All modern (USB) Macs support a 2-button mouse. I used a 2-button scrollwheel MS Intellimouse for a few months until its optics went bad or something (cursor jumping around).
Typically you set up the right button to ctrl-click, which is the standard Mac way to "give me a menu of less-common options for what to do with this."
I'm back on the zero-button Mac mouse now because, well, it works:)
But differentiating between first degree murder and a lesser homicide charges is -- pun intended -- a horse of an entirely different color than differentiating between a "hate crime" and non-"hate crime".
We punish homicide if you planned to do it ("first degree"), if you didn't plan to do it ("second degree") and even if you failed to adequately plan your actions to prevent it ("negligent homicide"). But please note that this is all about planning your *actions*.
"Planning your actions"? In other words, your non-actions: your thoughts. You've carefully chosen examples, but consider other examples too: judges will put people away for longer if they, for example, demonstrate extreme cruelty in the commission of a violent crime, whether planned or not. Or if they, in a wholly unrelated incident, tortured an animal, not (necessarily) because abusing the animal was a crime, but because the abuse is evidence of the type of mind which poses a greater danger to society.
More to the point: a criminal who confesses to great enjoyment of sadistic acts will be incarcerated longer than one who simply confesses to having performed them. That has nothing to do with planning actions, the judge is sentencing based on thoughts. "I believe that killing puppies is fun and everyone deserves to be beaten with lead pipes" is a belief that will get you more time in prison. So are certain beliefs about black people, women, Jews, or gays.
The only real important reason for locking people away is that while they're in prison they can do no harm to society by repeating their crimes. Prejudice that runs deep enough to influence behavior toward homicide is indicative of a criminal who is more likely to repeat his crime. I hope I don't have to explain this; it's simply true. Compared to his identical twin whose criminal act was not influenced by prejudice, our racially-motivated subject should be put away for longer, because he is a greater danger. This is really very simple.
Things aren't true just because you say them. Try doing research instead of believing whatever sounds good.
The FBI Uniform Crime Report documents that hate crimes are committed against almost every demographic slice of America you can think of. Hate-crime laws apply to attacks on white people just as on black people. I challenge you to find me a single law anywhere in the United States, enacted or proposed, that says that only black people shall be protected by hate-crime laws.
If you need an example instead of statistics, look to Ronald Taylor, a racist black man who shot two white people. He was arraigned not only for their murders but for "ethnic intimidation," Pennsylvania's equivalent of "hate crime."
"But only in extremely specialized circumstances will it be absolutely demonstrable that the crime itself was a direct result of that hate."
I've seen no evidence that that is true. Yes, you can make up hypotheticals where a court will draw the wrong conclusion, such as your "racist kills a black man but not because he's black" example.
But you can invent hypotheticals for the other examples I listed too. A man's wife does him wrong; he is filled with rage and writes in his journal "I wish she were dead," and then an hour later his gun goes off and kills her in what is honestly an accident. He should probably get manslaughter but will instead get first degree murder. A tough break but that's the way it goes sometimes. Occasional hypothetical imperfections in the administration of justice are not reason to change the law.
The court can find a motivation of bigoted hatred with as much ease or difficulty as it finds a motivation of revenge, or financial gain, or the ordinary non-bigoted kind of hatred. Don't ask me to believe that a court cannot determine to its satisfaction what was in a criminal's head, because almost every criminal court does this several times a day.
It sounds like we're in agreement on mandatory sentencing (and hey look, we're heading back towards on-topic:). Unfortunately, political posturing, most notably the GOP's noticing (in 1968, then again in the 1980s) that it could bash the Dems for being weak on crime, has tied judges' hands in the name of being "tough on crime."
Eh, clever, but we already have differing penalties "based on... the criminal's thoughts." If you kill me with no intention to do so, you're guilty of negligent manslaughter. If you kill me in a sudden fit of passion, you'll get second degree murder. If you kill me after having deliberately planned it, you're looking at first degree murder.
