until the dirt gets dizzy Hehehe ! ROTFLMFLWAO!!! Shame about the water proof bit, though - I'd figured it can't be that hard to make it waterproof... Oh well, back to the tea towels for spills, then!
What a brilliant piece of kit!!! I was a bit disappointed there was no "science bit", though - technologies used like NN's, GA's etc... I wonder what sort of capacity this thing has? I mean, my front room looks more like a bombsite most Sunday mornings if I have had people over... Imagine if this really takes off - and they get the cash to invest more development. A cross between an AIBO and a vacuum cleaner!!! Way to go! Moving further down the line - it could "home in" on it's docking station. Add a shampooing module - it totally cleans as it goes... Incidentally, Dyson use a really smart method of cleaning - some sort of vortex anomaly actually sweeps the dust up. So you have no bag to fill up - the sucking force is maintained at a uniform level no matter how full it is... plus I think it's waterproof... Handy for all those red wine spills! IIRC, Dyson is one of those eccentric garden-shed type inventors who made some cash with the wheelbarrow with a ball for a wheel, and then went on to make the vacuum. Warms the cockles of my heart to see the nerd mantle being taken up where Sir Clive Sinclair left off...
Hey, Guildford's not that bad! The shopping's not _bad_, there's plenty of restaurants etc, and the pubs aren't too bad either. And there were some gorgeous babes in the club we went to!:)
Yep. And all the times you've picked your nose and eaten it (I never have done this, but some people seem to like it!?), scratched your arse (especially when you have the Curry Ringpiece of Fire), or just plain old rearranged your meat & two veg / had to unbunch your panties... /. poll time again: The activity I'd most like not get caught on camera is...
I did a 10 week course on Eiffel as part of my BSc. It sucked large hairy ones IMHO. I think the lowest point of that course was to be told in the 10th week that all the Eiffel compiler did was to translate your source into C, then it called CC on the intermediate file. I dodged the Smalltalk sessions and got myself on the C/C++ course:) And WTF is wrong with the Moderators today? Has a load of good, cheap crack started flooding the market? I've seen valid rants about Java dissed down to -1 Flamebait, regardless that they made good points, and piss poor attempts at sarcasm and humour ramped up to +3 Funny! Boy, oh boy am I looking forward to metamoderate your lily white arses! (Now watch this go to : Score -1: Made valid points but pissed off the 5krip7 k1dd13s doing the moderating today)
From the article - "...arguing that the credit card companies encouraged his gambling" This sort of personal weakness makes me sick. "Oh, I didn't have a perfect childhood. That means I can fsck up my entire life, and it's not my fault". "I spilt hot coffee on my leg and it hurt. It's not my fault, I didn't expect coffee to be made with hot water" And I'm sure we've all seen the airline peanuts with instructions on how to eat them, as well as the safety warning "may contain nuts" It's a hard world out there, but too many people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. This gambler is just trying it on, plain and simple. The thing that scares me the most is that he might get away with it... With the way that both the USA and the judicial system operate at the minute. (I'm not knocking Uncle Sam here - this legislative madness infects us all. Here in the UK we had massive payouts recently for female soldiers who got pregnant and were asked to leave the Army as a result. But they'd already signed contracts before joining saying they would leave the Army if they fell pregnant...) Oh yeah, BTW, the article mentions the Credit Card companies as taking about 5% of all transactions... They do that anyway, even if you're buying a tank of petrol or a takeaway pizza... Excellent, sensationalist reporting... There. That's better. (rantMode=0)
What does your.sig mean? The closest I can get it pronounced with some meaning is "Go you carry outs" - BTW a "carry out" is any form of alcohol sold at a pub for you to drink at home - great for impromptu parties if all the offlicences are shut... Still, if I'm right on what it means, cheers, I'll have a couple of pints of Stella Artois!:) Cheers!
Yep. With our science and medicine we are tying the hands of Gaia. The lame, the sick, the stupid - all survive (long enough to reproduce) in our Western nanny states. And look at how this affecting the gene pool. Unstable family units (for example : unemployed single gymslip mothers) birth more children in their lifetime on average than employed married/bonded couples. Which is excellent for our gene pool, no? Those that can achieve in our societies have less children than those that don't. As a race, we humans have not evolved properly for many years. This could be the opportunity for that - and how about engineering a cluster of neurons in the base of the brain to plug your into your VR connector? Those petrified about the consequence/global morality of this can look at it this way - the rich West can afford it and will be guinea pigs for any weird shit that pops out. Meanwhile, 2nd and 3rd world countries still stay with homo sapiens v1.0. Balanced migration from 1.0 to 1.1 inherent in this situation.
