The definition of "fraud" is roughly to make someone else believe something that isn't true, which then causes that person to do something that is to your advantage, or their disadvantage, which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Clearly this is fraud: Lori Drew made the girl wrongly believe that a young boy who she loved suddenly turned against her, hated her, and felt the world would be a better place without her. If that boy had been real, and suddenly turned against her, and so on, there would have been no fraud.
Phewww, that's a relief. She'd still be dead, but there would have been no fraud committed if she had really been talking with a real boy. What you are suggesting is that most of the people on the Internet are guilty of fraud, that the guys in a dance club who are pretending to be something they are not so they can get laid are frauds... and worse, you believe that these things are punishable. I believe that the time that you need to live in was back in.. oh, 17th century?
No, I'm not saying that what Lori Drew did was the exact same as some guy getting laid and never calling the girl again, but I am saying it is no worse. The simple plain fact is that life is dangerous. You cannot trust all that you read or hear, and certainly cannot trust anyone on the Internet. Always get a second opinion. Always check the facts. Always investigate before believing.
You and others are suggesting that this girl should be protected. I have a question for you. What if someone online had told her that people of her religion are going to hell, and should be hung outright or burned at the stake just for believing what they do. That the world would be a better place without people of her religion. If she killed herself because of that, who should be on trial. Should we be protecting people from the other religion?
When exactly is it ok for us to become thought police? Millions of times each day people are told to fuck off and die. Do they? Should saying 'I wish you were dead' be a punishable crime? Capital crime?
When you start down this road you believe you are protecting someone or some group of people. What you forget is that in doing so you are criminalizing some other group of people, and that is simply more wrong then this girl's death.
I'm sorry, but equating nuclear weapons to the power of any school kid's voice hardly makes your argument worth considering. Unfortunately, not everyone is a qualified psychotherapist and therefore not able to determine when the line should be drawn. The two people who were in her life and qualified were her parents. Even they are not fully to blame, they simply were the best positioned and best informed people who could have and should have made decisions to keep their daughter safe. It is NOT my responsibility to look out after you. Yes, there are cruel people in the world but that doesn't mean you get a free pass, and no one is allowed to make fun of you, or play tricks on you. It's part of growing up. Part and parcel of the testing that our society, practically all societies, put their young through to ensure a healthy social situation when we are adults. Don't worry about how efficient it is, just know that it is. I can't think of a society on this planet where this is not the case.
While you may say just because it has been does not mean that it should be so. Well, there are reasons for it, or it would not survive as a custom. Yes, it's sad that she died. People die every day for much sadder reasons.
You just hit the nail on the head. What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better? Would he be on trial? Lets think this through. This girl thought she was talking to a boy (mistake #1) and believed what this internet person said (mistake #2) then acted on that information (mistake #3) to her own detriment. Three strikes and you're out as they say. I have sympathy for her family, I'm not cruel, but I am realistic. If you want to believe everything you hear, your life won't last long... whether you are a teen girl or anyone else. This girl did some incredibly stupid things. Why should we blame others for that? Sure, they did aide her along, but if they had not someone else would have sooner or later.
One of the things that the law is pretty firm about is that you take responsibility for your own actions, or inaction in some cases. Why would someone else be responsible for something that this girl did all on her own? At any point she was free to not log on, to not talk to this person, and to seek help or second opinions. She fucked up. That's life. If this girl got a bad ride, as you say, her parents should have been more careful, more loving, more concerned, more involved. It's sad, and a shame, but the rest of the world should not have to pay for their mistakes. period. Yes, that all leads to school bullies and other such things. Grow a spine please. The rest of us did, or survived somehow. You can get pads on kids when they are on the playground, but how far do you go? How much protection is too much?
Should we stop building tall buildings? Should we stop building bridges? Should we stop making razor blades? If you go down that path, where does it end?
It's not that difficult to script a search that checks multiple search engines to see if the same items appear. There are folks who do that. Comparing Google to other search engines is a business function these days. I don't think that Google could go too far out on a limb with modifying or restricting information without some complaints.
When you are as Big as Google, yes, there will be complaints. You can't please everyone all of the time. That said, I've not yet heard of Google outright doing evil.
