> 49. Defendants knew or should have known when they posted or > provided "links" to the DeCSS program on their web sites > that it was being made available by virtue of the unauthorized > use of proprietary information and that they were misusing > proprietary confidential information gained through improper means. > This is because the DeCSS program has the capability to > defeat DVD encryption software and, as a result, the DeCSS > program allows users to illegally pirate the copyrighted motion > pictures contained on DVD videos - - activity which is > fatal to the DVD video format and the hundreds of computer > and consumer electronics companies whose businesses rely > on the viability of this digital format.
This argument is breathtaking. The logic is that the defendants should have known that the information had been gotten by illegal means (theft of trade secrets) by the mere fact that this information would be "fatal" to certain unspecified electronics companies. Hurts big corporation = Must be of illegal origin. Read it, that's what it says; the crucial conjunction is "This is because..."
In other words, if you ever happen see a program or an algorithm on a web site somewhere, and you rub your chin and say, "Hmmm! I'll bet you could make <some kind of product> that would compete with Sony's or Microsoft's product, and take away some of their market share!" then you must instantly assume, ipso facto, that this program must have come into existence by "unauthorized use of proprietary information," and therefore it's your duty, not only not to download and use the axiomatically guilty crimecode, but also to maintain the strictest possible secrecy about the existence of said crimecode.
Someone elsewhere was commenting on the illiteracy of slashdot readers. If I were a judge I'd take this argument as an instance of either illiteracy or impudence.
Why picking on schoolteachers is so popular these days is beyond me. Would you like to be a cat-herder, I mean a public-school teacher? I happen to know a schoolteacher personally, so I am more sympathetic. Also, I'd bet money that the average of all slashdot posters, including not just all those chronic misspellers but also the Natalie Portman fans, are fifteen IQ points above the norm. Lot of programmers in that bunch, and it takes mucho brains to hack.
Your "illiterates" were brought up post-literate by TV. Who needs to read when you've got TV? Everything worthwhile that a corporation can do with a book or a magazine (that is, propaganda or advertising), TV does so much better. Because TV is completely one-way! They talk, you listen. They act, you stare.
But what is this article about? A technology for playing TV shows. As a matter of principle - Hell, as a matter of simple self-preservation for the "Linux community" - slashdot readers should fight the DVD CCA sharks, but I'd way rather defend Larry Flynt's right to sell his disgusting magazine, than help spread yet more more more TV.
Anyway misusing "to beg the question" is miscomprehension of an idiom, not either a spelling nor a grammar error. Just thought I'd be fussy; no offense intended, don't take it personally.
Everyone laughs, me too, when they hear or repeat that bit about "I, Albert Gore, invented the Internet." But a while back I was rereading (for nostalgia's sake) an old book on telecommunications by John Dvorak, from back in the BBS days, when the 9600 baud modem was "wowie zowie, but way too expensive for home users" technology. I bought that book way back when in the hope it would tell me how to make my 2400 baud modem work.
To my surprise, in his short history of the Internet, Dvorak mentioned Al Gore as the one politician who really pushed for funding the development and expansion of the Internet. I'm pretty sure he was the only politician mentioned by name in the book. So maybe Al Gore's claim to Internet fame isn't so off-the-wall as you might think!
It sits on my lap, or I can plop it down on a blueprint when taking data off a print into CAD, or wherever it is comfortable. I use the Logitech "wireless desktop" which uses radio, not IR, so I don't have to worry about line-of-sight. It is ever so much easier on the wrists than an ordinary wire-bound keyboard sitting up on a desk. When your wrists get tired of having the keyboard here, move it over there. The only thing I don't like is the lack of a keypress "click." Go to a local Office Depot or CompUSA and check it out.
Alas, apparently you can't get the clean-looking original model like I've got any more; instead Logitech now offers one that looks like the original but defaced with ugly little warts all along the top, like the keyboards that come with new Compaq Presarios, HP Pavilions, and other PCs aimed at the home market. (If you use their driver, which I suppose works only under MS OSes, when you tap these warts they fire up your CD player, your Internet browser, and so on.)
It also comes with a wireless three-button-plus-scroll-wheel mouse. I'd prefer a wireless trackball but the mouse is OK. There's a nice blank spot in the upper right corner of the keyboard where a trackball would fit perfectly (hint, hint, Logitech).
I check my mail on my pop3 account from Netscape inside Linux 2.2 by clicking on a little "button" in the lower right hand corner of the screen with my mouse. This is even easier, I think, than typing in those eleven or so characters; it is even one or two mouse clicks fewer than pulling down the "bookmarks" menu and picking Hotmail off it.
Just think of all the effort I save! If I check my mail twice a day for the next ten years, I'll have freed up enough time to download one more centerfold picture from alt.mag.playboy. Maybe even two more pictures.
You quote the mad American Family Association (to be exact, their ISP service, afo.net):
Pornography is dangerous, and viewing it (even for a moment) can set off a terrible chain of events.
Schopenhauer agrees, it is a mistake:
In between, however, in the midst of the tumult, we see the glances of two lovers meet longingly; yet why so secretly, fearfully and stealthily? Because these lovers are the traitors who seek to perpetuate the whole want and drudgery, which would otherwise speedily reach an end; this they wish to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it before.
And I agree, too, in the interest of eugenics, wouldn't you rather these AFA folks not continue to breed?
afo.net censors all Internet content by strict rules (e.g. no "erotica", no "violence," etc.; I wonder if they carry cnn.net) at the server, a service its subscribers explicitly pay for. To tell you the truth, from a technical point of view, this seems like a pretty good idea to me, more effective than browser-based censorware, so long as I don't have to use their proxy server.