Hmmm, thickly spread Marmite? Very manly indeed!!! I'm still experimenting on how to get a monomolecular layer on my toast.... I am a wuss!:) There. Now let the USA based moderators (tuh-wisted MODER-AY-TAH! Cuuuuuuuhm mark maaai posts! Slashdot addicted, nerdgeek insane! - with apologies to Keith Flint...:) slam me for that because they don't understand breakfast can be eaten without 10 tons of Laaaard!:) (Californians excepted - but do you really call half a sour grapefruit & a bowl of sawdust food?) Posted with Karma Bonus included because I'm feeling saucy! And Marmite is bound to stir up some powerful flamewars on/.! We should have a/. poll: I like marmite:
* spread thickly * spread thinly * spread all over Mars so I don't have to be anywhere near it * spread all over Hemos
Hmmm, thickly spread Marmite? Very manly indeed!!! I'm still experimenting on how to get a monomolecular layer on my toast.... I am a wuss!:) There. Now let the USA based moderators (tuh-wisted MODER-AY-TAH! Cuuuuuuuhm mark maaai posts! Slashdot addicted, nerdgeek insane! - with apologies to Keith Flint...:) slam me for that because they don't understand breakfast can be eaten without 10 tons of Laaaard!:) (Californians excepted - but do you really call half a sour grapefruit & a bowl of sawdust food?) Posted with Karma Bonus included because I'm feeling saucy! And Marmite is bound to stir up some powerful flamewars on/.! We should have a/. poll: I like marmite: * spread thickly * spread thinly * spread all over Mars so I don't have to be anywhere near it * spread all over Hemos Go to it!!!
"They're actually giving back to the community" Or are they just looking for some free debugging and patching? Ooooh, I'm feeling cynical today!:) That said, IBM's effort is at least a genuine effort to work with the OSrc community, instead of Sun's "you've worked hard, this is ours to make profit on now you suckers" attitude. I don't know much about the Blackdown project, how long it took (someone mentioned 4 years) or how many people there were on it. And I'm sure that all of the committed, idealistic developers who gave their time & effort expected no reward other than the reward of NerdPay (ie just for the fun of it, because it's interesting). But it would have been nice to see something along the lines of "Scott (Scott? He's 'scot no friends:) MacNealy of Sin Microsystems announced that the Blackdown team had been awarded an all expenses paid trip to an exotic location/ nerd holiday in Silicon Valley / a top of the range Sin workstation in recognition of their efforts" - I think that would have been nice for them to say "thanks" to the Blackdown people. Whilst many of the Blackdown dev team may not have accepted it, at least Sin would have appeared to have tried to do at least a partially right thing.
What has happened to CDC, anyway? Their website hasn't been touched for weeks! Hardly the actions of "media whores"... Maybe they're working on some diabolic new hac^H^H^H^administrative tool for W2K/Linux/TransMeta...
Yep, me to!:) I'd write out the program in asm mnemonics (had my own notation for addressing modes, and everything!), which I'd then debug by hand. Then I'd translate it into opcodes, and type it into DATA statements, with a BASIC loader in there somewhere. You're right about the debugging, though!!! And not even a blue screen to tell you it'd died on it's arse!!! I got an Action Replay plug in (in the days when a plug in was a small plastic box with a strip connector at one end), that made _everything_ a lot easier... Still, after I'd made loads of mistakes in opcode translation, I wrote a _really_ basic assembler which would write the DATA statements for me when I was about 14. I wrote an asteroids clone (with joystick support!:) with it, but that was about all! What reference books did you use? I had the Programmers reference guide, and a complete bible book whose name escapes me... It had _everything_ you wanted to know about the C64 in it, though - every interrupt (hook those vectors !:) and every memory location's function described. Cool as fuck. So I laugh when the 5kr1p7 k1ddi32 of today complain about compiler XYZ not having enough features! And it impresses the hel lout of them when you debug their pissy efforts _straight_ in assembler!!! Aaaah, those were the days!:)...
Download a chunk of the Web, study it with a keen mathematical eye, and soon enough you'll be able to speculate about its future behavior. Yeah, 'cos the net really needs more idle speculation published on it, hey?:) The net is a synthetic organism - it exhibits organic properties. But it's evolution rarely comes in gradual stages like real organic matter - on the net you have an innovation which changes everything overnight (like Cisco's cool new networking stuff). I can't think of any organic life that has a large gap in it's evolutionary history except... Homo Sapiens!!! Maybe the Internet will help us find the Missing Link!!!:)
People are authoring from scratch. Blimey, what a shattering statement!!! Next thing you know, these industry pundits will be telling us "computer data is made up of 0's and 1's"... Sheesh...
