You don't work in the telco industry and it shows. I do.
In the broadband market, very few large ISPs will add restrictions to their service that might have the customers leave for the competition. In addition, there is little damage to the ISP network. Our backbone is measured in GB/s and SMTP traffic in total is a small part of it. Driving down outgoing spam volume by, say 50%, is not a business goal, because it would be maybe 5% of our total traffic, which thanks to peering is dirt cheap anyways.
Two, I didn't talk about holding the ISP responsible for the customer actions, but for holding them responsible for letting them continue once they know about it. Much the way that you aren't responsible for someone else commiting a crime, but you are guilty of aiding and abetting if you know about it and don't inform the police.
Three, get off your anti-commi trip, the 60s are over. This has nothing to do with socialism and everything with social responsibility. Sounds alike, isn't at all. In fact, conservatives are often the ones who push for social responsibility.
A customer who is cut off could not care less about why, all they want is to be reconnected immediately and with no work on their part. They will threaten leaving your service, lawsuits, and practically death threats if you do not reconnect them. Which is why I propose that here a law-based solution would work. If all ISPs were forced by law to disconnect zombies and not let them on again until they're cleaned, both leaving and lawsuit would become empty threats.
they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes Weird, in 6+ months of using OSX, I've yet to do either of these once.
Then again, it's not your typical sniper rifle. It seems more to be a pistol with silencer and barrel attached. Then again, if it gets the job done, it gets the job done.
Whoever modded parent up as "insightful": Please get a clue.
A quick look at the ROKSO list will reveal just how much of the worldwide spam does originate from USA spammers. Take just them out and you will have done the world an unbelievable favour.
There are no silencers for (military) sniper rifles. What you see that looks like one are muzzle flash suppressors. For a sniper rifle, a silencer would be pointless since they fire supersonic bullets, so dampening the initial bang does next to nothing.
Rapists and murderers only harm one victim, not millions.
If you break it down to the number of victims, he's probably getting on the order of minutes per victim. A murderer gets years per victim. I think the ratio is fine there.
I didn't say that every smart person is a liar, or that every liar is smart. Read back to the original posting, please.
Likewise, I made no statement about recognition. In our current media landscape, recognition is a mix of connections (knowing a producer who can put you on TV) and simple luck. There's millions of movies on YouTube and Co. and the next Star Wars Kid is not going to be determined by any formula or system, but by Ia Chaos.
Disagree on the second. Yes, the simple "white lies" are easy, but they are also trivial to catch. I've done some experiments during psychology seminars - with a bit of training and calibration to the test person, you can fairly accurately spot it when someone is lying on simple questions (mostly it's yes/no questions that are being used in these demonstrations). My own accuracy rate is about 75%, others are better.
Maybe I should have elaborated a bit. Of course telling lies is easy. But telling convincing lies that will hold up to some scrutiny is far from trivial.
Selfish is a pretty common trait among the intelligent. Among other things, lying requires more brains than telling the truth (because you have to remember your lies and construct non-conflicting storylines instead of just accessing memory), and some of the greatest fraudsters in history were very smart people. A good part of the hacker community regularily walks a fine line between curiosity and criminal actions. Much of what I used to do on the 'net for fun 10 years ago is a crime today.
There's also another story here: Intelligent people often educate instead of breed. You can raise 2, 3 maybe 5 or so children to be good humans. Or you can write a book and teach your lessons to thousands. Even if only 1% of them become good people due to your book, you still contributed more.
The problem is that a lot of the dangerously witty people also know that. Which is why the xian right today tries to "get them" as early as possible. Kindergarden age, school age at most. Indoctrinate, indoctrinate. It's very hard to get something that's been shoved into them for 10, 15 years out of someone.
If I can prevent one of these camps from happening, if I can teach some people what I've learned so they don't have to - then I believe I have contributed more to the general intelligence than if I breed more.
The only thing that doesn't account for is the genetic aspect of intelligence, and the final ruling is still out on how large exactly that is.
Wouldn't you rather they try to fix the mess as best they can, or at least prevent things from getting worse? No, I wouldn't.
If you came into my house, slaughtered my dog, raped my daughter and wife and smashed up my furniture, I most definitely do not want you to stay to make sure no thieves come in through the broken window or to help me with that broken leg I suffered during it all. Even if my wife is screaming and my daughter crying and the blood of my dog is ruining the carpet. All I want is you gone, or better yet, dead.
