At first glance, one would guess the ISPs would like being able to charge a little extra for inclusion of the.XXX package. But in practice, I think it would not happen because there are a lot of people who are in situations, e.g. married, where they would be nervous of explicitly paying for the extra service. Thus they will surreptitiously go for providers where no such distinction is made.
No, it's more like bitching that because a cinema kicks you out when you start making a political speech in the middle of a movie, your free speech is being abridged. You can say whatever you want, but nobody has to provide you with a forum to say it.
Your domain = your forum. Their domain = their forum. You're talking about telling people where they can and can't have their forums and who can access those forums.
I don't believe he can be a shill. It's just too bone-headed. More like a False Flag agent. Reasons? Idiocy like ramming Bing references into an irrelevant post. I actually use Bing as my default, but I don't go around saying: "hey - just bing it!" for the very simple reason it sounds STOOPID!
If MS employed PR people to big them up online (who knows? Apple is the one that I'd first suspect of that) then they'd surely keep an eye on them enough to spot ones that were as obvious - and thus self-damaging - as this. I think it's either one of three things:
1. Misguided MS employee going nuts. Unlikely imo, because (a) low-level people at a business aren't usually that fanatical and high-level people wouldn't be wasting their time spamming Slashdot. Also, if they were really motivated purely by adoration of MS, they would follow-up their initial efforts by arguing with the people who disagreed. Such is the nature of fanaticism.
2. Genuine MS Fanboy. Linux has them. Apple has them. Certainly no reason MS can't have them. I've ended up defending MS on Slashdot quite a few times myself recently (unpaid, however.;). I think this one is also unlikely again because of the lack of follow-up. The grabbing of first posts and lack of follow-up elsewhere suggests trolling.
3. False Flag / Troll. My best guess. The behaviour is certainly trollish. The main question is whether the motivation is either to create the impression that MS is paying them as a shill in order to damage MS, or whether they just have identified Slashdot as a site with a few rabidly anti-MS types and find this a good way of trolling. I'm leaning toward the former motivation because they could be more trolling if they followed up on the posts, whilst the absence of follow-up or denials of being a shill, suggests an attempt to create the impression of shilling.
Of course there is possibility 4. which is that they are indeed a shill, just an incompetent one. Someone who shuffles off at the end of the day and says to their manager "I mentioned Bing in a first post, my $100 bonus, please". That would just be sad.
So I think 1 and 2 unlikely. 3 my guess, 4 an outside chance. If it's 4, then that's just shameful to make money that way and his / her manager needs to keep a better eye on them. If it's 3 as seems likely, then that's just really, really, tragically sad. It's bad enough to rabidly identify with an OS unless you have a hand in its development. But it's really awful to get so fanatical you start trying to wage a PR campaign against your "enemy".
I think another part of that is that techies don't accept that people don't accept that they have to learn a computer. Techies know this, but all we do is complain about it. No?
I am exceedingly nice and helpful when someone needs assistance, but I always take extra time to explain what I'm doing whether they want me to or not. If they keep asking for assistance, it becomes quickly clear to them that their ignorance is not an amusing character trait, but something that annoys people in the year 2011. The sole exception is when someone cute is asking me over to help because they fancy me. These people get a tolerance allowance. But nobody else!
I don't believe a lot of time is required to massively improve ones knowledge of the tools we use. There are legions of people out there who use Word everyday and yet week after week still shuffle round to the "computer person" to ask how to get something lined up, add a table or put an image in the document. Just an hour of reading the documentation and being willing to actually try clicking a button would improve their experience massively. That's not going to take away from their time learning the violin or playing with their kids in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they could probably throw in an hour or two of learning Excel, or how to move files around, rename them etcetera.
I care because currently we have two forces: powerful computer interfaces and ignorant people. The two are naturally distant and if one doesn't move, then the other must. And for the sake of all of us, I would like it to be the people. My view of someone who sits in front of a complicated program like a word processor and refuses to take a modicum of time and effort to learn how to use it, is that they are like a baby going "waaaaaah". I have little respect for their attitude. If someone is genuinely mentally challenged, then I can be incredibly patient with teaching them or helpful in assisting them. But wilful ignorance? It is not harmless - it distorts things for the rest of us.
I don't ask people to write their letters in LaTex. I just want a little acceptance that some things take effort to do well. The person hiking through Mongolia or learning the violin? I reckon they're not the one's I'm worried about. It's the ones that would rather not do anything that tend to have the most trouble with computers.
