I'll make an exception to my long standing policy of not responding to ACs:
The reason that America hasn't been subsequently attacked had nothing to do with punishing the silly, stupid Taleban in Afghanistan, or fomenting a war in Iraq. The perps were a group calling themselves Al Qaeda, and they haven't been touched. They were weak, tiny, and extremely clever; they got past security in NE airports, then were successful in three crashes, while the fourth dive bombed in Pennsylvania. This was not a million man army with nukes, just some very clever people. They subsequently disrupted transportation in Spain, where people were murdered, and also in the UK, where others were murdered.
No subsequent acts have occurred for any number of reasons, almost none of which have to do with the wars, as the wars were about pride and oil. This has nothing to do with US Dept of Homeland Security, which is an oxymoron.
Fight the bastards when they try to impinge on your privacy and your liberty. Question authority. Do so politely. Then let the judges kick them in the tender parts. That's their job. Do it again, repeat until you're free, because today, you're not.
I understand IP. I understand what is theft, and what isn't. I don't abide by customs searches for somebody's IP. I bought and paid for every single piece of music I have. None were torrented, or obtained through nebulous means from a copyright respect perspective.
And the music moguls now want to enforce the ability to check on me. With WHAT??? How can a customs agent possibly determine the MP3s that I have are, or are not purchased with validity???? THEY CANNOT!
IP protection isn't the backbone of the US economy. It's an intangibles-fantasy to think so. That's not what my father built, his father built, my mother built, and so on. It's the asset protection mechanism of the nonsensical. It's not innovative, it's not producing return on the intangible asset, it's as flimsy as derivates. Yet I respect the concept of asset ownership, and my rights under the law as a consumer. Now some nitwit's pressured various treaty signators to look at my damn MP3 player-- where's the justice in that??????
It would seem that there is truth to what you say. Defending the war seems to have come to awful ends for UK researchers, I'd say.
In the UK and in the EU, the price of fuel is far higher. Still, mass transportation and dealing with the high price is assuaged by decades of astute planning. Instead, we in the US have been spending money on airports without thought to what might happen if air travel wasn't quite as cost-effective sometime in the future. And we've built endless strip malls designed around people with cheap fuel to burn to get to them, rather then neighborhood-focused, easily/cheaply accessible shops.
Oil was bound to skyrocket at some point, but in the US, our preparation for such disasters is very poor; look at Katrina and how the fabric of a vibrant economy went to hell in just six hours, lasting until who knows when?
It's just as baseless as global warming. If Bush's pipe dreams (there not being any other intelligence supporting his actions, and he had hardly any plans at all, let alone support from the international community or the UN), it had to be for oil. Bush is an oil man. His father was an oil man. His brother was in real estate (remember the S&L crises in TX in the '80s??).
It was about oil. No tin foil hat. Oil. It wasn't about Saddam. He had a fat mouth that got him lynched. Yes, he was a murderous SOB but then there are loads of them around and we don't do even a fraction of them justice.
And the plan backfired. A commodities market has grasped the weakness of the currency and the high demand, and they now are poised to raise oil until it's at the blood-letting levels, where they'll back off and ride the profits until 'something happens' to deflate the market. In the interim, the economies of the middle east, Venezuela, and Mexico (although Mexico can't capitalize assets to reduce their bleeding) are pretty much glowing with petro-currencies, largely worthless dollars.
If we were going to halt terrorism, we should have targeted the perps in the 9/11 fiasco, and dealt with them. We have not, only serving as poster boy enemies for recruiters of psycho-jihadis. And the rest of Islam looks at us, like the rest of the world, like we must be insane. Indeed our gutless leadership is just that. It takes guts to admit you're wrong, and they'll never do it. This while deficit spending is far out of control, the Fed inflates the currency instead of forcing banks/derivative holders to take a bath, and the average Joe and his grandchildren go broke.
Oddly, we don't have cameras watching our every move, and have at least a modicum of academic freedom, contrasting with the poor researchers in TFA in the UK.
Fear drives so much in the form of bad governmental behavior. I feel for my British friends, as they must feel for Americans. Blair and Bush (now Brown), leading their countries down the path to an oil war-- not terrorism-- oil. Not religious self-righteousness-- war for oil and to destabilize governments not marching in-step with them.