And I'm sure the vast majority of Iraqis feel exactly that way.
It would be wholesale slaughter, As certain as there are WMDs? You(*) think there would be slaughter. You(*) also thought invading Iraq would reduce world-wide terror and would be quick and painless. If I were you, I wouldn't trust my thinking very much anymore.
(*) not necessarily you, personally. This is the plural "you".
But remember, kids, global warming is only a theory. And the earth is 14,000 years old. And stupid people outbreed what little intelligence the human race has left.
Word is not a word processor, despite it's name. LyX is a word processor. WP used to be. Ok, Word 5.0 FOR DOS (that was 1993 or so) also used to be.
What Word actually is is some kind of cross-breed between a word processor, a cheap DTP program, a text and HTML editor, some kind of weird generic office productivity thing and a dozen shiny, colourful things you don't really want to know what they really are. It's got every feature that has a remote relationship to something that once met the older brother of the father of a word processing feature on the subway crammed into it.
And it still can't do proper justification. For all the crap that's been shoven into it, it still can't handle the very basics of producing a good text document. You can probably code a game in Word, but you can't produce a professional text document.
Same as for any MS product: New and interesting bugs! More and exciting ways to have your PC remote controlled! Be the first on your block to experience that 0-day live!
Plus, of course, who would want to support those communist hippies and their free Open Office? Like air and sex, it's only worth what you pay for... err... wait... wrong turn back there...
However in Iraq, the US and UK would like nothing better than to leave, They came because they wanted to leave?
Yes, maybe the individual soldiers want to leave. Their governments certainly don't. Otherwise they, well, simply would. It's not as if there were thousands of americans living in Iraq who need protection, you know?
And please, stop the bullshit about "we don't want the place falling to pieces". It was you who shot it to pieces in the first place. How outright stupid does one have to be to believe that your presence now does any good whatsoever?
Sure, there won't be peace on day one after you leave. But there won't be peace if you stay, either. You can't put in a government, because any government you support will be toppled as soon as you leave. You can't build up peace because any structure you built up to ensure peace will be hated just because you built it. There's nothing you can do. You fucked up 100%. Time to say "sorry", and get out. But that won't happen, because you're not ready to accept that because of your stupidity, the end result of the whole mess might be something you don't like.
The real reason you're still there is that you don't want something to emerge out of it all that you don't like. Death and destruction is still better than something that messes up your middle east plans.
My guess: Someone at Cisco is certain that after Steve announced it as the iPhone, he's in a corner and will pay more than they had initially agreed upon.
A kind of extortion, really. I wouldn't be surprised.
This thing has to be good enough to survive on more than novelty and buzz, it's got to offer real advantages over your cell phone, It has. Even though I've been looking for quite a while, this is the first phone I've seen that will automatically sync everything that matters with my Mac, with no manual interaction whatsoever. According to what I've seen, and come to expect from Apple products, as soon as it sees my home wireless network, it'll log on and see if my MBP is on, and if so, go and sync address book and calender with it, probably at the same time syncing my mail if I want to.
And the very big plus: I don't have to deal with several different address books, address formats and all that crap. I want one address book, not five.
Actually, according to several reviews, you don't even have to type a password. You just click "Ok".
Now that's security, isn't it? It works everywhere else, right? No malicious webpages have installed anything anywhere after those warning dialogs were added to IE...
Your game, no matter how much I like it, does not need nor deserve unlimited access to my computer. If you think it does, I will take my business elsewhere because you have no idea about coding, obviously.
See, the only stuff that your game should ever need to touch is its own damn data. So as long as whatever restricted account I run your game and/or auto-updater as as write permissions to those files, it should work, right? Even in windos it should be possible to install the game in such a way that this works.
Corporations do the same thing that individuals or small businesses do, just on a larger scale. And that's exactly where I disagree.
You see, individuals (i.e. human beings) have had an upbringing. They have values - sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones, but values nonetheless. A corporation can't have values, because it is responsible to its shareholders to make a profit. If as CEO you decide against making profit because you consider the method immoral, you can be sued (as long as it was only immoral, not illegal).
Worse, corporations do not have a concept of morale, because they have no upbringing, they have not grown up in a society. Yes, I treat them like persons here, because they can develop a mind of their own the same way a mob develops a mind of its own, independent of those individuals it is made of (that research is a hundred years old).
