that you think it is justifiable to end a man's life because he sends you unwanted email?...
In the quantities that he sent, yes
Is spam that much of an annoyance to you that you are filled with satisfaction when a man is bludgeoned to death, only because that man was a spammer?...
I believe that this will end up in court. I have no idea how Canadian law works other than in many ways it works sort of like US law.
As this is totally uncharted territory, the biggest unknown is how the judges will interpret existing laws. Currently vogue politics will also have an impact on the judges' decisions. There are Canadian laws specificly regarding conduct during labor negotiations and labor unions have lawyers that are very good at using and/or avoiding these laws.
"why not spend some time working on nice graphical front-end and get people interested in something other than a server??"
Some people ask the same thing about Linux. I use both Linux and FreeBSD desktops and I see no real differences between KDE and Gnome under either OS.
FreeBSD has been used on enterprise level servers for so long that people just assume FreeBSD is only a server OS and they hadn't thought of using it as a desktop OS.
The Imax film about the International Space Station has an astronaut describing and partially showing what happens when popcorn is released in near Zero G. It floats around the cabin for a while and then gets sucked onto the air recirculation grills. It is very much like what happens when small particles are released into a closed room that has an air circulation system.
I am a Unix sysadmin and also admin an application that sends data to a mainframe. I cannot get over the lack of error handling on the mainframe side concerning input data. From my experience, Unix applications are designed to gracefully handle errors, frequently by discarding the input data and writing an error message to a log; sending an email message/page is optional. From what I see of the mainframe world, if the input isn't available when the mainframe wants it or the mainframe doesn't like the data for some reason the mainframe pukes, frequently rewinding the virtual input, process, and output tapes and starting over. If a 500,000 line data file has one field with 21 characters when the mainframe is looking for 20 characters, ignore the bad line and report the error - don't have a hissy fit and reject the entire file.
Uhh, that's not punishment - it's checking the filesystem for damage and attempting to recover from any filesystem damage that you caused by not turning the system off gracefully. The requirement that computers be gracefully shut down will not go away until we have instantaneous file storage write capability. Even with instantaneous writing to file storage; some OS's, applications, and filesystems will probably still need a a few seconds to gracefully shut down.
There usually isn't any immediately noticeable or significant damage caused to the filesystem by simply turning the power off. Scandisk is checking for damage and will attempt to repair some types of damage that it finds. I have seen significant unrepairable filesystem damage caused to both Windows and *NIX filesystems by suddenly turning the power off to a computer. *NIX uses fsck to check and attempt to repair it's filesystems. Some applications also have files that can be damaged (even if the filesystem isn't damaged) if the power is shut down at the wrong time.
"The home user, (not lazy, not ignorant as one post call them) is not an IT person."
I agree that it is unfair to call home users lazy. if one defines ignorant as having the lack of knowledge or education concerning the safe and secure operation of a personal computer running Windows, home users in general can fairly be considered to be ignorant. If people were as ignorant about the use of toasters or blow dryers as they are about the safe use of computers, every apartment building in the US and most of the houses in the US would have burned down by now. Home Depot and other stores stopped selling halogen torchiers because people were finding new and more stupid ways to start house fires with them. How are people who don't know that they aren't supposed to put a newspaper on top of a halogen bulb supposed to know how to safely use, operate, and maintain a personal computer?
Ovum has also said: "Microsoft's.NET technology is at least six months ahead of its rivals"... "It's more complete, more ready and more widely deployed than any of its web services framework competitors". http://www.aspstreet.com/pr/a.taf/idpr,61991
And: "The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a "doomed" technology that has no hope of matching Microsoft Corp.'s Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM), according to a new report on middleware. "http://www.computerworld.com/news/1997/story/0,11 280,21627,00.html
"So why does everyone providing non-DRM publications seem to be giving them away? If they're that convinced in people's honesty, prove it. Make money!
It seems that the current business model for authors who provide non-DRM digital copies is to give away the digital copies and sell the dead tree copies. It is the license model that they have chosen for these books and it appears that at least some of the authors believe that releasing non-DRM digital copies improves the sale of dead tree copies. These authors do not need to prove other peoples' honesty any more than any other author would have to. It appears that at least some of the authors that release non-DRM digital copies of their work ARE making money.
"... it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals... "
It is also conceivable that people may die because of cuts to various medical programs in the US. Does this mean that polititians should be charged with manslaughter if people die due to cuts in healthcare spending? What if people die because of laws and regulations that prohibit Americans from buying prescribed medication from a less expensive pharmacy in Canada? Should hospital administrators be charged with manslaughter if they use vulnerable software in a position where a computer virus would cause a person's death? Where does the criminal liability stop?
