Once you
understand the UI in windnows, it's simple and clean
Once you understand the UI in X, it's simpler
and cleaner. And it works. The difference is that it takes longer to understand the UI's on X than on Windows. Some would naively say this means Windows UI is better, but they are forgetting that easier-to-learn does not always mean easier-to-use. MS still to this day hasn't been able to fix the annoying hung-app-no-WM problem. (There is no window manager process in Windows, and apps are in charge of their own moving when you move, resize, or minimize them. This means that an app that isn't responding is physically stuck on your screen where you can't move it out of the way while you wait for it to unstick.)
My point was that it doesn't even have to be going a long distance to be terribly wrong. In my example, it would have been tracking in a completely random direction after only a single turn.
That technique would fail utterly when the tires
slip a bit on the pavement.
Just today when I pulled out of my parking lot I made a 90 degree turn on a patch of ice and the speedometer believed I was going 20 miles an hour when in fact I was doing about 1 or 2 miles an hour while my wheels spun a bit. If it was tracking my movement that way it would have thought I turned all the way around several times, straightening out at an entirely random direction.
That's an extreme case, but even if the slippage were small - a patch of oil or a wet spot - it would make the computer think you were pointed in a different direction than you actually were. In an old city like London, with it's many roads going off at odd angles (as opposed to younger cities where the streets are mostly orthogonal) this would be a big problem. The computer can't just round-off to the nearest cardinal direction. For all it knows, a 137-degree turn might be perfectly valid.
An English-language version of the game exists, and is sold by Hasbro under the name "Lord of the Rings". I've played it - it's a lot of fun. The premise is basicly that its the players vs the board, rather than the players vs each other. As a team, they have to try to destroy the One Ring, and if they don't cooperate, there's pretty much no way to do it. (For one thing, the ringbearer tends to get corrupted easily, so people have to plan to trade off who the ringbearer is so they can make it to the end without the ringbearer getting corrupted all the way (which ends the game).)
Re:Why pay money for anonymous information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 2
But they won't have the foggiest idea WHO you are. That's the point. This demographic data, where people compare interest in site X with interest in site Y requires that you let sites look at each others' cookies.
Re:Rigging the Marketing Information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 2
That would have been a reasonable argument were it not for the fact that the ban on Slashdot by cybersitter appeared after slashdot began covering cybersitter and ridiculing it. The foul language postings existed long before then.
Re:Rigging the Marketing Information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 2
seen a couple of elem. schools that've blocked/. as material not
suited for children
Are you sure about that? Was it the school that chose to block the site or was it being done by the third-party blocking software they installed? The school may be unaware of what is being blocked - none of these filter packages publish their blacklists. CyberSitter is known to block Slashdot because CyberSitter blocks sites with unflattering (i.e. truthful) reviews of CyberSitter. (A real eye-opener about why these companies are scum.)
Re:Why pay money for anonymous information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 2
Every time you hit a web page, every time you buy something, every step you take every move you make
they'll be watching you.
Only if you are stupid enough to leave all cookies enabled in your browser. Limit it to just allowing cookies to be seen by the same sites as sent them and they have no clue what your browsing history is, or who you are, but you will still be able to take advantage of the remembered logins/password/context feature that cookies were originally meant for.
What you described was socialism. No countries have ever really tried a Marxist government yet. The USSR was not communist, despite the lip service to the contrary - it was 100% socialist. The "workers" did not control the factories - the government did. BIG difference. The first myth of Marxism is that it's possible.
How about DeCSS : Is that REALLY for people who just want to watch their rightfully owned DVDs
on their Linux boxen? BULLSHIT.
I Never said it was. It's for making open-sourced DVD PLAYERS. The most common way such things would be used would probably be on Linux, but not exclusively so. Just like KDE and Gnome are used mainly on Linux and FreeBSD, but can also be used on other UNIXen.
And like I said, you have fallen for the snow job, hook line and sinker. Is it really acceptable to you, from an ethical standpoint, that with the Movie industry's grip on DVD decryption, they currently charge artificially inflated prices in different regions, make it so you can't play a DVD in a different country from where you bought it, and tell you what you can and can't fast-forward through, and that even though *they* are allowed to create encrypted DVD's *you* are not? These are the real reasons they want to keep DVD's closed off - they want that exclusive right to tell you *how* you can watch the movie you purchased. What's next - saying you can't fast-forward through the scene in the movie with all the product-placement for brandX cola? That's the kind of shit thier technological restrictions will let them do if they want. The normal ebb and flow of capitalistic economics won't check-and-balance this because there won't be any alternatives - they are being made illegal by this bullshit that's going on right now. And here you sit buying into the bullshit claims by the industry that the only reason they dislike DeCSS is becasue of pirates. What a snow job.
