My girlfriend and I were talking about the DARE programs that we were put through in middle school. She pointed something out that I found quite interesting: DARE made her quite comfortable with drugs, even curious about some of the more interesting ones. (ie, LSD.) Neither of have used drugs (we're straight edge, I guess), but I must admit that I'm in agreement with her -- I know just what I'd use, what to expect, and that I'd probably use them again. All thanks to DARE!
Yup, I'm guessing some people would. In which case you'd just use the ISPs caller ID logs. (They all still maintain those, right? We all did back in '94 and '95, anyhow.)
I know this doesn't entirely fix the problem, but I was thinking about this last night. My solution is more "how do I figure out who did this?" and less "how do I prevent this data from being stolen in the first place?"
I set my homepage on Netscape on my PowerBook to my website with a URL that grabs my IP and logs it to a file on my site. I've never had a "homepage" before, and I feel a little stupid using it.
The result is that if somebody were to take my laptop and use the browser on it, I'd have their IP, therefore their ISP, and therefore their identity, or something very close to it.
Like I said, it doesn't prevent the information from being stolen (though I don't think that's possible -- somebody with your computer has all the time that they like to crack your encryption), but it is a possibly useful method of capturing the thief.
Why? Do you think these companies loaded the questions? Filled the audience with employees told to ask certain questions? Lots of large companies actually donate money, goods, and services without compensation (except good publicity).
I have the same problem with that as I do with newspapers that don't maintain church-and-state separation between writers and advertisers. There will inherently be biases creeping into the event.
You can't honestly assert that Busch's sponsorship won't bias the moderator's questions as relates to, say, underage alcohol consumption, can you? Probably not even consciously (I'm being optimistic, of course), but there's just no way that this doesn't result in some influence.
Look at all the slamming of drug companes. If SmithKline Beecham or Glaxo Wellcome sponsored these debates, do you think that we'd see these questions? Hell no. They'd withdraw their sponsorship immediately.
Masem pointed out that US Air is paying to fly in reporters, and Busch is providing food and beverages at a nearby bar. That's bizarre. Reporters will come. It's the frickin' presidental debates. Food and beer? Get a local restaurant to sponsor it. Hell, can't us taxpayers foot the bill for a few thousand bucks for some beer and pizza?
Though I think that the debates have been run quite poorly, I think that it's fully within the realm of realistic government that we the people foot the bill for this. We pay millions in campaign underwriting from our tax money. Why not set aside a small percentage of that to chip in for food and drink for the press corp, if this is somehow required?
gaw, that's one of the saddest things I've heard. That you have no empathy and not enough imagination.
I agree that it's sad, but I'm not sure that I'm any different in this respect than most other American (western?) youths. It helps to visit the battlegrounds around me in Virginia and Pennsylvania, as I've done. But our Civil War remains a product of history to me, not something with a connection to my life beyond the legal precedents and the domino effect that all such occurances have on latter-day events.
Am I lacking in all empathy, unable to realize my own context in the world? Maybe, but I suspect not. What I think is more likely is that my perspective represents a common western perspective. It's just that most people don't want to admit that they hold this perspective. I think that's what this art exhibit is trying to make us realise in ourselves. It worked for me.
I can't really put my finger on it, but they really are quite interesting. I think that, in many ways, this style of art seems more "real" to me than the photographs. I've seen the images from when Dr. King was killed, but that's history. (By which I mean it's something inaccessible to me, just as distant to my 22-year-old-self as the Civil War.) Seeing an alternate rendition might be sufficient to make these scenes more real, but this offers more than that. This makes these distant concepts and events as real as the hours and hours that I've spent looking at Sierra and Maxis games.
Yes, I know those games are fiction, and the attack on the Birmingham protesters was real. But not to me they're not. The Sims is real. The attack on the Birmingham protesters is something that was in my history books in middle school.
I think this exhibit has had the desired effect (what I assume to be the desired effect) on me. I'm not sure that I like that effect, or what it says about me and my worldview. But it is fascinating.
You folks that replied to my initial post (and you who replied to those replies) -- y'all kick ass. This is the best series of replies and discussion that I've seen in ages on/. You guys should come out and play more often.:)
It seems strange to me that a wholly different version of CSS is required for mobile phones. Wouldn't an extension of the existing CSS definitions make more sense? The majority of these terms exist in CSS.
I guess I'm of the school of thought that the ISPs for mobile devices ought to filter the content and rewrite it to suit mobile phones. The idea of rewriting code (ie, http://www.amazon.com/phone/) for different access devices has always struck me as somewhat foolish.
Perhaps the only thing more foolish than that is attempting much in the way of layout on a PCS screen.:) I understand that there are more advanced devices, like the Palm VII, that can handle more than 16x3 characters (or whatever), but it still seems to be mostly about content right now.
We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.