The quotations of American and British patriots that warn that liberty at the cost of security is folly are now sadly worn out. My British friends have less hope because they believe that Tory and Labor, just like Democrats and Republicans, are largely the same. This is a dangerous time in the world for people not to believe in the integrity and veracity of their governments; more is at stake in interdependency than ever before. I hope, no pray, they listen to their constituents.
As its name implies, ransomware is a rather onerous and potentially litigious method of making money. Extortionware, TeaseWare, and other models are likely to be frown upon in most circles.
There's the OS model as manifested by Ubuntu, RH, SUSE, and others. Each has different market motivators and success.
There's the cool-app model, like MySQL, Apache, and others that depend on application support and transparency across a lot of software disciplines.
There's the vertical app model, like Asterisk, that uses hardware/software/extensions to motivate the community, each making a few cents in within sub-markets.
There's the 'fringe' app (not said in a deragotory way) that uses a shareware-like valuing through paypal, donationware, and other 'love of the art'/hacker's bent.
And these are only a sampling of general categories. F/OSS in the Stallman model doesn't have to be a vow of poverty. On the contrary, we're only scratching the surface of how F/OSS makes money.
As mentioned upthread, most people are sacked and possibly given severance. Removal of privilege shouldn't be regarded in a negative way. Post a lot. Catch up on your communications. Tell everyone your new email address. If they require you to be in the office, do a good job and get a good reference. If you can be at home and there are no strictures on what you can do there (e.g. employment contract), then do what you want to.
Most IT staff are unceremoniously sacked. They either have high standards or you're there in case you're needed to do something they haven't thought of. In any case, don't be bummed by lack of access. Learn how to beat Freecell in under 60 seconds or something, or do your job search, or whatever you're inclined/motivated to. And enjoy it, as you're luckier than 95% of the IT staff I deal with.
By your broad definition, any community is a small religion, and that's not true. There is a common bond, but Slashdot users are more like what Kurt Vonnegut called a grandfaloon, which is a gathering of individuals with no overt tying bond, like the Order of Elks. While Elks are a philanthropic group and that's their bond (as in fraternal), the ties here are topics of nerdish/computing bonds. But even though the LinuxOphiles, MacFanBois/girlz, WindowsDefenderz, and the hackers bond, slashdot is not a small religion.
We agree the that the judges showed wisdom, but the taint of definition is still ambiguous and the stanch of free speech is still onerous.
I believe that the replacement for the traditional browser will eventually emerge, and with luck, assuage some of the problems presented by both the UI and the methodology used to build the machine processes needed to communicate. But maybe I'm being quixotic..... thanks for your interesting addition to the thread.
It displays *stuff*. Content is a sycophantic notion. Browsers ought to have the ability to methodically represent the author's intention, and the author shouldn't have to be a manual embedder of information (codes) for it to be displayed correctly across multiple reading applications (browsers).
What you see is what you get is a wonderful idea. Imagine, not needing print views, and rendering for all window shapes and screen resolutions.... sorry, just fantasizing.
The web as a concept isn't at issue in my criticism, although the W3C isn't very good at setting 'standards'.
It's the browser. Coding php may be a server-side activity, but look at how browser design causes headaches. Any good web page designer needs five browsers to insure rendering. They need IE, Firefox/Mozilla, K/Safari, and Opera-- not to mention mobile/cell versions of these.
For more articulate criticism rendered by someone I agree with (mostly), search on Jakob Nielsen user interface.
I know the history of it intimately. Because it wasn't well though through, it's a miserable user interface. Yes, it seems flexible, and it's nice that the W3 specs are there, but they're not well thought-through, either. Whether it's Java, php, or another language, the pallette called the 'browser' is the biggest, most anarchistic piece of junk I've ever seen. Plug-ins are great.... there are many good things. But the screen real estate, and the number of ways that it can be buggered are just insane. As a GUI, the browser totally sucks. If you don't believe what I'm saying, try to remember "The Frames Era".
A good UI shouldn't have to have users embedding markup language manually. It shouldn't have to trouble you about fonts, re-sizing your window widths. It shouldn't have ways that browser makers can bugger up wysiwyg information in so many ingenious ways.
