were to carry this story, say, Reuters, then you would hear about it on NPR, you'd see it on ABC, and you'd read it in the New York Times. And it would be illegal in two months for these assholes to share your personal information while you trust them to do something as simple as file your taxes electronically. Of course, the Reuters author would have to write it up with a pro-consumer spin. It would have to cry privacy violation in every sentence.
The facts speak for themselves. They are selling your information without telling you.
It is like what MIT is doing. They didn't tell you they stopped being a university 20 years ago, and turned into a community college. Wouldn't you feel cheated if you sent your kid there, when he could have gone to Cal-Tech? But hey, I hear MIT has one hell of a disco on campus.
It's slower than an e-file, but far more anonymous, providing you don't put a return address on the envelope.
And for complete anonymity, take your thumb, lick it, and rub over your social security numbers til you can't read it any more. Hey, that is what general Shwarzkaupf did with his map of vietnam. Cambodia? Cambodia is miles from here.:p
Read the fine print for your savings and checking
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Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 4, Interesting
They already share your information, and it is done by your bank. Banks make good money selling your financial information to "related buisnesses". And there is no way to opt-out. Don't want to have us sell your social security number and financial data? Then we won't open a savings account for you. What can you do? Stuff your mattress with money?
People have no rights anymore because buisnesses stopped thinking about serving you. They now look at aggregates. You have become an after-thought on someones spreadsheet. We have 10,000 customers. We lose 50 this month because they don't like us sharing their information. But we get 500 new accounts from our marketing blitz. The bank is going to say it isn't worth their time to deal with 50 unhappy customers when an advertisment can bring in more customers.
BTW, this is unrelated to this story, but I need help and I have to ask (since all the smart people hang out at slashdot, and I don't know the ipa to any forus to ask). My damn internet connection is not working right. I can't get to yahoo.com, but if i type in the ip address, i get there. What the hell is wrong?
I have given up on companies to make stuff people want and can use.
Back in yesteryear, you had walkmans, they played all tapes. They could play tapes you copied off the radio, off a deck, any tapes. You did not have to worry that your friend had different tapes than you. It all worked. The best $200 walkman and the cheapest $15 tape player from kmart, it all worked the same.
Fuck corporations. I ain't buying their shit anymore. Why? So in 2 years the standard can change? So I have to re-buy everything all over again. I am tired of paying three times for the same thing. I am tired of no longer being able to OWN something, but paying a service for it. BUT WAIT, friendly Mr. Hacker fixed the problem... for now. Am I the only one who does not like searching 5 hours on the web, to find some software which defeats DRM, and even then, you are not 100% sure what you're installing on your system? Sure, you could get a old computer, not connected to the web, and download, burn, and instal on that system. But how much trouble is it?
Lets face it. Corporations want one thing, to suck every penny from you. And corporations are learning it does not matter what they are selling you, all they have to do is put a big ribbon on it and enough people will shell out money.
We'll, go ahead. You all spend your money. I'm going to the bar. It is dollar wednesdays.
Oh, speaking about the bar. Did you hear what they got now? And it is from Sony. Remember the big juke boxes they used to have? You get 4 songs for a buck? Some bars even set it up so it's free. Well, the bar replaced it with a small computer sized box that takes dollars and now plays 1 song per dollar, 3 songs for $2. And it is tied in via some internet connection.
Once again, Slashdot advertises for a service that:
A) Has no bearing on my life
B) Has no bearing on most of the SlashDot community
C) IS probably being paid for to mention
D) Means nothing to anyone except the author
E) All of the above
I was thinking the same thing. Who gives a fuck about meetup.com. I never even heard of them.
I remember 3 or 4 years ago I saw a website with 1,000,000 singles looking for a date. It said "register for free, search for free, meet the love of your life". So I signed up. The thing they did not tell you was it cost money to send a message. And you could not delete your profile. So I bet of the 1,000,000 people there, 900,000,000 did what I did- made a profile and never went back. I would hate to be the idiot who sent a message to a dead account.
One would think they could make enough money from advertising. Look at slashdot. They make money, and I ignore all their ad's.
I see MIT listed, but no Cal-Tech. I guess the guys at Cal-Tech are either more honest and only buy music and never share, or they don't get caught.
BTW, I also see Harvard and Princeton. I like that. Those are the guys who are damn good at shit like Law and turning a simple argument into a 5 year long case.
Harvard Student: "But your Honor, we have not examined how this law relates to the 1892 Kapskern case"
Judge: "Kapskern??"
