I think this is a bit simplistic. The senate had 735 Bills last year according to that site, with language such as
And so what? Would millions of kids die if you don't pass a bill about tax credits in time? If you haven't read the bill, vote against it, simple. And next time you, as a Senator or Congressman are writing a bill, write it clearly. It's not like the Bills are prepared by some evil outsiders - they are written in the parliament, so they can at least make sure they understand what they write, that's all.
Why does the country need so many new laws anyway? It's not like the situation is changing so quickly that without new laws the country would collapse. I think cutting the number of the bills 10 times would only do you all some good.
This is bullshit. The King of Sweden drives his own car to work without much protection. The Prime Minister does her own shopping without bodyguards (unfortunatly, the last one was killed by a drug-addict in a terrible and very sad incident). It's mostly like this in the few civilised countries, where life is good, people are well-off and happy, and that do not threated the world.
Of course, unpopular leaders like Bush, Putin, Kim Chen Ir (sp?), Hussein, etc., need thousands (literally) of thugs "protecting" them. But let me tell you, when you were elected by the people, when people believe you, when they see you care about them and are doing a good job, when they respect you and love you, then you will prevail even when someone attacks you, your government and the constitution of your country. Check out The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an amazing documentary about a failed US-supported coup d'etait in Venezuela in 2002.
P.S. And just to make myself clear, if I could kill Mr. Bush (or Mr. Putin) without significan risk to my life or if I could support financially a terrorist organisation that would likely do it, I would. Sadly, I don't have the skills, resources and connections necessary to pull it off.:((
P.P.S. Just to remind you - King of Sweden drives his own car to job and reportedly he was even stopped once by a traffic cop. If that is OK for a European monarch, surely it must be good enough for a retarded illiterate coke-sniffing deserting greedy lying texan moron scumbag...
P.P.P.S. Just so that this post is easy to find, here are some keywords: Al-Quaeda, Usama Bin Laden, Saddam, WMD^H^H^H (strike that, it won't be easy to find), explosives, anthrax, dirty bomb, terrorism, kill the president, porn, teens, Nintendo, Zelda, Mario.:)))
I was not aware that this is now the procedure for civil cases. Nor was I aware that trademark violation is a criminal offence now...
As far as I am aware, when your trademark is violated, you can file a lawsuit and wait for the court to decide the case. If the court decides that the toys should be removed from the store even before the case is resolved, so be it, but in no way it is legal for some men in black to arrive in your store and demand to remove certain products. This is abuse of power and all good Americans should oppose this... or just practice bending over and.... with a broomstick, because you will need this skill quite often, it seems.
If you do a little research at this site or another one here, you will realise that anything can be declared job of a secret police organisation in a totalitarian country. Ergo, anything that the agents do, including assassinating dissidents, planting explosives, selling weapons to fanatics, raping women, torturing children and killing puppies, absolutely anything is "just their job". Heck, the guards in Buchenwald were "just doing their job" too.
This doesn't change the fact that some jobs are abominable and the government that assigns such jobs is detestable and outright scary.
I agree with Rahga - using pens would be very strange. Instead a good interface should combine the existing cutting-edge state-of-the-art technologies, such as mind-mapping software, graph visualisation, 3D desktop acceleration and produce a modern interface where you interact with objects in natural ways and the computer worries about the technicalities (such as where to position something, what to resize a bit, etc.). As for the interface, there is only one way that is worth talking about (until we get neural implants) - eye tracking and gestures (and voice recognition, of course). Eye tracking can easily replace the mouse as a pointing tool and if you redesign the interface, the need to click will not be a big problem.
Integrating the computer into paper sounds cool, especially if you read something like Diamond Age, but is ultimately pointless and utterly counterproductive. I don't really see a convincing use case for a computer based on paper (besides the obvious case of reading an ebook/enewspaper).
Thanks for making traffic shaping impossible to use. You may not be aware of it, but the importance of BitTorrent downloads is not in direct proportion to the amount of traffic they consume. By making it impossible for smaller ISPs to reduce its impact on their network, you make all their clients (who are not using BT at that moment) suffer.
