is it better to allow the botnet to continue unabated, or perhaps to risk crashing a computer controlling a heart monitor somewhere?" I would suggest that if a mission-critical system like that is already infected with a bot, the damage is done -- might as well attempt to clean it at that point.
Fine; disregarding the PI=3 thing, and any discussion of homosexuality in the Bible, the ID debate still boils down to taking the Bible (specifically the origin of man) literally versus taking it as an allegory. I still see strict literalists arguing that the universe was created in exactly 144 hours, six thousand years ago. I see people swearing that the Earth literally ceased rotating for a day in Joshua 10:13, and that all humanity except Noah and his wife were obliterated in the Great Flood (thus making every one of us their descendants and incredibly incestuous to boot).
Heck, you get the argument that all humanity on Earth began from Adam and Eve, despite the fact that Cain is marked by God so that any man who finds him will kill him on sight (Genesis 4:15), leaves to settle in the Land of Nod, and in the very next verse (Genesis 4:17) he "knew his wife". His wife? Where the heck did a wife come from? Were Adam and Eve especially bizz-ay? Did God go around randomly creating other humans, and if so, why aren't they written about in Genesis? You'd think the dawn of the human race was important enough that God would make sure to include a heck of a lot more detail.
My point is that you can't decide that some parts of the Bible are to be taken literally, and others are not -- never mind the fact that what we consider "the Bible" today has been translated and retranslated, by people both benign and malicious. One can argue that every single translator was somehow imbued with the Holy Spirit in the same manner as the original authors and thus produced an infallible translation... but that opens a whole new can of worms, as we have dozens of translations of the Bible right now that occasionally contradict one another.
And if you aren't going to be super literal about the origin of man... then there's no argument. It's all semantics. God could easily have designed the Big Bang and the formation of the cosmos and the evolution of life to work out exactly as it has.
In fact, that makes far more sense to me; why would He create this complex universe with its incredible mesh of physical laws, only to break them with miracles and supernatural occurrences? I'd think He'd work within the confines of what He had created.
It isn't a straw man, it's an analogy in the form of parody.
The point is that the ridiculous "pi equals three because the Bible says so" is just as bad an example of cherry-picking as the folks who will quote specific out-of-context Leviticus quotes to "prove" that the Bible is against homosexuality, or point to Genesis and say it "proves" that the universe was created in 6000 years.
You say everyone recognizes that "pi = 3" was not the point of the Bible, and yet there are thousands of Biblical literalists out there who do that exact same thing with whichever passages they find convenient, while hand-waving away those parts that contradict what they want to believe.
The best part of that plan is that the monitors would have to watch the entire video every single time to make sure the horrible content wasn't actually buried in the video. Or maybe they'd be poring over a zillion rickrolls, desperately applying steganographic technique after technique to try and find the hidden illegal porn! It must be here somewhere, the filename said so!
Article:
Some are passive aggressive Comment:
Nothing is sweeter than annoying them silently You do realize that the "IT Bully" is referring to the guy in IT who is being a bully, not the people the IT guy is dealing with, right?
I'm sorry, the FCC is currently occupied making sure deadly deadly nipples don't invade our television programming. Please try your request at a later time.
Complain loudly enough to Comcast and threaten to switch providers unless their service improves I'd love to, if there were an alternative where I live. There isn't, and they know it.
(And to forestall the question, dial-up and satellite Internet are not alternatives -- the former due to throughput, the latter due to latency.)
BitTorrent the company is not BitTorrent the protocol. Bram Cohen may be working with Comcast to get the "legitimate" BitTorrent 6.0 (with its closed source code and protocol) operating cleanly on their networks, but don't expect that this will magically work for every client and tracker out there. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively collaborate to cripple the original, open protocol.
I agree with you totally, but would like to point out that the "upside-down book" photo was manipulated. Bush has done plenty of stupid things without us having to invent more.