Personally I've never really understood the fuss over hate crimes. We should add another category to the list. Did you kill me because I'm Zoroastrian? Well, this murderous rage of yours is something which any number of other people in the world could also trigger for no reason other than minding their own business. So you are much more dangerous to the world-at-large than the dude who accidentally runs over Timmy, or kills his wife in a sudden fit of anger, or who kills just one person for some life-situation of his that is not likely to happen again. You -- you're going to be an equal and continuing danger to every other Zoroastrian you happen to run across.
And if you're more dangerous to society, you should be locked up for longer. Duh.
"When Microsoft announces a patch for Windows two days after a security hole is found, they get bashed for publishing insecure software.
When Apple fixes a hole five days after acknowledging it, they're praised for being so quick to patch it."
The situation is not quite comparable...
The last n Microsoft security holes that I've seen have been discovered by security groups which reported them privately to Microsoft, and worked with Microsoft for typically a month or two to get the patch out. Then the vulnerability was announced the same day as the patch release. A few days or weeks later, an exploit for the vulnerability was posted someplace reasonably mainstream.
Not so here. The Apple vulnerability was just posted to bugtraq along with an exploit. No indication was made that any attempt to contact Apple was made, much less working privately with Apple while the problem was resolved.
Also this wasn't the worst vulnerability ever found. If someone poisons your DNS server they really can do all manner of bad things to you; Software Update is (was) just one of many concerns you should have. Keep your DNS servers secure!
1) He has removed anti page widening code, so slashdot looks messed up in IE again. Good job screwing over most of your users (everyone knows most people who visit slashdot use IE, windows or mac versions)
2) The karma system no longer uses numerical values... this means you don't know wether you are getting karma added or taken away besides a vague discription. Basically it means editors can abuse users they don't like easier."
1) I fixed it about an hour after I broke it (before your comment was posted). Thanks for the vote of confidence though.
This post is quite inaccurate and we will be responding, also on bugtraq, momentarily. The author of the post did not contact the Slash development team, or we could have corrected some of his misconceptions.
"When an official of WorldCom reports that he could see nothing wrong, let alone unusual about classifying moneys dispensed as capitalized expenditures when in fact they were moneys spent in doing business, the question arises: Can that man see
anything as wrong? And if so, does he emerge as simply one criminal practitioner, or is he a member of a class newly acceptable in American business?"
"2002-05-24 13:10:04 Pay for Play? a loophole for Payola (articles,music) (rejected)
"Here you go moderators... does this make it ON TOPIC?!?"
Yes, and redundant. We ran a story on that news item, on May 24th -- it just wasn't your submission we went with. And if you look at the links in the writeup, you'll see the May 24th story was already linked from this one.
Don't take it personally; we get a lot of submissions and can't use them all.
"We do NOT, I repeat DO NOT have any internet censorship in Australia."
I contacted Irene Graham of Electronic Frontiers Australia about this, to see if she had any comment. She did. And she invited me to quote from her email, so I will:
Under the above Commonwealth law, "prohibited content" on Australian
sites is text and images classified R18+, or X (non violent sexually
explicit activity between consenting adults) and RC (refused
classification). Content that has been banned/taken down from Australian
sites, under that censorship law, in the past two years and half years
includes material that is legally available offline - that adults can
see at the cinema, rent on video and buy in magazines at the local shop.
Under that law, when the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) finds
"prohibited content" hosted in Australia, the ABA issues a take-down
notice to the ISP or Internet content host, who has 24 hours to take the
content down. If they don't, they are subject to a fine of AU$5500 for
individuals or AU$27500 for corporations, for each day during which the
failure to take the content down continues. The ABA also notifies police
when they consider the content is "sufficiently serious".
When the ABA finds "prohibited content" hosted on sites _outside_
Australia, they notify commercial censorware providers of the material
with the intent of it being put on the censorware blacklist. (Use of
censorware is *not* mandatory). This is completely different from what
happens when "prohibited content" is found on Australian sites. Content
on Australian sites is taken down/banned.