Actually it WAS televised. And, incidentally, you can get it off P2P: ed2k://|file|Hugo%20Chavez%20-%20The%20Revolution% 20Will%20Not%20Be%20Televised.mpg|757187208|481734 035ADC08A17CD4D495100715BA|h=LABES47ZD44IYGOM7F6L2 S5K27TL2UDP|/
That is silly. They can very easily find out what corporate versions are pirated by downloading a few copies from KaZaA. The Genuine Advantage Program per se can't always differentiate between a corporate version that was legitimately installed on a plethora of machines and a corporate version that was illegitimately installed by some employees, etc.
They also realise that their corporate client is not really responsible for the leak - it would have happened anyway. They simply want to kill commercial pirates, because when a person is willing to pay 200$ for a Windows copy, he should pay it to Microsoft, not a random pirate guy. This Microsoft's decision is absolutely good, innocent, and white and fluffy in every respect, except that it may potentially lead in the future to stricter measures against non-commercial piracy and legitimate users, but it would be bad manners to criticise MS for something it hasn't done yet.
What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries. Control the media and you can control the minds of your subjects. To have a truly free thinking society means that the media cannot be controlled. The freedom of press is mostly irrelevant to having a free thinking society. Media is necessary to control corruption and other evils when they run rampant. For a free thining society you need good free education and good public-funded media.
Free media will necessarily cater to the majority's tastes, and today that means they will start pushing crap instead of quality [news, analysis, education, entertainment] content. Furthermore, when problems are sufficiently complex, the media will fail (just like "ordinary" citizens and politicos) to correctly reflect on them.
Free media didn't make Finland or Denmark great. On the contrary, these countries have free media because they are not corrupt, because they are rich, and because people there are generally nice. Free media is a very good and necessary (because without it people can't exercise their freedom of speech) thing, but in good countries (where you don't need whistleblowers and journalistic investigations often) it's not really important or useful, all things considered.
Well, since everyone appears to be more concerned with the girls than the actual story, let me give my attempt at explaining the logic behind that nastigramm.
It often happens that porn sites, especially the dirtier and spammier ones use popular keywords in an attempt to boost their popularity in search engines. You probably saw one or two examples. Sometimes they would go as far as to use words like "Nintendo" or "Zelda" in a semi-futile attempt to attract the gaming fan via an accidental link on Google. Obviously, Nintendo is pissed off when it happens (you would be pissed off too if a search for your full name would bring irrelevant porn search results), so they devised a clever strategy.
They used a robot or a database that located sites belonging to two sets simultaneously - the set of pornographic sites (possibly from some filtering database) and the set of sites with Nintendo brandnames (accessed via Google API, own web-crawling, or something). The software then sends a nastygram to the site admin, informing about the problem. Since most pornographic sites have no reason to mention Nintendo and its products, this strategy doesn't produce many false positives (especially, when there is a certain threshold, such as at least 2 brands or something) and so it was decided to automate the process.
Then of course, it went wrong. But please understand, first, that there was no malicious intent, second, that Nintendo lawyers were quick to fix it by apologizing and offering a free Gamecube to Suicide Girls and the poster who mentioned the brands, and third, that lawyers are not paid to harass the innocent people, it is being done automatically by computers we all know and love.:)
Remember what Frodo tells to Faramir (in the movie) - "we set out from Rivendell with seven companions". I think we might have at least found the companions (except not all of them were hobbits, AFAIR)...
I don't understand why there still no way to edit Wikis in a frontend. It would be a perfect project for a Firefox extension - an integrated "RTF-like" editor that would allow you to click anywhere on the page (or ctrl+click, or press a hotkey and click) and start typing (of course, only on wikiservers. The frontend would then take care of actually generating the diff and sending it to the server for integration, as well as for locking, conflict resolution, etc. This would have a nice side effect of making it possible to edit all different (compliant) Wikis, even based on different WikiEngines with a single interface.