I'd like to brighten your day with a little tid-bit gleaned from their web page, concerning why they censor ALL chat rooms, ALL of usenet, and ALL uncensored bulletin boards, including, presumably, this one:
American Family Online's Chat-Room Policy
It is our policy at American Family Online to block chat rooms. The policy extends to innocuous and Christian chat rooms.
Some true stories:
A 14 year old girl makes an Internet friend in a chat room and discovers this other 14 year old girl shares a common interest in Roller-Blading. After a few months of dialog they agree to meet in a local park to spend the day skating. Unfortunately, the "other" girl was not a girl, it was a guy who kidnapped her and intended to sell her into sex slavery. She was fortunate to escape two weeks later to finish living her life in fear and with the most awful memories. Most kidnap victims are not so fortunate.
A 11 year old boy was also using chat rooms and made friends. Although he did not agree to meet with anyone, he got very interested in guns and bomb making through chat rooms and a year and a half later acted out his frustrations by killing some fellow classmates at his school.
These are extreme cases, but similar activities happen every day because of internet chat rooms and we have not even mentioned the vulgarity, emotional affairs and adultery perpetrated because of chat rooms.
"Vulgarity, emotional affairs and adultery," slashdot to a "t".
I find that second case-history fascinating, the tale of a thirteen-year-old kid somewhere or another who gunned down, or blew up, some of his classmates at school. Now every time some fscked up gun nut in the madhouse of a country goes and blows away a few of his classmates, he becomes the national media's Hero-for-a-Day, right? I mean, you'd have heard about this thirteen-year-old; you'd know his name, you'd know all about him, right? Sure you would. Well, I don't recall hearing about any thirteen-year-old schoolyard assassins, do you? OK, so who is this thirteen-year-old schoolyard gunman, anyway? Hmmm?
Or, I blush to suggest, but, but...could it be that the American Family Association is fibbing? That they made the whole story up? I feel the chill shadow of doubt pass over me; if that's the case, and gosh it seems to be, well...shame, shame!!
That was kind of an interestuing post, and surprisingly well written, too. But why do you care so very, very much about how your posts are rated? Aren't you the least bit interested in expressing your opinions on the topic at hand instead? I thought that was the whole idea of posting to a free public board such as slashdot.
This is kind of like those musicians who are way more interested in whether their music is a big hit on the charts, rather than how good it is as music. Except their attitude, lame though it is, makes more sense than yours. After all, no matter how good or bad a hit song may be as music, one thing is for sure, any hit song will generate a lot of money, which translates immediately into exotic cars, loose women, and powerful recreational drugs. All my musician friends agree that these are inherently desirable goods, worthy to be pursued vigorously. But on the other hand,/. pays exactly the same for a post with a rating of five as it does for a post with a rating of minus-one: nothing. So, once again, why do you care?
> A minor should not be reading EITHER Penthouse letters > nor "Men in Love". Simple...no problem.
Horseshit. The disgusting fear of sex that afflicts a majority of U.S. citizens is not merely unnatural but is, in fact, perverted to the point of pathology. Period.
The average kid in the U.S.A. watches three thousand hours of TV a year, or some ungodly number like that. (Yep, I made that statistic up, but I'll bet I'm right - within a half an order of magnitude or so...) And how much mental effort does he put into all that watching? Zero, of course! He just clicks the remote-control button, opens wide the floodgates of his eyes, and lets the corporate product flow right into his brain.
Today tens of millions of kids have access to the Internet, which from the read-only browser's point-of-view works the same way, more or less. True, there is the advantage that at least some of the product he ingests is not manufactured by one or another multi-billion-dollar company, and that's good. But still, it's mainly click, download, stare and drool.
But install a copy of some dumbass censorware product on a kid's computer, and everything changes! Not necessarily all for the better; any kid whose parents inflict censorware on him surely has to pick up the big, demoralizing message: "Your own parents don't trust you." But on the plus side, it's a challenge, and if there's one thing our TV-addicted kids need in this country, it's to be challenged.
To be specific, the challenge is, "How can I get around this &^%$#?" I know two kids whose parents installed censorware programs on their PCs, and both of the kids defeated it, all on their own, in a couple of weeks. I was so glad to see it! There's hope for the younger generation yet! And in the process, they both learned far more about their PCs in those two weeks than they had in years of being mere users.
They are evil Snideleys. Seriously. It's hard for ordinary, clean-thinking nerds like us to compass the baseness, the vileness, of their ugly and loathsome thought processes. Just hang out around lawyers for a while and listen to how they talk. These fsckers are pathological. In their day-to-day casual speech they continuously employ insanely aggressive military and sado-pervo sexual metaphors about how they're going to "crush" or "screw" somebody else - and they think that this is the funniest thing in the world. And they are truly amoral; you will sooner hear a Hezbollah terrorist talk about peace, tolerance and brotherhood than hear a commercial lawyer take the slightest consideration about issues of right and wrong. Right and wrong be damned, justice be damned, all that matters is winning. Hell, that doesn't even matter! All that really matters is making sure to collect that great big check.