This accomplishes only a few things that I can see:
1. Puts pressure on all sorts of sites to operate only under a.xxx domain whenever a loud enough moral group insist that it should be categorised as dirty.
2. Falsely creates a sense of safety amongst idiots who think they can block.xxx and filter out "the bad stuff".
3. Creates a sense of unjustified expectation amongst a different set of idiots who immediately decide that just because ICANN has created this TLD, that any site they deem improper that operates outside the hierarchy is engaged in some terrible underhandedness for daring to do so, trying to expose innocent people to their content.
4. Instantly tars anyone who visits a site in.xxx domain in the eyes of moralisers and authority groups, regardless of whether the site is donkeyporn.xxx or just some site that was pushed to register under.xxx because it deals with mature topics.
5. Creates artificial segregation along lines decided by minority moral bodies. I.e. sexual content has to be treated differently. We don't have a separate TLD for religion, or science - why must sex be so treated?
6. Make pot loads of money for ICANN and registrars everywhere.
I'll leave it to the reader to consider how that last consequence was balanced against the others...
In this case, according to the article, the botnet was a major source of spam. Doesn't mean that other uses couldn't have been made of it, but spam is what is referenced in a major way in this case.
So if the ISPs can't / won't / shouldn't do anything, and the end user will click any old thing to get free screensavers / smileys / porn - How do you win?
Raid datacentres and seize the command and control computers?
Didn't really mean to give them flak. I think the systems are pretty much comparable, I was just trying to be complete in my analysis. I do run my Windows box as Admin. It's not my primary OS and I wasn't aware of that until another poster also pointed it out. I mainly just use my Windows partition for MS Office and occasional audio work, for everything else it's either Gentoo or (when I've broken Gentoo), Kubuntu. I wasn't giving Windows 7 grief - I actually really enjoy using it.
I'm not fully convinced of that. Buy something from a spam email and there's a good chance you'll be defrauded. Which creates problems for the credit card companies. I got a couple of fraudulent charges to a card of mine once (and I'm careful with mine) so I'm guessing it was a compromised shop database somewhere. The company called me up quickly and cancelled the payment and I got my money back. To do that, they must be spending a fair amount of money on anti-fraud. Anything that helps them cut down on that cost is probably going to be something they're in favour of. There might be a lot of money in spam from an individuals' point of view, but as a slice of the overall transactions the credit card companies and banks deal with, it's a petty little thing.
Firstly, you should address the actual argument. If you can't find anything false in what someone wrote, then calling them biased isn't going to make their statements false.
Secondly, what makes your bias more acceptable than one that were pro-bias? I think bias is bad generally, but you seem to think a strong anti-Microsoft bias is a good thing which makes it acceptable to dismiss news because it's about a company you don't like doing something good? I'm finding it hard to tell whether you are serious or just trolling.
For the great majority of users, computers have become just too complicated and confusing to operate,
I think a part of that is people just don't accept that they have to learn how to use a computer. If they actually accepted that maybe they couldn't just sit in front of this complicated piece of equipment and magically do everything, then perhaps they'd take a few moments to think or read about it and then it wouldn't be so complicated and confusing to them.
There was someone extremely irritating at a place I worked some years ago, who asked me to help them line up the paragraphs in Word (some older version than the latest). After helpfully pressing a few buttons to line things up on the left again, accompanied by the cooing wonder of this...person... and their inane comments of "oh, I'm so bad at computers", I made the mistake of pointing out the Help option in Word and saying: "you know, there's documentation on this. It would be worth taking an hour to read through it all.". Instant snappy nastiness ensued. I seemed to have called them a liar when they said that they were bad with computers and somehow implied that it was their fault. Goodness me! How dare I?
If someone who uses Word every working day of their life can't be bothered to spend an hour (less, really) reading through a little bit of documentation or a tutorial, then what hope is there? Must we all suffer from locked down, dumbed down systems because some people expect everything in life to be super-easy?
I see the point you're making. I fully understand it. But those of us who actually use our brains despise a looming future in a world where we're not able to because some people might injure themselves if they tried.
Code can only self-modify within the confines of parameters set by the human programmer. Therefore the ultimate cause of the modified code was the human.
Which completely misses the point that my post was entirely showing that "cause" was not a limiting factor. Your notion that something must be bounded by its originator would suggest that mankind must still be grubbing for roots in forests because no generation can develop beyond the capacities of the previous.