In addition, some Australian States and Territories have had Internet
censorship laws since 1996 (e.g. Victoria, Western Australia and
Northern Territory) that include jail terms or fines under criminal law
applicable to Net users for making available online material that is
deemed unsuitable for persons under 18 years, etc. The wording of these
State/Territory laws varies, as does what is prohibited and in what
circumstances. Further, in South Australia a similar Internet censorship
law is before the Parliament and likely to be voted on in July.
One of the CDs I picked up recently was
Piano Rolls
by Jelly Roll Morton. He was one of the kings of ragtime back in the days before the electric microphone had been invented. He was a powerful, arrogant, flashy player who would often make a living by moving from town to town in Louisiana and challenging local players to a "duel." (No RIAA back then! I'm not quite sure what the revenue model was for having a hoedown with some honky-tonk player, but apparently he made it work.)
No really good-quality audio recordings of his best work exist, he was born too soon. But we do have digital recordings: piano rolls he cut for player piano while he was at his prime. Five years ago or so, some smart people found some of those original piano rolls, scanned them into the computer, and converted them to MIDI files. Any adulterated roll-holes that the publisher might have added were removed -- at the time, player-piano publishers often took a razor blade and cut extra holes to make it sound like their artists had more hands. And subtle dynamic variations were added by hand to each note, since a player-piano roll has only one note attack volume (which at the time was often crudely modulated on playback anyway). As the liner notes say: "Converting Morton's old 78 recordings to computer data, we were able to study them from myriad standpoints of tempo, melodic shaping, accentuation, swung rhythms, chord voicing, and pedaling."
Then they played the files on a Disklavier in a concert hall.
It's eerie to listen to. It's this guy who was born in 1885, actual recordings he made in 1920, and it sounds... brilliant. You're not used to hearing jazz pianists from that era in CD quality on a great piano. Suddenly you realize that the 1920s did not sound like the 1920s to the 1920s. It's like seeing photographs a hundred years ago in
color -- your mind knows better, but your senses go: whoa.
"Please Explain... what/. has against military service?... I guess it is just fashionable to spend your late teens and twenties doing drugs and being a bored, sullen, and directionless loser nowadays."
Several of the people involved in bringing you Slashdot, including the author who posted this story, have previously been in the U.S. armed forces.
And -- Hey... I may be sullen, and I may be directionless, but... uh what was that other thing you said?
I'm sure Microsoft doesn't want to lose money on the Xbox. But the article makes it sound like Bill Gates is trembling in his boots at the thought of losing $70 per machine sold.
To put the numbers in perspective... there have been
20 million
Sony Playstation 2's sold since its launch. This article claims it costs Microsoft $320 to make an Xbox.
Microsoft has $40 billion in cash. That's not capital tied up in equipment, that's money in the bank. This means that, if Microsoft decided to contact every PS2 owner around the world, everyone who has bought a PS2 in the last three years, buy them a free Xbox, and send it to them with free shipping... they would be left with only $34 billion.
Microsoft could then buy a controlling interest in
Sony Corporation
for $26 billion, and then pay retail for a $50 free game for every child in America (from newborn infants up to the 17-year-olds). After doing all that, Microsoft would still have over four billion dollars in cash reserves.
"Yea yea, it was on the net, I couldn't resist.:)"
Speaking of on the net, you might want to remove a decimal point or two from the latitude and longitude in your sig. According to Terraserver, you live on the south side of a major road in Kalamazoo-Portage, probably on a minor cross street there. It's across from two private schools, and a block from a big home improvement store that just went in recently.
You really don't want strangers to come knocking at your door, do you?:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's deh, like Deborah.
Use the Preview button :)
Typically you set up the right button to ctrl-click, which is the standard Mac way to "give me a menu of less-common options for what to do with this."
I'm back on the zero-button Mac mouse now because, well, it works :)
"Planning your actions"? In other words, your non-actions: your thoughts. You've carefully chosen examples, but consider other examples too: judges will put people away for longer if they, for example, demonstrate extreme cruelty in the commission of a violent crime, whether planned or not. Or if they, in a wholly unrelated incident, tortured an animal, not (necessarily) because abusing the animal was a crime, but because the abuse is evidence of the type of mind which poses a greater danger to society.