And, you know, the world is chock full of psychos, shitheels and thugs. But how many of them, either individually or collectively, have the power of lawyers? We constantly hear from their scummy fellows, the professional politicians, about the dire moral dangers inherent in trivial things like video games and sexy music videos; how these things draw impressionable youths away from morality into decadence. But as far as setting a bad example, what can compare to the systematic amorality of the legal profession at work? And unlike a video game character or an actor in a music video, these people constantly inflict their villainy upon real victims in the real world.
Christ's sake, if you're going to tell me that a commercial lawyer's sense of decency compares favorably to any other trade besides professional hit-man, what's next? You gonna try to convince me, maybe, that Hitler wasn't bad, exactly, it's just that he was, like, misguided? Sheesh.
...and sewer workers are even more necessary, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us should feel obliged to sign over the rights to all of our property, present and future, to them.
(btw, of all the jobs I've ever held in my life I'm proudest of having constructed sewers - now that was really useful, far more so than diddling around with these stupid ugly computers. Think about it. If your personal computer was down a week, so what? I'll bet you'd enjoy the restful vacation. But if the sanitary sewers in any city were down for a week the inhabitants would have to flee; if for two weeks, people would start dying all over.)
But the Leonardo(tm) group are in finance, and international finance embraces every business, in fact, every human activity, including eating and breathing (that is, corporations get to set air pollution standards and market genetically engineered "foods" and lowly grubby workies have exactly no right whatsoever to restrain them in the least.) Just ask Thomas Friedman; globalism uber alles, all must kneel and obey.
>...where will the madness end?
In Paradise, rest assured. All is well; as the insurance ad had it, "You're in good (invisible) hands."
Something has to be done, then, about all these foreigners masquerading as Americans by using.com and.org domain names. Obviously this is both a violation of America's immigration laws, and also a particularly cowardly and insidious form of "computer hacking." When viewed from the right perspective, every foreign terrorist web server is the digital equivalent of an enemy ICBM silo, trageted against American corporations, that is to say, America. But this kind of digital terrorism isn't going to be tolerated much longer.
Unfortunately America's liberal government's weak defense policies have resulted in a severe shortage of cruise missiles, as we used a major part of our supply bombing apartment complexes, civilian bridges and elementary schools in the recent Kosovo conflict. A strong America needs enough cruise missiles in stock, always, to be able to continuously bomb every other nation on the globe, without ever having to fear running short. But due to the Clinton Administration's unpreparedness, the bottom line is, we can't begin bombarding all these foreign terrorist web sites for several months. Keep that fact in mind next year when you go to the polls.
Nevertheless America can't sit and wait and do nothing. So the campaign against foreign domain-name terrorism has to start at home. While we must respect the rights of citizens to the privacy of their own homes, we must also work out a balance between liberty and permissiveness. Don't forget, terrorism terrorism terrorism. During this emergency, therefore, Federal Police will be issued warrants to enter the houses of Internet users, and examine the files in their cache directories. There had better not be any dubious files of suspected foreign origin in there.
Perhaps, we can only hope and pray, for the sake of our youths, this vigilance can forestall another tragedy like the incident at Columbine. Let us hope so, my fellow Americans.
> Corporations and online commerce are one of the things > that keeps the modern Internet up and running (and allows > you to read services like Slashdot.) Entities like search > engines have got to (italics mine, ed.) start giving preferential > treatment to corporations if they expect to continue to be > allowed to operate.
Say, you wouldn't happen to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, posting as an "anonymous coward," are you? "...have got to," ha ha, I loved it. This was a very good, very funny post. Thanks!
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
...hey Bill Kent, you've got to change your initials or I'll sue you!
I'm going to go to the Univ. of S. Florida library and see if I can find any print books published by this so-called "Leonardo" society. There's just something fishy about "the Leonardo family of websites." Every bit of evidence you've got is on the web, which means a smart guy can create it all with a text editor and a graphics program. Besides it comes out of MIT and everybody knows that they are famous, notorious liars and pranksters.
Because it's just too much, I don't buy it, I can't believe anybody in the world can get away with making a trademark out of "Leonardo," it's a person's name. A pretty common one, actually. Will I have to trademark "William" pre-emptively to avoid being sued for carrying my driver's license?
As far as I know the drive letters for FAT drives are assigned starting with C: and you can't do too much about it. But you can easily give an NTFS partition a high drive letter, such as M:, with NT's Disk Adminsitrator (Start Menu/Administrative Tools/Disk Administrator). Your Novell setup probably uses not just F: (G:, H:, etc.) but also Z: (Y:, X:, etc.) but there should be some unused letters in the middle of the alphabet you can still use.
Disk Administrator also lets you set your CD drive to a high letter. In my company, I always set up NT machines so the CD drive is drive L:, instead of leaving it at the default, which is one letter past the last hard drive partition. Not only does this make it easier when you go from one machine to the next, but also there are a lot of CD-based programs which have the drive letter in the registry settings. Suppose I have drives C: and D: on a machine and I leave the CD as E:. When I install a program that needs to access the CD drive (like, for example, a map program where the map database is on a CD) the program's configuration expects to find the data CD in E: Now I add a second hard drive to that machine, so the CD drive becomes F: instead. Presto! I've just broken that program, and I get to reinstall it. But the way I do it, even with the new hard drive, the CD drive stays at L:, so the program still works even with the new hard drive.
> I know it is hard to accept but I can only mess with OS > products after work, because I need a job. It is terrible for me > to have to reinvent the wheel just because it is GPL'd.