You have fallen for the snow job given to us by the existing media moguls. They have tried to paint these technolgies as only being about pirating, when they also have other uses.
1 - If you *already own* a legal copy of a song, it is perfectly legal and ethically correct to copy that song to some other format. (For example, I have no CD player in my car, so I often make cassette tape compilations of some of my CD's so I can use them in the car. There is nothing wrong with this. I should not have to buy a song *twice* just to change its type of recording media. I've already paid the copyright holder for the right to listen to his intellectual property when I bought the song in its first form (CD). Therefore, If I use Napster to get an MP3 of a song *I already have* in CD form, I've done nothing wrong. This is the problem with the Metallica suit. They assumed falsely that everyone trading their songs was doing it illegally, when some of them probably were not. (They also arrogantly assumed that any file with a title that looked like one of their songs must be one of their songs, even though, for example, there are lots of artists with songs called "One".)
2 - DeCSS was written to allow people to view DVDs on opensource software. Because of the restrictions on getting the decrpytion information from the MPAA, this *required* that the encryption be reverse-engineered - the MPAA's non-disclosure agreement prevents people from showing their decrypting source code to the outside world, so if they wanted to make an opensource player they had to do it without signing that NDA, hence the reverse-engineering. DeCSS was *NOT* written for the purpose of pirating, although admittedly it can be used in that fashion.
Is it right to take away a technology becuase it *can* be used harmfully, even if that is not its main intended purpose? If that is truly how you feel, then I suggest you try outlawing automobiles, since they can be used for drive-by shootings, or running people over, or getting away from the cops after a robbery. The fact that their intended primary use is simple transportation doesn't matter to you apparently.
Even that tounge-in-cheek solution doesn't really work well at all, because when you use one raster-scan device to record another raster-scan device, you get a nasty flicker unless you have
some specialized equipment to sync the scan of the recorder with the scan of the TV screen.
(It's basicly the looking-at-something-cyclical-under-a-strobelight effect. You can get anything from a false impression that it's standing still, to a false impression that it's moving backward, to a false impression that it's moving slower forward than is is - all depending on minor changes in timing between the cyclical activity (like spinning a wheel) and the strobelight speed.)
Camcorder recordings of a TV screen look terrible.
The problem is not that the data exists. The problem is that it is incorrect in the first place a lot of the time, and even when it is correct, it gets used to make incorrect conclusions about you, and there is no way to find out this has been done until after it starts screwing you over. Then it's very hard to fix the incorrect information becuase the companies that hold it often won't talk to you, and even when they do, the information propigates between companies in such a way that your corrected data can be replaced again by the incorrect data coming from another site you missed.
The problem isn't that the data is visible. The problem is that it's only visible in one direction. Companies can know everything about YOU, but you can't know anything about what their doing with this data, and often you can't check up
on it to see if it's right because you don't even know it exists.
If individuals lose thier privacy, then so too should corporations. Either total privacy for all or total publicity for all - nothing in-between.
Microsoft,
Compaq, IBM et al are not control freaks
Really? In which alternate dimension do you live?
I don't know about Compaq, but IBM fit the definition of "control freak" perfectly, and now MS learned from them and did it even more so. Consider, while MS lets external companies develop things for Windows, it buys them out if the product they make does well. MS can't stand the idea of a useful product being outside their control.
As I understand it, the government didn't pay anything for that MS/UNISYS/DELL voting system yet. Those companies decided entirely on their own to build it and then are going to try to sell it to individual municipalities. (Voting in the US is not regulated at the federal level. Each district does it their own way and then reports results up to the next level in the hirearchy.)
Re:Cool but a BFT (Big F*SCKING Target)
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 2
But don't think this is going to be a "Battlestar Gallactica" with wings. The plane is going to be one
great big high-value target. It will need escort fighters, tankers to refuel the fighters, maybe an
AWACS to manage things,... you get the idea.
Kinda like a bunch of Colonial Vipers in the hangar and a rag-tag fleet of other ships nearby.
In other words, it *would* be like a Battlestar Galactica with wings;-)
That is not the CRA's fault you idiot. That is VISA telling you to PROVE that the charges on your
CARD were fraudulent.