Harvard Student: "Yes, it set a precident about if the tomatoe is a fruit or vegitable, and there are many parallels between that question and the question of sharing music". Judge: Irrelevent, find something else. Harvard Student: We motion for a continuance so we can file an appeal to this decision.
Judge: Case postponed for appelate review, we'll recovien in 4 months.
How many end users know the man command? Ask your mother what a man page is. (Just watch, his mother has a CS doctorate and I just stuck my foot in my mouth.)
Hell, I had enough trouble teaching people to use the Office Assistant. And you think a monolithic text document viewed from the command line is the answer?
Non-technical end users NEED a natural-language-queryable help engine. Technical users are just fine with man pages. Remembering that non-technical users have different needs would go a long way towards better software.
Actually, I was bitching that the quality of the MAN pages can vary greatly from one program to another. If the MAN pages suck, and were written poorly, it is a bad omen. My suggestion was, if you are a killer programmer, and write the best applications ever seen, don't think you are the best documentation writer. Give that task to someone else. Keep it simple, give an example or two. And when you have your draft, give it to some people who are not famlilar with your software and see if the MAN pages are good enough for them to figure it out.
It doesn't matter if the MAN pages will impart upon you magical powers simply by reading it, most novice-mid users (which is most of the computer market) don't read any documentation unless it's part of an interactive setup
This is true for windows users, they don't need to read documentation. It is intuative, you just click your way through an instal. When you run a program, you keep clicking until you figure it out. But with linux, where a command is often followed by an argument, people rely on the MAN pages. For example, something as simple as "chmod" requires you telling it what to do.
If I can't figure out a program, I read the manual. Then I see if a friend knows the answer. Then I will try the internet.
I had a debian instal on an older PC. I could not get xwindows to work, the sound did not work, and the nic card was not recognized. I lucked out in one way, there was a program called PUMP that got the nic working. But I had to use Lynx to surf the web, and it kinda sucked. I looked for info on XFree86. The nice thing about debian was I had two logins and could switch back and forth, one for Lynx and one for the XFree86 config file. But after 2 hours, I still could not get XFree86 properly working on that machine. It would have been nice if the MAN pages had the information needed to make it run, so the internet is not needed because often with an instal, getting a nic working is not 100% guarenteed.
If we were talking about religions, closed source is Chrisianity, with missionaries, and wars and such.
Open source is Buhddism, where one must go and seek out enlightenment himself. There are no wars fought, to missionaries spreading the word. One adpots buhddism dur to principal, and not because someone else tried to sell it to me.
Your post is flaimbait. What makes you so arragant to believe that Christianity is forced on me? I freely accept God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Christianity is about a private and personal relationship with God. It is not about anything else.
God is the creator of the universe, he sent his Son to save us. When he created Adam and Eve, they lived with only one rule, not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Adam exersized his free will, he was tricked by Satan to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. What does this mean? Adam now knew good and evil, and could judge for himself. Why is this bad? Because there is only one perfect judge, and that is God. Adam will judge badly, and that is the source of all unhappiness. We use intellect to judge, but we are not all knowing, we don't understand everything. This self-love of our self, the thoughts that we are smarter than everyone else leads to this false judgements. What we must do is turn over all judgement to God and live as he tells us to. Remember, he is God, he created everything, he gave us life, and he gave us Jesus so that we may be closer to Him.
In the absence of a monopoly, there are three traits that are likely to make an application popular: it is cool or attractive in some way, it provides easy entry, and it is addictive.
No, don't follow that advice when making software. If you want it to be popular, make is useful and easy to use. That does not mean dumbing it down, but make good MAN pages. If you are a tech wizard, let 2 or 3 people who are tech idiots read the MAN pages to see if they can figure it out. A english major would be a good person for this task.
I'll give you a clue. When there is some new tool in linux I want to use, if I can't figure it out in an hour, I move on to something else. My time is valuable. Don't make it a puzzle.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank God. Sometimes I think there is more inbreeding at Slashdot than in the British Royal Family.
I can just imagine if Slashdot was a government. They would ban Microsoft, everyone would have to have linux, although there would be a sect of the government pushing for BSD. Government TV would only show Wierd Science and Real Genius, back to back, and forever! And every pending bill would have 10 amendments attached by anonyomous cowards. Wait, that last part sounds like the USA government.
They have a population large enough to support it, and that way, if there's stuff they don't like, they have someone to drag out of his bed and murder in front of his children in the middle of the night.
This is what I was thinking. France had their own internet before anyone else. I believe it was government owned. People used it for purposes the government approved, you could find out what was playing at the local theater and the like.
China is a HUGE country. They could easily have thier own intranet. Ban the internet. Then they would control content like they did with newspapers and other forms of media.
