"there are electrical discharge theories of the cosmos that do not need to invoke "dark matter" at all"
I was all ready to mod you up but, alas, no examples or links....
For starters, every crime index report done in the US shows that more negligent discharging of firearms occurs among "trained professionals" (the police) than among the general population.
And while it is true that murder victims are often known associates of their murderer, what is rarely reported is that the murder victims are very often criminal themselves. These are not, in most cases, average citizens losing their tempers over the outcome of a sporting event. Adam Walinsky, writing for Atlantic Monthly in July 1995, calls this idea (that murderers and their victims usually know each other) the "twenty-year fraud". In a 1993 report from the Chicago Police Department (no stranger to gun violence) it was shown that only 3% of homicides involved victims in a marital relationship with the offender and only another 3% involved blood relatives. Another statistic that skews the numbers is that only about 65% of murders are solved in the US and, by the nature of the crime, those murders resulting from domestic disputes are cleared at a much higher rate than those homicides among gang members and strangers.
As for children dying from the negligent discharge of a firearm, consider this: In 1970, 2,406 Americans died from firearm accidents. By 1991 that number had fallen to only 1,441 even though the number of guns in circulation rose exponentially. In fact, between 1970 and 1991 the annual rate of fatal gun accidents was cut in half from 1.2 to 0.6 per 100,000 Americans. As of 1991 the death rate from firearms was lower than that from drowning, ingesting foreign objects, or complications from medical procedures. Should I really blow this all up by including auto fatalities?
Those who oppose gun control, it seems to me, have a basic outlook on their fellow humans: we are too stupid and crude to be allowed to provide for our own personal protection. I disagree completely.
I live in Arizona in the US. Arizona allows anyone who is not a felon to carry a handgun as long as it is visible. Permits that allow carrying concealed firearms can be applied for.
Phoenix is the fifth largest city in North America by population. I invite anyone to look at the crime stats on other major metropolitan areas and compare them to Phoenix. Can it really be a coincidence that those areas with the tightest gun control laws (Washington D.C. and New York) have the highest violent crime rates?
I know this won't help the denizens of London where most of the constabulary don't even carry firearms but...
While I agreee that what these three brothers did was criminal, to equate the actions of those who attacked the WTC and the Pentagon with a confidence scam (regardless of the amount of money in question) is wildly, grossly, disturbingly inappropriate.
The linked-to story is ambiguous/misleading when it says, "His "handle" came from the inclusion of a plastic whistle in Captain Crunch cereal in the 1960's which could, with proper manipulation, send out a control tone that would affect telephone systems of the time. Of course, Draper didn't actually discover that fact (the honor goes to a blind phone phreak named Joe Engressia)..."
To clarify: Engressia was born with perfect pitch and realized that by whistling a 2600 cycle tone he could trick the switching system into giving him free phone calls. Draper, who was not born with the same ability, realized he could make the same tone using a toy whistle that came in a box of cereal.
Google-ing either name will bring up a pile of links on the history of phreaking.
Of course you could old-school it and pick up a copy of 2600 magazine at your local newstand.
"Hopefully LotR: RotK will fare just as well, or better, at the Oscars."
Because being in the exalted company of such artistic masterpieces as Forrest Gump and Titanic will finally bring legitimacy to homoerotic fairytales.
I thougth LotR was wonderfully realized; don't get me wrong. I just think it all smells like Santana's 2000 Grammy blowout. Santana's awards were given more for what had been shamefully ignored than for the single object d'art for which the should have been given (made all the more obvious by the fact that he did not win an award in the Latin category!). And there too the winds of a marketing firestorm overwhelmed and consumed a wealth of far more deserving entries.
I'm gonna guess Disney's battalion of attorneys would be able to make the arguement that the DVDs are in no way defective because the DVDs are in fact not defective; they simply won't play on your television.
I'm gonna guess too that "their entire stock" of DVDs is far greater than the average consumer's patience and free time.
Solution? Keep your eye out for other parents who might be in the market for the DVDs you bought. Make sure you tell them they won't play on a Sony tv. If they're in good condition you should be able to get near to what you paid for them and whatever money you don't get back will be payment for a quick lesson in "buyer beware".