Perhaps you were under the impression that I was referring to clearing the *charges*. I was not. I was referring to clearing the CRA. The charges with VISA aren't a big deal since you are only liable for $50.00. It's the damaging black spot on the rating is what screws people more.
The burden of proof is on the companies that made the report to begin with
That's the way it *should* be, and innocent-until-proven guilty is the way it works for other aspects of the law, but not this one. Read the law quoted in the article. The individual has to prove that he *didn't* purchase the disputed item or service, in order to clear the credit record. This is blatantly wrong of course, and it should work the way you claim, but it doesn't.
This is entirely possible, and what frightens me is that the ignorant marketplace once again will fawn over Microsoft and give them credit for coming up with this "new" operating system.
Not everyone who has a bad credit record has actually done something wrong. The credit reporting agencies have no accountability to keep their information correct at all. When they screw up and claim you owe something you don't, you are assumed guilty until proven innocent, and as anyone who has had basic debate logic training can tell you, you often can't prove that something *didn't* happen.
The burden of proof should be on the credit reporting agency, and it isn't.
People aren't complaining about the consequenses of their actions. They're complaining about being saddled with the consequences of OTHER people's actions: other people with the same name who get mistaken for you, other people who don't bother to tell you that you owe them money, other people in the post office who screw up your mail (This has happened to me - for some dumbass reason about half the mail sent to me gets rejected saying "Doesn't live here anymore", even though I *do* live here, and *some* mail does reach me. I've asked the post office to fix it and they don't. I'm at the point now where I just call the phone company and power company every so often and ask them what I owe them, since I don't always receive the bills.)
The problem is that these credit reporting agencies have NO accountability. If they lie about you, YOU have to prove them wrong. You are guilty until proven innocent.
Corporation is the idea that you can treat a company like a person in the eyes of the law, but unfortunately there is no accountability that goes with this. If a PERSON slanders you, they owe you damages. If a PERSON murders someone, they go to
prison. If a Credit Reporting Agency screws you, they aren't taken to task on it.
So, MS, make up my mind - do I have a *license* to use the product on one machine, in which case I shouldn't have to pay full price a second time for the product if I want to get
a second CD of it for redundancy, or do I *own* my copy, in which case it's my damn decision which computer I want to put it on.
And what happens when the NIC fries and I have to get a new one - do I have to pay you for a second license now, in addition to replacing the fried hardware.
Any company not already in a majority position would never be able to get away with tactics like this. Users would say, "What? Those license terms are unacceptable, I'll take my business elsewhere, thank you."
In any censorship law, an inherent problem is that if the law says certain things are verbotten to speak of in some medium, then its illegal to communicate that law itself via that medium.
Because of the law, you cannot tell people what the law actually is.
You would not be able to make a TV commercial
listing the things you can't say on TV. You can't send someone an e-mail to tell then what words are illegal in an e-mail (assuming such a thing comes to pass), and so on.
The only reason this hasn't happened yet is that we have multiple media formats (radio, mail, e-mail, etc) and there aren't any topics that are censored for all of the media. There are sets of verbotten topics for each medium, but they don't overlap enough for a topic to be censored across
all media yet. This means that medium X can be used to communcate a list of what is censored in medium Y.
But someday the internet might truly become the uber-medium, encompassing all others. We already know how it could be done - we can send video over the net, we can send audio over the net, we can use the net for a telephone, we can use it for mail, etc. It's just a matter of the infrastructure to handle the bandwith - which is merely a matter of money and time. It can happen and it will. Once it does, censorship laws that cover "only" the internet will actually cover everything, since the internet will be the backbone behind TV and radio and so forth. The technique of using medium X to mention what is illegal in medium Y won't work anymore when everything is the same medium.
I'm no lawyer, but ethically I see something very wrong with making it illegal to tell someone what the law is. Making it mandatory to keep the public ignorant of the law is a blueprint for arbitrary punishment by the government. "Sir, what am I being arrested for?" - "I can't tell you that."
The Manifest destiny was about the US "spanning" the continent. I would take that to mean coast-to-coast, but I suppose it is a bit fuzzy to interpet what that meant.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you understand the UI in X, it's simpler and cleaner. And it works. The difference is that it takes longer to understand the UI's on X than on Windows. Some would naively say this means Windows UI is better, but they are forgetting that easier-to-learn does not always mean easier-to-use. MS still to this day hasn't been able to fix the annoying hung-app-no-WM problem. (There is no window manager process in Windows, and apps are in charge of their own moving when you move, resize, or minimize them. This means that an app that isn't responding is physically stuck on your screen where you can't move it out of the way while you wait for it to unstick.)