More to the point: a criminal who confesses to great enjoyment of sadistic acts will be incarcerated longer than one who simply confesses to having performed them. That has nothing to do with planning actions, the judge is sentencing based on thoughts. "I believe that killing puppies is fun and everyone deserves to be beaten with lead pipes" is a belief that will get you more time in prison. So are certain beliefs about black people, women, Jews, or gays.
The only real important reason for locking people away is that while they're in prison they can do no harm to society by repeating their crimes. Prejudice that runs deep enough to influence behavior toward homicide is indicative of a criminal who is more likely to repeat his crime. I hope I don't have to explain this; it's simply true. Compared to his identical twin whose criminal act was not influenced by prejudice, our racially-motivated subject should be put away for longer, because he is a greater danger. This is really very simple.
Things aren't true just because you say them. Try doing research instead of believing whatever sounds good.
The FBI Uniform Crime Report documents that hate crimes are committed against almost every demographic slice of America you can think of. Hate-crime laws apply to attacks on white people just as on black people. I challenge you to find me a single law anywhere in the United States, enacted or proposed, that says that only black people shall be protected by hate-crime laws.
If you need an example instead of statistics, look to Ronald Taylor, a racist black man who shot two white people. He was arraigned not only for their murders but for "ethnic intimidation," Pennsylvania's equivalent of "hate crime."
If you want the statistics: Hate Crimes, 1995 (see table 2)
I've seen no evidence that that is true. Yes, you can make up hypotheticals where a court will draw the wrong conclusion, such as your "racist kills a black man but not because he's black" example.
But you can invent hypotheticals for the other examples I listed too. A man's wife does him wrong; he is filled with rage and writes in his journal "I wish she were dead," and then an hour later his gun goes off and kills her in what is honestly an accident. He should probably get manslaughter but will instead get first degree murder. A tough break but that's the way it goes sometimes. Occasional hypothetical imperfections in the administration of justice are not reason to change the law.
The court can find a motivation of bigoted hatred with as much ease or difficulty as it finds a motivation of revenge, or financial gain, or the ordinary non-bigoted kind of hatred. Don't ask me to believe that a court cannot determine to its satisfaction what was in a criminal's head, because almost every criminal court does this several times a day.
It sounds like we're in agreement on mandatory sentencing (and hey look, we're heading back towards on-topic :). Unfortunately, political posturing, most notably the GOP's noticing (in 1968, then again in the 1980s) that it could bash the Dems for being weak on crime, has tied judges' hands in the name of being "tough on crime."
Eh, clever, but we already have differing penalties "based on... the criminal's thoughts." If you kill me with no intention to do so, you're guilty of negligent manslaughter. If you kill me in a sudden fit of passion, you'll get second degree murder. If you kill me after having deliberately planned it, you're looking at first degree murder.
Personally I've never really understood the fuss over hate crimes. We should add another category to the list. Did you kill me because I'm Zoroastrian? Well, this murderous rage of yours is something which any number of other people in the world could also trigger for no reason other than minding their own business. So you are much more dangerous to the world-at-large than the dude who accidentally runs over Timmy, or kills his wife in a sudden fit of anger, or who kills just one person for some life-situation of his that is not likely to happen again. You -- you're going to be an equal and continuing danger to every other Zoroastrian you happen to run across.
And if you're more dangerous to society, you should be locked up for longer. Duh.
The situation is not quite comparable...
The last n Microsoft security holes that I've seen have been discovered by security groups which reported them privately to Microsoft, and worked with Microsoft for typically a month or two to get the patch out. Then the vulnerability was announced the same day as the patch release. A few days or weeks later, an exploit for the vulnerability was posted someplace reasonably mainstream.
Not so here. The Apple vulnerability was just posted to bugtraq along with an exploit. No indication was made that any attempt to contact Apple was made, much less working privately with Apple while the problem was resolved.
http://www.cunap.com/~hardingr/projects/osx/exploi t.html
http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/280964
Also this wasn't the worst vulnerability ever found. If someone poisons your DNS server they really can do all manner of bad things to you; Software Update is (was) just one of many concerns you should have. Keep your DNS servers secure!