I don't think that egoism really is the problem. It's the lack of social context. Corporations behave anti-social, because they aren't social beings. Humans require positive interactions with other humans to survive (ever know the ancient greek we know that kids blocked from interaction with other humans will not under-developed, they will die). Corporations don't. Pure business relations are just as good as being friendly, as long as the bottom line is the same.
We are different kinds of animals, we and the corporations. Psychologically. As someone else posted somewhere else - corporations do, indeed, meet most of the criteria of psychiatry for being psychotic.
As for Walmart - I wasn't talking about how they treat their chinese employees, I was talking about how they treat their american employees...
Finally, the gas in Europe isn't "hyperinflated", but it is very expensive due to high taxes, yes. However, very little if any at all goes to public transportation. Mostly, it's just a very convenient and reliable tax source. As for average wages, when you talk about purchasing power (because that's what matters), from what I know Europe is roughly level with the US, depending on which places exactly you compare. Compared with a fairly wealthy city like mine most places in the US will score lower. Compare with some backwater town in Spain and most of the US will fare better.
As for "communist" - I know there is this strange habbit of most americans to label anything that is left-wing of the christian right as "communist", but aside from that, well let's see - the communist party scored a whooping... err... too little to be even mentioned on the wikipedia entry about the last election. There's also a left-wing party which scored 8.7 % and which you would probably call "communist", though only about half of it actually is (it was formed recently by the merger of two left-wing parties, one more a labour party, one more a communist party).
Welcome to the home of the suspected criminals, land of the bold (if they dare to speak up).
How does it feel being considered a criminal by default? Heck, in my day job I teach people to treat every input with suspicion and every unknown as if it were malicious, but at least I'm speaking about data, not humans!
We all know the answer if we've studied computer science. The problem is that the answer is boring, lots of work and totally non-hip.
It's specifications, pre- and post-conditions, all that "theoretical bullshit" we learned in university. It's just that writing code that way is very un-exciting, and that's a vast understatement.
As for corporations being unbound by moral rules, thats just rubbish, and quite an old misconception about capitalism. I'm very interested in your counter-argument. The one you provided about evil business going out of business isn't based on morale, it's based on business - it assumes that the customer is making choices based on morale. I highly doubt that is true, except in some spectacular cases. There are more than enough examples of the WalMart kind, where being evil is rewarded in the marketplace, because it allows you to undercut the competition in prices.
Tell me that you don't own a car. Funny you should ask. I don't own a car. Here in Europe, we have something called public transport and it doesn't suck. In fact, I commute to work and back slightly faster than a co-worker who lives one street away and drives by car.
And no, that I don't own a car isn't because I'm some greeny. I'm not. I simply don't need a car, because the maths work out in favour of not owning one. Renting one the 3-5 times a year I really need one, or going by taxi (saving on time to find parking spaces, etc.) is still cheaper than owning one.
So with that settled, sure the oil industry provides goods and services. No problem there. The problem is that they finance manipulations of public opinion, with the goal of business continuity.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still think that humans should come first and profit second.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't work in the telco industry and it shows. I do.
In the broadband market, very few large ISPs will add restrictions to their service that might have the customers leave for the competition. In addition, there is little damage to the ISP network. Our backbone is measured in GB/s and SMTP traffic in total is a small part of it. Driving down outgoing spam volume by, say 50%, is not a business goal, because it would be maybe 5% of our total traffic, which thanks to peering is dirt cheap anyways.
Two, I didn't talk about holding the ISP responsible for the customer actions, but for holding them responsible for letting them continue once they know about it. Much the way that you aren't responsible for someone else commiting a crime, but you are guilty of aiding and abetting if you know about it and don't inform the police.
Three, get off your anti-commi trip, the 60s are over. This has nothing to do with socialism and everything with social responsibility. Sounds alike, isn't at all. In fact, conservatives are often the ones who push for social responsibility.
So much for facts.
Yes, I was unaware of this specific gun.
Then again, it's not your typical sniper rifle. It seems more to be a pistol with silencer and barrel attached. Then again, if it gets the job done, it gets the job done.
Whoever modded parent up as "insightful": Please get a clue.
A quick look at the ROKSO list will reveal just how much of the worldwide spam does originate from USA spammers. Take just them out and you will have done the world an unbelievable favour.
There are no silencers for (military) sniper rifles. What you see that looks like one are muzzle flash suppressors. For a sniper rifle, a silencer would be pointless since they fire supersonic bullets, so dampening the initial bang does next to nothing.