Mark me as flamebait if you want, but the browser is a disaster, years after its invention, and constant reinvention.
As Vista is the only platform known to respect the flag, yes. Underneath the embedded flag is either a screw-up, or the barrel of a gun aimed precisely at the metatarsals and the smoking hole after-effect.
Let's see, how many different competing sources of videos are there today? And NBC thinks it's got the best ones out there and wants to restrict their dissemination with the broadcast flag?
I don't really care if Vista respects the flag or not. NBC, by putting it in the stream, thwarts its use, legitimate or not. In the YouTube/Tube world, they have *so* scratched themselves off the list.
Let's see-- was that good for marketshare, branding, asset value, shareholder value, or compennsation? Hullo?
You're handing them the keys. You're not allowed to do that. You're obligated to assess the implications and give them to a corporate officer, because you're transferring assets. Really. Don't make this decision on your own. It's your organization's assets and if they're going to be given away, an officer needs to know this.
Should accessibility be granted, then you need user controls that don't kill your CPU or generate queries from hell. RO access is one thing, sucking data and porting into MySQL or another db is trivial, so be prepared for other strange problems that you customer might try and impose on you. You need to clearly constrain the access, if in a congenial way.
It might be quixotic, but you're a nice person. Your carrier might have some problem it... and it might be illegal to use your AP depending on the locale.
It reminds me of the old biker saying, ass grass or gas, nobody rides for free.....
You haven't seen the salient evidence. Children are impressionable, and things like graphic violence and pornography aren't good for them. There's a very good reason why adult bookstores are 18+.
Children have no context to put such images in. I won't go into parental responsibilities to teach their children about the realities of life, but there are some images that children clearly should not be subjected to.
In my opinion, which varies from the 'norm', nudity is fine at any age. But watching sex acts isn't a good idea, and watching violence without giving the context also is a bad idea. If you believe it's a good idea, or has no impression, then you're invited to research the topic as I have, and you'll see the research, see the conclusions, and see the evidence.
I gave up my Verizon plan; $60/mo was ridiculous. Convenient, yes. Frustrating, yes. Mercurial on a good day, impossible on a bad one.
Yeah, the meter is on. Let's hope this form of 'broadband' changes, and soon. I was hoping that WiMAX would be real, but even with the recent divorce and remarriage of Clearwire and Sprint and Intel, I don't give it much of a chance. I like Craig McGaw's LEO access balloons.....
Although I wonder how you get email it it's not 'internet', my old plan didn't seem to have any boundaries, just crappy and mercurial service. I had to mod various ugly plist files on my Mac to make it work, and Linux was plainly not going to see it as a modem without a lot of work. This guy used Windows; the low-hanging-fruit test.
The reality is that wireless broadband as expoused by the carriers in the US is on the meter now; it's not really broadband just bits-per-buck.
Does anyone see the connection here?
on
Comparing 3G Networks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Philadelphia's muniWiFi network goes dead next month when Earthlink pulls the plug.
Oddly, the telcos start allowing metered access of their 3G networks; no all-you-can-eat plans anymore. In megabyte increments in one case.....
You share a commonality with every other American-- that our politicians don't fully represent our views. They can't as they're only 549 of them, and several hundred million of us.
Yes, the Chinese censor the Internet. This is one of the smaller of their displeasing behaviors. Censorship is almost always a bad thing, except when the sensibilities of children are at stake.
The slumbering dragon slowly awakes after many years of dark ages. Their rulers are inexperienced, and their political system isn't as evolved as others. There are worse, and many of them, just not as large as China. We're impatient to watch them grow up. I'd like to see a free Tibet..... press freedoms, and freedom of movement, and freedom from involuntary servitude, and better environmental management. These things will come, hopefully soon. Trying to eradicate China in toto is silly, however. Instead, consider befriending and allying democratic and sensible efforts towards a freer and open society. It takes one person at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll make an exception to my long standing policy of not responding to ACs:
The reason that America hasn't been subsequently attacked had nothing to do with punishing the silly, stupid Taleban in Afghanistan, or fomenting a war in Iraq. The perps were a group calling themselves Al Qaeda, and they haven't been touched. They were weak, tiny, and extremely clever; they got past security in NE airports, then were successful in three crashes, while the fourth dive bombed in Pennsylvania. This was not a million man army with nukes, just some very clever people. They subsequently disrupted transportation in Spain, where people were murdered, and also in the UK, where others were murdered.