So every web-based business that relies on their customers' Internet access should pitch in and help pay for their customers' Internet access? Amazon and iTunes are to be held fiscally responsible for network traffic? That's ludicrous.
Also, any business is taxed. A portion of those taxes may not be earmarked for support of the infrastructure but they are taxed nonetheless.
I think any new technology which supplants or significantly modifies an existing dominant technology goes through the same set of circumstances and is subject to the same tone of criticism. The bottom line is this: VoIP is being embraced by the public at a very rapid rate and whether it is the startups or the existing media corporations that end up as the major service providers it is we, the consumers, who benefit.
Occassionally we get to vote with our dollars for an emergent technology that signals the beginning of the end of some huge pain in the ass. This is one of those times and I haven't felt so good about spending money in quite awhile.
Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")
Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.
Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!
"I can't think of any other CG animation studio that has films of the caliber of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, etc."
Umm....Wega Digital? I suppose I'm to assume you mean to constrain this to animation studios being more than hired guns? I love Pixar but have to put my money on those CGI artists whose work is more transparent, when the audience doesn't know or very quickly forgets they are looking at CGI.
I'd love to see Pixar put out something a bit darker, with a bit more complex character development and a bit less "free toy with your Happy Meal purchase" oriented...
"...something becomes news if an institution that's known to be a news source...reports it as such"
All the more reason for the Slashdot Powers-That-Be to issue a bit of restraint!! This "tech jobs are being outsourced to (insert 3rd-world country)" ahem...story, is becoming the Elizabeth Smart of the industry. I come to Slashdot as much for which stories might be floated as for the commentary those stories elicit
This is the sort of editorial decision I would expect some monolithic profit-driven bastard Knight Ridder pawn to regurgitate at the last minute as a ratings booster.
C'mon people....
Re:cousin of spam?
on
Spidering Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There is an industry built on teaching businesses and web designers how to increase ranking by making pages spider-friendly. The inverse of those same techniques could be used to protect a site.
If "bad" spiders became so common that businesses began needing to weigh the pros of page ranking against the cons of data theft then the indexing services (those that wanted to remain relevant) would develop other methods for accessing web content.
On a side note: I actually bought this book a couple of weeks ago as a tool to help me learn perl. Over the past few years I've built and used scraping tools and when I saw this book I was thrilled to have so many real-world examples that weren't about building front-end grids and tables to databases!
Re:That's not what this is used for...
on
Spidering Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Analyzing publicly available information is not addressed by H.R. 3261.
Section 3(a) describes "a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database". The information gathered from a single web page would almost certainly not be the "substantial part" of data held by Alexa or any other indexing service.
Also, I doubt that it could be seriously, let alone successfully, argued that making a record of publicly available information falls under the definition in Section 3(a)(2) that talks about inflicting "injury on the the database". While there may be seen some ambiguity in that, the argument is made moot considering Section 3(b) goes on to narrowly define "injury" as "serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue"
In an arena where bitter sarcasm is the lingua franca I can see where a reader might misconstrue my intentional display of vulnerability as gleeful apathy.
To clarify: I didn't intentionally cat around with my mouse code. I was admitting to missing the obvious solution while in pursuit of some baroque code poetry. I was in complete agreement with the author.
I actually had the thought that someone else might admit the same about themselves if they witnessed a brazen disregard for self-preservation.
Like a friggin' haiku it is! How many hours have I chewed up adding elegance to my solutions when the problem was already solved? "Look Ma, what I made'ja at Summer Camp".....sheesh
I'll concede that every once in awhile, if I'm looking for advice on something archaic, I'll have to hone my search a couple of times but generally it's a cinch. That said, the toughest MSDN adventure is a stoll in the park compared to almost any man page.
When OS X is ported to run on Intel I just might but spending $1500 on hardware just to get an OS is silly.
aside: do the OpenSource and GNU apps (read: free software) run under OS X?
"Are you going to go to freenode and get on IRC #WinXP and ask a bunch of wannabes to give you free technical support"...
No, I'll go to msdn.microsoft.com and find everything I could ever possibly want to know about my question/situation including sample code in three or four different languages.
For free.
Slashdot Mirror
"there are electrical discharge theories of the cosmos that do not need to invoke "dark matter" at all" I was all ready to mod you up but, alas, no examples or links....