In no way (other than social, may be) is Wiki concept a revolution. It's totally evolutionary, because it's merely an extension of some of the original WWW ideas.
If I am allowed to engage in some baseless "what if"s, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that had Microsoft not decided to cheat in the browser war by releasing IE for free, then Netscape would rule, would solve its internal development problems, would roll out a decent Netscape 5 package with a some solid improvements over the Composer from Netscape 4. If that happened, it would be relatively easy to further improve it to make page editing just as simple (or simplier) than it is in most Wikis today.
It is totally silly (if I am allowed to state my opinion) to have editing done via HTML forms. This is ridiculous and I hope someone makes an extension for Firefox that allows to edit any Wiki page inline with browser handling all technicalities (if that happens I would even dump my beloved Opera and convert). And when it happens, then we will simply have the WWW, without those pesky Wikis. A user-editable WWW, just like TBL intended.:)
This is a totally irrelevant comment. First, "Wikis" are not the source of information, just as websites aren't. They are simply the technical platform on which content is created and edited. If you think that Wikipedia is the only Wiki worth talking about (and Wikipedia does pretent to be a source of information and aims to become THE source eventually), you are still wrong, because despite the potential for problems, Wikipedia managed to avoid most of them and is rather reliable, although reliability is still not its main advantage.
As a matter of fact, they often go to their favourite TGPs or subscription websites. Don't misunderstand me, eD2k (or other networks) is great when you know what you are searching for, but to taste, to sample the content you need more variety and more structure.
Also, Google has failed to capitalise on the interest to porn and so other solutions emerged, such as catlist.com, which are thousands times better to find something related to porn (and then click-through to the paysite where you get as much satisfaction for your narrow specialised fetish as you want). Google, on the other hand, has too much junk (keyword and URL spam).
Contrary to popular belief, ideas are basically worthless in the business world. It's all in the implementation.
Linux developers are very open about their plans - does that provide any tangible benefit to Microsoft? Basically not. Even if Google told all their plans to the world, the world would be largely unaffected, except that Google's share price would reflect this sooner (the only long-term effect would be positive, due to bigger transparency). Do you think that if Google told their plans for Keynote MS would be able to quickly counterattack? I doubt it. Imagine that it told about their plans for webmail in advance. Everyone would say "So Google is planning a webmail with javascript interface. Duh!"
That alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic concerns at play. Yeah, sure. Traffic is so expensive, the candidate from a Republican party may not have enough money to pay for it. Unless your definition of a normal person significantly differs from the one normal persons use, a normal person would very clearly understand that whatever the real reason is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with traffic.
That's exactly the problem, you prude. Not that it's illegal to show people hugging each other, but that's it's considered "improper" in the society. Not that blacks are somehow inferiour to us, humans, but you are "not supposed" to put them on wallpapers and login screens. Not that I am racist, Jimmy, but I don't want you to play with those niggers in school. Not that it's illegal for free adults to care about each other, but we must protect the sacred institution of marriage. Or something...
This is sick, this is what every sane person hates about political correctness, that it makes us inhuman, that it denies us everything that somehow deviates from the bland, corporate-sanctioned banality.
And since no discussion about Linux distros is complete without mentioning Microsoft, let me remind you about this cute little story of our beloved government fighting child porn peddlers. Or was it some retards making fuss about nothing, I don't remember. To make a long story short, a hologram on a Windows'95 retail box had an animation of a happy little kid pointing to the computer where Win95 was installed. That was a cute animation, but the child (or horrors!) was not wearing a shirt. Which, in the minds of our hiddenly perverted keepers of the morals, meant that the kid was not wearing any pants either (even though the kid was only seen from the waist up). Which meant, in turn, that it was evil child porn and Microsoft was pressured to change the image on that sticker. Shit, America and it's political correctness bullshit is a disgrace to our world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a bit simplistic. The senate had 735 Bills last year according to that site, with language such as
And so what? Would millions of kids die if you don't pass a bill about tax credits in time? If you haven't read the bill, vote against it, simple. And next time you, as a Senator or Congressman are writing a bill, write it clearly. It's not like the Bills are prepared by some evil outsiders - they are written in the parliament, so they can at least make sure they understand what they write, that's all.