The reason for attacking these areas in the Ruhr valley was critical to the subduing of the perceived threat by the Nazis. As mentioned in an Einstein post earlier, there were concerns about the Nazis having this uber weapon to bring countries to it's knees. The British intelligence knew that this weapon was to be atomic. To make the atomic weapons, a large supply of Deuterium ("heavy" water) was required - it slows activity of radioactive materials. That was why the dams were so heavily fortified, and why the British had to destroy them. BTW, they said that the Lancaster would never fly...
Hey, quit bashing South Africans, would you? Geez, if people on/. bashed Americans like this there'd be flame wars like you wouldn't believe and Rob would have his mail box full of whining emails. I used to think that way, too. Poor, poor Nelson Mandela, locked away by the evil Afrikaans, those wicked racist pigs, the poor underpriveleged kids with their spaniel eyes and empty bellies... All on the TV news piped into my safe and warm front room; hell, I'm glad we're imposing sanctions on those evil scum, destroy apartheid by economic means. Easy, and we can all sleep safe in our beds because we're doing our bit to end racism. Then I talked to a few South Africans. My girlfriend who grew up with black children as equal playmates - something I'd have said was impossible, after viewing all those TV specials about the evil of the governmental regime. About how she spoke Kosa(sp?), the native black language of the region she lived in better than Afrikaans. And more that I won't bore you with right now. I'm not trying to defend apartheid, or racism in any way. But the whole situation there has never been as clear cut as your TV would lead you to believe; getting the story from the horses mouth (so to speak - don't tell my GF!) certainly opened my eyes to the slant that the media put on it. And what else has TV "educated" you about? Scared me so much, I quit reading the news or watching TV - don't believe all that you hear until you've spoken to the people that were there.
"Some will own a Quantum Computer and offer free (quantum) encryption (in return for banner ads). " Hmm, not at first. The economics of the thing will probably preclude this form of "free" usage - ie you pay only for downloading the banner. If you charge a nominal fee, say a few quid a month, it will prevent the masses from _really_ wanting it - I don't think people on the net as a whole _really_ understand what's at risk. Still, give it a few years, and maybe the populace will be more privacy-savvy - we can only hope...
"Questioning the decisions that Government makes, and the laws they pass, is supposed to be a central element of a functioning democracy."
*sigh*. I was actually trying to imply this; I didn't think/. readers needed me to type a few extra paragraphs on the basic process of democracy and lawmaking - you have proved me wrong. But at the end of the day, it is the "elected representatives." (my words from original post) who will effect the change in the law, not you or I. Unless you're a judge!:) Although I'd like to think the legislative changes are at our behest.
But hey, that's your definition of democracy and not mine. I'd go further to state that my definition of democracy would also encompass a bit more influence on Government than mere "Questioning" - I'd like to think that they may actually take the feelings of the populace into consideration...
This isn't a just a personal rights issue, it also incorporates business law. Which I suppose is the great pity - who can shout the loudest? Huge companies with expansive expense accounts vs a bunch of [geeks|nerds] - see recent articles:) with a few laptops... Hmmmm... And we all know how much respect politicians have for judges and courts... Jeffrey Archer, anyone?
A few things came up from reading this - the guy seems to think "the punishment is harsh for what he did". I don't agree with this punishment for computer intruders, but the law is the law until it is changed by your elected representatives. And if you got caught, then tough tittie. You knew the risks. HNN has an excellent article about it. Basically, this type of activity is like trespass & vandalism. In the UK, that's more like a slap on the wrist community service type punishment. I'm not going to go on about ethics or morals; that's been done to death and everybody has a different standpoint. What would ultimately benefit society more - imprisoning this kid for a year, or making him teach (under supervision) underpriveleged kids how to use computers?
"riot nrrrd" ROTFLMAO!!! We've have riots in London this year (next "protest" coming 30th of this month, btw - if you live in london, be careful!), basically dregs of society bitchin' because they have no money (apart from the free state handouts they get from our taxes... Hmm - we're paying them to wreck our streets?). Anyway, back on topic, what would a "riot nrrrd" do on a protest march? I can see:
Free the Penguin protest signs
Handouts of various Linux distros
Beowulf clusters being formed over wireless LAN's, all over the city
Public speakers explaining how that STW thingy was finally unravelled Obviously, the police would lose control of the crowd, who would then go on a 12 hour marathon spree of:
Fixing broken ATM's
Realigning street lamps
A mass recompiling of their kernel of choice in the park
And I'd like to think those who slammed you yesterday will find forgiveness in themselves also. Congratulations on having the guts to admit your mistakes. I forget if it's a traditional, or some eminently quotable source, but "If you've never made a mistake, you've never made anything".