Knowing the Bush administration and spy types in general, it's quite likely that there have been instances of co-operation, if not ongoing situations. The trouble is that given the size of Google and other Internet services providers it is not likely that there will be NO government co-operative instances. The thing to work at is keeping such things minimal and transparent/above board.
So far, Google has been good for the world. I'm not saying it will always be so, so it is good that people are watching them.
There actually is a way that would be workable but it would take the skills, resources, and bandwidth of Google.... and of course the willingness for people to let Google or someone scan their data file to categorize it for them. Something like when you save a file, there would be an extra button on the dialog box that allows you to save it with Google tags embedded, save it with your own tags, or just save it.
This would involve being able to analyze the data in the file, no matter what kind, and that might not yet be possible.
There would be several levels of tagging. While I've not got a plan here, a basic level of music, text, drawing, picture, animation etc. Then a level that equates to naming of files. Name of the mp3, title of the drawing etc. The 3rd level is descriptive: Rock music by Rainbow, Suspension of 97 Honda Accord, picture from beach - vacation 2003. The fourth level would be more detailed yet, and a fifth level could get technically detailed.
I have not yet found anything that this would not work for, nor have I found anything that would easily do this for a user. With some good background information/dictionary the technology in the FF address bar, or some search engines could go a long ways since much of what you do is related to other things that you do as a user. If you can imagine 200+ tags for an image... you start to understand how meta data can be overwhelming.
Take just a picture of the Lincoln Memorial from across the fountain. How many things in that picture might want a tag? Date, time, year, who is in the photo, was it a holiday, a celebration, a speech, vacation and so on. Photographers would like to know the camera, film, shutter speed etc. The police want to know the resolution of the photo.... the list goes on.
It's not possible to apply that level of tagging yet, but automated tagging built into file formats would help, and services such as Google could provide by analyzing the picture would help. Note that there are other services that could do much of this too, it's not just Google. In analysis the software could tell you that you were diving, at the beach, at the zoo, playing golf, etc. Imagine your vacation photos tagged automatically with gps, date/time, by the camera, when you save it to your computer GoogleTags adds search links for the resort you stayed at and the town it is in. Your pc adds tags that fits it in with other photographs from that general location, software tags it with names of people it can recognize from other photos. The end result is that some months later you can recall the images you want by giving the vacation/location/date/person's name/activity etc. because THAT is how people remember things.
You can call up all pictures of Uncle Fred to do some photo-montage for his birthday or what have you.
Of course there are dangers to this, but I'm just thinking of the good side right now.
Seriously, they have overlooked the obvious. Air is what ages us. If you want to stop getting older, stop BREATHING!
This is especially useful information for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers.
On a side note, breast augmentation is unnecessary. Look at women. All they need to do is rub toilet paper on their breasts... it works for their behinds. ba dum dum
Well, since your handle is 'Pros_n_Cons' perhaps we should revisit the news:
Georgia started the strife with Russia - not the other way around. Russia has been trying to get in on Iranian nuclear power to sell them stuff for a long time. The politics of the middle east is complex enough that no slashdot post will explain it all. Russia still needs warm water ports. Iran is a strategically valid place for them. Russia actually offered to help settle the sabre rattling over nuclear power in Iran by assisting with running the program. If you were to sit and look at America the way that the rest of the world has to, what Russia has done is not all that out of line.
One reason that people found a fondness for the cold war between Russia and the US is because it managed to keep a lid on the nuclear arms problem. With too many wild cards in the game, the game gets that much more difficult to play without losing.
....They are doing everything they can to provoke the united states in hopes the US will be seen as the aggressor.
uhmmmm, yeah, Iraq had to work pretty hard at that, didn't they?
Demonizing Russia or any other country is nothing more than propaganda. period. Propaganda that the world, specifically the US, does not need now, or ever.
I agree. If the semantic web were a parachute, we'd have a lot of dead base jumpers. Some of the idea behind a semantic web are good, but terribly difficult to implement. It's truly a tower of Babylon problem. If (big if) everyone ever agrees to how to handle/interface to web resources, we still all have to learn how to describe things. I call it 'you suck at Gimp' but you call it tutorial, and yet someone else calls it 'fun with Linux apps' and that is just for something easy. It gets worse depending on the subject and the problem can be seen in tag clouds. Definitive descriptions of web resources will hinder the semantic web until it dies.