It was explained simply, and thefore I can't do much more than repeat or re-phrase it: dead code can only change in accordance to the people that create it, therefore exists within the bounds of those people's limitations. But self-modifying code can change in accordance with the world beyond those people, and therefore is not necessarily bound by those people's limitations. In short, it can experience for itself.
Ambiguity is a defining characteristic of philosophy.
Ambiguity is not a defining characteristic of philosophy. You don't read Karl Popper's 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery' and say: "this is not ambiguous, therefore it is not philosophy', or conversely say 'this is ambiguous and therefore may be philosophy'. A 'defining characteristic' is a characteristic which helps distinguish whether something falls into a category or not. And ambiguity is not such a characteristic of philosophy. Indeed philosophy strives to avoid ambiguity in all cases I can currently think of.
Perhaps you should total up the good and bad deeds MS do (quantifying your feelings of loss for WordPerfect et al as appropriate) and pro-rata your emnity. So for example, on 350 days of the year, you might damn MS on Slashdot, but on the remaining 15 days of the year, you refrain or post about the Gates Foundations charity donations or something.
I guess on leap years, you could get an extra day to go out and not post on Slashdot or something.;)
And no one dare give any of the "It's MY PC, I will use it however I choose!" bullshit. The EULA CLEARLY states the contrary.
Are you serious? EULA's don't contradict the laws of the land. If I break the terms of a EULA, then the company can go to the courts to seek redress, but they'd better not try kicking down my door and coming after my computer. In this instance, it's probably a red herring because the Feds probably needed Microsoft's assistance and it was at the Fed's invitation. But your proposal that EULA violations should empower corporations with Super Viglante Powers of Justice is either silly or scary depending on whether anyone else agrees with you.
Slashdot Mirror
that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...
And quite a lot of time and effort to produce.
There is a difference in price between hardcopy and digital versions.
Are we going to get a Hobbits on a Plane movie, too?
No it's going to be called Old Hobbits: Die Hard!
At first glance, one would guess the ISPs would like being able to charge a little extra for inclusion of the .XXX package. But in practice, I think it would not happen because there are a lot of people who are in situations, e.g. married, where they would be nervous of explicitly paying for the extra service. Thus they will surreptitiously go for providers where no such distinction is made.
Ooh, somebody mod parent up +2 Sumarian.
No, it's more like bitching that because a cinema kicks you out when you start making a political speech in the middle of a movie, your free speech is being abridged. You can say whatever you want, but nobody has to provide you with a forum to say it.
Your domain = your forum. Their domain = their forum. You're talking about telling people where they can and can't have their forums and who can access those forums.
I don't believe he can be a shill. It's just too bone-headed. More like a False Flag agent. Reasons? Idiocy like ramming Bing references into an irrelevant post. I actually use Bing as my default, but I don't go around saying: "hey - just bing it!" for the very simple reason it sounds STOOPID!
;). I think this one is also unlikely again because of the lack of follow-up. The grabbing of first posts and lack of follow-up elsewhere suggests trolling.
If MS employed PR people to big them up online (who knows? Apple is the one that I'd first suspect of that) then they'd surely keep an eye on them enough to spot ones that were as obvious - and thus self-damaging - as this. I think it's either one of three things:
1. Misguided MS employee going nuts. Unlikely imo, because (a) low-level people at a business aren't usually that fanatical and high-level people wouldn't be wasting their time spamming Slashdot. Also, if they were really motivated purely by adoration of MS, they would follow-up their initial efforts by arguing with the people who disagreed. Such is the nature of fanaticism.
2. Genuine MS Fanboy. Linux has them. Apple has them. Certainly no reason MS can't have them. I've ended up defending MS on Slashdot quite a few times myself recently (unpaid, however.
3. False Flag / Troll. My best guess. The behaviour is certainly trollish. The main question is whether the motivation is either to create the impression that MS is paying them as a shill in order to damage MS, or whether they just have identified Slashdot as a site with a few rabidly anti-MS types and find this a good way of trolling. I'm leaning toward the former motivation because they could be more trolling if they followed up on the posts, whilst the absence of follow-up or denials of being a shill, suggests an attempt to create the impression of shilling.
Of course there is possibility 4. which is that they are indeed a shill, just an incompetent one. Someone who shuffles off at the end of the day and says to their manager "I mentioned Bing in a first post, my $100 bonus, please". That would just be sad.