It's also pretty terrible that I have to either write my own word processor - that is, "reinvent the wheel" - or pay Microsoft to use Word 2000. Why can't I just steal Word 2000 instead? Just because the Microsoft Corporation spent millions of dollars to write and distribute Word 2000, and copyrighted it too, how does that give them any right to keep me from copying the Word 2000 CD, installing it and using it on my computer, and selling copies to others for profit, all the while not paying Microsoft a single penny? I don't know about "improving overall life," but it certainly would improve my life if I could start a business reselling hot commercial warez for big bux without those stupid police hassling me.
It's so unfair that greedy, selfish organizations, such as Microsoft and the FSF, get to keep legal control over their own property.
Maybe so; if I want to buy something from Dell and my Internet connection is down (which seems to happen reasonably often, for reasons which I suspect have little to do with "hacking") I just pick up the telephone and dial up their 1-800 number. I can't help feeling that anybody who runs a business entirely on the Internet and expects he will get the same 24/7 reliability as he can get from the telephone network is kind of deluding himself.
Not that that exactly justifies script kiddies maliciously breaking into anyone's system and running rm -rf as root, far from it. It seems to me that a judge should make a distinction between hacks that are basically harmless, such as Melissa, hacks that require a little cleaning up, like replacing the FBI home page with a parody, and hacks which do permanent damage, like the guy who wiped One38.org's entire web server. A judge would certainly make an analogous distinction between trespassing, burglary and armed robbery. To threaten all hackers indiscriminately with a longer jail sentence for diddling somebody's essentially meaningless home page than they would serve if convicted of assault with a deadly weapon isn't justice, it's hysteria.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
PS: Hey! I can't help noticing, there must be a cookie on this PC because when I went to compose this reply, I was automatically logged in under my/. ID. What a unique, brilliant innovation! Isn't it time that CmdrTaco patented "one-click posting"?
No doubt you (and ABC) are trying to convey the notion that the physical location of l0pht's office is some big dark secret, utterly unknown to the FBI and that like, like the geographical coordinates of Osama Bin Laden's current hideout. Yeah, sure it is.
By the way, something just now occurred to me concerning amazon.com's patented technology. Does amazon.com require the user to enter a password as well as the cookie info? and if the latter, doesn't that add up to more than Just One Click(tm)? I regularly shop at a couple of web stores which store at least your account name in a cookie, so when you jump to the "Checkout" page your name is already filled in, even including your credit card number (which is displayed as "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234"). But to get to the "Checkout" page you have to present your password first. At any rate, that certainly wouldn't be new or unique (that is, patentable) technology for amazon.com to do it that way.
But if the everything you need for ordering is already stored in cookies, doesn't that present a king-size security hole? Suppose, for example, one of my co-workers orders something from amazon.com with their web browser. And suppose I want to play a mean trick on this co-worker. So I copy his cookies file. Now if all the customer info is keyed off the cookies in the user's PC, I can't exactly steal anything; even if I order something, it will get sent to the original shipping address. But as harassment, I can order up, say, twenty copies of "Mein Kampf" or "The Joys of Enema Sex" or something obnoxious like that on his credit card, with Just One Click!(tm). Is that possible?
I'm almost tempted to break the boycott to experiment. It would be easy enough; just make an actual purchase from one PC, copy the cookie file to a second PC, and see if I can make a second order with Just One Click!(tm).
amazon.com has got a LOT of customers. If there really is such a big, obvious security hole in their patented technology, then maybe these news magazines could make themselves really useful to their readers by warning them away, rather than blathering about the Dire Threat to American Security posed by a few industrious security hackers and a bunch of dumbass script kiddies.
At any rate I hope I'm wrong, and there is a mechanism which forestalls illegitimate ordering. amazon.com and Jeff Bezos can certainly go to Hell for all I care, but I'd hate to see all those innocent customers getting screwed.
I read that first article about the secretive shadowy sinister L0pht gang, and laughed so hard I spilled my coffee. Oooh yeah, L0pht is a big top secret all right. I'm sure I can rely on the rest of the/. readers, insiders and conspirators one and all, to not publicly reveal the location of their top-secret underground web site at, just guess, yep you got it, www.l0pht.com, 'cause if the Man finds out, whooey!
If the major media could stop kissing Jeff Bezos's ass for just a few minutes they'd see that amazon.com's fraudulent patent is a bigger threat to the Internet than all the hackers in the world put together. But Bezos is a billionaire, and Americans - rich ones, at least, like the management of the mass media - don't seem to be able to think clearly in the overwhelming presence of billionaires, whom they worship, unreflectively, disgustingly, just like a crackhead worships a big old chunk of crack.
>But not all software ought to be free. People have to eat.
Well, food should be free too. I mean it. Look, for example, at the last decade in the U.S.A. Right now the official unemployment rate is about four percent. In 1990 it was up to ten percent. The difference amounts to six percent of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the "cohort" of workers - right now, just short of 140,000,000 people. At the very least then we're talking about approximately nine million people, who were willing to work (as you can see by the fact that they are currently employed) but who were denied jobs by the wave-action of the American economic system. Should nine million Americans, together with their dependent children, have literally starved while the economy slowly readjusted itself?
Slashdot Mirror
> Would that be before or after said country accepts millions in foreign aid from the US?
Gee, which country in Western Europe gets foreign aid from the U.S.A. these days? Like, duh.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Boy, this is a strange one!
> 49. Defendants knew or should have known when they posted or
> provided "links" to the DeCSS program on their web sites
> that it was being made available by virtue of the unauthorized
> use of proprietary information and that they were misusing
> proprietary confidential information gained through improper means.