There is a philosophical question under all this. Do people have an inherent right to have any and all information free? I don't think anyone wants ALL information floating around free. What most would consider freedom advocates will still want all spam shut down. Somwhere a little to the right of that, some will want websites teaching how to make bombs shut down. A little more to the right, some will want porn shut down.
So the question arises, should countries, with their own values, be able to determine what content their people are exposed to? For example, can China declare communism is best, and ban all websites promoting capitalism? Can Iran declare western film evil, and ban all websites with western film content?
With all this work to ban websites, why doesn't China just ban the internet. I am sure they could pass a law making it illegal, shutting down all ISP's.
Shutting down a specific website is alot of work, and someone will get through if they really want to. Someone will find a proxy, or find some website that will pass along the data.
I am suprised China does not declare the internet "not useful" and just bans it. They can tell the people to use "traditional" sources of information like newspapers.
A social contract is between ALL people, the whole society. It is why we can punish people, even if they disagree with a law.
I won't adblock a server/ad that's generally nice or doesn't get in the way of my browsing... think google or other text-based adverts
Are the adblock programs smart enough to know what to block, and what not to block? How do they learn? Do they have some algorithm. It is a big, large web out there.
Have adblock programs ever blocked content you want?? I am assuming they block third party content, like a banner originating from a different IP address than the one you are surfing. If that is the case, won't it ban all content from third parties? Or does it have a list of advertising domains, and blocks those?
What gets me is that arguably, social cotract was first violated by offending websites and ad-server ppl in general, with things like popups, glaringly bad animation... Not to mention the EVIL doubleclick and their "we will track your ass... try and avoid us, punk" attitude
I agree 100% with everything you wrote. The advertising can be annoying.
But the problem is something different than advertising. It is a content problem. I remember when the web first went live (in the early 1990's). I can't remember any advertising. I can't remember any spam. NONE!! I don't remember websites with only one purpose, to send you to a different website. Now these websites use tricks to get a high return on google, and there are so many, it is hard finding legitimate websites. I'll give you an example- there is only one bangbus website, but there are 1000 websites trying to lead you to bangbus, each probably getting a penny for a refferal. I'll give you one more example, a better. Try doing a search for alaskan crab fishing jobs. They pay between $20,000 and $100,000 for 3-4 weeks of work. And they can't get enough people because of the high-risk nature of the work (I think over 100 die each year, tides get to be 100 feet high, you are 100 miles from shore, it is ice cold, you are wet, people lose fingers easily while trying to grab the big cages in the ocean filled with crabs). Anyways, I did a search, and outside of the State of Alaska, there is not one website I could find in the first 500 returns by google that was not selling "Make $200,000 in Alaska fish industry, send $29.99 for my book". It is all bullshit. I tried to search using words like "blog" or "experiance", I tried to limit the search to "site:edu". Then I tried searching for cruise jobs... it is even worse.
The problem is THERE ARE TOO MANY JUNK WEBSITES.
Oh, I promised to tell you what is comming next. People will hate this. Some websites are going to 100% flash for all content. They integrate their advertising in the flash. You either have to have flash turned on, or you can't use the website at all. The worst ones are where you get a 1 minute commercial flash before the website appears. Yahoo is now doing this with fantasy baseball stat tracker. You pay 7 dollars for this tool, it used to be a java applet, it is now flash. The stat tracker is a real time update of scores. The old java applet loaded quickly, and went straight to scores. The new flash now has a 30 seconds screen for GM cars, then it goes to scores.
It was well known that M$ has purchased politicians. Remember when Clinton was in office, he ordered the department of justice to start anti-trust investigations against Microsoft. As soon as Bush was elected, he ordered Ashcroft to end those investigations.
One anti-trust law. Two administrations. Shouldn't the law be applied the same? Or did money get into the decisions?
But there was hope the problem would be fixed. People like Senator John McCain wanted to limit how much money got in the political process. People like former Senator Paul Simon admited he spent over one year each term doing fund raising, and he felt compelled to anwser the phone from those groups which funded him. He said "how do you say no to someone who you are dependant on to stay in office"?
I would love to see an avarage person be able to run for office and have a chance for winning. I would love to see an avarage person get elected with no strings and no favors to groups. Someone who had 100% of his attention on his constituents.
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With the internet, I can see money being raised in foriegn countries, then having websites promoting candidates unregulated on the internet. So what if there is a $1,000 maximum on individuals contributing to candidates. Who is going to stop China from helping Clinton get elected http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:1smXmfU5JwEJ: www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000 /000/001/990axijx.asp+gore+china+fundraising+scand al&hl=en&ie=UTF-8.