Slashdot Mirror
until the dirt gets dizzy
Hehehe ! ROTFLMFLWAO!!!
Shame about the water proof bit, though - I'd figured it can't be that hard to make it waterproof... Oh well, back to the tea towels for spills, then!
What a brilliant piece of kit!!!
I was a bit disappointed there was no "science bit", though - technologies used like NN's, GA's etc...
I wonder what sort of capacity this thing has? I mean, my front room looks more like a bombsite most Sunday mornings if I have had people over...
Imagine if this really takes off - and they get the cash to invest more development. A cross between an AIBO and a vacuum cleaner!!! Way to go! Moving further down the line - it could "home in" on it's docking station. Add a shampooing module - it totally cleans as it goes...
Incidentally, Dyson use a really smart method of cleaning - some sort of vortex anomaly actually sweeps the dust up. So you have no bag to fill up - the sucking force is maintained at a uniform level no matter how full it is... plus I think it's waterproof... Handy for all those red wine spills!
IIRC, Dyson is one of those eccentric garden-shed type inventors who made some cash with the wheelbarrow with a ball for a wheel, and then went on to make the vacuum. Warms the cockles of my heart to see the nerd mantle being taken up where Sir Clive Sinclair left off...
Hey, Guildford's not that bad!
The shopping's not _bad_, there's plenty of restaurants etc, and the pubs aren't too bad either.
And there were some gorgeous babes in the club we went to!:)
The activity I'd most like not get caught on camera is...
Picking my nose
Itching my ringpiece
Rearranging my tackle
Rearranging Hemos' tackle
I did a 10 week course on Eiffel as part of my BSc. It sucked large hairy ones IMHO. :)
I think the lowest point of that course was to be told in the 10th week that all the Eiffel compiler did was to translate your source into C, then it called CC on the intermediate file.
I dodged the Smalltalk sessions and got myself on the C/C++ course
And WTF is wrong with the Moderators today? Has a load of good, cheap crack started flooding the market? I've seen valid rants about Java dissed down to -1 Flamebait, regardless that they made good points, and piss poor attempts at sarcasm and humour ramped up to +3 Funny!
Boy, oh boy am I looking forward to metamoderate your lily white arses!
(Now watch this go to : Score -1: Made valid points but pissed off the 5krip7 k1dd13s doing the moderating today)
...But I won't sully /. by writing what they're called in London... :)
...You can imagine how upset I was last Saturday when I didn't buy a ticket for the lottery, and saw Elvis zing by in his flying saucer...
From the article - "...arguing that the credit card companies encouraged his gambling"
This sort of personal weakness makes me sick. "Oh, I didn't have a perfect childhood. That means I can fsck up my entire life, and it's not my fault".
"I spilt hot coffee on my leg and it hurt. It's not my fault, I didn't expect coffee to be made with hot water"
And I'm sure we've all seen the airline peanuts with instructions on how to eat them, as well as the safety warning "may contain nuts"
It's a hard world out there, but too many people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. This gambler is just trying it on, plain and simple. The thing that scares me the most is that he might get away with it... With the way that both the USA and the judicial system operate at the minute. (I'm not knocking Uncle Sam here - this legislative madness infects us all. Here in the UK we had massive payouts recently for female soldiers who got pregnant and were asked to leave the Army as a result. But they'd already signed contracts before joining saying they would leave the Army if they fell pregnant...)
Oh yeah, BTW, the article mentions the Credit Card companies as taking about 5% of all transactions... They do that anyway, even if you're buying a tank of petrol or a takeaway pizza... Excellent, sensationalist reporting...
There. That's better. (rantMode=0)
What does your .sig mean? :)
The closest I can get it pronounced with some meaning is "Go you carry outs" - BTW a "carry out" is any form of alcohol sold at a pub for you to drink at home - great for impromptu parties if all the offlicences are shut...
Still, if I'm right on what it means, cheers, I'll have a couple of pints of Stella Artois!
Cheers!
Yep. With our science and medicine we are tying the hands of Gaia.
The lame, the sick, the stupid - all survive (long enough to reproduce) in our Western nanny states. And look at how this affecting the gene pool. Unstable family units (for example : unemployed single gymslip mothers) birth more children in their lifetime on average than employed married/bonded couples. Which is excellent for our gene pool, no? Those that can achieve in our societies have less children than those that don't.
As a race, we humans have not evolved properly for many years. This could be the opportunity for that - and how about engineering a cluster of neurons in the base of the brain to plug your into your VR connector?