No subsequent acts have occurred for any number of reasons, almost none of which have to do with the wars, as the wars were about pride and oil. This has nothing to do with US Dept of Homeland Security, which is an oxymoron.
Fight the bastards when they try to impinge on your privacy and your liberty. Question authority. Do so politely. Then let the judges kick them in the tender parts. That's their job. Do it again, repeat until you're free, because today, you're not.
Thanks. Fixing our foreign policy will be difficult. We have jihadi of our own.
I understand IP. I understand what is theft, and what isn't. I don't abide by customs searches for somebody's IP. I bought and paid for every single piece of music I have. None were torrented, or obtained through nebulous means from a copyright respect perspective.
And the music moguls now want to enforce the ability to check on me. With WHAT??? How can a customs agent possibly determine the MP3s that I have are, or are not purchased with validity???? THEY CANNOT!
IP protection isn't the backbone of the US economy. It's an intangibles-fantasy to think so. That's not what my father built, his father built, my mother built, and so on. It's the asset protection mechanism of the nonsensical. It's not innovative, it's not producing return on the intangible asset, it's as flimsy as derivates. Yet I respect the concept of asset ownership, and my rights under the law as a consumer. Now some nitwit's pressured various treaty signators to look at my damn MP3 player-- where's the justice in that??????
It would seem that there is truth to what you say. Defending the war seems to have come to awful ends for UK researchers, I'd say.
In the UK and in the EU, the price of fuel is far higher. Still, mass transportation and dealing with the high price is assuaged by decades of astute planning. Instead, we in the US have been spending money on airports without thought to what might happen if air travel wasn't quite as cost-effective sometime in the future. And we've built endless strip malls designed around people with cheap fuel to burn to get to them, rather then neighborhood-focused, easily/cheaply accessible shops.
Oil was bound to skyrocket at some point, but in the US, our preparation for such disasters is very poor; look at Katrina and how the fabric of a vibrant economy went to hell in just six hours, lasting until who knows when?
It's just as baseless as global warming. If Bush's pipe dreams (there not being any other intelligence supporting his actions, and he had hardly any plans at all, let alone support from the international community or the UN), it had to be for oil. Bush is an oil man. His father was an oil man. His brother was in real estate (remember the S&L crises in TX in the '80s??).
It was about oil. No tin foil hat. Oil. It wasn't about Saddam. He had a fat mouth that got him lynched. Yes, he was a murderous SOB but then there are loads of them around and we don't do even a fraction of them justice.
And the plan backfired. A commodities market has grasped the weakness of the currency and the high demand, and they now are poised to raise oil until it's at the blood-letting levels, where they'll back off and ride the profits until 'something happens' to deflate the market. In the interim, the economies of the middle east, Venezuela, and Mexico (although Mexico can't capitalize assets to reduce their bleeding) are pretty much glowing with petro-currencies, largely worthless dollars.
If we were going to halt terrorism, we should have targeted the perps in the 9/11 fiasco, and dealt with them. We have not, only serving as poster boy enemies for recruiters of psycho-jihadis. And the rest of Islam looks at us, like the rest of the world, like we must be insane. Indeed our gutless leadership is just that. It takes guts to admit you're wrong, and they'll never do it. This while deficit spending is far out of control, the Fed inflates the currency instead of forcing banks/derivative holders to take a bath, and the average Joe and his grandchildren go broke.
Oddly, we don't have cameras watching our every move, and have at least a modicum of academic freedom, contrasting with the poor researchers in TFA in the UK.
Fear drives so much in the form of bad governmental behavior. I feel for my British friends, as they must feel for Americans. Blair and Bush (now Brown), leading their countries down the path to an oil war-- not terrorism-- oil. Not religious self-righteousness-- war for oil and to destabilize governments not marching in-step with them.