> This is because the DeCSS program has the capability to
> defeat DVD encryption software and, as a result, the DeCSS
> program allows users to illegally pirate the copyrighted motion
> pictures contained on DVD videos - - activity which is
> fatal to the DVD video format and the hundreds of computer
> and consumer electronics companies whose businesses rely
> on the viability of this digital format.
This argument is breathtaking. The logic is that the defendants should have known that the information had been gotten by illegal means (theft of trade secrets) by the mere fact that this information would be "fatal" to certain unspecified electronics companies. Hurts big corporation = Must be of illegal origin. Read it, that's what it says; the crucial conjunction is "This is because..."
In other words, if you ever happen see a program or an algorithm on a web site somewhere, and you rub your chin and say, "Hmmm! I'll bet you could make <some kind of product> that would compete with Sony's or Microsoft's product, and take away some of their market share!" then you must instantly assume, ipso facto, that this program must have come into existence by "unauthorized use of proprietary information," and therefore it's your duty, not only not to download and use the axiomatically guilty crimecode, but also to maintain the strictest possible secrecy about the existence of said crimecode.
Someone elsewhere was commenting on the illiteracy of slashdot readers. If I were a judge I'd take this argument as an instance of either illiteracy or impudence.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why picking on schoolteachers is so popular these days is beyond me. Would you like to be a cat-herder, I mean a public-school teacher? I happen to know a schoolteacher personally, so I am more sympathetic. Also, I'd bet money that the average of all slashdot posters, including not just all those chronic misspellers but also the Natalie Portman fans, are fifteen IQ points above the norm. Lot of programmers in that bunch, and it takes mucho brains to hack.
Your "illiterates" were brought up post-literate by TV. Who needs to read when you've got TV? Everything worthwhile that a corporation can do with a book or a magazine (that is, propaganda or advertising), TV does so much better. Because TV is completely one-way! They talk, you listen. They act, you stare.
But what is this article about? A technology for playing TV shows. As a matter of principle - Hell, as a matter of simple self-preservation for the "Linux community" - slashdot readers should fight the DVD CCA sharks, but I'd way rather defend Larry Flynt's right to sell his disgusting magazine, than help spread yet more more more TV.
Anyway misusing "to beg the question" is miscomprehension of an idiom, not either a spelling nor a grammar error. Just thought I'd be fussy; no offense intended, don't take it personally.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Everyone laughs, me too, when they hear or repeat that bit about "I, Albert Gore, invented the Internet." But a while back I was rereading (for nostalgia's sake) an old book on telecommunications by John Dvorak, from back in the BBS days, when the 9600 baud modem was "wowie zowie, but way too expensive for home users" technology. I bought that book way back when in the hope it would tell me how to make my 2400 baud modem work.
To my surprise, in his short history of the Internet, Dvorak mentioned Al Gore as the one politician who really pushed for funding the development and expansion of the Internet. I'm pretty sure he was the only politician mentioned by name in the book. So maybe Al Gore's claim to Internet fame isn't so off-the-wall as you might think!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Get serious. No one cares about how many Barbies there are, for crying out loud. But Pokemon are important.
Yours Snorlax - WKiernan@concentric.net
It sits on my lap, or I can plop it down on a blueprint when taking data off a print into CAD, or wherever it is comfortable. I use the Logitech "wireless desktop" which uses radio, not IR, so I don't have to worry about line-of-sight. It is ever so much easier on the wrists than an ordinary wire-bound keyboard sitting up on a desk. When your wrists get tired of having the keyboard here, move it over there. The only thing I don't like is the lack of a keypress "click." Go to a local Office Depot or CompUSA and check it out.
Alas, apparently you can't get the clean-looking original model like I've got any more; instead Logitech now offers one that looks like the original but defaced with ugly little warts all along the top, like the keyboards that come with new Compaq Presarios, HP Pavilions, and other PCs aimed at the home market. (If you use their driver, which I suppose works only under MS OSes, when you tap these warts they fire up your CD player, your Internet browser, and so on.)
It also comes with a wireless three-button-plus-scroll-wheel mouse. I'd prefer a wireless trackball but the mouse is OK. There's a nice blank spot in the upper right corner of the keyboard where a trackball would fit perfectly (hint, hint, Logitech).
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I check my mail on my pop3 account from Netscape inside Linux 2.2 by clicking on a little "button" in the lower right hand corner of the screen with my mouse. This is even easier, I think, than typing in those eleven or so characters; it is even one or two mouse clicks fewer than pulling down the "bookmarks" menu and picking Hotmail off it.
Just think of all the effort I save! If I check my mail twice a day for the next ten years, I'll have freed up enough time to download one more centerfold picture from alt.mag.playboy. Maybe even two more pictures.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You quote the mad American Family Association (to be exact, their ISP service, afo.net):
Pornography is dangerous, and viewing it (even for a moment) can set off a terrible chain of events.
Schopenhauer agrees, it is a mistake:
In between, however, in the midst of the tumult, we see the glances of two lovers meet longingly; yet why so secretly, fearfully and stealthily? Because these lovers are the traitors who seek to perpetuate the whole want and drudgery, which would otherwise speedily reach an end; this they wish to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it before.
And I agree, too, in the interest of eugenics, wouldn't you rather these AFA folks not continue to breed?
afo.net censors all Internet content by strict rules (e.g. no "erotica", no "violence," etc.; I wonder if they carry cnn.net) at the server, a service its subscribers explicitly pay for. To tell you the truth, from a technical point of view, this seems like a pretty good idea to me, more effective than browser-based censorware, so long as I don't have to use their proxy server.