So I think 1 and 2 unlikely. 3 my guess, 4 an outside chance. If it's 4, then that's just shameful to make money that way and his / her manager needs to keep a better eye on them. If it's 3 as seems likely, then that's just really, really, tragically sad. It's bad enough to rabidly identify with an OS unless you have a hand in its development. But it's really awful to get so fanatical you start trying to wage a PR campaign against your "enemy".
I think another part of that is that techies don't accept that people don't accept that they have to learn a computer. Techies know this, but all we do is complain about it. No?
I am exceedingly nice and helpful when someone needs assistance, but I always take extra time to explain what I'm doing whether they want me to or not. If they keep asking for assistance, it becomes quickly clear to them that their ignorance is not an amusing character trait, but something that annoys people in the year 2011. The sole exception is when someone cute is asking me over to help because they fancy me. These people get a tolerance allowance. But nobody else!
Good for you. :)
BTW, did you RTFA?
I don't believe a lot of time is required to massively improve ones knowledge of the tools we use. There are legions of people out there who use Word everyday and yet week after week still shuffle round to the "computer person" to ask how to get something lined up, add a table or put an image in the document. Just an hour of reading the documentation and being willing to actually try clicking a button would improve their experience massively. That's not going to take away from their time learning the violin or playing with their kids in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they could probably throw in an hour or two of learning Excel, or how to move files around, rename them etcetera.
I care because currently we have two forces: powerful computer interfaces and ignorant people. The two are naturally distant and if one doesn't move, then the other must. And for the sake of all of us, I would like it to be the people. My view of someone who sits in front of a complicated program like a word processor and refuses to take a modicum of time and effort to learn how to use it, is that they are like a baby going "waaaaaah". I have little respect for their attitude. If someone is genuinely mentally challenged, then I can be incredibly patient with teaching them or helpful in assisting them. But wilful ignorance? It is not harmless - it distorts things for the rest of us.
I don't ask people to write their letters in LaTex. I just want a little acceptance that some things take effort to do well. The person hiking through Mongolia or learning the violin? I reckon they're not the one's I'm worried about. It's the ones that would rather not do anything that tend to have the most trouble with computers.
This accomplishes only a few things that I can see: .xxx domain whenever a loud enough moral group insist that it should be categorised as dirty. .xxx and filter out "the bad stuff". .xxx domain in the eyes of moralisers and authority groups, regardless of whether the site is donkeyporn.xxx or just some site that was pushed to register under .xxx because it deals with mature topics.
1. Puts pressure on all sorts of sites to operate only under a
2. Falsely creates a sense of safety amongst idiots who think they can block
3. Creates a sense of unjustified expectation amongst a different set of idiots who immediately decide that just because ICANN has created this TLD, that any site they deem improper that operates outside the hierarchy is engaged in some terrible underhandedness for daring to do so, trying to expose innocent people to their content.
4. Instantly tars anyone who visits a site in
5. Creates artificial segregation along lines decided by minority moral bodies. I.e. sexual content has to be treated differently. We don't have a separate TLD for religion, or science - why must sex be so treated?
6. Make pot loads of money for ICANN and registrars everywhere.
I'll leave it to the reader to consider how that last consequence was balanced against the others...
In this case, according to the article, the botnet was a major source of spam. Doesn't mean that other uses couldn't have been made of it, but spam is what is referenced in a major way in this case.
I'm pretty sure he was being being funny, actually.
So if the ISPs can't / won't / shouldn't do anything, and the end user will click any old thing to get free screensavers / smileys / porn - How do you win?
Raid datacentres and seize the command and control computers?
Didn't really mean to give them flak. I think the systems are pretty much comparable, I was just trying to be complete in my analysis. I do run my Windows box as Admin. It's not my primary OS and I wasn't aware of that until another poster also pointed it out. I mainly just use my Windows partition for MS Office and occasional audio work, for everything else it's either Gentoo or (when I've broken Gentoo), Kubuntu. I wasn't giving Windows 7 grief - I actually really enjoy using it.
I'm not fully convinced of that. Buy something from a spam email and there's a good chance you'll be defrauded. Which creates problems for the credit card companies. I got a couple of fraudulent charges to a card of mine once (and I'm careful with mine) so I'm guessing it was a compromised shop database somewhere. The company called me up quickly and cancelled the payment and I got my money back. To do that, they must be spending a fair amount of money on anti-fraud. Anything that helps them cut down on that cost is probably going to be something they're in favour of. There might be a lot of money in spam from an individuals' point of view, but as a slice of the overall transactions the credit card companies and banks deal with, it's a petty little thing.
