If you havn't got anything to hide then you don't have anything to worry about
Why do I need to have something to hide in order to want privacy? Can't I simply desire to prevent others from gathering unnecessary information on me?
Have you joined the EFF? I have. And now I am considering ways to let those that haven't joined, or that aren't even aware of issues such as these, to become informed. My frustration is that it seems 99% of the general public is content wallow in ignorance. Not by choice, but simply by virtue of the fact that they don't read sites like/., or EFF, or attend conferences, or try to do anything that is "non-standard" with digital devices or content. They just have no interest, and so they don't realize that eventually this spills over into everyday life.
The reaction to my telling friends and associates about these things is that they look at me like I'm a nutcase (yeah ok sometimes I *am* a nutcase:p). I wish I could transform that reaction into interest.
I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it.
Shit happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't.
Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.
Yes, once again its another dupe - why is everyone still so surprised that this happens? The 'editors' barely pay lip service to their title and I doubt very much that they read the comments either. At face value there is no real passion from the creators of the site - its just the same old shit day after day.
To explain further, Slashdot exists for one purpose: to make money for parent company OSDN. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but don't expect a high quality site the way its currently run. The Slashdot business model (if you can call it that) seems to be to provoke reaction from the loyal crowd of slashbots that frequent the site. Inflammatory / trollish stories (e.g here) and dupes cause the page hits (and therefore ad revenue) to go through the roof.
As a result, most of the comments I see on the stories are neither insightful, interesting or informative. There seems to be no real balanced discussion - something I feel is a product of the moderation system which rewards those who conform to the slashbot mindset and censors everything else. This democratic method of editing the comments is terrible - especially where technical issues are concerned, as a lot of nonsense is modded up by people who don't know otherwise.
You are probably wondering why I read Slashdot. Partly morbid curiosity and partly to laugh at both the flame wars which invevitably break out and the well crafted trolls.
To conclude, Slashdot is neither really "News for Nerds" nor is it "Stuff that matters". If you want the former, go to somewhere like arstechnica or kuroshin and if you want actual stuff that matters, the BBC are hard to beat.
Surprisingly there are a bunch of low cost carriers who route their calls over VoIP when going overseas so they can fit more calls into the same pipe. A lot of said countries are in the third world. Of course, whether you can get decent IP service when you don't have leased T1s is a different story:-)
Anyway, you can test your VoIP quality from anywhere with IP and a Java-enabled browser at http://testyourvoip.com if you are concerned about your IP quality not being up to snuff, or if you want to see how it is and you are in the wilds of Africa... but have IP connectivity.
I agree, BUT 95% of these problems stem from Microsoft having a stranglehold. Think about it. If you were a soft/hardware developer and you are trying to make a profit, you're going to develop your product on the most ubiquitous platform and only consider secondary platforms if market share (potential profit) warrants this. It's simple economics.
Linux/BSD variants have come a LONG way considering most of the functionality/drivers has been either creatively engineered by the community or obtained by lobbying vendors (resulting in drivers that only provide the most basic functionality).
Boost the installed base and provide demand for functionality in your OS, and vendors will respond.
Unfortunately these problems are difficult to solve because they are both a cause and a symptom of themselves. Not to mention the very active efforts of Microsoft to thwart any meaningful attempts at the adoption of alternate systems.
Here in Europe it has been possible to buy 60mpg cars that will do 90mph+ for years...I really don't see how this is a revelation. Most new hatchbacks (especially the turbodiesels) can do this. Hell my 15 year old Peugeot 205 can do 55mpg.
This is not a troll but it would be really nice when certain parts of the world realise that having a 2.5 tonne behemoth that barely can get 5mpg is just not a smart idea.
Whoever came up with this idea is clever. But, he/she similarly totally misunderstands the point of copyright laws by playing "bright lining" games (as do, in my experience, many slashdot readers).
(the term "bright lining" means doing some activity with a full knowledge of where the law or regulation is and doing something right up to this regulation, this living up to the letter of the law, though, the implication is, not the spirit.)
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.