Why does the country need so many new laws anyway? It's not like the situation is changing so quickly that without new laws the country would collapse. I think cutting the number of the bills 10 times would only do you all some good.
This is bullshit. The King of Sweden drives his own car to work without much protection. The Prime Minister does her own shopping without bodyguards (unfortunatly, the last one was killed by a drug-addict in a terrible and very sad incident). It's mostly like this in the few civilised countries, where life is good, people are well-off and happy, and that do not threated the world.
:((
:)))
Of course, unpopular leaders like Bush, Putin, Kim Chen Ir (sp?), Hussein, etc., need thousands (literally) of thugs "protecting" them. But let me tell you, when you were elected by the people, when people believe you, when they see you care about them and are doing a good job, when they respect you and love you, then you will prevail even when someone attacks you, your government and the constitution of your country. Check out The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an amazing documentary about a failed US-supported coup d'etait in Venezuela in 2002.
P.S. And just to make myself clear, if I could kill Mr. Bush (or Mr. Putin) without significan risk to my life or if I could support financially a terrorist organisation that would likely do it, I would. Sadly, I don't have the skills, resources and connections necessary to pull it off.
P.P.S. Just to remind you - King of Sweden drives his own car to job and reportedly he was even stopped once by a traffic cop. If that is OK for a European monarch, surely it must be good enough for a retarded illiterate coke-sniffing deserting greedy lying texan moron scumbag...
P.P.P.S. Just so that this post is easy to find, here are some keywords: Al-Quaeda, Usama Bin Laden, Saddam, WMD^H^H^H (strike that, it won't be easy to find), explosives, anthrax, dirty bomb, terrorism, kill the president, porn, teens, Nintendo, Zelda, Mario.
I would be terribly surprised if this idea has never occured to Mr. Bush and his cronies...
I was not aware that this is now the procedure for civil cases. Nor was I aware that trademark violation is a criminal offence now...
.... with a broomstick, because you will need this skill quite often, it seems.
As far as I am aware, when your trademark is violated, you can file a lawsuit and wait for the court to decide the case. If the court decides that the toys should be removed from the store even before the case is resolved, so be it, but in no way it is legal for some men in black to arrive in your store and demand to remove certain products. This is abuse of power and all good Americans should oppose this... or just practice bending over and
If you do a little research at this site or another one here, you will realise that anything can be declared job of a secret police organisation in a totalitarian country. Ergo, anything that the agents do, including assassinating dissidents, planting explosives, selling weapons to fanatics, raping women, torturing children and killing puppies, absolutely anything is "just their job". Heck, the guards in Buchenwald were "just doing their job" too.
This doesn't change the fact that some jobs are abominable and the government that assigns such jobs is detestable and outright scary.
I agree with Rahga - using pens would be very strange. Instead a good interface should combine the existing cutting-edge state-of-the-art technologies, such as mind-mapping software, graph visualisation, 3D desktop acceleration and produce a modern interface where you interact with objects in natural ways and the computer worries about the technicalities (such as where to position something, what to resize a bit, etc.). As for the interface, there is only one way that is worth talking about (until we get neural implants) - eye tracking and gestures (and voice recognition, of course). Eye tracking can easily replace the mouse as a pointing tool and if you redesign the interface, the need to click will not be a big problem.
Integrating the computer into paper sounds cool, especially if you read something like Diamond Age, but is ultimately pointless and utterly counterproductive. I don't really see a convincing use case for a computer based on paper (besides the obvious case of reading an ebook/enewspaper).
Thanks for making traffic shaping impossible to use. You may not be aware of it, but the importance of BitTorrent downloads is not in direct proportion to the amount of traffic they consume. By making it impossible for smaller ISPs to reduce its impact on their network, you make all their clients (who are not using BT at that moment) suffer.