How do we know that it's not retaliation for an attack on Russian computers that originated from US military networks?
When we start hearing news stories about computer attacks from Latvia, Peru, or some small country in the far east perhaps they can be believed. Right now the news is all about attacks from people that the current administration would like to demonize. That makes the believability of these reports a little less than zero IMO. It sounds like pure propaganda at this point. If it is real, it's probably part of a cat/mouse game that we've been playing with them all along. Anyone who has been in the US military knows that we play war games all the time with Russia. Look up news on the USS Augusta, search for news about submarines a week before and after, you'll see that it hit a Russian sub in a bad game of chicken. Why would computer networks be any different? I bet there are teams of IT people that set up honey pot networks just for this kind of war game. It would be stupid to believe otherwise.
I agree with the posts saying spend more time with the kid. On the other hand, an older pc costs pennies these days. Let the kid bang on a real keyboard, they are cheap enough to replace. Maybe he'll be touch typing at 5 years old. As long as you spend time with the kid away from the computer, there is no harm in letting the kid play along when daddy is at the computer too.
Just judging by age, you might want to pick an age appropriate OS.... at that age, I'm going to suggest...... NO, I'm not starting that flame war
seriously, if you want him to play along, get him a cheap pc with no Internet connection, find some learning software, let him bang on the damn keyboard till it breaks, buy another one, repeat.
It's rather difficult to coordinate several hundred stats at minute resolution and make things move like a speedometer. RRDTool is fantastic, present it the right data and all is good. When there are many pretty widgets to look at, 5 minute resolution is often better than good enough. RRDTool can be used to display aggregated RRD data as well, so you can have simple go/no_go indicators as well as pretty widgets. A bit of PERL and you can do wonderful things with data fed to RRDTool.
My knowledge of the credit card payment industry is not complete, but as I recall, the rate that a business pays for CC services is based on average transaction value and number of transactions per day/week/month/quarter. This would have a more than insignificant impact on that rate.
It does however have some far reaching possible effects: If the patrons are paying at the table (no wait staff involved), the value of wait staff is reduced and the likelihood that they could be replaced by robotic wait staff is increased. Already wait staff are paid some of the lowest wages on the planet. If their value decreases, it could be interesting times for restaurant patrons.
I'm not saying that robots could replace waitresses at Hooters, but there are places where robots could be used. It was always the payment end of things that made using robots impossible.
Bajebus! Is this guy reading 5 year old newspapers? Can we all chip in and buy the RIAA a cake that says "welcome to the 21st Century" and underneath that 'dickheads'....?
On the other hand, I thought we already had a noshitsherlock tag?
It's good to see that someone is awake in this industry, after such a long nap, perhaps now is the time to really swing with the clue stick. What I mean is perhaps now would be a really good time to stage one of those 'day without downloads' or 'week with out CDs' kind of things to get their attention. As we are coming up to the shopping season it might mean something?
Well, something that I take great pains to explain to anyone that I help with their computing needs is this: Backups are necessary, painful, and like insurance; you don't like to pay premiums, but if you don't, when you need coverage most you will not have it and be up that proverbial creek with no means of locomotion.
Every weekend, sit down before bed and click the little backup icon I set up for you, and all will be good. Once a month, rotate disks, or whatever the routine is. If you don't have time to do backups, you don't deserve to be rescued when it all goes to shit. You do your part, I'll do mine. If you don't do your part there is little I can do to help you.
Keeping it up to date is like always checking your skydiving rig to ensure that nothing is frayed or worn out. If you get lax with your skydiving rig, you are getting lax with your life. This is generally not acceptable, if you know what I mean. Skip the backups at your own peril.
Exactly, and there are a few other problems that might pop up when matching familial DNA. There do not seem to be any privacy issues addressed here, nor any concern for the rights of citizens.