My point was that it doesn't even have to be going a long distance to be terribly wrong. In my example, it would have been tracking in a completely random direction after only a single turn.
Just today when I pulled out of my parking lot I made a 90 degree turn on a patch of ice and the speedometer believed I was going 20 miles an hour when in fact I was doing about 1 or 2 miles an hour while my wheels spun a bit. If it was tracking my movement that way it would have thought I turned all the way around several times, straightening out at an entirely random direction.
That's an extreme case, but even if the slippage were small - a patch of oil or a wet spot - it would make the computer think you were pointed in a different direction than you actually were. In an old city like London, with it's many roads going off at odd angles (as opposed to younger cities where the streets are mostly orthogonal) this would be a big problem. The computer can't just round-off to the nearest cardinal direction. For all it knows, a 137-degree turn might be perfectly valid.
An English-language version of the game exists, and is sold by Hasbro under the name "Lord of the Rings". I've played it - it's a lot of fun. The premise is basicly that its the players vs the board, rather than the players vs each other. As a team, they have to try to destroy the One Ring, and if they don't cooperate, there's pretty much no way to do it. (For one thing, the ringbearer tends to get corrupted easily, so people have to plan to trade off who the ringbearer is so they can make it to the end without the ringbearer getting corrupted all the way (which ends the game).)
But they won't have the foggiest idea WHO you are. That's the point. This demographic data, where people compare interest in site X with interest in site Y requires that you let sites look at each others' cookies.
That would have been a reasonable argument were it not for the fact that the ban on Slashdot by cybersitter appeared after slashdot began covering cybersitter and ridiculing it. The foul language postings existed long before then.
Are you sure about that? Was it the school that chose to block the site or was it being done by the third-party blocking software they installed? The school may be unaware of what is being blocked - none of these filter packages publish their blacklists. CyberSitter is known to block Slashdot because CyberSitter blocks sites with unflattering (i.e. truthful) reviews of CyberSitter. (A real eye-opener about why these companies are scum.)
Only if you are stupid enough to leave all cookies enabled in your browser. Limit it to just allowing cookies to be seen by the same sites as sent them and they have no clue what your browsing history is, or who you are, but you will still be able to take advantage of the remembered logins/password/context feature that cookies were originally meant for.
What you described was socialism. No countries have ever really tried a Marxist government yet. The USSR was not communist, despite the lip service to the contrary - it was 100% socialist. The "workers" did not control the factories - the government did. BIG difference. The first myth of Marxism is that it's possible.
And like I said, you have fallen for the snow job, hook line and sinker. Is it really acceptable to you, from an ethical standpoint, that with the Movie industry's grip on DVD decryption, they currently charge artificially inflated prices in different regions, make it so you can't play a DVD in a different country from where you bought it, and tell you what you can and can't fast-forward through, and that even though *they* are allowed to create encrypted DVD's *you* are not? These are the real reasons they want to keep DVD's closed off - they want that exclusive right to tell you *how* you can watch the movie you purchased. What's next - saying you can't fast-forward through the scene in the movie with all the product-placement for brandX cola? That's the kind of shit thier technological restrictions will let them do if they want. The normal ebb and flow of capitalistic economics won't check-and-balance this because there won't be any alternatives - they are being made illegal by this bullshit that's going on right now. And here you sit buying into the bullshit claims by the industry that the only reason they dislike DeCSS is becasue of pirates. What a snow job.
1 - If you *already own* a legal copy of a song, it is perfectly legal and ethically correct to copy that song to some other format. (For example, I have no CD player in my car, so I often make cassette tape compilations of some of my CD's so I can use them in the car. There is nothing wrong with this. I should not have to buy a song *twice* just to change its type of recording media. I've already paid the copyright holder for the right to listen to his intellectual property when I bought the song in its first form (CD). Therefore, If I use Napster to get an MP3 of a song *I already have* in CD form, I've done nothing wrong. This is the problem with the Metallica suit. They assumed falsely that everyone trading their songs was doing it illegally, when some of them probably were not. (They also arrogantly assumed that any file with a title that looked like one of their songs must be one of their songs, even though, for example, there are lots of artists with songs called "One".)