I have no sympathy whatsoever for ANY users that continue to use Internet Explorer to visit ANY website. The problem has been talked to death in the popular press and anybody who doesn't realize that there is a major security problem when using Windows and MSIE should not be using a computer. I also believe that anybody who doesn't know that they shouldn't toss a toaster or blow dryer into a bathtub should not be allowed to use any electrical appliance. There is NO difference between ignoring the warnings about computer security and ignoring warnings about the use of other appliances.
Re:Not sure about this.
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Okay, wooden objects (like this) are for everyone, but some people want wooden inlays in their cars too. I think that would be comparable."
Wood inlays consist of thin slices of wood covering a substrate. Wood inlays are generally used for decorating a flat object and it is possible to have curved wood inlays. This iPod case is a three dimensional carving made from one piece of wood, not an inlay.
Wood carving and wood inlays are both techniques that can be used to create beautiful works of art, and both techniques can be combined in the same piece.
Your Linux users anology just made me realize the difference between Linux users, *BSD users, and Apple users: Linux users are like Rice-Boys, *BSD users are like the dudes who built high performance muscle cars, and Apple users just want to drive the cool muscle cars that the *BSD guys built.
Some examples of what this tax has funded:
It Puerto Rico, it was supposed to be used to wire 1,500 of Puerto Rico's schools for the Internet. In 2001, only nine schools had been wired.
Auditors also found nearly $23 million in equipment that had never been installed in [Puerto Rican] schools, along with $3 million per month spent on high-speed Internet connections in schools that didn't even have PCs.
In Chicago, about $8 million worth of equipment provided by SBC was never deployed in the city's public schools.
It is likely that "poor college kids" are not Sony's target market for this product. It could be that Sony is going for the more lucrative older people with a job and disposable income market. I can see business software, travel, credit card, some automobile, and maybe cell phone companies busting ass to get the college kid market in order to try to get a brand recognition and loyalty established. Playstations already have brand recognition and if they have the games, they will have the market. Sony is trying to sell games by subsidising their game console, they are NOT subsidising a general purpose computer and DVD player. "Poor college kids" don't have the disposable income to buy the $60 games that makes it profitable to subsidise the console. Maybe in a few years the price will come down to the point where you will be able to afford it.
Maybe they got lucky the previous times. Maybe they didn't overlook these safety issues on previous launches because there was less PR pressure to launch. I do not if there were documented specifications that should have prevented the launch of the Columbia. I do know that there were documented specifications that should have prevented the launch of the Challenger and that engineers had tried to postpone the launch based upon documented specs of the materials used - would you consider this to be paranoid?
Except for Des Moines, which is not reachable by Amrak, air travel is either the same price or close in price to travel by Amtrak. Time wise, there is no contest.
Time and prices, round trip from St Paul to Chicago and Detroit leaving July 10th, returning July 18th. I did minimal searching for best fares and the times include shortest possible lay overs.
Amtrack:
Chicago 8 hours, $200
Detroit 29 hours, $250
By Northwest Airlines:
Chicago 1.5 hours, $200
Detroit less than 3 hours, $300
Don't forget to add the cost of food for the Detroit trip.
This means that the sheeple are either knowingly buying DRM'd music files or don't care enough to know that the files are DRM'd and that their use (and possibly their usable life) is limited. On top of this, the sheeple are paying about a dollar per file. THis is yet another example of P.T. Barnum being 100% correct about a sucker being born every minute (several per minute now due to the increased birth rate).
"Once deployed, SuitSat is expected to orbit the planet for several weeks before burning up when it enters Earth's atmosphere."
From Wikipedia:... "In the United States, persons who travel above an altitude of 50.0 miles (80.5 km) are designated as astronauts.... The Karman line, at 100 km (62 mi), is also frequently used as the boundary between atmosphere and space."
At an altitude of about 350 km, the ISS is in a stable orbit (barely) and is a bit further out than "the edge of the atmosphere" (which does not exist but is frequently considered to be 100 km).
It is cool for hams to get satellites into earth orbit. Amateur Radio is perhaps one of the first examples Open Source or community development. From the very start; amateurs developed radio circuits, techniques, and standards that were openly published for anybody to use. Some of the right people understand the usefulness of Amateur Radio and the need for such projects.
In most cases the people building ham satellites are hams, with some corporate support. The really cool part is that the various national space agencies allow / takes part in the deployment of the ham satellites.
Yeah, I know that US politics are far right of much of Western European and Canadian politics. American politics are not that right of center compared to some other areas of the world; such as the Middle East and of South America in some ways. My reference points were the American political spectrum. My point was that during American political compaigns that there is no middle ground between the two parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you joking?
No
Has human life lost all sanctity...
No
that you think it is justifiable to end a man's life because he sends you unwanted email?...
In the quantities that he sent, yes
Is spam that much of an annoyance to you that you are filled with satisfaction when a man is bludgeoned to death, only because that man was a spammer?...