1) I fixed it about an hour after I broke it (before your comment was posted). Thanks for the vote of confidence though.
2) See http://slashdot.org/~CmdrTaco/journal/9748
and 3) this thread is clearly offtopic :)
(without the leading slash, your link was going to the wrong place on our static .shtml page... we've gotten a ton of 404s in our error log :)
Oh, and don't forget the other easter egg, /comments.pl?op=user_created_index
This post is quite inaccurate and we will be responding, also on bugtraq, momentarily. The author of the post did not contact the Slash development team, or we could have corrected some of his misconceptions.
Excellent, thanks.
Yes, and redundant. We ran a story on that news item, on May 24th -- it just wasn't your submission we went with. And if you look at the links in the writeup, you'll see the May 24th story was already linked from this one.
Don't take it personally; we get a lot of submissions and can't use them all.
Did you subconsciously read the dept. line, or is this a case of great fans thinking alike? :)
I contacted Irene Graham of Electronic Frontiers Australia about this, to see if she had any comment. She did. And she invited me to quote from her email, so I will:
That was Theodore Sturgeon, actually. It's become known as Sturgeon's Law, typically phrased: "Ninety percent of everything is crap."
Yeah, yeah... do as I say, not as I do. :)
No really good-quality audio recordings of his best work exist, he was born too soon. But we do have digital recordings: piano rolls he cut for player piano while he was at his prime. Five years ago or so, some smart people found some of those original piano rolls, scanned them into the computer, and converted them to MIDI files. Any adulterated roll-holes that the publisher might have added were removed -- at the time, player-piano publishers often took a razor blade and cut extra holes to make it sound like their artists had more hands. And subtle dynamic variations were added by hand to each note, since a player-piano roll has only one note attack volume (which at the time was often crudely modulated on playback anyway). As the liner notes say: "Converting Morton's old 78 recordings to computer data, we were able to study them from myriad standpoints of tempo, melodic shaping, accentuation, swung rhythms, chord voicing, and pedaling."
Then they played the files on a Disklavier in a concert hall.
It's eerie to listen to. It's this guy who was born in 1885, actual recordings he made in 1920, and it sounds... brilliant. You're not used to hearing jazz pianists from that era in CD quality on a great piano. Suddenly you realize that the 1920s did not sound like the 1920s to the 1920s. It's like seeing photographs a hundred years ago in color -- your mind knows better, but your senses go: whoa.
http://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml#sm1100
I've yet to hear a good reason why a niche news site like ours, where you know where we're coming from, has to pretend to be objective.
Several of the people involved in bringing you Slashdot, including the author who posted this story, have previously been in the U.S. armed forces.
And -- Hey... I may be sullen, and I may be directionless, but... uh what was that other thing you said?
Maybe you don't really want to post a huge comment that will require readers to click through anyway (it's too big to display at once).
How about posting a link to the ISS Alert instead? Is that so hard?
To put the numbers in perspective... there have been 20 million Sony Playstation 2's sold since its launch. This article claims it costs Microsoft $320 to make an Xbox.
Microsoft has $40 billion in cash. That's not capital tied up in equipment, that's money in the bank. This means that, if Microsoft decided to contact every PS2 owner around the world, everyone who has bought a PS2 in the last three years, buy them a free Xbox, and send it to them with free shipping... they would be left with only $34 billion.
Microsoft could then buy a controlling interest in Sony Corporation for $26 billion, and then pay retail for a $50 free game for every child in America (from newborn infants up to the 17-year-olds). After doing all that, Microsoft would still have over four billion dollars in cash reserves.
Speaking of on the net, you might want to remove a decimal point or two from the latitude and longitude in your sig. According to Terraserver, you live on the south side of a major road in Kalamazoo-Portage, probably on a minor cross street there. It's across from two private schools, and a block from a big home improvement store that just went in recently.
You really don't want strangers to come knocking at your door, do you? :)