If you look exactly like someone that just robbed a bank, you might get stopped walking down the same street. If you happen to have 99% of the same DNA as someone that just robbed a bank, there should not be much cause for searching your person or papers.
This is only a blaspheme away from searching everyone's DNA to eliminate them from criminal prosecution. Everyone is guilty till proven innocent. On top of that, 'if you have nothing to hide, give us your DNA' is NOT the right solution. Warrants should not be issued on the idea of similar DNA alone.
Would a man who is step father to 3 good boys, and unknowingly father to a son in another city of the same state have to endure the searching and police BS, as well as his entire family enduring it simply because his DNA was similar to the DNA found at a crime scene?
This can be good for a marginal minute percentage of the crime fighting. The rest of the time it will be used for pure terrorism, the kind that only police states can generate.
Better than that. It will be quite a trick to keep the robots from coming back to camp laden with the robotic equivalent of a suicide bomb. There are just way too many possible ways for this to go wrong that any 'ethical' thinking put into this is outweighed initially by the unethical basis for war in the first place, and secondly by the risks associated with sending machines to fight where a human is still the more complete information processor/weapon. UAVs are one thing, but we do not have robots that are capable of the same decisions as humans are. That is both good and bad, and it means that humans will be fighting for quite a while yet.
That said, there is much to be said for the Star Trek take on war: It should be messy, nasty, and full of foul stinking death and destruction lest we forget how much better peace is.
You're not missing anything. Some people want their survivors to be able to access everything needed with the ease of logging on from home rather than presenting a death certificate to access the accounts. Some even think it would be nice to log on to hobby mail lists you might be active on and say a quick note that you wont' be back online etc. It's always up to you what you want your survivors to do for you when you are gone.
Yes, but when 37% of their clients show the same poor service it's much more convincing than one person's tale of woes. There are plenty of ways to monitor your own ISP, but when it's not your ISP, where do you go for the information? That's why this would be brilliant.
Last time I looked, Asteroids was at the local bowling alley. Do I win a prize? Do these youngster space explorer types need any more investigative help? All the comets they need are under my kitchen sink! there! ba da bing! Oh, my neighbor guy has Saturn in his driveway! But if you guys need help or a camera to find Uranus... damn, I'm out!
a USB drive in the fireproof safe next to any important papers. Passwords for things they don't need to see are not on that drive. If you are worried even more, get a safety deposit box at the bank. Keep it updated and all will be ok. Then, on the other hand, some people don't care... the world can figure it out on their own.
When the smiling AT&T cable sales people come knocking on my door, I'd like to show them a website or printed graph of how badly their Internet service really sucks. I'm starting to get a couple of options for ISP now, and it would just be so awesome to hold up a graph and smile the entire time I tell them how badly their service/product sucks!
Now you've gone and done it. If Symantec et al were to try to cover such exploitable possibilities, they'd have to have sales and marketing information that explains them. Sounds reasonable until you think about it. Their business model is built on selling crap^H^H^H^Hsoftware to people who don't want to think and explaining it to them would only expose them to ridicule when people start asking why they need to pay for something that has better free alternatives? If it was not bundled in the system when purchased Symantec would be out of business by now.
There are hundreds of ways to compromise a computer system and then it's peers. Antivirus software can only hope to attempt to protect a machine from the most probable threats, not all threats, not even all types of threats.
You can play in a sandbox, in a park, away from the highway... or... your can move your sandbox to the median of an eight lane highway. Your choice. No matter what you choose you will still find a dog turd in it sooner or later. Point being that anytime an anti-virus company blathers on about new attacks, it's likely to be FUD or worse, it's marketing.
It depends on how you file, whether you use a law firm etc. What is certain is that defending a patent is NOT cheap. Going up against MS is kind of like a college kid who can't really afford school trying to defend themselves against the RIAA.
If software patents fall away to only those that actually make sense, or fewer, perhaps the industry can get back to making innovative software and creating value rather than working on protective measures to stave off patent suits.