Rapists and murderers only harm one victim, not millions.
If you break it down to the number of victims, he's probably getting on the order of minutes per victim. A murderer gets years per victim. I think the ratio is fine there.
Now you're twisting words.
I didn't say that every smart person is a liar, or that every liar is smart. Read back to the original posting, please.
Likewise, I made no statement about recognition. In our current media landscape, recognition is a mix of connections (knowing a producer who can put you on TV) and simple luck. There's millions of movies on YouTube and Co. and the next Star Wars Kid is not going to be determined by any formula or system, but by Ia Chaos.
Granted on the first point.
Disagree on the second. Yes, the simple "white lies" are easy, but they are also trivial to catch. I've done some experiments during psychology seminars - with a bit of training and calibration to the test person, you can fairly accurately spot it when someone is lying on simple questions (mostly it's yes/no questions that are being used in these demonstrations). My own accuracy rate is about 75%, others are better.
Maybe I should have elaborated a bit. Of course telling lies is easy. But telling convincing lies that will hold up to some scrutiny is far from trivial.
Selfish is a pretty common trait among the intelligent. Among other things, lying requires more brains than telling the truth (because you have to remember your lies and construct non-conflicting storylines instead of just accessing memory), and some of the greatest fraudsters in history were very smart people. A good part of the hacker community regularily walks a fine line between curiosity and criminal actions. Much of what I used to do on the 'net for fun 10 years ago is a crime today.
There's also another story here: Intelligent people often educate instead of breed. You can raise 2, 3 maybe 5 or so children to be good humans. Or you can write a book and teach your lessons to thousands. Even if only 1% of them become good people due to your book, you still contributed more.
The problem is that a lot of the dangerously witty people also know that. Which is why the xian right today tries to "get them" as early as possible. Kindergarden age, school age at most. Indoctrinate, indoctrinate. It's very hard to get something that's been shoved into them for 10, 15 years out of someone.
If I can prevent one of these camps from happening, if I can teach some people what I've learned so they don't have to - then I believe I have contributed more to the general intelligence than if I breed more.
The only thing that doesn't account for is the genetic aspect of intelligence, and the final ruling is still out on how large exactly that is.
If you came into my house, slaughtered my dog, raped my daughter and wife and smashed up my furniture, I most definitely do not want you to stay to make sure no thieves come in through the broken window or to help me with that broken leg I suffered during it all. Even if my wife is screaming and my daughter crying and the blood of my dog is ruining the carpet. All I want is you gone, or better yet, dead.
And I'm sure the vast majority of Iraqis feel exactly that way. It would be wholesale slaughter, As certain as there are WMDs? You(*) think there would be slaughter. You(*) also thought invading Iraq would reduce world-wide terror and would be quick and painless. If I were you, I wouldn't trust my thinking very much anymore.
(*) not necessarily you, personally. This is the plural "you".
But remember, kids, global warming is only a theory. And the earth is 14,000 years old. And stupid people outbreed what little intelligence the human race has left.
Mod parent up!
Word is not a word processor, despite it's name. LyX is a word processor. WP used to be. Ok, Word 5.0 FOR DOS (that was 1993 or so) also used to be.
What Word actually is is some kind of cross-breed between a word processor, a cheap DTP program, a text and HTML editor, some kind of weird generic office productivity thing and a dozen shiny, colourful things you don't really want to know what they really are. It's got every feature that has a remote relationship to something that once met the older brother of the father of a word processing feature on the subway crammed into it.
And it still can't do proper justification. For all the crap that's been shoven into it, it still can't handle the very basics of producing a good text document. You can probably code a game in Word, but you can't produce a professional text document.
So whatever it is, it's not a word processor.
Same as for any MS product: New and interesting bugs! More and exciting ways to have your PC remote controlled! Be the first on your block to experience that 0-day live!
Plus, of course, who would want to support those communist hippies and their free Open Office? Like air and sex, it's only worth what you pay for... err... wait... wrong turn back there...
Yes, maybe the individual soldiers want to leave. Their governments certainly don't. Otherwise they, well, simply would. It's not as if there were thousands of americans living in Iraq who need protection, you know?
And please, stop the bullshit about "we don't want the place falling to pieces". It was you who shot it to pieces in the first place. How outright stupid does one have to be to believe that your presence now does any good whatsoever?
