"Do I find it annoying? Yes. However, I also find it a necessary nuissance to help keep smugglers and criminals from easily moving money around through our banking system."
YOU managed to explain it to the satisfaction of whoever asked. Why do you think a "smuggler or criminal" would be any less clever than you were?
If I were a Skype (EBay) stockholder, I'd want to know why they lied to *me* about the reason for limiting the functionality on non-Intel machines. I don't think either Intel or AMD has a dog in this fight, legitimately, but if the investors were to get upset about it, they'd just call it fraud.
I thought you were serious, sorry. Spending too much time on alt.politics groups. There really are some morons out there, and some of them really *do* believe football is the most important thing in the world.
Well, whether a politician represents *you* is another matter entirely. But I get tired of the complacency people exhibit, when they fail to understand how many people are out there whose views differ from their own, which, together with a failure to understand how political views are correlated with geography, will act so surprised by the outcome of an election that the only possible explanation they can muster is that "it was rigged."
You apparently have ideas that transcend the concepts of nations and governments, and that's wonderful, but not very practical in terms of solutions to the problems that we have that can be perhaps be solved in our lifetimes.
>If outsourcing is to a company's advantage then they will try to do it.
Even if it isn't, they will still do it. It's become unacceptable for a manager's resume to not include a project that was outsourced to an Indian team. It's not necessary for the project to be successful.
Last time I checked, the Australian government was not under control of the US Legislature. I think your country shares the blame here. Clean your own house, then throw stones.
"What the fuck is wrong with our elected officials..."
They represent the people. That scares me a lot more than any Act they can pass.
There's always an implication that the elected government doesn't represent the will of the people. That view is reinforced by the fact that like minded people tend to congregate.
If this is wrong, then this year's elections should correct it. If an incoming legislature chooses to do so, it has effectively unlimited power to reverse all this policy.
I'm not optimistic, however. I expect this year's elections to deliver an even *more* solidly republican majority, and the people who don't see how that's possible, still won't understand.
There are a lot of educated, liberal minded people out there that insist on abstaining from the process. They claim that there's only one party anyway, or that all elections are rigged, and they use that as an excuse for their apathy. Then they look around and see only other people who share their views, and they don't understand how people they can't even *find* in their world, can possibly have gotten a majority representation in an elected government. This same scenario plays out millions of times, and it adds up.
And then we end up with a Congress that believes the PATRIOT Act is informed by the consensed will of the people. And why shouldn't they? They only witness a minuscule opposition to it.
Whether you like it or not, that wasn't the last election the US will ever have. You can't have your party win once and then decide that's it, "get over it", politics are a thing of the past, tough luck. It doesn't work that way. The Bush term will end, and his stewardship has been so breathtakingly poor, that there's every likelihood that all the authority he grabbed for the Executive office, will be handed over to an incoming administration that is the diametric opposite of his party. And when that happens, and people tell YOU to "get over it", you won't be able to.
A revolution cannot really accumulate meaningful momentum until the issues are so serious and so divisive that even members of the military realize that they have no choice except to turn arms against their own government. Not rebel soldiers, but whole chains of command together with the civilian infrastructure that provides their raw materials and manufactures their weapons with finance and labor.
Don't picture a revolution as being between farmers with shotguns, or street gangs with.38's versus a 21st century armed force! Instead, try to imagine a scenario where whole divisions of the military are ordered to take arms against what was formerly their command, and imagine circumstances where they could be expected to follow those orders. Then you've got a revolution. Not until then.
"These are not risks inherent to space travel; they are risks inherent to flying in the space shuttle. By contrast, they Soyuz capsule has not had a single death since 1971. 35 years a good track record."
A better thing to point out would be that the entire history of space flight has only seen five fatal accidents, and only four of them actually occurred during a mission. Two Soviet missions, and two NASA missions. Setting national political considerations aside, man's exploration of space has been an incredible success, and far safer than anyone would have predicted. Much safer, in fact, than the equivalent period after the inception of *rail travel*.
"Offtopic, but if you do get a laser, just get one that supports postscript and has a network interface. "
Sounds expensive. I find it amusing when running linux means spending more.
I'd really like to just be able to use my current printer, which works just fine under Windows, and almost works under linux. Offtopic I know. But the Comp.os.linux forums left me stranded at "set the paper to Letter instead of A4". And building cups and the hp stuff from scratch just took me to the same place.