Thinking laterally, this means also that smaller developers won't have to worry so much about falling foul of patents. This is nothing but a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The definition of "fraud" is roughly to make someone else believe something that isn't true, which then causes that person to do something that is to your advantage, or their disadvantage, which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Clearly this is fraud: Lori Drew made the girl wrongly believe that a young boy who she loved suddenly turned against her, hated her, and felt the world would be a better place without her. If that boy had been real, and suddenly turned against her, and so on, there would have been no fraud.
Phewww, that's a relief. She'd still be dead, but there would have been no fraud committed if she had really been talking with a real boy. What you are suggesting is that most of the people on the Internet are guilty of fraud, that the guys in a dance club who are pretending to be something they are not so they can get laid are frauds... and worse, you believe that these things are punishable. I believe that the time that you need to live in was back in .. oh, 17th century?
No, I'm not saying that what Lori Drew did was the exact same as some guy getting laid and never calling the girl again, but I am saying it is no worse. The simple plain fact is that life is dangerous. You cannot trust all that you read or hear, and certainly cannot trust anyone on the Internet. Always get a second opinion. Always check the facts. Always investigate before believing.
You and others are suggesting that this girl should be protected. I have a question for you. What if someone online had told her that people of her religion are going to hell, and should be hung outright or burned at the stake just for believing what they do. That the world would be a better place without people of her religion. If she killed herself because of that, who should be on trial. Should we be protecting people from the other religion?
When exactly is it ok for us to become thought police? Millions of times each day people are told to fuck off and die. Do they? Should saying 'I wish you were dead' be a punishable crime? Capital crime?
When you start down this road you believe you are protecting someone or some group of people. What you forget is that in doing so you are criminalizing some other group of people, and that is simply more wrong then this girl's death.
I'm sorry, but equating nuclear weapons to the power of any school kid's voice hardly makes your argument worth considering. Unfortunately, not everyone is a qualified psychotherapist and therefore not able to determine when the line should be drawn. The two people who were in her life and qualified were her parents. Even they are not fully to blame, they simply were the best positioned and best informed people who could have and should have made decisions to keep their daughter safe. It is NOT my responsibility to look out after you. Yes, there are cruel people in the world but that doesn't mean you get a free pass, and no one is allowed to make fun of you, or play tricks on you. It's part of growing up. Part and parcel of the testing that our society, practically all societies, put their young through to ensure a healthy social situation when we are adults. Don't worry about how efficient it is, just know that it is. I can't think of a society on this planet where this is not the case.
While you may say just because it has been does not mean that it should be so. Well, there are reasons for it, or it would not survive as a custom. Yes, it's sad that she died. People die every day for much sadder reasons.
You just hit the nail on the head. What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better? Would he be on trial? Lets think this through. This girl thought she was talking to a boy (mistake #1) and believed what this internet person said (mistake #2) then acted on that information (mistake #3) to her own detriment. Three strikes and you're out as they say. I have sympathy for her family, I'm not cruel, but I am realistic. If you want to believe everything you hear, your life won't last long... whether you are a teen girl or anyone else. This girl did some incredibly stupid things. Why should we blame others for that? Sure, they did aide her along, but if they had not someone else would have sooner or later.
One of the things that the law is pretty firm about is that you take responsibility for your own actions, or inaction in some cases. Why would someone else be responsible for something that this girl did all on her own? At any point she was free to not log on, to not talk to this person, and to seek help or second opinions. She fucked up. That's life. If this girl got a bad ride, as you say, her parents should have been more careful, more loving, more concerned, more involved. It's sad, and a shame, but the rest of the world should not have to pay for their mistakes. period. Yes, that all leads to school bullies and other such things. Grow a spine please. The rest of us did, or survived somehow. You can get pads on kids when they are on the playground, but how far do you go? How much protection is too much?
Should we stop building tall buildings? Should we stop building bridges? Should we stop making razor blades? If you go down that path, where does it end?
It's not that difficult to script a search that checks multiple search engines to see if the same items appear. There are folks who do that. Comparing Google to other search engines is a business function these days. I don't think that Google could go too far out on a limb with modifying or restricting information without some complaints.
When you are as Big as Google, yes, there will be complaints. You can't please everyone all of the time. That said, I've not yet heard of Google outright doing evil.