I'd like to brighten your day with a little tid-bit gleaned from their web page, concerning why they censor ALL chat rooms, ALL of usenet, and ALL uncensored bulletin boards, including, presumably, this one:
American Family Online's Chat-Room Policy
It is our policy at American Family Online to block chat rooms. The policy extends to innocuous and Christian chat rooms.
Some true stories:
A 14 year old girl makes an Internet friend in a chat room and discovers this other 14 year old girl shares a common interest in Roller-Blading. After a few months of dialog they agree to meet in a local park to spend the day skating. Unfortunately, the "other" girl was not a girl, it was a guy who kidnapped her and intended to sell her into sex slavery. She was fortunate to escape two weeks later to finish living her life in fear and with the most awful memories. Most kidnap victims are not so fortunate.
A 11 year old boy was also using chat rooms and made friends. Although he did not agree to meet with anyone, he got very interested in guns and bomb making through chat rooms and a year and a half later acted out his frustrations by killing some fellow classmates at his school.
These are extreme cases, but similar activities happen every day because of internet chat rooms and we have not even mentioned the vulgarity, emotional affairs and adultery perpetrated because of chat rooms.
"Vulgarity, emotional affairs and adultery," slashdot to a "t".
I find that second case-history fascinating, the tale of a thirteen-year-old kid somewhere or another who gunned down, or blew up, some of his classmates at school. Now every time some fscked up gun nut in the madhouse of a country goes and blows away a few of his classmates, he becomes the national media's Hero-for-a-Day, right? I mean, you'd have heard about this thirteen-year-old; you'd know his name, you'd know all about him, right? Sure you would. Well, I don't recall hearing about any thirteen-year-old schoolyard assassins, do you? OK, so who is this thirteen-year-old schoolyard gunman, anyway? Hmmm?
Or, I blush to suggest, but, but...could it be that the American Family Association is fibbing? That they made the whole story up? I feel the chill shadow of doubt pass over me; if that's the case, and gosh it seems to be, well...shame, shame!!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
That was kind of an interestuing post, and surprisingly well written, too. But why do you care so very, very much about how your posts are rated? Aren't you the least bit interested in expressing your opinions on the topic at hand instead? I thought that was the whole idea of posting to a free public board such as slashdot.
This is kind of like those musicians who are way more interested in whether their music is a big hit on the charts, rather than how good it is as music. Except their attitude, lame though it is, makes more sense than yours. After all, no matter how good or bad a hit song may be as music, one thing is for sure, any hit song will generate a lot of money, which translates immediately into exotic cars, loose women, and powerful recreational drugs. All my musician friends agree that these are inherently desirable goods, worthy to be pursued vigorously. But on the other hand, /. pays exactly the same for a post with a rating of five as it does for a post with a rating of minus-one: nothing. So, once again, why do you care?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> A minor should not be reading EITHER Penthouse letters
> nor "Men in Love". Simple...no problem.
Horseshit. The disgusting fear of sex that afflicts a majority of U.S. citizens is not merely unnatural but is, in fact, perverted to the point of pathology. Period.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The average kid in the U.S.A. watches three thousand hours of TV a year, or some ungodly number like that. (Yep, I made that statistic up, but I'll bet I'm right - within a half an order of magnitude or so...) And how much mental effort does he put into all that watching? Zero, of course! He just clicks the remote-control button, opens wide the floodgates of his eyes, and lets the corporate product flow right into his brain.
Today tens of millions of kids have access to the Internet, which from the read-only browser's point-of-view works the same way, more or less. True, there is the advantage that at least some of the product he ingests is not manufactured by one or another multi-billion-dollar company, and that's good. But still, it's mainly click, download, stare and drool.
But install a copy of some dumbass censorware product on a kid's computer, and everything changes! Not necessarily all for the better; any kid whose parents inflict censorware on him surely has to pick up the big, demoralizing message: "Your own parents don't trust you." But on the plus side, it's a challenge, and if there's one thing our TV-addicted kids need in this country, it's to be challenged.
To be specific, the challenge is, "How can I get around this &^%$#?" I know two kids whose parents installed censorware programs on their PCs, and both of the kids defeated it, all on their own, in a couple of weeks. I was so glad to see it! There's hope for the younger generation yet! And in the process, they both learned far more about their PCs in those two weeks than they had in years of being mere users.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
They are evil Snideleys. Seriously. It's hard for ordinary, clean-thinking nerds like us to compass the baseness, the vileness, of their ugly and loathsome thought processes. Just hang out around lawyers for a while and listen to how they talk. These fsckers are pathological. In their day-to-day casual speech they continuously employ insanely aggressive military and sado-pervo sexual metaphors about how they're going to "crush" or "screw" somebody else - and they think that this is the funniest thing in the world. And they are truly amoral; you will sooner hear a Hezbollah terrorist talk about peace, tolerance and brotherhood than hear a commercial lawyer take the slightest consideration about issues of right and wrong. Right and wrong be damned, justice be damned, all that matters is winning. Hell, that doesn't even matter! All that really matters is making sure to collect that great big check.