Everyone knows that money elects people, not idea's. Campaigns hire people to run advertising. They have buzz words, speeches filled with little phrases perfect for a 10 second soundbyte on the news. They make more negative attack ads than advertising about ideas. And often those negative attacks can be ridiculous lies, but they work.
Right now, China can't buy commercial space on TV for promoting a candidate in a USA election. Who is to say they won't do just that with the internet? Or Isreal. Who is to say that Isreal won't secretly fund a candidate, then in return have weapons secrets leaked to them?
I believe the avarage senate seat now costs over one million dollars. The president raised over $60,000,000 of hard money. The days of going door to door, meeting people is over. The days of long talks about what you believe and why is over. The new 30 second soundbyte is in, and the negative attack ads.
Thank you!!! It worked. I just hope I am not using a server for some porn site in the USSR. lol. Or maybe this is one of those times to not ask why it works.
And if this fix is so easy, why can't comcast get their stuff to work.
The national sales tax has nothing to do with third party tax preperation services.
If you want to fix the tax system, how about closing the loopholes the rich use? Wouldn't that be a better place to start. To remove their tax shelters.
To be fair, democrats are doing it too. Look at John Edwards. Before he was elected to the Senate, he worked as a liability lawyer. He won a big case, and had $600,000 in taxes due. Instead, he formed a corporation and using tax laws, did not pay one penny. He kept all the money for himself. Republicans do it far more often then democrats, but that is only because most democrats are dirt poor.
I figured it is DNS. I was able to get google, and since I can't connect to any website, I was using their cache. It appears Comcast has some hackers attacking them, they are calling it "pharming". They posion the DNS server. So I guess I am at the mercy of Comcast to fix their DNS server.
I really wish I had a list of IP addresses to the most common domains. So far, using google, I am searching "www.yahoo.com ip address" and then if I see something in the cache with an ip address, i copy and paste it.
The facts speak for themselves. They are selling your information without telling you.
It is like what MIT is doing. They didn't tell you they stopped being a university 20 years ago, and turned into a community college. Wouldn't you feel cheated if you sent your kid there, when he could have gone to Cal-Tech? But hey, I hear MIT has one hell of a disco on campus.
And for complete anonymity, take your thumb, lick it, and rub over your social security numbers til you can't read it any more. Hey, that is what general Shwarzkaupf did with his map of vietnam. Cambodia? Cambodia is miles from here. :p
People have no rights anymore because buisnesses stopped thinking about serving you. They now look at aggregates. You have become an after-thought on someones spreadsheet. We have 10,000 customers. We lose 50 this month because they don't like us sharing their information. But we get 500 new accounts from our marketing blitz. The bank is going to say it isn't worth their time to deal with 50 unhappy customers when an advertisment can bring in more customers.
BTW, this is unrelated to this story, but I need help and I have to ask (since all the smart people hang out at slashdot, and I don't know the ipa to any forus to ask). My damn internet connection is not working right. I can't get to yahoo.com, but if i type in the ip address, i get there. What the hell is wrong?
Back in yesteryear, you had walkmans, they played all tapes. They could play tapes you copied off the radio, off a deck, any tapes. You did not have to worry that your friend had different tapes than you. It all worked. The best $200 walkman and the cheapest $15 tape player from kmart, it all worked the same.
Fuck corporations. I ain't buying their shit anymore. Why? So in 2 years the standard can change? So I have to re-buy everything all over again. I am tired of paying three times for the same thing. I am tired of no longer being able to OWN something, but paying a service for it. BUT WAIT, friendly Mr. Hacker fixed the problem... for now. Am I the only one who does not like searching 5 hours on the web, to find some software which defeats DRM, and even then, you are not 100% sure what you're installing on your system? Sure, you could get a old computer, not connected to the web, and download, burn, and instal on that system. But how much trouble is it?
Lets face it. Corporations want one thing, to suck every penny from you. And corporations are learning it does not matter what they are selling you, all they have to do is put a big ribbon on it and enough people will shell out money.
We'll, go ahead. You all spend your money. I'm going to the bar. It is dollar wednesdays.
Oh, speaking about the bar. Did you hear what they got now? And it is from Sony. Remember the big juke boxes they used to have? You get 4 songs for a buck? Some bars even set it up so it's free. Well, the bar replaced it with a small computer sized box that takes dollars and now plays 1 song per dollar, 3 songs for $2. And it is tied in via some internet connection.
I guess people no longer want to own anything.
A) Has no bearing on my life
B) Has no bearing on most of the SlashDot community
C) IS probably being paid for to mention
D) Means nothing to anyone except the author
E) All of the above
I was thinking the same thing. Who gives a fuck about meetup.com. I never even heard of them.