I take your position the vast majority of the time. I'm usually the one screaming at crazy eco-freaks "Hey, what do you think *we* are, if not natural?"
In this case, we just don't know enough about what we've done here yet. And we also don't know what the status of life on Mars is. Neither point has been proven to the point of satisfaction of the general scientific community.
Before you say that nothing has been to that degree, consider that we can agree on some basic facts now that we couldn't just a couple of hundred years ago. The solar system has 8-9 planets, depending on whether you count Pluto. We orbit the sun, a medium-sized star. We're in a galaxy. Humans can see a small amount of the spectrum. We understand the basic manner in which the brain works. We can grasp our central nervous system's methodolgy of function. And so on. These are largely undisputed facts.
We do not know such things about the issues at hand. Let's wait until we know more about the Martian ecosystem, if there is one, and until we know more about our own ecosystem. I'm inclined to believe that the hole in the ozone is perfectly normal, and that global warming is a hoax. But I don't know that, and I'm probably wrong. But until most of the scientific community can come to some sort of a consensus on this, I hardly think that we're fit to terraform Mars.
I really don't know about this. We've damaged our own environment pretty badly, not always threw neglect, but often through ignorance. Surely we remain largely in the dark in our knowledge of how our atmosphere interacts with our water and our earth, and where we fit in with all of this.
The idea of inflicting ourselves on the whole of Mars is a little unsettling. We may have the best intentions, but do we really know what we're doing?
A legal process, overseen by a single regulatory body, by which inventors, creative individuals and idea-pirating Internet companies can register inventions, methods and other debateably-unique concepts for the purpose of maintaining a monopoly on that particular idea.
It's always been illegal for me to borrow tapes/cds from friends and libraries and record them, but it is easy to do, so everyone does...
I believe that the fair use clause that went into effect in '92ish (the Home Recording Act?) permits the duplication of music in just such a scenario. Anybody with a little more knowledge than I care to expand on this?
That's what I remembered. I can't help but wonder if such strong magnetic forces are bad for the body. I must admit that my knowledge of physiology is nearly non-existent, but it seems to me that such a tremendous amount of magnetism would be less-than-healthy.
I also recall something about decreasing the force of gravity over a superconductor...something about a 2% reduction in weight over some super-cooled ceramic or something. Is there a connection to that? It's been a while... I vaguely remember an article debunking the 2% figure, and that the reduction in weight is actually so small as to be a result of chance, not the physics behind the levitation system.
Am I making this up? Is there a connection between these?
The Ig Nobel Prize honors individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." [from the site Why *wouldn't* you want to levitate that frog again? I think that perhaps the most important method of spending our tax dollars very well may be levitating frogs and other amphibious creatures.
But I do want to check: the levitating frog is the real deal, right? I remember hearing about it at the time, and I still think it's pretty goddamned cool. The movie cracks me up. But before I go around telling people that I have a video clip of a floating frog, I figure I should check to make sure it's legit.:)
On our line at the office, I got a call a few months ago from a friendly woman at AT&T, who wanted to know why we left them for our long distance service. I told her that we hadn't changed our long distance, that it was the same as it had always been. Concerned, she offered to switch us back.
I got a little suspicious, and got her phone number and extension, and told her that I'd call her right back. Reviewing our bills, I found I was right -- we'd been with Sprint ever since we started the business 14 months previously. Just to check, I called Sprint, and they said that we were still with them, just as we'd always been.
I called the woman back and demanded that she explain herself. She stuttered out a lame excuse: her computer said that I was with AT&T before, and that we're now with Joe's Long Distance, or something like that. I told her that was an absolute lie, and asked to speak with her supervisor. She said that she didn't have one, and hung up.
That is sneaky. BTW, we're now with Cable & Wireless. Our long distance bills have gone from -- really -- $13 / month to $1.25.
Wow, I'm really impressed, for once, with C|Net's reporting. Normally they'd just get down on their knees and bob their head enthusiastically if RedHat (or any other company) delcared something like this. I can't believe that author Stephen Shankland, whose name I don't recognize from the usual roster of news.com writers, would be so bold as to interview Bruce and ESR. Yay.
Slashdot Mirror
"squating" -- it's spelled "squatting".
:)
I don't run Slash, but I'm going to guess that there's no aspell integration.
-Waldo
My girlfriend and I were talking about the DARE programs that we were put through in middle school. She pointed something out that I found quite interesting: DARE made her quite comfortable with drugs, even curious about some of the more interesting ones. (ie, LSD.) Neither of have used drugs (we're straight edge, I guess), but I must admit that I'm in agreement with her -- I know just what I'd use, what to expect, and that I'd probably use them again. All thanks to DARE!
Waldo
Hey, good call, x-empt: Distributed.net Captures Laptop Thief.