Suborned? Really? I had to look it up. freedictionary says: 1. To induce (a person) to commit an unlawful or evil act.
Ahhh, you learned a new word - don't complain! ;)
Firstly, you should address the actual argument. If you can't find anything false in what someone wrote, then calling them biased isn't going to make their statements false.
Secondly, what makes your bias more acceptable than one that were pro-bias? I think bias is bad generally, but you seem to think a strong anti-Microsoft bias is a good thing which makes it acceptable to dismiss news because it's about a company you don't like doing something good? I'm finding it hard to tell whether you are serious or just trolling.
How exactly do I stop someone else's machine sending me spam, if not via law enforcement?
Ah, interesting. I guess that kind of reveals that I run my set up as an Admin account, then.
For the great majority of users, computers have become just too complicated and confusing to operate,
I think a part of that is people just don't accept that they have to learn how to use a computer. If they actually accepted that maybe they couldn't just sit in front of this complicated piece of equipment and magically do everything, then perhaps they'd take a few moments to think or read about it and then it wouldn't be so complicated and confusing to them.
...person... and their inane comments of "oh, I'm so bad at computers", I made the mistake of pointing out the Help option in Word and saying: "you know, there's documentation on this. It would be worth taking an hour to read through it all.". Instant snappy nastiness ensued. I seemed to have called them a liar when they said that they were bad with computers and somehow implied that it was their fault. Goodness me! How dare I?
There was someone extremely irritating at a place I worked some years ago, who asked me to help them line up the paragraphs in Word (some older version than the latest). After helpfully pressing a few buttons to line things up on the left again, accompanied by the cooing wonder of this
If someone who uses Word every working day of their life can't be bothered to spend an hour (less, really) reading through a little bit of documentation or a tutorial, then what hope is there? Must we all suffer from locked down, dumbed down systems because some people expect everything in life to be super-easy?
I see the point you're making. I fully understand it. But those of us who actually use our brains despise a looming future in a world where we're not able to because some people might injure themselves if they tried.
Code can only self-modify within the confines of parameters set by the human programmer. Therefore the ultimate cause of the modified code was the human.
Which completely misses the point that my post was entirely showing that "cause" was not a limiting factor. Your notion that something must be bounded by its originator would suggest that mankind must still be grubbing for roots in forests because no generation can develop beyond the capacities of the previous.
It was explained simply, and thefore I can't do much more than repeat or re-phrase it: dead code can only change in accordance to the people that create it, therefore exists within the bounds of those people's limitations. But self-modifying code can change in accordance with the world beyond those people, and therefore is not necessarily bound by those people's limitations. In short, it can experience for itself.
Yes, you've got me, your dazzling intellect has uncovered my shoddy logic.
Uncovered? More like scaled it and sat on it!
Ambiguity is a defining characteristic of philosophy.
Ambiguity is not a defining characteristic of philosophy. You don't read Karl Popper's 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery' and say: "this is not ambiguous, therefore it is not philosophy', or conversely say 'this is ambiguous and therefore may be philosophy'. A 'defining characteristic' is a characteristic which helps distinguish whether something falls into a category or not. And ambiguity is not such a characteristic of philosophy. Indeed philosophy strives to avoid ambiguity in all cases I can currently think of.
Perhaps you should total up the good and bad deeds MS do (quantifying your feelings of loss for WordPerfect et al as appropriate) and pro-rata your emnity. So for example, on 350 days of the year, you might damn MS on Slashdot, but on the remaining 15 days of the year, you refrain or post about the Gates Foundations charity donations or something.
;)
I guess on leap years, you could get an extra day to go out and not post on Slashdot or something.
And no one dare give any of the "It's MY PC, I will use it however I choose!" bullshit. The EULA CLEARLY states the contrary.
Are you serious? EULA's don't contradict the laws of the land. If I break the terms of a EULA, then the company can go to the courts to seek redress, but they'd better not try kicking down my door and coming after my computer. In this instance, it's probably a red herring because the Feds probably needed Microsoft's assistance and it was at the Fed's invitation. But your proposal that EULA violations should empower corporations with Super Viglante Powers of Justice is either silly or scary depending on whether anyone else agrees with you.