>When your printer isn't working, you call... ummm.... I don't know.
When your printer doesn't work because it's malfunctioned, that's one thing. When your printer doesn't work becuase there is no driver available for your OS because the manufacturer insists on keeping the protocol secret, that's another thing entirely.
I've got a printer that's supported under linux by the manufacturer, and it is still almost useless because the driver insists that the hardware margins are bigger than they actually are, and if there's a way to adjust this, I can't find it. (I know about alignmargins, and I know about the ppd config in cups, and I know to update the drivers from the HP site, all futility.)
In my world, this just means I get another printer next time I'm at the store; probably a laser printer, and it also means that for color printing, I'll be booting windows.
If you want to fix my problem for me, it's an HP PSC-1350. It cuts off the margins slightly, no matter what I do, and I'm *not* confusing A4 with Letter.
>The notion that MSN will have something better in six months is well wide of the mark. Nice >try.
It might be 'better' according to the people who measure things like ad revenue, and people who focus on things like being able to buy your way into the search results. And of course, it will be the default MSN home page for IE, so they will also be able to claim it's better because it's installed on more desktops, in a classic WTF? that we're sure to be granted.
"Then again what if its a store? Or the preson thinks it is a store? Would you arrest someone because they walked to a place and pushed on the door?"
The distinction is usually framed in terms of whether a reasonable person would believe it was acceptable. In a strip mall at 3:00 in the morning, you'd better have an explanation. A store that's usually open at 3:00 in the afternoon, but the door is locked, it's reasonable to try the door.
"I can't think how many times I tried to enter a place only to find it was locked. Maybe it was the wrong entrance or after hours, but doesn't mean I had intention of breaking in."
And the store owner would likewise have no reasonable apprehension of his life or property being in danger. He would be wrong to detain you or use force against you in a situation where you acted reasonably -- and he would be liable for assault if he did so. As for law enforcement officer, it's up to the officer to determine if there is cause for suspicion, and you could indeed find yourself in a position where you'd have to explain to the officer's satisfaction that you thought the door would be unlocked, open to the public, etc. Whether police officers are always able to take the point of view of "a reasonable person" is a subject of some debate, but you can be sure the state will take that view...
If keeping the peace were as simple as an elementary flowchart, we would never have needed a system of justice. I don't understand why people insist on trying to narrow down the idea of law and order by focusing on corner cases, or by trying to force false analogies to fit. (If I had a dollar for every time someone has explained copyright infringement in terms of stealing a car...)
"In Texas, for example, any unauthorized connection or attempt to connect to a computer is illegal."
"Illegal", as in, someone can detect a portscan, call the Rangers, and the State will gather evidence prosecute?
or
"Illegal", as in, if the person owning the computer can demonstrate to a reasonable person that he has suffered damages, he may sue for the recovery of those damages?
There is a wide range of meanings for "illegal."
It's "illegal" to run a stop sign at 4:00 in the morning when you're the only car on the road. It's also "illegal" to sell a hundred kilos of heroin. Same thing? I think not.
"Actually, I think port-scanning is a wee bit closer to turning the doorknobs on all exterior doors (but not opening them and going through), pushing the windowsills, and knocking on the walls looking for hidden doors. Grey-hat activity, probably not illegal"
Clearly and expressly illegal in my state. Depending on the circumstances, this activity is legal justification for the property owner to use deadly force against the trespasser!
Trying the front door is burglary. Trying the back door is criminal trespass and burglary. Not a good idea to sit around with a gun drawn waiting for someone to do it, but an even worse idea to go around trying doors and windows.
It's not relevant anyway. Ports on computers are not doors and windows on buildings and houses, period. As tempting as it may be to frame this analogy, it simply doesn't hold, not in common sense, and definitely not in any legal sense.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do I find it annoying? Yes. However, I also find it a necessary nuissance to help keep
smugglers and criminals from easily moving money around through our banking system."
YOU managed to explain it to the satisfaction of whoever asked. Why do you think a "smuggler or criminal" would be any less clever than you were?
Shame on you for letting him in your country in the first place, and shame again for letting him leave once you had him.
If I were a Skype (EBay) stockholder, I'd want to know why they lied to *me* about the reason for limiting the functionality on non-Intel machines. I don't think either Intel or AMD has a dog in this fight, legitimately, but if the investors were to get upset about it, they'd just call it fraud.