-Waldo
Yup, I'm guessing some people would. In which case you'd just use the ISPs caller ID logs. (They all still maintain those, right? We all did back in '94 and '95, anyhow.)
-Waldo
I know this doesn't entirely fix the problem, but I was thinking about this last night. My solution is more "how do I figure out who did this?" and less "how do I prevent this data from being stolen in the first place?"
I set my homepage on Netscape on my PowerBook to my website with a URL that grabs my IP and logs it to a file on my site. I've never had a "homepage" before, and I feel a little stupid using it.
The result is that if somebody were to take my laptop and use the browser on it, I'd have their IP, therefore their ISP, and therefore their identity, or something very close to it.
Like I said, it doesn't prevent the information from being stolen (though I don't think that's possible -- somebody with your computer has all the time that they like to crack your encryption), but it is a possibly useful method of capturing the thief.
-Waldo
When I've voted (I'm 22, so I'm new at this :), we push a little button on a little computer. Nothing to spoil!
-Waldo
Huh? What church-and-state separation are you talking about? The press is neither church nor state.
Sorry -- it's a figure of speech in journalism, the separation of the editorial side of the paper and the business side of the paper.
-Waldo
Why? Do you think these companies loaded the questions? Filled the audience with employees told to ask certain questions? Lots of large companies actually donate money, goods, and services without compensation (except good publicity).
I have the same problem with that as I do with newspapers that don't maintain church-and-state separation between writers and advertisers. There will inherently be biases creeping into the event.
You can't honestly assert that Busch's sponsorship won't bias the moderator's questions as relates to, say, underage alcohol consumption, can you? Probably not even consciously (I'm being optimistic, of course), but there's just no way that this doesn't result in some influence.
Look at all the slamming of drug companes. If SmithKline Beecham or Glaxo Wellcome sponsored these debates, do you think that we'd see these questions? Hell no. They'd withdraw their sponsorship immediately.
Masem pointed out that US Air is paying to fly in reporters, and Busch is providing food and beverages at a nearby bar. That's bizarre. Reporters will come. It's the frickin' presidental debates. Food and beer? Get a local restaurant to sponsor it. Hell, can't us taxpayers foot the bill for a few thousand bucks for some beer and pizza?
Though I think that the debates have been run quite poorly, I think that it's fully within the realm of realistic government that we the people foot the bill for this. We pay millions in campaign underwriting from our tax money. Why not set aside a small percentage of that to chip in for food and drink for the press corp, if this is somehow required?
Church and state.
-Waldo
Did you know that the presidental debates are brought to you by:
? I sure didn't.
That's disgusting.
-Waldo
gaw, that's one of the saddest things I've heard. That you have no empathy and not enough imagination.
I agree that it's sad, but I'm not sure that I'm any different in this respect than most other American (western?) youths. It helps to visit the battlegrounds around me in Virginia and Pennsylvania, as I've done. But our Civil War remains a product of history to me, not something with a connection to my life beyond the legal precedents and the domino effect that all such occurances have on latter-day events.
Am I lacking in all empathy, unable to realize my own context in the world? Maybe, but I suspect not. What I think is more likely is that my perspective represents a common western perspective. It's just that most people don't want to admit that they hold this perspective. I think that's what this art exhibit is trying to make us realise in ourselves. It worked for me.
-Waldo
I can't really put my finger on it, but they really are quite interesting. I think that, in many ways, this style of art seems more "real" to me than the photographs. I've seen the images from when Dr. King was killed, but that's history. (By which I mean it's something inaccessible to me, just as distant to my 22-year-old-self as the Civil War.) Seeing an alternate rendition might be sufficient to make these scenes more real, but this offers more than that. This makes these distant concepts and events as real as the hours and hours that I've spent looking at Sierra and Maxis games.
Yes, I know those games are fiction, and the attack on the Birmingham protesters was real. But not to me they're not. The Sims is real. The attack on the Birmingham protesters is something that was in my history books in middle school.
I think this exhibit has had the desired effect (what I assume to be the desired effect) on me. I'm not sure that I like that effect, or what it says about me and my worldview. But it is fascinating.
-Waldo
You folks that replied to my initial post (and you who replied to those replies) -- y'all kick ass. This is the best series of replies and discussion that I've seen in ages on /. You guys should come out and play more often. :)
Now I'm going to have a cheery day.
-Waldo
It seems strange to me that a wholly different version of CSS is required for mobile phones. Wouldn't an extension of the existing CSS definitions make more sense? The majority of these terms exist in CSS.
:) I understand that there are more advanced devices, like the Palm VII, that can handle more than 16x3 characters (or whatever), but it still seems to be mostly about content right now.
I guess I'm of the school of thought that the ISPs for mobile devices ought to filter the content and rewrite it to suit mobile phones. The idea of rewriting code (ie, http://www.amazon.com/phone/) for different access devices has always struck me as somewhat foolish.