The quotations of American and British patriots that warn that liberty at the cost of security is folly are now sadly worn out. My British friends have less hope because they believe that Tory and Labor, just like Democrats and Republicans, are largely the same. This is a dangerous time in the world for people not to believe in the integrity and veracity of their governments; more is at stake in interdependency than ever before. I hope, no pray, they listen to their constituents.
As its name implies, ransomware is a rather onerous and potentially litigious method of making money. Extortionware, TeaseWare, and other models are likely to be frown upon in most circles.
There's the OS model as manifested by Ubuntu, RH, SUSE, and others. Each has different market motivators and success.
There's the cool-app model, like MySQL, Apache, and others that depend on application support and transparency across a lot of software disciplines.
There's the vertical app model, like Asterisk, that uses hardware/software/extensions to motivate the community, each making a few cents in within sub-markets.
There's the 'fringe' app (not said in a deragotory way) that uses a shareware-like valuing through paypal, donationware, and other 'love of the art'/hacker's bent.
And these are only a sampling of general categories. F/OSS in the Stallman model doesn't have to be a vow of poverty. On the contrary, we're only scratching the surface of how F/OSS makes money.
Silly AC, you equate religions with fearmongering and fanboi-ism.
Oh, wait......
As mentioned upthread, most people are sacked and possibly given severance. Removal of privilege shouldn't be regarded in a negative way. Post a lot. Catch up on your communications. Tell everyone your new email address. If they require you to be in the office, do a good job and get a good reference. If you can be at home and there are no strictures on what you can do there (e.g. employment contract), then do what you want to.
Most IT staff are unceremoniously sacked. They either have high standards or you're there in case you're needed to do something they haven't thought of. In any case, don't be bummed by lack of access. Learn how to beat Freecell in under 60 seconds or something, or do your job search, or whatever you're inclined/motivated to. And enjoy it, as you're luckier than 95% of the IT staff I deal with.
By your broad definition, any community is a small religion, and that's not true. There is a common bond, but Slashdot users are more like what Kurt Vonnegut called a grandfaloon, which is a gathering of individuals with no overt tying bond, like the Order of Elks. While Elks are a philanthropic group and that's their bond (as in fraternal), the ties here are topics of nerdish/computing bonds. But even though the LinuxOphiles, MacFanBois/girlz, WindowsDefenderz, and the hackers bond, slashdot is not a small religion.
We agree the that the judges showed wisdom, but the taint of definition is still ambiguous and the stanch of free speech is still onerous.
I believe that the replacement for the traditional browser will eventually emerge, and with luck, assuage some of the problems presented by both the UI and the methodology used to build the machine processes needed to communicate. But maybe I'm being quixotic..... thanks for your interesting addition to the thread.
It displays *stuff*. Content is a sycophantic notion. Browsers ought to have the ability to methodically represent the author's intention, and the author shouldn't have to be a manual embedder of information (codes) for it to be displayed correctly across multiple reading applications (browsers).
What you see is what you get is a wonderful idea. Imagine, not needing print views, and rendering for all window shapes and screen resolutions.... sorry, just fantasizing.
The web as a concept isn't at issue in my criticism, although the W3C isn't very good at setting 'standards'.
It's the browser. Coding php may be a server-side activity, but look at how browser design causes headaches. Any good web page designer needs five browsers to insure rendering. They need IE, Firefox/Mozilla, K/Safari, and Opera-- not to mention mobile/cell versions of these.
For more articulate criticism rendered by someone I agree with (mostly), search on Jakob Nielsen user interface.
I know the history of it intimately. Because it wasn't well though through, it's a miserable user interface. Yes, it seems flexible, and it's nice that the W3 specs are there, but they're not well thought-through, either. Whether it's Java, php, or another language, the pallette called the 'browser' is the biggest, most anarchistic piece of junk I've ever seen. Plug-ins are great.... there are many good things. But the screen real estate, and the number of ways that it can be buggered are just insane. As a GUI, the browser totally sucks. If you don't believe what I'm saying, try to remember "The Frames Era".
A good UI shouldn't have to have users embedding markup language manually. It shouldn't have to trouble you about fonts, re-sizing your window widths. It shouldn't have ways that browser makers can bugger up wysiwyg information in so many ingenious ways.