Did they maintain this lie with their shareholders? Or were their shareholders (lenders) in on the scam?
What kind of expensive wine comes in a can?
I thought you were serious, sorry. Spending too much time on alt.politics groups. There really are some morons out there, and some of them really *do* believe football is the most important thing in the world.
Well, whether a politician represents *you* is another matter entirely. But I get tired of the complacency people exhibit, when they fail to understand how many people are out there whose views differ from their own, which, together with a failure to understand how political views are correlated with geography, will act so surprised by the outcome of an election that the only possible explanation they can muster is that "it was rigged."
You apparently have ideas that transcend the concepts of nations and governments, and that's wonderful, but not very practical in terms of solutions to the problems that we have that can be perhaps be solved in our lifetimes.
>If outsourcing is to a company's advantage then they will try to do it.
Even if it isn't, they will still do it. It's become unacceptable for a manager's resume to not include a project that was outsourced to an Indian team. It's not necessary for the project to be successful.
Last time I checked, the Australian government was not under control of the US Legislature.
I think your country shares the blame here. Clean your own house, then throw stones.
You're going to make a sweeping generalization about the power of labor by using the pro football league as an example?
"What the fuck is wrong with our elected officials..."
They represent the people. That scares me a lot more than any Act they can pass.
There's always an implication that the elected government doesn't represent the will of the people. That view is reinforced by the fact that like minded people tend to congregate.
If this is wrong, then this year's elections should correct it. If an incoming legislature chooses to do so, it has effectively unlimited power to reverse all this policy.
I'm not optimistic, however. I expect this year's elections to deliver an even *more* solidly republican majority, and the people who don't see how that's possible, still won't understand.
There are a lot of educated, liberal minded people out there that insist on abstaining from the process. They claim that there's only one party anyway, or that all elections are rigged, and they use that as an excuse for their apathy. Then they look around and see only other people who share their views, and they don't understand how people they can't even *find* in their world, can possibly have gotten a majority representation in an elected government. This same scenario plays out millions of times, and it adds up.
And then we end up with a Congress that believes the PATRIOT Act is informed by the consensed will of the people. And why shouldn't they? They only witness a minuscule opposition to it.
>The election was in 2004, get over it.
Whether you like it or not, that wasn't the last election the US will ever have. You can't have your party win once and then decide that's it, "get over it", politics are a thing of the past, tough luck. It doesn't work that way. The Bush term will end, and his stewardship has been so breathtakingly poor, that there's every likelihood that all the authority he grabbed for the Executive office, will be handed over to an incoming administration that is the diametric opposite of his party. And when that happens, and people tell YOU to "get over it", you won't be able to.
A revolution cannot really accumulate meaningful momentum until the issues are so serious and so divisive that even members of the military realize that they have no choice except to turn arms against their own government. Not rebel soldiers, but whole chains of command together with the civilian infrastructure that provides their raw materials and manufactures their weapons with finance and labor.
.38's versus a 21st century armed force! Instead, try to imagine a scenario where whole divisions of the military are ordered to take arms against what was formerly their command, and imagine circumstances where they could be expected to follow those orders. Then you've got a revolution. Not until then.
Don't picture a revolution as being between farmers with shotguns, or street gangs with
"These are not risks inherent to space travel; they are risks inherent to flying in the space shuttle. By contrast, they Soyuz capsule has not had a single death since 1971. 35 years a good track record."
A better thing to point out would be that the entire history of space flight has only seen five fatal accidents, and only four of them actually occurred during a mission. Two Soviet missions, and two NASA missions. Setting national political considerations aside, man's exploration of space has been an incredible success, and far safer than anyone would have predicted. Much safer, in fact, than the equivalent period after the inception of *rail travel*.
>America doesn't have any "news" companies. It has advertising media companies.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is an advertising media company?
>WTF is up with this trend?
It's common, formal British usage. It is hardly "a trend"; it's been standard usage for collective plural nouns for centuries.
>"My family are going on vacation" would you?
A person in the UK would, yes.
> Yes but early explorers did it for *personal* gains.
It's not exactly a pauper's life to be an astronaut.
"Offtopic, but if you do get a laser, just get one that supports postscript and has a network interface. "
Sounds expensive. I find it amusing when running linux means spending more.