This needed to start yesterday. I'm sick of this crap. If they can spread lies like truth then we should be able to spread truth about their dirty secrets. *obviously* I don't support doing anything illegal... I'm just saying that if someone happened to come across some really personal and destructive information about these clowns that it would be for the common good. You might even say it should be posted to all the P2P networks out there.
This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers. A bunch of them in a municipality could automatically mesh together. In theory, enough of them could create a network large enough that they wouldn't even need to tie into the Internet -- they'd have become their own network.
The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course. I'm sure getting an efficient routing system down would be a total nightmare. With a decentralized system like that, I don't know how you'd index or search for information (the exact same problem FreeNet has had). Efficiency and speed will degrade proportionally to geographic distance (number of nodes your data has to hop through). And unless you had a ton of nodes, you're going to get splits in the mesh if a single node happens to connect two disparate meshes and it goes down.
It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me. A completely democratic network, totally decentralized and controlled by the users. And so I'm sure we'll never see it (and it would never work in reality anyway, similar to how communism breaks down in the real world).
1. I have used the HDHomeRun unit with good success - it has two ATSC/QAM tuners and can record two streams simultaneously. It records over your network to a destination such as a MythTV box. It costs around $170. I'd love to try that guy out. Unfortunately, that doesn't resolve the primary issue -- there's no way to record encrypted digital cable streams with a homebrew system, and I doubt there ever will be. In fact, I fully expect that cable boxes will soon only provide HDMI connections encrypted with HDCP -- can't have that "analog hole" now, can we.
Comcast/etc - Advertise their vastly inferior boxes as "Better than TiVo" Actually, I believe it's Dish Network that's doing that, and to be fair, from what I've heard the DishPlayer has made huge strides since the buggy mess it was a few years back. It probably beats the DirecTV DVR hands down, but I'd be surprised if it beats TiVo. I haven't seen one, though, so I can't make a fair comparison.
Instead of spending $600 on a Tivo Series3 device, you can buy a cheap $200 computer, use MythTV to replicate what the Tivo would offer, put Firefox and the VideoDownloader extension on there to watch all the YouTube videos you want on your own time. You're either a troll, or grossly misinformed.
Let's see what it would really take to assemble a MythTV system that could do everything the cheaper ($300, less if refurbished) HD-TiVo can do:
Record two HD streams simultaneously: Two ATSC/QAM Hauppauge HD-PVR cards will cost $600 total. If you want to record any channel that is encrypted, you're out of luck: no decoder cards (that I can find) exist that can accept analog HD video and encode it. (If they do exist, you'll have to hook them each up via an IR extender to a cable box... and you'll still lose quality from the cable box decoding the signal and you re-encoding it.)
Record any instance of a show a la Season Pass: You'll need to pay SchedulesDirect for your TV listings (although granted it is far less than the TiVo monthly fee), and hope they don't collapse and leave you with no listings at all at some arbitrary point in the future.
Output your video to an HDTV: Requires a video card with component, DVI, or HDMI output. Requires a sound card that can output digital sound.
Install additional plugins to watch YouTube: Easy or not, it still requires time that many people simply don't have.
And when you're done, you still get to deal with an interface that is far less intuitive than TiVo's... and in my opinion a lot uglier as well.
There are two main reasons I prefer the MythTV solution to TiVo: first, if you're in full control of the system, you're in full control of the data it records, and you don't have to deal with any encryption crap for the media saved on your own drive. Second, MythVideo lets you play other video files easily, whereas with TiVo you have to use a rather cumbersome TivoToGo hack to do it. But the total inability to record encrypted HD digital cable channels is the deal-stopper for me.
Then how about this: the phone company decides to disconnect your line because although they advertise that their customers can talk for an unlimited amount of time, they think you're just talking way too much, possibly about something they deem inappropriate. You can call right back and continue talking, but they'll keep periodically disconnecting you. When you complain about this to the phone company, they claim that they aren't stopping you from having your conversation; they're just slowing it down a lot in order to manage the number of phone calls on their lines.