Actually it WAS televised. And, incidentally, you can get it off P2P: ed2k://|file|Hugo%20Chavez%20-%20The%20Revolution% 20Will%20Not%20Be%20Televised.mpg|757187208|481734 035ADC08A17CD4D495100715BA|h=LABES47ZD44IYGOM7F6L2 S5K27TL2UDP|/
Because it's first.psot
That is silly. They can very easily find out what corporate versions are pirated by downloading a few copies from KaZaA. The Genuine Advantage Program per se can't always differentiate between a corporate version that was legitimately installed on a plethora of machines and a corporate version that was illegitimately installed by some employees, etc.
They also realise that their corporate client is not really responsible for the leak - it would have happened anyway. They simply want to kill commercial pirates, because when a person is willing to pay 200$ for a Windows copy, he should pay it to Microsoft, not a random pirate guy. This Microsoft's decision is absolutely good, innocent, and white and fluffy in every respect, except that it may potentially lead in the future to stricter measures against non-commercial piracy and legitimate users, but it would be bad manners to criticise MS for something it hasn't done yet.
What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries. Control the media and you can control the minds of your subjects. To have a truly free thinking society means that the media cannot be controlled.
The freedom of press is mostly irrelevant to having a free thinking society. Media is necessary to control corruption and other evils when they run rampant. For a free thining society you need good free education and good public-funded media.
Free media will necessarily cater to the majority's tastes, and today that means they will start pushing crap instead of quality [news, analysis, education, entertainment] content. Furthermore, when problems are sufficiently complex, the media will fail (just like "ordinary" citizens and politicos) to correctly reflect on them.
Free media didn't make Finland or Denmark great. On the contrary, these countries have free media because they are not corrupt, because they are rich, and because people there are generally nice. Free media is a very good and necessary (because without it people can't exercise their freedom of speech) thing, but in good countries (where you don't need whistleblowers and journalistic investigations often) it's not really important or useful, all things considered.
Well, since everyone appears to be more concerned with the girls than the actual story, let me give my attempt at explaining the logic behind that nastigramm.
:)
It often happens that porn sites, especially the dirtier and spammier ones use popular keywords in an attempt to boost their popularity in search engines. You probably saw one or two examples. Sometimes they would go as far as to use words like "Nintendo" or "Zelda" in a semi-futile attempt to attract the gaming fan via an accidental link on Google. Obviously, Nintendo is pissed off when it happens (you would be pissed off too if a search for your full name would bring irrelevant porn search results), so they devised a clever strategy.
They used a robot or a database that located sites belonging to two sets simultaneously - the set of pornographic sites (possibly from some filtering database) and the set of sites with Nintendo brandnames (accessed via Google API, own web-crawling, or something). The software then sends a nastygram to the site admin, informing about the problem. Since most pornographic sites have no reason to mention Nintendo and its products, this strategy doesn't produce many false positives (especially, when there is a certain threshold, such as at least 2 brands or something) and so it was decided to automate the process.
Then of course, it went wrong. But please understand, first, that there was no malicious intent, second, that Nintendo lawyers were quick to fix it by apologizing and offering a free Gamecube to Suicide Girls and the poster who mentioned the brands, and third, that lawyers are not paid to harass the innocent people, it is being done automatically by computers we all know and love.
Thanks for tuning in.
Thanks for the laugh. A very cool observation. :)
I like to entertain thoughts of actually ascending from apes. :)
Shirrealistic Park.
Remember what Frodo tells to Faramir (in the movie) - "we set out from Rivendell with seven companions". I think we might have at least found the companions (except not all of them were hobbits, AFAIR)...
I don't understand why there still no way to edit Wikis in a frontend. It would be a perfect project for a Firefox extension - an integrated "RTF-like" editor that would allow you to click anywhere on the page (or ctrl+click, or press a hotkey and click) and start typing (of course, only on wikiservers. The frontend would then take care of actually generating the diff and sending it to the server for integration, as well as for locking, conflict resolution, etc. This would have a nice side effect of making it possible to edit all different (compliant) Wikis, even based on different WikiEngines with a single interface.