And, you know, the world is chock full of psychos, shitheels and thugs. But how many of them, either individually or collectively, have the power of lawyers? We constantly hear from their scummy fellows, the professional politicians, about the dire moral dangers inherent in trivial things like video games and sexy music videos; how these things draw impressionable youths away from morality into decadence. But as far as setting a bad example, what can compare to the systematic amorality of the legal profession at work? And unlike a video game character or an actor in a music video, these people constantly inflict their villainy upon real victims in the real world.
Christ's sake, if you're going to tell me that a commercial lawyer's sense of decency compares favorably to any other trade besides professional hit-man, what's next? You gonna try to convince me, maybe, that Hitler wasn't bad, exactly, it's just that he was, like, misguided? Sheesh.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...and sewer workers are even more necessary, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us should feel obliged to sign over the rights to all of our property, present and future, to them.
(btw, of all the jobs I've ever held in my life I'm proudest of having constructed sewers - now that was really useful, far more so than diddling around with these stupid ugly computers. Think about it. If your personal computer was down a week, so what? I'll bet you'd enjoy the restful vacation. But if the sanitary sewers in any city were down for a week the inhabitants would have to flee; if for two weeks, people would start dying all over.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> 1) Odd little men in berets.
They can keep the berets.
> 2) Women who can drink large men under the table.
> 4) Disease ridden kisses.
> 5) Women who don't shave. Ever. Anywhere.
<HEAVY BREATHING>O God I want to emigrate.</ HEAVY BREATHING>
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
But the Leonardo(tm) group are in finance, and international finance embraces every business, in fact, every human activity, including eating and breathing (that is, corporations get to set air pollution standards and market genetically engineered "foods" and lowly grubby workies have exactly no right whatsoever to restrain them in the least.) Just ask Thomas Friedman; globalism uber alles, all must kneel and obey.
> ...where will the madness end?
In Paradise, rest assured. All is well; as the insurance ad had it, "You're in good (invisible) hands."
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
Something has to be done, then, about all these foreigners masquerading as Americans by using .com and .org domain names. Obviously this is both a violation of America's immigration laws, and also a particularly cowardly and insidious form of "computer hacking." When viewed from the right perspective, every foreign terrorist web server is the digital equivalent of an enemy ICBM silo, trageted against American corporations, that is to say, America. But this kind of digital terrorism isn't going to be tolerated much longer.
Unfortunately America's liberal government's weak defense policies have resulted in a severe shortage of cruise missiles, as we used a major part of our supply bombing apartment complexes, civilian bridges and elementary schools in the recent Kosovo conflict. A strong America needs enough cruise missiles in stock, always, to be able to continuously bomb every other nation on the globe, without ever having to fear running short. But due to the Clinton Administration's unpreparedness, the bottom line is, we can't begin bombarding all these foreign terrorist web sites for several months. Keep that fact in mind next year when you go to the polls.
Nevertheless America can't sit and wait and do nothing. So the campaign against foreign domain-name terrorism has to start at home. While we must respect the rights of citizens to the privacy of their own homes, we must also work out a balance between liberty and permissiveness. Don't forget, terrorism terrorism terrorism. During this emergency, therefore, Federal Police will be issued warrants to enter the houses of Internet users, and examine the files in their cache directories. There had better not be any dubious files of suspected foreign origin in there.
Perhaps, we can only hope and pray, for the sake of our youths, this vigilance can forestall another tragedy like the incident at Columbine. Let us hope so, my fellow Americans.
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
> Corporations and online commerce are one of the things
> that keeps the modern Internet up and running (and allows
> you to read services like Slashdot.) Entities like search
> engines have got to (italics mine, ed.) start giving preferential
> treatment to corporations if they expect to continue to be
> allowed to operate.
Say, you wouldn't happen to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, posting as an "anonymous coward," are you? "...have got to," ha ha, I loved it. This was a very good, very funny post. Thanks!
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
...hey Bill Kent, you've got to change your initials or I'll sue you!
I'm going to go to the Univ. of S. Florida library and see if I can find any print books published by this so-called "Leonardo" society. There's just something fishy about "the Leonardo family of websites." Every bit of evidence you've got is on the web, which means a smart guy can create it all with a text editor and a graphics program. Besides it comes out of MIT and everybody knows that they are famous, notorious liars and pranksters.
Because it's just too much, I don't buy it, I can't believe anybody in the world can get away with making a trademark out of "Leonardo," it's a person's name. A pretty common one, actually. Will I have to trademark "William" pre-emptively to avoid being sued for carrying my driver's license?
Yours WDK(tm) - WKiernan(tm)@concentric.net
As far as I know the drive letters for FAT drives are assigned starting with C: and you can't do too much about it. But you can easily give an NTFS partition a high drive letter, such as M:, with NT's Disk Adminsitrator (Start Menu/Administrative Tools/Disk Administrator). Your Novell setup probably uses not just F: (G:, H:, etc.) but also Z: (Y:, X:, etc.) but there should be some unused letters in the middle of the alphabet you can still use.
Disk Administrator also lets you set your CD drive to a high letter. In my company, I always set up NT machines so the CD drive is drive L:, instead of leaving it at the default, which is one letter past the last hard drive partition. Not only does this make it easier when you go from one machine to the next, but also there are a lot of CD-based programs which have the drive letter in the registry settings. Suppose I have drives C: and D: on a machine and I leave the CD as E:. When I install a program that needs to access the CD drive (like, for example, a map program where the map database is on a CD) the program's configuration expects to find the data CD in E: Now I add a second hard drive to that machine, so the CD drive becomes F: instead. Presto! I've just broken that program, and I get to reinstall it. But the way I do it, even with the new hard drive, the CD drive stays at L:, so the program still works even with the new hard drive.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I know it is hard to accept but I can only mess with OS
> products after work, because I need a job. It is terrible for me
> to have to reinvent the wheel just because it is GPL'd.