Knowing the Bush administration and spy types in general, it's quite likely that there have been instances of co-operation, if not ongoing situations. The trouble is that given the size of Google and other Internet services providers it is not likely that there will be NO government co-operative instances. The thing to work at is keeping such things minimal and transparent/above board.
So far, Google has been good for the world. I'm not saying it will always be so, so it is good that people are watching them.
There actually is a way that would be workable but it would take the skills, resources, and bandwidth of Google.... and of course the willingness for people to let Google or someone scan their data file to categorize it for them. Something like when you save a file, there would be an extra button on the dialog box that allows you to save it with Google tags embedded, save it with your own tags, or just save it.
This would involve being able to analyze the data in the file, no matter what kind, and that might not yet be possible.
There would be several levels of tagging. While I've not got a plan here, a basic level of music, text, drawing, picture, animation etc. Then a level that equates to naming of files. Name of the mp3, title of the drawing etc. The 3rd level is descriptive: Rock music by Rainbow, Suspension of 97 Honda Accord, picture from beach - vacation 2003. The fourth level would be more detailed yet, and a fifth level could get technically detailed.
I have not yet found anything that this would not work for, nor have I found anything that would easily do this for a user. With some good background information/dictionary the technology in the FF address bar, or some search engines could go a long ways since much of what you do is related to other things that you do as a user. If you can imagine 200+ tags for an image... you start to understand how meta data can be overwhelming.
Take just a picture of the Lincoln Memorial from across the fountain. How many things in that picture might want a tag? Date, time, year, who is in the photo, was it a holiday, a celebration, a speech, vacation and so on. Photographers would like to know the camera, film, shutter speed etc. The police want to know the resolution of the photo.... the list goes on.
It's not possible to apply that level of tagging yet, but automated tagging built into file formats would help, and services such as Google could provide by analyzing the picture would help. Note that there are other services that could do much of this too, it's not just Google. In analysis the software could tell you that you were diving, at the beach, at the zoo, playing golf, etc. Imagine your vacation photos tagged automatically with gps, date/time, by the camera, when you save it to your computer GoogleTags adds search links for the resort you stayed at and the town it is in. Your pc adds tags that fits it in with other photographs from that general location, software tags it with names of people it can recognize from other photos. The end result is that some months later you can recall the images you want by giving the vacation/location/date/person's name/activity etc. because THAT is how people remember things.
You can call up all pictures of Uncle Fred to do some photo-montage for his birthday or what have you.
Of course there are dangers to this, but I'm just thinking of the good side right now.
Holy shit, that's funny! In an OMFG kind of way.
Seriously, they have overlooked the obvious. Air is what ages us. If you want to stop getting older, stop BREATHING!
This is especially useful information for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers.
On a side note, breast augmentation is unnecessary. Look at women. All they need to do is rub toilet paper on their breasts... it works for their behinds. ba dum dum
I'm here all week
Well, since your handle is 'Pros_n_Cons' perhaps we should revisit the news:
Georgia started the strife with Russia - not the other way around.
Russia has been trying to get in on Iranian nuclear power to sell them stuff for a long time. The politics of the middle east is complex enough that no slashdot post will explain it all. Russia still needs warm water ports. Iran is a strategically valid place for them. Russia actually offered to help settle the sabre rattling over nuclear power in Iran by assisting with running the program. If you were to sit and look at America the way that the rest of the world has to, what Russia has done is not all that out of line.
One reason that people found a fondness for the cold war between Russia and the US is because it managed to keep a lid on the nuclear arms problem. With too many wild cards in the game, the game gets that much more difficult to play without losing.
uhmmmm, yeah, Iraq had to work pretty hard at that, didn't they?
Demonizing Russia or any other country is nothing more than propaganda. period. Propaganda that the world, specifically the US, does not need now, or ever.
I agree. If the semantic web were a parachute, we'd have a lot of dead base jumpers. Some of the idea behind a semantic web are good, but terribly difficult to implement. It's truly a tower of Babylon problem. If (big if) everyone ever agrees to how to handle/interface to web resources, we still all have to learn how to describe things. I call it 'you suck at Gimp' but you call it tutorial, and yet someone else calls it 'fun with Linux apps' and that is just for something easy. It gets worse depending on the subject and the problem can be seen in tag clouds. Definitive descriptions of web resources will hinder the semantic web until it dies.