Yes
I believe that this will end up in court. I have no idea how Canadian law works other than in many ways it works sort of like US law. As this is totally uncharted territory, the biggest unknown is how the judges will interpret existing laws. Currently vogue politics will also have an impact on the judges' decisions. There are Canadian laws specificly regarding conduct during labor negotiations and labor unions have lawyers that are very good at using and/or avoiding these laws.
"why not spend some time working on nice graphical front-end and get people interested in something other than a server??"
Some people ask the same thing about Linux. I use both Linux and FreeBSD desktops and I see no real differences between KDE and Gnome under either OS.
FreeBSD has been used on enterprise level servers for so long that people just assume FreeBSD is only a server OS and they hadn't thought of using it as a desktop OS.
The Imax film about the International Space Station has an astronaut describing and partially showing what happens when popcorn is released in near Zero G. It floats around the cabin for a while and then gets sucked onto the air recirculation grills. It is very much like what happens when small particles are released into a closed room that has an air circulation system.
" I have to work with these lists, because part of my job is to support a telemarketing system ..."
All I can say is "Fuck off phone spammer"
I am a Unix sysadmin and also admin an application that sends data to a mainframe. I cannot get over the lack of error handling on the mainframe side concerning input data. From my experience, Unix applications are designed to gracefully handle errors, frequently by discarding the input data and writing an error message to a log; sending an email message /page is optional. From what I see of the mainframe world, if the input isn't available when the mainframe wants it or the mainframe doesn't like the data for some reason the mainframe pukes, frequently rewinding the virtual input, process, and output tapes and starting over. If a 500,000 line data file has one field with 21 characters when the mainframe is looking for 20 characters, ignore the bad line and report the error - don't have a hissy fit and reject the entire file.
Uhh, that's not punishment - it's checking the filesystem for damage and attempting to recover from any filesystem damage that you caused by not turning the system off gracefully. The requirement that computers be gracefully shut down will not go away until we have instantaneous file storage write capability. Even with instantaneous writing to file storage; some OS's, applications, and filesystems will probably still need a a few seconds to gracefully shut down.
There usually isn't any immediately noticeable or significant damage caused to the filesystem by simply turning the power off. Scandisk is checking for damage and will attempt to repair some types of damage that it finds. I have seen significant unrepairable filesystem damage caused to both Windows and *NIX filesystems by suddenly turning the power off to a computer. *NIX uses fsck to check and attempt to repair it's filesystems. Some applications also have files that can be damaged (even if the filesystem isn't damaged) if the power is shut down at the wrong time.
"The home user, (not lazy, not ignorant as one post call them) is not an IT person."
I agree that it is unfair to call home users lazy. if one defines ignorant as having the lack of knowledge or education concerning the safe and secure operation of a personal computer running Windows, home users in general can fairly be considered to be ignorant. If people were as ignorant about the use of toasters or blow dryers as they are about the safe use of computers, every apartment building in the US and most of the houses in the US would have burned down by now. Home Depot and other stores stopped selling halogen torchiers because people were finding new and more stupid ways to start house fires with them. How are people who don't know that they aren't supposed to put a newspaper on top of a halogen bulb supposed to know how to safely use, operate, and maintain a personal computer?
Ovum has also said: "Microsoft's .NET technology is at least six months ahead of its rivals" ... "It's more complete, more ready and more widely deployed than any of its web services framework competitors". http://www.aspstreet.com/pr/a.taf/idpr,61991
1 280,21627,00.html
And: "The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a "doomed" technology that has no hope of matching Microsoft Corp.'s Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM), according to a new report on middleware. "http://www.computerworld.com/news/1997/story/0,1
"So why does everyone providing non-DRM publications seem to be giving them away? If they're that convinced in people's honesty, prove it. Make money!
It seems that the current business model for authors who provide non-DRM digital copies is to give away the digital copies and sell the dead tree copies. It is the license model that they have chosen for these books and it appears that at least some of the authors believe that releasing non-DRM digital copies improves the sale of dead tree copies. These authors do not need to prove other peoples' honesty any more than any other author would have to. It appears that at least some of the authors that release non-DRM digital copies of their work ARE making money.
"... it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals ... "
It is also conceivable that people may die because of cuts to various medical programs in the US. Does this mean that polititians should be charged with manslaughter if people die due to cuts in healthcare spending? What if people die because of laws and regulations that prohibit Americans from buying prescribed medication from a less expensive pharmacy in Canada? Should hospital administrators be charged with manslaughter if they use vulnerable software in a position where a computer virus would cause a person's death? Where does the criminal liability stop?