For starters, every crime index report done in the US shows that more negligent discharging of firearms occurs among "trained professionals" (the police) than among the general population.
And while it is true that murder victims are often known associates of their murderer, what is rarely reported is that the murder victims are very often criminal themselves. These are not, in most cases, average citizens losing their tempers over the outcome of a sporting event. Adam Walinsky, writing for Atlantic Monthly in July 1995, calls this idea (that murderers and their victims usually know each other) the "twenty-year fraud". In a 1993 report from the Chicago Police Department (no stranger to gun violence) it was shown that only 3% of homicides involved victims in a marital relationship with the offender and only another 3% involved blood relatives. Another statistic that skews the numbers is that only about 65% of murders are solved in the US and, by the nature of the crime, those murders resulting from domestic disputes are cleared at a much higher rate than those homicides among gang members and strangers. As for children dying from the negligent discharge of a firearm, consider this: In 1970, 2,406 Americans died from firearm accidents. By 1991 that number had fallen to only 1,441 even though the number of guns in circulation rose exponentially. In fact, between 1970 and 1991 the annual rate of fatal gun accidents was cut in half from 1.2 to 0.6 per 100,000 Americans. As of 1991 the death rate from firearms was lower than that from drowning, ingesting foreign objects, or complications from medical procedures. Should I really blow this all up by including auto fatalities?
Those who oppose gun control, it seems to me, have a basic outlook on their fellow humans: we are too stupid and crude to be allowed to provide for our own personal protection. I disagree completely.
I live in Arizona in the US. Arizona allows anyone who is not a felon to carry a handgun as long as it is visible. Permits that allow carrying concealed firearms can be applied for. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in North America by population. I invite anyone to look at the crime stats on other major metropolitan areas and compare them to Phoenix. Can it really be a coincidence that those areas with the tightest gun control laws (Washington D.C. and New York) have the highest violent crime rates? I know this won't help the denizens of London where most of the constabulary don't even carry firearms but...
I'm just glad to see someone else is reading Counterpunch! I've been a regular reader for quite a few years.
"However, you're an idiot if you think that paying for something means that it's safe...For gods sake, look at IE."
You paid for IE? And who's the idiot again?
While I agreee that what these three brothers did was criminal, to equate the actions of those who attacked the WTC and the Pentagon with a confidence scam (regardless of the amount of money in question) is wildly, grossly, disturbingly inappropriate.
To clarify: Engressia was born with perfect pitch and realized that by whistling a 2600 cycle tone he could trick the switching system into giving him free phone calls. Draper, who was not born with the same ability, realized he could make the same tone using a toy whistle that came in a box of cereal.
Google-ing either name will bring up a pile of links on the history of phreaking.
Of course you could old-school it and pick up a copy of 2600 magazine at your local newstand.
"Hopefully LotR: RotK will fare just as well, or better, at the Oscars."
Because being in the exalted company of such artistic masterpieces as Forrest Gump and Titanic will finally bring legitimacy to homoerotic fairytales.
I thougth LotR was wonderfully realized; don't get me wrong. I just think it all smells like Santana's 2000 Grammy blowout. Santana's awards were given more for what had been shamefully ignored than for the single object d'art for which the should have been given (made all the more obvious by the fact that he did not win an award in the Latin category!). And there too the winds of a marketing firestorm overwhelmed and consumed a wealth of far more deserving entries.
I'm gonna guess Disney's battalion of attorneys would be able to make the arguement that the DVDs are in no way defective because the DVDs are in fact not defective; they simply won't play on your television.
I'm gonna guess too that "their entire stock" of DVDs is far greater than the average consumer's patience and free time.
Solution? Keep your eye out for other parents who might be in the market for the DVDs you bought. Make sure you tell them they won't play on a Sony tv. If they're in good condition you should be able to get near to what you paid for them and whatever money you don't get back will be payment for a quick lesson in "buyer beware".
sorry...I keep forgetting the 'tongue-in-cheek' emoticon at the end of all my posts
"Total cost of the project: $34
...pissing off all your non-christian co-workers: priceless
Total cost of the project after I return "unneeded items": $14
Total time to build, including sawing, etc: 5.5 hours."