When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations and rulings based on past technological and social circumstance. as technology and social circumstance change, it may become necessary to change (usually tighten) what is allowed in order to best preserve the spirit and intention of copyright, which, again, is to encourage authors.
here's a really obvious sign of when the spirit of copyright is broken--i call it the "extrapolation" argument. basically, somebody takes an existing interpretation and tries to "scale it up":
-sharing music with your kid sister is ok, so sharing music with everybody's kid sister is (Napster)
-photocopying one page is ok, so let's set up a distributed system via amazon's new full-text thing by which everybody downloads one page and somehow they are combined again (slashdot/amazon)
-MIT has a blanket license for analog music / copying music from existing analog sources of music is ok (radio - unscheduled recordings, includes ads, not complete songs), so let's play a clever trick by which people can get whatever they want in a high quality, but analog format (MIT)
All three of these will work, in the short term. And all three will generate stricter interpretations and a clamp-down, because they are so clearly against the spirit of the socially beneficial copyright law (oh, shut up already, completely-anti-copyright anarcho-libertarians - go and do a little historical research about every attempt to do away with copyrights and patents completely). The end result of this will be stricted interpretations and more bitching and whining on slashdot. What is the root cause of this? The evil RIAA and MPAA? Yes, they occasionally go overboard (the mickey mouse extension act is pretty egregious), but generally they are in the right.
The root cause is those who think that they're being clever by bright-lining copyright interpretations without realizing that they are interpretations that are subject to reasonable modification as circumstances warrant, not god-given cast-in-stone truths. or, in other words, more technological sense than social understanding.
I read somewhere that MyDoom was named because the virus when viewed in an ASCII viewer contains an amount of freetext that was meant to say 'mydomain' but instead it was mis-spelt in the virus to say 'mydoomain' - hence MyDoom.
I live and work in Toulouse, and I was somewhat surprised at this article - there already are phone jammers operating in cinemas here, possibly illegally?
It's a good idea though, there is no need to have a mobile phone when watching a film;-)
If you are interested in high quality audio, try making a gainclone amplifier - this website has more details:
http://www.decdun.fsnet.co.uk/
I made one and the sound quality is fantastic - better than any of the amps I have previously owned.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you joined the EFF? I have. And now I am considering ways to let those that haven't joined, or that aren't even aware of issues such as these, to become informed. My frustration is that it seems 99% of the general public is content wallow in ignorance. Not by choice, but simply by virtue of the fact that they don't read sites like /., or EFF, or attend conferences, or try to do anything that is "non-standard" with digital devices or content. They just have no interest, and so they don't realize that eventually this spills over into everyday life.
:p). I wish I could transform that reaction into interest.
The reaction to my telling friends and associates about these things is that they look at me like I'm a nutcase (yeah ok sometimes I *am* a nutcase
I guess because (for some moronic reason) AMD are "good guys" and Intel are "bad guys" we just have to get all giggly and rub their noses in it. Shit happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some products take off, some don't. Itanium looks like a good architecture for transaction processing, at least on paper. Turns out the market was more interested in backwards compatibility.
Yes, once again its another dupe - why is everyone still so surprised that this happens? The 'editors' barely pay lip service to their title and I doubt very much that they read the comments either. At face value there is no real passion from the creators of the site - its just the same old shit day after day.
To explain further, Slashdot exists for one purpose: to make money for parent company OSDN. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but don't expect a high quality site the way its currently run. The Slashdot business model (if you can call it that) seems to be to provoke reaction from the loyal crowd of slashbots that frequent the site. Inflammatory / trollish stories (e.g here) and dupes cause the page hits (and therefore ad revenue) to go through the roof.
As a result, most of the comments I see on the stories are neither insightful, interesting or informative. There seems to be no real balanced discussion - something I feel is a product of the moderation system which rewards those who conform to the slashbot mindset and censors everything else. This democratic method of editing the comments is terrible - especially where technical issues are concerned, as a lot of nonsense is modded up by people who don't know otherwise.
You are probably wondering why I read Slashdot. Partly morbid curiosity and partly to laugh at both the flame wars which invevitably break out and the well crafted trolls.
To conclude, Slashdot is neither really "News for Nerds" nor is it "Stuff that matters". If you want the former, go to somewhere like arstechnica or kuroshin and if you want actual stuff that matters, the BBC are hard to beat.
Surprisingly there are a bunch of low cost carriers who route their calls over VoIP when going overseas so they can fit more calls into the same pipe. A lot of said countries are in the third world. Of course, whether you can get decent IP service when you don't have leased T1s is a different story :-)
Anyway, you can test your VoIP quality from anywhere with IP and a Java-enabled browser at http://testyourvoip.com if you are concerned about your IP quality not being up to snuff, or if you want to see how it is and you are in the wilds of Africa... but have IP connectivity.