I have been hearing quite a bit recently about OpenBSD being wonderful and about how some people are having issues with the FreeBSD 5.n tree.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for ANY users that continue to use Internet Explorer to visit ANY website. The problem has been talked to death in the popular press and anybody who doesn't realize that there is a major security problem when using Windows and MSIE should not be using a computer. I also believe that anybody who doesn't know that they shouldn't toss a toaster or blow dryer into a bathtub should not be allowed to use any electrical appliance. There is NO difference between ignoring the warnings about computer security and ignoring warnings about the use of other appliances.
"Okay, wooden objects (like this) are for everyone, but some people want wooden inlays in their cars too. I think that would be comparable."
Wood inlays consist of thin slices of wood covering a substrate. Wood inlays are generally used for decorating a flat object and it is possible to have curved wood inlays. This iPod case is a three dimensional carving made from one piece of wood, not an inlay.
Wood carving and wood inlays are both techniques that can be used to create beautiful works of art, and both techniques can be combined in the same piece.
Your Linux users anology just made me realize the difference between Linux users, *BSD users, and Apple users: Linux users are like Rice-Boys, *BSD users are like the dudes who built high performance muscle cars, and Apple users just want to drive the cool muscle cars that the *BSD guys built.
Some examples of what this tax has funded: It Puerto Rico, it was supposed to be used to wire 1,500 of Puerto Rico's schools for the Internet. In 2001, only nine schools had been wired. Auditors also found nearly $23 million in equipment that had never been installed in [Puerto Rican] schools, along with $3 million per month spent on high-speed Internet connections in schools that didn't even have PCs. In Chicago, about $8 million worth of equipment provided by SBC was never deployed in the city's public schools.
It is likely that "poor college kids" are not Sony's target market for this product. It could be that Sony is going for the more lucrative older people with a job and disposable income market. I can see business software, travel, credit card, some automobile, and maybe cell phone companies busting ass to get the college kid market in order to try to get a brand recognition and loyalty established. Playstations already have brand recognition and if they have the games, they will have the market. Sony is trying to sell games by subsidising their game console, they are NOT subsidising a general purpose computer and DVD player. "Poor college kids" don't have the disposable income to buy the $60 games that makes it profitable to subsidise the console. Maybe in a few years the price will come down to the point where you will be able to afford it.
Maybe they got lucky the previous times. Maybe they didn't overlook these safety issues on previous launches because there was less PR pressure to launch. I do not if there were documented specifications that should have prevented the launch of the Columbia. I do know that there were documented specifications that should have prevented the launch of the Challenger and that engineers had tried to postpone the launch based upon documented specs of the materials used - would you consider this to be paranoid?
Except for Des Moines, which is not reachable by Amrak, air travel is either the same price or close in price to travel by Amtrak. Time wise, there is no contest. Time and prices, round trip from St Paul to Chicago and Detroit leaving July 10th, returning July 18th. I did minimal searching for best fares and the times include shortest possible lay overs. Amtrack: Chicago 8 hours, $200 Detroit 29 hours, $250 By Northwest Airlines: Chicago 1.5 hours, $200 Detroit less than 3 hours, $300 Don't forget to add the cost of food for the Detroit trip.
"Firefox absolutely must work with the standards that IE has set."
*BZZZT* Ohhh, that's the wrong answer. Thank you for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you.
One word: "Active-X"
This means that the sheeple are either knowingly buying DRM'd music files or don't care enough to know that the files are DRM'd and that their use (and possibly their usable life) is limited. On top of this, the sheeple are paying about a dollar per file. THis is yet another example of P.T. Barnum being 100% correct about a sucker being born every minute (several per minute now due to the increased birth rate).
From TFA:
... "In the United States, persons who travel above an altitude of 50.0 miles (80.5 km) are designated as astronauts. ... The Karman line, at 100 km (62 mi), is also frequently used as the boundary between atmosphere and space."
"Once deployed, SuitSat is expected to orbit the planet for several weeks before burning up when it enters Earth's atmosphere."
From Wikipedia:
At an altitude of about 350 km, the ISS is in a stable orbit (barely) and is a bit further out than "the edge of the atmosphere" (which does not exist but is frequently considered to be 100 km).
It is cool for hams to get satellites into earth orbit. Amateur Radio is perhaps one of the first examples Open Source or community development. From the very start; amateurs developed radio circuits, techniques, and standards that were openly published for anybody to use. Some of the right people understand the usefulness of Amateur Radio and the need for such projects.
In most cases the people building ham satellites are hams, with some corporate support. The really cool part is that the various national space agencies allow / takes part in the deployment of the ham satellites.
Yeah, I know that US politics are far right of much of Western European and Canadian politics. American politics are not that right of center compared to some other areas of the world; such as the Middle East and of South America in some ways. My reference points were the American political spectrum. My point was that during American political compaigns that there is no middle ground between the two parties.