So every web-based business that relies on their customers' Internet access should pitch in and help pay for their customers' Internet access? Amazon and iTunes are to be held fiscally responsible for network traffic? That's ludicrous.
Also, any business is taxed. A portion of those taxes may not be earmarked for support of the infrastructure but they are taxed nonetheless.
I think any new technology which supplants or significantly modifies an existing dominant technology goes through the same set of circumstances and is subject to the same tone of criticism. The bottom line is this: VoIP is being embraced by the public at a very rapid rate and whether it is the startups or the existing media corporations that end up as the major service providers it is we, the consumers, who benefit.
Occassionally we get to vote with our dollars for an emergent technology that signals the beginning of the end of some huge pain in the ass. This is one of those times and I haven't felt so good about spending money in quite awhile.
Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")
Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.
Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!
"I can't think of any other CG animation studio that has films of the caliber of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, etc."
Umm....Wega Digital? I suppose I'm to assume you mean to constrain this to animation studios being more than hired guns? I love Pixar but have to put my money on those CGI artists whose work is more transparent, when the audience doesn't know or very quickly forgets they are looking at CGI.
I'd love to see Pixar put out something a bit darker, with a bit more complex character development and a bit less "free toy with your Happy Meal purchase" oriented...
Downloading the trailers couldn't be more of a waste of time than sitting through the 2nd and 3rd of the trilogy......
"...something becomes news if an institution that's known to be a news source...reports it as such"
All the more reason for the Slashdot Powers-That-Be to issue a bit of restraint!! This "tech jobs are being outsourced to (insert 3rd-world country)" ahem...story, is becoming the Elizabeth Smart of the industry. I come to Slashdot as much for which stories might be floated as for the commentary those stories elicit This is the sort of editorial decision I would expect some monolithic profit-driven bastard Knight Ridder pawn to regurgitate at the last minute as a ratings booster. C'mon people....
There is an industry built on teaching businesses and web designers how to increase ranking by making pages spider-friendly. The inverse of those same techniques could be used to protect a site.
If "bad" spiders became so common that businesses began needing to weigh the pros of page ranking against the cons of data theft then the indexing services (those that wanted to remain relevant) would develop other methods for accessing web content.
On a side note: I actually bought this book a couple of weeks ago as a tool to help me learn perl. Over the past few years I've built and used scraping tools and when I saw this book I was thrilled to have so many real-world examples that weren't about building front-end grids and tables to databases!
Analyzing publicly available information is not addressed by H.R. 3261.
Section 3(a) describes "a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database". The information gathered from a single web page would almost certainly not be the "substantial part" of data held by Alexa or any other indexing service.
Also, I doubt that it could be seriously, let alone successfully, argued that making a record of publicly available information falls under the definition in Section 3(a)(2) that talks about inflicting "injury on the the database". While there may be seen some ambiguity in that, the argument is made moot considering Section 3(b) goes on to narrowly define "injury" as "serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue"
In an arena where bitter sarcasm is the lingua franca I can see where a reader might misconstrue my intentional display of vulnerability as gleeful apathy.
To clarify: I didn't intentionally cat around with my mouse code. I was admitting to missing the obvious solution while in pursuit of some baroque code poetry. I was in complete agreement with the author.
I actually had the thought that someone else might admit the same about themselves if they witnessed a brazen disregard for self-preservation.
Silly me....
"mediocre is good enough for almost everything"
Like a friggin' haiku it is! How many hours have I chewed up adding elegance to my solutions when the problem was already solved? "Look Ma, what I made'ja at Summer Camp".....sheesh
I'll concede that every once in awhile, if I'm looking for advice on something archaic, I'll have to hone my search a couple of times but generally it's a cinch. That said, the toughest MSDN adventure is a stoll in the park compared to almost any man page.
When OS X is ported to run on Intel I just might but spending $1500 on hardware just to get an OS is silly. aside: do the OpenSource and GNU apps (read: free software) run under OS X?
"Are you going to go to freenode and get on IRC #WinXP and ask a bunch of wannabes to give you free technical support"... No, I'll go to msdn.microsoft.com and find everything I could ever possibly want to know about my question/situation including sample code in three or four different languages. For free.