I agree, BUT 95% of these problems stem from Microsoft having a stranglehold. Think about it. If you were a soft/hardware developer and you are trying to make a profit, you're going to develop your product on the most ubiquitous platform and only consider secondary platforms if market share (potential profit) warrants this. It's simple economics.
Linux/BSD variants have come a LONG way considering most of the functionality/drivers has been either creatively engineered by the community or obtained by lobbying vendors (resulting in drivers that only provide the most basic functionality).
Boost the installed base and provide demand for functionality in your OS, and vendors will respond.
Unfortunately these problems are difficult to solve because they are both a cause and a symptom of themselves. Not to mention the very active efforts of Microsoft to thwart any meaningful attempts at the adoption of alternate systems.
Just my 0.02$
No! Pirates are people who board naval vessels without consent. Its "you copyright infringed my intellectual property"
What are these strange "tabs" you speak of?
Here in Europe it has been possible to buy 60mpg cars that will do 90mph+ for years...I really don't see how this is a revelation. Most new hatchbacks (especially the turbodiesels) can do this. Hell my 15 year old Peugeot 205 can do 55mpg.
This is not a troll but it would be really nice when certain parts of the world realise that having a 2.5 tonne behemoth that barely can get 5mpg is just not a smart idea.
Whoever came up with this idea is clever. But, he/she similarly totally misunderstands the point of copyright laws by playing "bright lining" games (as do, in my experience, many slashdot readers).
(the term "bright lining" means doing some activity with a full knowledge of where the law or regulation is and doing something right up to this regulation, this living up to the letter of the law, though, the implication is, not the spirit.)
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.
When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations and rulings based on past technological and social circumstance. as technology and social circumstance change, it may become necessary to change (usually tighten) what is allowed in order to best preserve the spirit and intention of copyright, which, again, is to encourage authors.
here's a really obvious sign of when the spirit of copyright is broken--i call it the "extrapolation" argument. basically, somebody takes an existing interpretation and tries to "scale it up":
-sharing music with your kid sister is ok, so sharing music with everybody's kid sister is (Napster)
-photocopying one page is ok, so let's set up a distributed system via amazon's new full-text thing by which everybody downloads one page and somehow they are combined again (slashdot/amazon)
-MIT has a blanket license for analog music / copying music from existing analog sources of music is ok (radio - unscheduled recordings, includes ads, not complete songs), so let's play a clever trick by which people can get whatever they want in a high quality, but analog format (MIT)
All three of these will work, in the short term. And all three will generate stricter interpretations and a clamp-down, because they are so clearly against the spirit of the socially beneficial copyright law (oh, shut up already, completely-anti-copyright anarcho-libertarians - go and do a little historical research about every attempt to do away with copyrights and patents completely). The end result of this will be stricted interpretations and more bitching and whining on slashdot. What is the root cause of this? The evil RIAA and MPAA? Yes, they occasionally go overboard (the mickey mouse extension act is pretty egregious), but generally they are in the right.
The root cause is those who think that they're being clever by bright-lining copyright interpretations without realizing that they are interpretations that are subject to reasonable modification as circumstances warrant, not god-given cast-in-stone truths. or, in other words, more technological sense than social understanding.
Spiderman is much better!
http://www.newcomicreviews.com/temp/spidey/
I read somewhere that MyDoom was named because the virus when viewed in an ASCII viewer contains an amount of freetext that was meant to say 'mydomain' but instead it was mis-spelt in the virus to say 'mydoomain' - hence MyDoom.
I live and work in Toulouse, and I was somewhat surprised at this article - there already are phone jammers operating in cinemas here, possibly illegally?
;-)
It's a good idea though, there is no need to have a mobile phone when watching a film
As a fellow South African I also recommend Castle.
I'm now living in France, and the beer here is sweeter - once you get used to it though its fine.
My wife drives a minivan, haul 2 kids around(yes, to soccer) but she is not brain dead by any stretch of the imagination.
Because you really need a minivan to haul 2 kids around....Seriously?
If you are interested in high quality audio, try making a gainclone amplifier - this website has more details:
http://www.decdun.fsnet.co.uk/
I made one and the sound quality is fantastic - better than any of the amps I have previously owned.
Only someone from SA would have the tagline 'Ja no well fine'....
They probably will - Cmdrtaco's site has more details...
It's interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the dominant Linux distribution they'll have to compete against.
Novell? They'll be lucky....more like Knoppix!!