Is that a bit more appropriate to you? It's still grossly unacceptable.
Are they going to search every kid's locker and backpack for USB sticks, micro SD-cards, and plain old external hard drive enclosures? From what I've heard, good old sneaker-net is still a common way for kids to exchange movies, songs, games... if they crack down on the net, kids will just resort to physical trading more often.
The side-effect, of course, is that you've made your website accessible only to the "nerd elite". There may be people who are interested in anime, and just getting started, but can't recognize a screencap from Kodomo no Omocha.
Unless, of course, this is exactly what you wanted to do...
...we keep creating smarter CAPTCHAs, which are in turn broken by smarter programs. I'd really hate for the first programs to become sentient and self-aware to be spambots.
You dare to question the people who are just looking out for the children? Why, I bet you're a child molester yourself. Why else would you be defending them, huh? We all know that people who keep shouting about "privacy" are really just using it as an excuse to hide their evil, awful, perverted ways.
Slashdot Mirror
...return from 1960. From. Wow. I've totally forgotten how to spaghetti-code!
Although maybe that's a good thing...
You realize that your use of GOSUB implies that you intend to RETURN to 1960 someday...
Fine; disregarding the PI=3 thing, and any discussion of homosexuality in the Bible, the ID debate still boils down to taking the Bible (specifically the origin of man) literally versus taking it as an allegory. I still see strict literalists arguing that the universe was created in exactly 144 hours, six thousand years ago. I see people swearing that the Earth literally ceased rotating for a day in Joshua 10:13, and that all humanity except Noah and his wife were obliterated in the Great Flood (thus making every one of us their descendants and incredibly incestuous to boot).
Heck, you get the argument that all humanity on Earth began from Adam and Eve, despite the fact that Cain is marked by God so that any man who finds him will kill him on sight (Genesis 4:15), leaves to settle in the Land of Nod, and in the very next verse (Genesis 4:17) he "knew his wife". His wife? Where the heck did a wife come from? Were Adam and Eve especially bizz-ay? Did God go around randomly creating other humans, and if so, why aren't they written about in Genesis? You'd think the dawn of the human race was important enough that God would make sure to include a heck of a lot more detail.
My point is that you can't decide that some parts of the Bible are to be taken literally, and others are not -- never mind the fact that what we consider "the Bible" today has been translated and retranslated, by people both benign and malicious. One can argue that every single translator was somehow imbued with the Holy Spirit in the same manner as the original authors and thus produced an infallible translation... but that opens a whole new can of worms, as we have dozens of translations of the Bible right now that occasionally contradict one another.
And if you aren't going to be super literal about the origin of man... then there's no argument. It's all semantics. God could easily have designed the Big Bang and the formation of the cosmos and the evolution of life to work out exactly as it has.
In fact, that makes far more sense to me; why would He create this complex universe with its incredible mesh of physical laws, only to break them with miracles and supernatural occurrences? I'd think He'd work within the confines of what He had created.
It isn't a straw man, it's an analogy in the form of parody.
The point is that the ridiculous "pi equals three because the Bible says so" is just as bad an example of cherry-picking as the folks who will quote specific out-of-context Leviticus quotes to "prove" that the Bible is against homosexuality, or point to Genesis and say it "proves" that the universe was created in 6000 years.
You say everyone recognizes that "pi = 3" was not the point of the Bible, and yet there are thousands of Biblical literalists out there who do that exact same thing with whichever passages they find convenient, while hand-waving away those parts that contradict what they want to believe.
The best part of that plan is that the monitors would have to watch the entire video every single time to make sure the horrible content wasn't actually buried in the video. Or maybe they'd be poring over a zillion rickrolls, desperately applying steganographic technique after technique to try and find the hidden illegal porn! It must be here somewhere, the filename said so!
You are the bully.