I remember 3 or 4 years ago I saw a website with 1,000,000 singles looking for a date. It said "register for free, search for free, meet the love of your life". So I signed up. The thing they did not tell you was it cost money to send a message. And you could not delete your profile. So I bet of the 1,000,000 people there, 900,000,000 did what I did- made a profile and never went back. I would hate to be the idiot who sent a message to a dead account.
One would think they could make enough money from advertising. Look at slashdot. They make money, and I ignore all their ad's.
I see the http://members.internet2.edu/JoinInternet2.html page. But How does someone log into internet2. What is on there? Is there a cahce of internet2 on google or somewhere else?
Is it just limited to students and faculty, or can it be ssh'ed into. How does it work?? What credentials do you need to access internet2?
BTW, I also see Harvard and Princeton. I like that. Those are the guys who are damn good at shit like Law and turning a simple argument into a 5 year long case.
Harvard Student: "But your Honor, we have not examined how this law relates to the 1892 Kapskern case"
Judge: "Kapskern??"
Harvard Student: "Yes, it set a precident about if the tomatoe is a fruit or vegitable, and there are many parallels between that question and the question of sharing music".
Judge: Irrelevent, find something else.
Harvard Student: We motion for a continuance so we can file an appeal to this decision.
Judge: Case postponed for appelate review, we'll recovien in 4 months.
Is there a second internet, or is it something like bittorrent or some small group that runs on top of the internet? Is it like what the french have?
Hell, I had enough trouble teaching people to use the Office Assistant. And you think a monolithic text document viewed from the command line is the answer?
Non-technical end users NEED a natural-language-queryable help engine. Technical users are just fine with man pages. Remembering that non-technical users have different needs would go a long way towards better software.
Actually, I was bitching that the quality of the MAN pages can vary greatly from one program to another. If the MAN pages suck, and were written poorly, it is a bad omen. My suggestion was, if you are a killer programmer, and write the best applications ever seen, don't think you are the best documentation writer. Give that task to someone else. Keep it simple, give an example or two. And when you have your draft, give it to some people who are not famlilar with your software and see if the MAN pages are good enough for them to figure it out.
This is true for windows users, they don't need to read documentation. It is intuative, you just click your way through an instal. When you run a program, you keep clicking until you figure it out. But with linux, where a command is often followed by an argument, people rely on the MAN pages. For example, something as simple as "chmod" requires you telling it what to do.
If I can't figure out a program, I read the manual. Then I see if a friend knows the answer. Then I will try the internet.
I had a debian instal on an older PC. I could not get xwindows to work, the sound did not work, and the nic card was not recognized. I lucked out in one way, there was a program called PUMP that got the nic working. But I had to use Lynx to surf the web, and it kinda sucked. I looked for info on XFree86. The nice thing about debian was I had two logins and could switch back and forth, one for Lynx and one for the XFree86 config file. But after 2 hours, I still could not get XFree86 properly working on that machine. It would have been nice if the MAN pages had the information needed to make it run, so the internet is not needed because often with an instal, getting a nic working is not 100% guarenteed.
Open source is Buhddism, where one must go and seek out enlightenment himself. There are no wars fought, to missionaries spreading the word. One adpots buhddism dur to principal, and not because someone else tried to sell it to me.
Your post is flaimbait. What makes you so arragant to believe that Christianity is forced on me? I freely accept God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Christianity is about a private and personal relationship with God. It is not about anything else.
God is the creator of the universe, he sent his Son to save us. When he created Adam and Eve, they lived with only one rule, not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Adam exersized his free will, he was tricked by Satan to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. What does this mean? Adam now knew good and evil, and could judge for himself. Why is this bad? Because there is only one perfect judge, and that is God. Adam will judge badly, and that is the source of all unhappiness. We use intellect to judge, but we are not all knowing, we don't understand everything. This self-love of our self, the thoughts that we are smarter than everyone else leads to this false judgements. What we must do is turn over all judgement to God and live as he tells us to. Remember, he is God, he created everything, he gave us life, and he gave us Jesus so that we may be closer to Him.
No, don't follow that advice when making software. If you want it to be popular, make is useful and easy to use. That does not mean dumbing it down, but make good MAN pages. If you are a tech wizard, let 2 or 3 people who are tech idiots read the MAN pages to see if they can figure it out. A english major would be a good person for this task.
I'll give you a clue. When there is some new tool in linux I want to use, if I can't figure it out in an hour, I move on to something else. My time is valuable. Don't make it a puzzle.