The other side of the coin is like this:
How do we know that it's not retaliation for an attack on Russian computers that originated from US military networks?
When we start hearing news stories about computer attacks from Latvia, Peru, or some small country in the far east perhaps they can be believed. Right now the news is all about attacks from people that the current administration would like to demonize. That makes the believability of these reports a little less than zero IMO. It sounds like pure propaganda at this point. If it is real, it's probably part of a cat/mouse game that we've been playing with them all along. Anyone who has been in the US military knows that we play war games all the time with Russia. Look up news on the USS Augusta, search for news about submarines a week before and after, you'll see that it hit a Russian sub in a bad game of chicken. Why would computer networks be any different? I bet there are teams of IT people that set up honey pot networks just for this kind of war game. It would be stupid to believe otherwise.
I agree with the posts saying spend more time with the kid. On the other hand, an older pc costs pennies these days. Let the kid bang on a real keyboard, they are cheap enough to replace. Maybe he'll be touch typing at 5 years old. As long as you spend time with the kid away from the computer, there is no harm in letting the kid play along when daddy is at the computer too.
Just judging by age, you might want to pick an age appropriate OS.... at that age, I'm going to suggest ...... NO, I'm not starting that flame war
seriously, if you want him to play along, get him a cheap pc with no Internet connection, find some learning software, let him bang on the damn keyboard till it breaks, buy another one, repeat.
It's rather difficult to coordinate several hundred stats at minute resolution and make things move like a speedometer. RRDTool is fantastic, present it the right data and all is good. When there are many pretty widgets to look at, 5 minute resolution is often better than good enough. RRDTool can be used to display aggregated RRD data as well, so you can have simple go/no_go indicators as well as pretty widgets. A bit of PERL and you can do wonderful things with data fed to RRDTool.
My knowledge of the credit card payment industry is not complete, but as I recall, the rate that a business pays for CC services is based on average transaction value and number of transactions per day/week/month/quarter. This would have a more than insignificant impact on that rate.
It does however have some far reaching possible effects: If the patrons are paying at the table (no wait staff involved), the value of wait staff is reduced and the likelihood that they could be replaced by robotic wait staff is increased. Already wait staff are paid some of the lowest wages on the planet. If their value decreases, it could be interesting times for restaurant patrons.
I'm not saying that robots could replace waitresses at Hooters, but there are places where robots could be used. It was always the payment end of things that made using robots impossible.
Tag this one ripvanwinkle or rtfmripvanwinkle....
Bajebus! Is this guy reading 5 year old newspapers? Can we all chip in and buy the RIAA a cake that says "welcome to the 21st Century" and underneath that 'dickheads'....?
On the other hand, I thought we already had a noshitsherlock tag?
It's good to see that someone is awake in this industry, after such a long nap, perhaps now is the time to really swing with the clue stick. What I mean is perhaps now would be a really good time to stage one of those 'day without downloads' or 'week with out CDs' kind of things to get their attention. As we are coming up to the shopping season it might mean something?
Well, something that I take great pains to explain to anyone that I help with their computing needs is this: Backups are necessary, painful, and like insurance; you don't like to pay premiums, but if you don't, when you need coverage most you will not have it and be up that proverbial creek with no means of locomotion.
Every weekend, sit down before bed and click the little backup icon I set up for you, and all will be good. Once a month, rotate disks, or whatever the routine is. If you don't have time to do backups, you don't deserve to be rescued when it all goes to shit. You do your part, I'll do mine. If you don't do your part there is little I can do to help you.
Keeping it up to date is like always checking your skydiving rig to ensure that nothing is frayed or worn out. If you get lax with your skydiving rig, you are getting lax with your life. This is generally not acceptable, if you know what I mean. Skip the backups at your own peril.
Exactly, and there are a few other problems that might pop up when matching familial DNA. There do not seem to be any privacy issues addressed here, nor any concern for the rights of citizens.
If you look exactly like someone that just robbed a bank, you might get stopped walking down the same street. If you happen to have 99% of the same DNA as someone that just robbed a bank, there should not be much cause for searching your person or papers.