I'm sorry, the FCC is currently occupied making sure deadly deadly nipples don't invade our television programming. Please try your request at a later time.
(And to forestall the question, dial-up and satellite Internet are not alternatives -- the former due to throughput, the latter due to latency.)
BitTorrent the company is not BitTorrent the protocol. Bram Cohen may be working with Comcast to get the "legitimate" BitTorrent 6.0 (with its closed source code and protocol) operating cleanly on their networks, but don't expect that this will magically work for every client and tracker out there. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively collaborate to cripple the original, open protocol.
I DON'T SEE WHAT THE BIG PROBLEM IS. I
HAVE BEEN POSTING FROM MY COMMODORE 64 F
OR TWENTY YEARS NOW AND IT IS WORKING JU
ST FINE FOR ME!
The damned lameness filter has just managed to destroy my joke. Thanks a lot, filter.
I agree with you totally, but would like to point out that the "upside-down book" photo was manipulated. Bush has done plenty of stupid things without us having to invent more.
What? Zap2It was a service of Tribune Media Services. I don't think the two have anything at all in common.
Do as we say, not as we do.
This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers. A bunch of them in a municipality could automatically mesh together. In theory, enough of them could create a network large enough that they wouldn't even need to tie into the Internet -- they'd have become their own network.
The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course. I'm sure getting an efficient routing system down would be a total nightmare. With a decentralized system like that, I don't know how you'd index or search for information (the exact same problem FreeNet has had). Efficiency and speed will degrade proportionally to geographic distance (number of nodes your data has to hop through). And unless you had a ton of nodes, you're going to get splits in the mesh if a single node happens to connect two disparate meshes and it goes down.
It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me. A completely democratic network, totally decentralized and controlled by the users. And so I'm sure we'll never see it (and it would never work in reality anyway, similar to how communism breaks down in the real world).
Let's see what it would really take to assemble a MythTV system that could do everything the cheaper ($300, less if refurbished) HD-TiVo can do:
And when you're done, you still get to deal with an interface that is far less intuitive than TiVo's... and in my opinion a lot uglier as well.
There are two main reasons I prefer the MythTV solution to TiVo: first, if you're in full control of the system, you're in full control of the data it records, and you don't have to deal with any encryption crap for the media saved on your own drive. Second, MythVideo lets you play other video files easily, whereas with TiVo you have to use a rather cumbersome TivoToGo hack to do it. But the total inability to record encrypted HD digital cable channels is the deal-stopper for me.
Then how about this: the phone company decides to disconnect your line because although they advertise that their customers can talk for an unlimited amount of time, they think you're just talking way too much, possibly about something they deem inappropriate. You can call right back and continue talking, but they'll keep periodically disconnecting you. When you complain about this to the phone company, they claim that they aren't stopping you from having your conversation; they're just slowing it down a lot in order to manage the number of phone calls on their lines.
Is that a bit more appropriate to you? It's still grossly unacceptable.
Are they going to search every kid's locker and backpack for USB sticks, micro SD-cards, and plain old external hard drive enclosures? From what I've heard, good old sneaker-net is still a common way for kids to exchange movies, songs, games... if they crack down on the net, kids will just resort to physical trading more often.
I figured he was just preventing KittenAuth from being Slashdotted. Seemed very polite to me, actually.
The side-effect, of course, is that you've made your website accessible only to the "nerd elite". There may be people who are interested in anime, and just getting started, but can't recognize a screencap from Kodomo no Omocha.
Unless, of course, this is exactly what you wanted to do...
...we keep creating smarter CAPTCHAs, which are in turn broken by smarter programs. I'd really hate for the first programs to become sentient and self-aware to be spambots.
You dare to question the people who are just looking out for the children? Why, I bet you're a child molester yourself. Why else would you be defending them, huh? We all know that people who keep shouting about "privacy" are really just using it as an excuse to hide their evil, awful, perverted ways.
(Also, they're all terrorists who hate America.)