I'd really like to just be able to use my current printer, which works just fine under Windows, and almost works under linux. Offtopic I know. But the Comp.os.linux forums left me stranded at "set the paper to Letter instead of A4". And building cups and the hp stuff from scratch just took me to the same place.
>When your printer isn't working, you call... ummm.... I don't know.
When your printer doesn't work because it's malfunctioned, that's one thing. When your printer doesn't work becuase there is no driver available for your OS because the manufacturer insists on keeping the protocol secret, that's another thing entirely.
I've got a printer that's supported under linux by the manufacturer, and it is still almost useless because the driver insists that the hardware margins are bigger than they actually are, and if there's a way to adjust this, I can't find it. (I know about alignmargins, and I know about the ppd config in cups, and I know to update the drivers from the HP site, all futility.)
In my world, this just means I get another printer next time I'm at the store; probably a laser printer, and it also means that for color printing, I'll be booting windows.
If you want to fix my problem for me, it's an HP PSC-1350. It cuts off the margins slightly, no matter what I do, and I'm *not* confusing A4 with Letter.
"The ISC write-up is all hype and grotesquely distorts the actual assignment. There were no crimes committed, no one is going to jail."
I know. I was just going to the worst case scenario because the real scenario is boring.
>The notion that MSN will have something better in six months is well wide of the mark. Nice
>try.
It might be 'better' according to the people who measure things like ad revenue, and people who focus on things like being able to buy your way into the search results. And of course, it will be the default MSN home page for IE, so they will also be able to claim it's better because it's installed on more desktops, in a classic WTF? that we're sure to be granted.
> Oh, that's easy. The more dangerous one is the one I get.
:-)
Nah, if you get it, that makes me statistically safer
"Then again what if its a store? Or the preson thinks it is a store? Would you arrest someone because they walked to a place and pushed on the door?"
The distinction is usually framed in terms of whether a reasonable person would believe it was acceptable. In a strip mall at 3:00 in the morning, you'd better have an explanation. A store that's usually open at 3:00 in the afternoon, but the door is locked, it's reasonable to try the door.
"I can't think how many times I tried to enter a place only to find it was locked. Maybe it was the wrong entrance or after hours, but doesn't mean I had intention of breaking in."
And the store owner would likewise have no reasonable apprehension of his life or property being in danger. He would be wrong to detain you or use force against you in a situation where you acted reasonably -- and he would be liable for assault if he did so. As for law enforcement officer, it's up to the officer to determine if there is cause for suspicion, and you could indeed find yourself in a position where you'd have to explain to the officer's satisfaction that you thought the door would be unlocked, open to the public, etc. Whether police officers are always able to take the point of view of "a reasonable person" is a subject of some debate, but you can be sure the state will take that view...
If keeping the peace were as simple as an elementary flowchart, we would never have needed a system of justice. I don't understand why people insist on trying to narrow down the idea of law and order by focusing on corner cases, or by trying to force false analogies to fit. (If I had a dollar for every time someone has explained copyright infringement in terms of stealing a car...)
"In Texas, for example, any unauthorized connection or attempt to connect to a computer is illegal."
"Illegal", as in, someone can detect a portscan, call the Rangers, and the State will gather evidence prosecute?
or
"Illegal", as in, if the person owning the computer can demonstrate to a reasonable person that he has suffered damages, he may sue for the recovery of those damages?
There is a wide range of meanings for "illegal."
It's "illegal" to run a stop sign at 4:00 in the morning when you're the only car on the road. It's also "illegal" to sell a hundred kilos of heroin. Same thing? I think not.
"Actually, I think port-scanning is a wee bit closer to turning the doorknobs on all exterior doors (but not opening them and going through), pushing the windowsills, and knocking on the walls looking for hidden doors. Grey-hat activity, probably not illegal"
Clearly and expressly illegal in my state. Depending on the circumstances, this activity is legal justification for the property owner to use deadly force against the trespasser!
Trying the front door is burglary. Trying the back door is criminal trespass and burglary.
Not a good idea to sit around with a gun drawn waiting for someone to do it, but an even worse idea to go around trying doors and windows.
It's not relevant anyway. Ports on computers are not doors and windows on buildings and houses, period. As tempting as it may be to frame this analogy, it simply doesn't hold, not in common sense, and definitely not in any legal sense.