This is only a blaspheme away from searching everyone's DNA to eliminate them from criminal prosecution. Everyone is guilty till proven innocent. On top of that, 'if you have nothing to hide, give us your DNA' is NOT the right solution. Warrants should not be issued on the idea of similar DNA alone.
Would a man who is step father to 3 good boys, and unknowingly father to a son in another city of the same state have to endure the searching and police BS, as well as his entire family enduring it simply because his DNA was similar to the DNA found at a crime scene?
This can be good for a marginal minute percentage of the crime fighting. The rest of the time it will be used for pure terrorism, the kind that only police states can generate.
I only had the Star Trek reference in my head. No offense to Mr. Lee as he would certainly know better the ills of war.
Better than that. It will be quite a trick to keep the robots from coming back to camp laden with the robotic equivalent of a suicide bomb. There are just way too many possible ways for this to go wrong that any 'ethical' thinking put into this is outweighed initially by the unethical basis for war in the first place, and secondly by the risks associated with sending machines to fight where a human is still the more complete information processor/weapon. UAVs are one thing, but we do not have robots that are capable of the same decisions as humans are. That is both good and bad, and it means that humans will be fighting for quite a while yet.
That said, there is much to be said for the Star Trek take on war: It should be messy, nasty, and full of foul stinking death and destruction lest we forget how much better peace is.
You're not missing anything. Some people want their survivors to be able to access everything needed with the ease of logging on from home rather than presenting a death certificate to access the accounts. Some even think it would be nice to log on to hobby mail lists you might be active on and say a quick note that you wont' be back online etc. It's always up to you what you want your survivors to do for you when you are gone.
Yes, but when 37% of their clients show the same poor service it's much more convincing than one person's tale of woes. There are plenty of ways to monitor your own ISP, but when it's not your ISP, where do you go for the information? That's why this would be brilliant.
Last time I looked, Asteroids was at the local bowling alley. Do I win a prize? Do these youngster space explorer types need any more investigative help? All the comets they need are under my kitchen sink! there! ba da bing! Oh, my neighbor guy has Saturn in his driveway! But if you guys need help or a camera to find Uranus... damn, I'm out!
a USB drive in the fireproof safe next to any important papers. Passwords for things they don't need to see are not on that drive. If you are worried even more, get a safety deposit box at the bank. Keep it updated and all will be ok. Then, on the other hand, some people don't care... the world can figure it out on their own.
When the smiling AT&T cable sales people come knocking on my door, I'd like to show them a website or printed graph of how badly their Internet service really sucks. I'm starting to get a couple of options for ISP now, and it would just be so awesome to hold up a graph and smile the entire time I tell them how badly their service/product sucks!
Now you've gone and done it. If Symantec et al were to try to cover such exploitable possibilities, they'd have to have sales and marketing information that explains them. Sounds reasonable until you think about it. Their business model is built on selling crap^H^H^H^Hsoftware to people who don't want to think and explaining it to them would only expose them to ridicule when people start asking why they need to pay for something that has better free alternatives? If it was not bundled in the system when purchased Symantec would be out of business by now.
There are hundreds of ways to compromise a computer system and then it's peers. Antivirus software can only hope to attempt to protect a machine from the most probable threats, not all threats, not even all types of threats.
You can play in a sandbox, in a park, away from the highway... or ... your can move your sandbox to the median of an eight lane highway. Your choice. No matter what you choose you will still find a dog turd in it sooner or later. Point being that anytime an anti-virus company blathers on about new attacks, it's likely to be FUD or worse, it's marketing.
Godwin's English teacher just had a heart attack!
It depends on how you file, whether you use a law firm etc. What is certain is that defending a patent is NOT cheap. Going up against MS is kind of like a college kid who can't really afford school trying to defend themselves against the RIAA.
If software patents fall away to only those that actually make sense, or fewer, perhaps the industry can get back to making innovative software and creating value rather than working on protective measures to stave off patent suits.
Thinking laterally, this means also that smaller developers won't have to worry so much about falling foul of patents. This is nothing but a good thing.