It's also pretty terrible that I have to either write my own word processor - that is, "reinvent the wheel" - or pay Microsoft to use Word 2000. Why can't I just steal Word 2000 instead? Just because the Microsoft Corporation spent millions of dollars to write and distribute Word 2000, and copyrighted it too, how does that give them any right to keep me from copying the Word 2000 CD, installing it and using it on my computer, and selling copies to others for profit, all the while not paying Microsoft a single penny? I don't know about "improving overall life," but it certainly would improve my life if I could start a business reselling hot commercial warez for big bux without those stupid police hassling me.
It's so unfair that greedy, selfish organizations, such as Microsoft and the FSF, get to keep legal control over their own property.
Yours WDK - Wkiernan@concentric.net
Maybe so; if I want to buy something from Dell and my Internet connection is down (which seems to happen reasonably often, for reasons which I suspect have little to do with "hacking") I just pick up the telephone and dial up their 1-800 number. I can't help feeling that anybody who runs a business entirely on the Internet and expects he will get the same 24/7 reliability as he can get from the telephone network is kind of deluding himself.
Not that that exactly justifies script kiddies maliciously breaking into anyone's system and running rm -rf as root, far from it. It seems to me that a judge should make a distinction between hacks that are basically harmless, such as Melissa, hacks that require a little cleaning up, like replacing the FBI home page with a parody, and hacks which do permanent damage, like the guy who wiped One38.org's entire web server. A judge would certainly make an analogous distinction between trespassing, burglary and armed robbery. To threaten all hackers indiscriminately with a longer jail sentence for diddling somebody's essentially meaningless home page than they would serve if convicted of assault with a deadly weapon isn't justice, it's hysteria.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
PS: Hey! I can't help noticing, there must be a cookie on this PC because when I went to compose this reply, I was automatically logged in under my /. ID. What a unique, brilliant innovation! Isn't it time that CmdrTaco patented "one-click posting"?
No doubt you (and ABC) are trying to convey the notion that the physical location of l0pht's office is some big dark secret, utterly unknown to the FBI and that like, like the geographical coordinates of Osama Bin Laden's current hideout. Yeah, sure it is.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
By the way, something just now occurred to me concerning amazon.com's patented technology. Does amazon.com require the user to enter a password as well as the cookie info? and if the latter, doesn't that add up to more than Just One Click(tm)? I regularly shop at a couple of web stores which store at least your account name in a cookie, so when you jump to the "Checkout" page your name is already filled in, even including your credit card number (which is displayed as "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234"). But to get to the "Checkout" page you have to present your password first. At any rate, that certainly wouldn't be new or unique (that is, patentable) technology for amazon.com to do it that way.
But if the everything you need for ordering is already stored in cookies, doesn't that present a king-size security hole? Suppose, for example, one of my co-workers orders something from amazon.com with their web browser. And suppose I want to play a mean trick on this co-worker. So I copy his cookies file. Now if all the customer info is keyed off the cookies in the user's PC, I can't exactly steal anything; even if I order something, it will get sent to the original shipping address. But as harassment, I can order up, say, twenty copies of "Mein Kampf" or "The Joys of Enema Sex" or something obnoxious like that on his credit card, with Just One Click!(tm). Is that possible?
I'm almost tempted to break the boycott to experiment. It would be easy enough; just make an actual purchase from one PC, copy the cookie file to a second PC, and see if I can make a second order with Just One Click!(tm).
amazon.com has got a LOT of customers. If there really is such a big, obvious security hole in their patented technology, then maybe these news magazines could make themselves really useful to their readers by warning them away, rather than blathering about the Dire Threat to American Security posed by a few industrious security hackers and a bunch of dumbass script kiddies.
At any rate I hope I'm wrong, and there is a mechanism which forestalls illegitimate ordering. amazon.com and Jeff Bezos can certainly go to Hell for all I care, but I'd hate to see all those innocent customers getting screwed.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I read that first article about the secretive shadowy sinister L0pht gang, and laughed so hard I spilled my coffee. Oooh yeah, L0pht is a big top secret all right. I'm sure I can rely on the rest of the /. readers, insiders and conspirators one and all, to not publicly reveal the location of their top-secret underground web site at, just guess, yep you got it, www.l0pht.com, 'cause if the Man finds out, whooey!
If the major media could stop kissing Jeff Bezos's ass for just a few minutes they'd see that amazon.com's fraudulent patent is a bigger threat to the Internet than all the hackers in the world put together. But Bezos is a billionaire, and Americans - rich ones, at least, like the management of the mass media - don't seem to be able to think clearly in the overwhelming presence of billionaires, whom they worship, unreflectively, disgustingly, just like a crackhead worships a big old chunk of crack.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
>But not all software ought to be free. People have to eat.
Well, food should be free too. I mean it. Look, for example, at the last decade in the U.S.A. Right now the official unemployment rate is about four percent. In 1990 it was up to ten percent. The difference amounts to six percent of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the "cohort" of workers - right now, just short of 140,000,000 people. At the very least then we're talking about approximately nine million people, who were willing to work (as you can see by the fact that they are currently employed) but who were denied jobs by the wave-action of the American economic system. Should nine million Americans, together with their dependent children, have literally starved while the economy slowly readjusted itself?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net