Mark me as flamebait if you want, but the browser is a disaster, years after its invention, and constant reinvention.
As Vista is the only platform known to respect the flag, yes. Underneath the embedded flag is either a screw-up, or the barrel of a gun aimed precisely at the metatarsals and the smoking hole after-effect.
Let's see, how many different competing sources of videos are there today? And NBC thinks it's got the best ones out there and wants to restrict their dissemination with the broadcast flag?
I don't really care if Vista respects the flag or not. NBC, by putting it in the stream, thwarts its use, legitimate or not. In the YouTube/Tube world, they have *so* scratched themselves off the list.
Let's see-- was that good for marketshare, branding, asset value, shareholder value, or compennsation? Hullo?
You're handing them the keys. You're not allowed to do that. You're obligated to assess the implications and give them to a corporate officer, because you're transferring assets. Really. Don't make this decision on your own. It's your organization's assets and if they're going to be given away, an officer needs to know this.
Should accessibility be granted, then you need user controls that don't kill your CPU or generate queries from hell. RO access is one thing, sucking data and porting into MySQL or another db is trivial, so be prepared for other strange problems that you customer might try and impose on you. You need to clearly constrain the access, if in a congenial way.
Start here: http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornography/prngrphy_ovrvw.html
Then go to to the APA: http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov07/webporn.html
Take the chip off your shoulder and go here: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/BIB/DIAM/effects_pornography.htm
None of these are right-wing, or faith-based or in other ways crazed observations. YMMV.
It might be quixotic, but you're a nice person. Your carrier might have some problem it... and it might be illegal to use your AP depending on the locale.
It reminds me of the old biker saying, ass grass or gas, nobody rides for free.....
You haven't seen the salient evidence. Children are impressionable, and things like graphic violence and pornography aren't good for them. There's a very good reason why adult bookstores are 18+.
Children have no context to put such images in. I won't go into parental responsibilities to teach their children about the realities of life, but there are some images that children clearly should not be subjected to.
In my opinion, which varies from the 'norm', nudity is fine at any age. But watching sex acts isn't a good idea, and watching violence without giving the context also is a bad idea. If you believe it's a good idea, or has no impression, then you're invited to research the topic as I have, and you'll see the research, see the conclusions, and see the evidence.
I gave up my Verizon plan; $60/mo was ridiculous. Convenient, yes. Frustrating, yes. Mercurial on a good day, impossible on a bad one.
Yeah, the meter is on. Let's hope this form of 'broadband' changes, and soon. I was hoping that WiMAX would be real, but even with the recent divorce and remarriage of Clearwire and Sprint and Intel, I don't give it much of a chance. I like Craig McGaw's LEO access balloons.....
Although I wonder how you get email it it's not 'internet', my old plan didn't seem to have any boundaries, just crappy and mercurial service. I had to mod various ugly plist files on my Mac to make it work, and Linux was plainly not going to see it as a modem without a lot of work. This guy used Windows; the low-hanging-fruit test.
The reality is that wireless broadband as expoused by the carriers in the US is on the meter now; it's not really broadband just bits-per-buck.
Philadelphia's muniWiFi network goes dead next month when Earthlink pulls the plug.
Oddly, the telcos start allowing metered access of their 3G networks; no all-you-can-eat plans anymore. In megabyte increments in one case.....
You share a commonality with every other American-- that our politicians don't fully represent our views. They can't as they're only 549 of them, and several hundred million of us.
Yes, the Chinese censor the Internet. This is one of the smaller of their displeasing behaviors. Censorship is almost always a bad thing, except when the sensibilities of children are at stake.
The slumbering dragon slowly awakes after many years of dark ages. Their rulers are inexperienced, and their political system isn't as evolved as others. There are worse, and many of them, just not as large as China. We're impatient to watch them grow up. I'd like to see a free Tibet..... press freedoms, and freedom of movement, and freedom from involuntary servitude, and better environmental management. These things will come, hopefully soon. Trying to eradicate China in toto is silly, however. Instead, consider befriending and allying democratic and sensible efforts towards a freer and open society. It takes one person at a time.