In no way (other than social, may be) is Wiki concept a revolution. It's totally evolutionary, because it's merely an extension of some of the original WWW ideas.
:)
If I am allowed to engage in some baseless "what if"s, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that had Microsoft not decided to cheat in the browser war by releasing IE for free, then Netscape would rule, would solve its internal development problems, would roll out a decent Netscape 5 package with a some solid improvements over the Composer from Netscape 4. If that happened, it would be relatively easy to further improve it to make page editing just as simple (or simplier) than it is in most Wikis today.
It is totally silly (if I am allowed to state my opinion) to have editing done via HTML forms. This is ridiculous and I hope someone makes an extension for Firefox that allows to edit any Wiki page inline with browser handling all technicalities (if that happens I would even dump my beloved Opera and convert). And when it happens, then we will simply have the WWW, without those pesky Wikis. A user-editable WWW, just like TBL intended.
This is a totally irrelevant comment. First, "Wikis" are not the source of information, just as websites aren't. They are simply the technical platform on which content is created and edited. If you think that Wikipedia is the only Wiki worth talking about (and Wikipedia does pretent to be a source of information and aims to become THE source eventually), you are still wrong, because despite the potential for problems, Wikipedia managed to avoid most of them and is rather reliable, although reliability is still not its main advantage.
As a matter of fact, they often go to their favourite TGPs or subscription websites. Don't misunderstand me, eD2k (or other networks) is great when you know what you are searching for, but to taste, to sample the content you need more variety and more structure.
Also, Google has failed to capitalise on the interest to porn and so other solutions emerged, such as catlist.com, which are thousands times better to find something related to porn (and then click-through to the paysite where you get as much satisfaction for your narrow specialised fetish as you want). Google, on the other hand, has too much junk (keyword and URL spam).
Contrary to popular belief, ideas are basically worthless in the business world. It's all in the implementation.
Linux developers are very open about their plans - does that provide any tangible benefit to Microsoft? Basically not. Even if Google told all their plans to the world, the world would be largely unaffected, except that Google's share price would reflect this sooner (the only long-term effect would be positive, due to bigger transparency). Do you think that if Google told their plans for Keynote MS would be able to quickly counterattack? I doubt it. Imagine that it told about their plans for webmail in advance. Everyone would say "So Google is planning a webmail with javascript interface. Duh!"
That alone should prove to a normal person that there are clearly traffic concerns at play.
Yeah, sure. Traffic is so expensive, the candidate from a Republican party may not have enough money to pay for it. Unless your definition of a normal person significantly differs from the one normal persons use, a normal person would very clearly understand that whatever the real reason is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with traffic.
That's exactly the problem, you prude. Not that it's illegal to show people hugging each other, but that's it's considered "improper" in the society. Not that blacks are somehow inferiour to us, humans, but you are "not supposed" to put them on wallpapers and login screens. Not that I am racist, Jimmy, but I don't want you to play with those niggers in school. Not that it's illegal for free adults to care about each other, but we must protect the sacred institution of marriage. Or something...
This is sick, this is what every sane person hates about political correctness, that it makes us inhuman, that it denies us everything that somehow deviates from the bland, corporate-sanctioned banality.
And since no discussion about Linux distros is complete without mentioning Microsoft, let me remind you about this cute little story of our beloved government fighting child porn peddlers. Or was it some retards making fuss about nothing, I don't remember. To make a long story short, a hologram on a Windows'95 retail box had an animation of a happy little kid pointing to the computer where Win95 was installed. That was a cute animation, but the child (or horrors!) was not wearing a shirt. Which, in the minds of our hiddenly perverted keepers of the morals, meant that the kid was not wearing any pants either (even though the kid was only seen from the waist up). Which meant, in turn, that it was evil child porn and Microsoft was pressured to change the image on that sticker. Shit, America and it's political correctness bullshit is a disgrace to our world.
Access denied from Russia.
And I forgot the Fur Real ones.