Perhaps the only thing more foolish than that is attempting much in the way of layout on a PCS screen.
We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.
-Waldo
Yup. See Part 9.
-Waldo
I take your position the vast majority of the time. I'm usually the one screaming at crazy eco-freaks "Hey, what do you think *we* are, if not natural?"
In this case, we just don't know enough about what we've done here yet. And we also don't know what the status of life on Mars is. Neither point has been proven to the point of satisfaction of the general scientific community.
Before you say that nothing has been to that degree, consider that we can agree on some basic facts now that we couldn't just a couple of hundred years ago. The solar system has 8-9 planets, depending on whether you count Pluto. We orbit the sun, a medium-sized star. We're in a galaxy. Humans can see a small amount of the spectrum. We understand the basic manner in which the brain works. We can grasp our central nervous system's methodolgy of function. And so on. These are largely undisputed facts.
We do not know such things about the issues at hand. Let's wait until we know more about the Martian ecosystem, if there is one, and until we know more about our own ecosystem. I'm inclined to believe that the hole in the ozone is perfectly normal, and that global warming is a hoax. But I don't know that, and I'm probably wrong. But until most of the scientific community can come to some sort of a consensus on this, I hardly think that we're fit to terraform Mars.
-Waldo
Thanks, Pete. That was pretty damned stupid of me. A slip like that can be fatal on /. :)
-W
I really don't know about this. We've damaged our own environment pretty badly, not always threw neglect, but often through ignorance. Surely we remain largely in the dark in our knowledge of how our atmosphere interacts with our water and our earth, and where we fit in with all of this.
The idea of inflicting ourselves on the whole of Mars is a little unsettling. We may have the best intentions, but do we really know what we're doing?
-Waldo
Stick your finger in your _what_?
A legal process, overseen by a single regulatory body, by which inventors, creative individuals and idea-pirating Internet companies can register inventions, methods and other debateably-unique concepts for the purpose of maintaining a monopoly on that particular idea.
-Waldo
(A tip o' the weinerdog to Spax.)
It's always been illegal for me to borrow tapes/cds from friends and libraries and record them, but it is easy to do, so everyone does...
I believe that the fair use clause that went into effect in '92ish (the Home Recording Act?) permits the duplication of music in just such a scenario. Anybody with a little more knowledge than I care to expand on this?
-Waldo
That's what I remembered. I can't help but wonder if such strong magnetic forces are bad for the body. I must admit that my knowledge of physiology is nearly non-existent, but it seems to me that such a tremendous amount of magnetism would be less-than-healthy.
I also recall something about decreasing the force of gravity over a superconductor...something about a 2% reduction in weight over some super-cooled ceramic or something. Is there a connection to that? It's been a while... I vaguely remember an article debunking the 2% figure, and that the reduction in weight is actually so small as to be a result of chance, not the physics behind the levitation system.
Am I making this up? Is there a connection between these?
-Waldo
The Ig Nobel Prize honors individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." [from the site
:)
Why *wouldn't* you want to levitate that frog again? I think that perhaps the most important method of spending our tax dollars very well may be levitating frogs and other amphibious creatures.
But I do want to check: the levitating frog is the real deal, right? I remember hearing about it at the time, and I still think it's pretty goddamned cool. The movie cracks me up. But before I go around telling people that I have a video clip of a floating frog, I figure I should check to make sure it's legit.
-Waldo
On our line at the office, I got a call a few months ago from a friendly woman at AT&T, who wanted to know why we left them for our long distance service. I told her that we hadn't changed our long distance, that it was the same as it had always been. Concerned, she offered to switch us back.
I got a little suspicious, and got her phone number and extension, and told her that I'd call her right back. Reviewing our bills, I found I was right -- we'd been with Sprint ever since we started the business 14 months previously. Just to check, I called Sprint, and they said that we were still with them, just as we'd always been.
I called the woman back and demanded that she explain herself. She stuttered out a lame excuse: her computer said that I was with AT&T before, and that we're now with Joe's Long Distance, or something like that. I told her that was an absolute lie, and asked to speak with her supervisor. She said that she didn't have one, and hung up.
That is sneaky. BTW, we're now with Cable & Wireless. Our long distance bills have gone from -- really -- $13 / month to $1.25.
-Waldo
Sorry to reply to my own post, but a quick search reveals that Shankland has written a great many articles for news.com, many of them on Linux.
Though it's true that I didn't recognize his name, I should have done my homework before posting.
-Waldo
Wow, I'm really impressed, for once, with C|Net's reporting. Normally they'd just get down on their knees and bob their head enthusiastically if RedHat (or any other company) delcared something like this. I can't believe that author Stephen Shankland, whose name I don't recognize from the usual roster of news.com writers, would be so bold as to interview Bruce and ESR. Yay.
-Waldo