Sure, there won't be peace on day one after you leave. But there won't be peace if you stay, either. You can't put in a government, because any government you support will be toppled as soon as you leave. You can't build up peace because any structure you built up to ensure peace will be hated just because you built it. There's nothing you can do. You fucked up 100%. Time to say "sorry", and get out. But that won't happen, because you're not ready to accept that because of your stupidity, the end result of the whole mess might be something you don't like.
The real reason you're still there is that you don't want something to emerge out of it all that you don't like. Death and destruction is still better than something that messes up your middle east plans.
My guess: Someone at Cisco is certain that after Steve announced it as the iPhone, he's in a corner and will pay more than they had initially agreed upon.
A kind of extortion, really. I wouldn't be surprised.
What a cheap publicity stunt.
A 0day of this kind is worth at least twice that on the black market, mostly to the botnet creators who are the base of all the spam we get.
And the very big plus: I don't have to deal with several different address books, address formats and all that crap. I want one address book, not five.
Actually, according to several reviews, you don't even have to type a password. You just click "Ok".
Now that's security, isn't it? It works everywhere else, right? No malicious webpages have installed anything anywhere after those warning dialogs were added to IE...
Ok, is this guy stupid or is the quote wrong?
Your game, no matter how much I like it, does not need nor deserve unlimited access to my computer. If you think it does, I will take my business elsewhere because you have no idea about coding, obviously.
See, the only stuff that your game should ever need to touch is its own damn data. So as long as whatever restricted account I run your game and/or auto-updater as as write permissions to those files, it should work, right? Even in windos it should be possible to install the game in such a way that this works.
They're for the coders, not the attackers.
A proper specification with testable pre- and post-conditions allows you to eliminate most input variable problems and a host of others.
You see, individuals (i.e. human beings) have had an upbringing. They have values - sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones, but values nonetheless. A corporation can't have values, because it is responsible to its shareholders to make a profit. If as CEO you decide against making profit because you consider the method immoral, you can be sued (as long as it was only immoral, not illegal).
Worse, corporations do not have a concept of morale, because they have no upbringing, they have not grown up in a society. Yes, I treat them like persons here, because they can develop a mind of their own the same way a mob develops a mind of its own, independent of those individuals it is made of (that research is a hundred years old).
I don't think that egoism really is the problem. It's the lack of social context. Corporations behave anti-social, because they aren't social beings. Humans require positive interactions with other humans to survive (ever know the ancient greek we know that kids blocked from interaction with other humans will not under-developed, they will die). Corporations don't. Pure business relations are just as good as being friendly, as long as the bottom line is the same.
We are different kinds of animals, we and the corporations. Psychologically. As someone else posted somewhere else - corporations do, indeed, meet most of the criteria of psychiatry for being psychotic.
As for Walmart - I wasn't talking about how they treat their chinese employees, I was talking about how they treat their american employees...
Finally, the gas in Europe isn't "hyperinflated", but it is very expensive due to high taxes, yes. However, very little if any at all goes to public transportation. Mostly, it's just a very convenient and reliable tax source. As for average wages, when you talk about purchasing power (because that's what matters), from what I know Europe is roughly level with the US, depending on which places exactly you compare. Compared with a fairly wealthy city like mine most places in the US will score lower. Compare with some backwater town in Spain and most of the US will fare better.
As for "communist" - I know there is this strange habbit of most americans to label anything that is left-wing of the christian right as "communist", but aside from that, well let's see - the communist party scored a whooping
Welcome to the home of the suspected criminals, land of the bold (if they dare to speak up).
How does it feel being considered a criminal by default? Heck, in my day job I teach people to treat every input with suspicion and every unknown as if it were malicious, but at least I'm speaking about data, not humans!
We all know the answer if we've studied computer science. The problem is that the answer is boring, lots of work and totally non-hip.
It's specifications, pre- and post-conditions, all that "theoretical bullshit" we learned in university. It's just that writing code that way is very un-exciting, and that's a vast understatement.
And no, that I don't own a car isn't because I'm some greeny. I'm not. I simply don't need a car, because the maths work out in favour of not owning one. Renting one the 3-5 times a year I really need one, or going by taxi (saving on time to find parking spaces, etc.) is still cheaper than owning one.
So with that settled, sure the oil industry provides goods and services. No problem there. The problem is that they finance manipulations of public opinion, with the goal of business continuity.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still think that humans should come first and profit second.