2 - DeCSS was written to allow people to view DVDs on opensource software. Because of the restrictions on getting the decrpytion information from the MPAA, this *required* that the encryption be reverse-engineered - the MPAA's non-disclosure agreement prevents people from showing their decrypting source code to the outside world, so if they wanted to make an opensource player they had to do it without signing that NDA, hence the reverse-engineering. DeCSS was *NOT* written for the purpose of pirating, although admittedly it can be used in that fashion.
Is it right to take away a technology becuase it *can* be used harmfully, even if that is not its main intended purpose? If that is truly how you feel, then I suggest you try outlawing automobiles, since they can be used for drive-by shootings, or running people over, or getting away from the cops after a robbery. The fact that their intended primary use is simple transportation doesn't matter to you apparently.
(It's basicly the looking-at-something-cyclical-under-a-strobelight effect. You can get anything from a false impression that it's standing still, to a false impression that it's moving backward, to a false impression that it's moving slower forward than is is - all depending on minor changes in timing between the cyclical activity (like spinning a wheel) and the strobelight speed.)
Camcorder recordings of a TV screen look terrible.
The problem isn't that the data is visible. The problem is that it's only visible in one direction. Companies can know everything about YOU, but you can't know anything about what their doing with this data, and often you can't check up on it to see if it's right because you don't even know it exists.
If individuals lose thier privacy, then so too should corporations. Either total privacy for all or total publicity for all - nothing in-between.
As I understand it, the government didn't pay anything for that MS/UNISYS/DELL voting system yet. Those companies decided entirely on their own to build it and then are going to try to sell it to individual municipalities. (Voting in the US is not regulated at the federal level. Each district does it their own way and then reports results up to the next level in the hirearchy.)
You misinterpeted my post. I wasn't referring to Katz's examples, but to the large number of replies to it in this thread.
The burden of proof is on the companies that made the report to begin with That's the way it *should* be, and innocent-until-proven guilty is the way it works for other aspects of the law, but not this one. Read the law quoted in the article. The individual has to prove that he *didn't* purchase the disputed item or service, in order to clear the credit record. This is blatantly wrong of course, and it should work the way you claim, but it doesn't.
This is entirely possible, and what frightens me is that the ignorant marketplace once again will fawn over Microsoft and give them credit for coming up with this "new" operating system.
The burden of proof should be on the credit reporting agency, and it isn't.
The problem is that these credit reporting agencies have NO accountability. If they lie about you, YOU have to prove them wrong. You are guilty until proven innocent.
Corporation is the idea that you can treat a company like a person in the eyes of the law, but unfortunately there is no accountability that goes with this. If a PERSON slanders you, they owe you damages. If a PERSON murders someone, they go to prison. If a Credit Reporting Agency screws you, they aren't taken to task on it.
And what happens when the NIC fries and I have to get a new one - do I have to pay you for a second license now, in addition to replacing the fried hardware.
Any company not already in a majority position would never be able to get away with tactics like this. Users would say, "What? Those license terms are unacceptable, I'll take my business elsewhere, thank you."
You would not be able to make a TV commercial listing the things you can't say on TV. You can't send someone an e-mail to tell then what words are illegal in an e-mail (assuming such a thing comes to pass), and so on.
The only reason this hasn't happened yet is that we have multiple media formats (radio, mail, e-mail, etc) and there aren't any topics that are censored for all of the media. There are sets of verbotten topics for each medium, but they don't overlap enough for a topic to be censored across all media yet. This means that medium X can be used to communcate a list of what is censored in medium Y.
But someday the internet might truly become the uber-medium, encompassing all others. We already know how it could be done - we can send video over the net, we can send audio over the net, we can use the net for a telephone, we can use it for mail, etc. It's just a matter of the infrastructure to handle the bandwith - which is merely a matter of money and time. It can happen and it will. Once it does, censorship laws that cover "only" the internet will actually cover everything, since the internet will be the backbone behind TV and radio and so forth. The technique of using medium X to mention what is illegal in medium Y won't work anymore when everything is the same medium.
I'm no lawyer, but ethically I see something very wrong with making it illegal to tell someone what the law is. Making it mandatory to keep the public ignorant of the law is a blueprint for arbitrary punishment by the government. "Sir, what am I being arrested for?" - "I can't tell you that."
The Manifest destiny was about the US "spanning" the continent. I would take that to mean coast-to-coast, but I suppose it is a bit fuzzy to interpet what that meant.