Those petrified about the consequence/global morality of this can look at it this way - the rich West can afford it and will be guinea pigs for any weird shit that pops out. Meanwhile, 2nd and 3rd world countries still stay with homo sapiens v1.0. Balanced migration from 1.0 to 1.1 inherent in this situation.
Hmmm, thickly spread Marmite? Very manly indeed!!! I'm still experimenting on how to get a monomolecular layer on my toast.... I am a wuss! :) :) slam me for that because they don't understand breakfast can be eaten without 10 tons of Laaaard! :) (Californians excepted - but do you really call half a sour grapefruit & a bowl of sawdust food?) /.! /. poll:
There. Now let the USA based moderators (tuh-wisted MODER-AY-TAH! Cuuuuuuuhm mark maaai posts! Slashdot addicted, nerdgeek insane! - with apologies to Keith Flint...
Posted with Karma Bonus included because I'm feeling saucy! And Marmite is bound to stir up some powerful flamewars on
We should have a
I like marmite:
* spread thickly
* spread thinly
* spread all over Mars so I don't have to be anywhere near it
* spread all over Hemos
Go to it!!!
Hmmm, thickly spread Marmite? Very manly indeed!!! I'm still experimenting on how to get a monomolecular layer on my toast.... I am a wuss! :) There. Now let the USA based moderators (tuh-wisted MODER-AY-TAH! Cuuuuuuuhm mark maaai posts! Slashdot addicted, nerdgeek insane! - with apologies to Keith Flint... :) slam me for that because they don't understand breakfast can be eaten without 10 tons of Laaaard! :) (Californians excepted - but do you really call half a sour grapefruit & a bowl of sawdust food?) Posted with Karma Bonus included because I'm feeling saucy! And Marmite is bound to stir up some powerful flamewars on /.! We should have a /. poll: I like marmite: * spread thickly * spread thinly * spread all over Mars so I don't have to be anywhere near it * spread all over Hemos Go to it!!!
"They're actually giving back to the community" :) :) MacNealy of Sin Microsystems announced that the Blackdown team had been awarded an all expenses paid trip to an exotic location/ nerd holiday in Silicon Valley / a top of the range Sin workstation in recognition of their efforts" - I think that would have been nice for them to say "thanks" to the Blackdown people. Whilst many of the Blackdown dev team may not have accepted it, at least Sin would have appeared to have tried to do at least a partially right thing.
Or are they just looking for some free debugging and patching?
Ooooh, I'm feeling cynical today!
That said, IBM's effort is at least a genuine effort to work with the OSrc community, instead of Sun's "you've worked hard, this is ours to make profit on now you suckers" attitude.
I don't know much about the Blackdown project, how long it took (someone mentioned 4 years) or how many people there were on it. And I'm sure that all of the committed, idealistic developers who gave their time & effort expected no reward other than the reward of NerdPay (ie just for the fun of it, because it's interesting). But it would have been nice to see something along the lines of "Scott (Scott? He's 'scot no friends
What has happened to CDC, anyway? Their website hasn't been touched for weeks! Hardly the actions of "media whores"...
Maybe they're working on some diabolic new hac^H^H^H^administrative tool for W2K/Linux/TransMeta...
Or swapped the valves for jumpers just to get the thing to boot...
Yep, me to! :) :) with it, but that was about all! :) and every memory location's function described. Cool as fuck. :) ...
I'd write out the program in asm mnemonics (had my own notation for addressing modes, and everything!), which I'd then debug by hand. Then I'd translate it into opcodes, and type it into DATA statements, with a BASIC loader in there somewhere.
You're right about the debugging, though!!! And not even a blue screen to tell you it'd died on it's arse!!! I got an Action Replay plug in (in the days when a plug in was a small plastic box with a strip connector at one end), that made _everything_ a lot easier...
Still, after I'd made loads of mistakes in opcode translation, I wrote a _really_ basic assembler which would write the DATA statements for me when I was about 14. I wrote an asteroids clone (with joystick support!
What reference books did you use? I had the Programmers reference guide, and a complete bible book whose name escapes me... It had _everything_ you wanted to know about the C64 in it, though - every interrupt (hook those vectors !
So I laugh when the 5kr1p7 k1ddi32 of today complain about compiler XYZ not having enough features! And it impresses the hel lout of them when you debug their pissy efforts _straight_ in assembler!!!
Aaaah, those were the days!
Download a chunk of the Web, study it with a keen mathematical eye, and soon enough you'll be able to speculate about its future behavior. :) :)
Yeah, 'cos the net really needs more idle speculation published on it, hey?
The net is a synthetic organism - it exhibits organic properties. But it's evolution rarely comes in gradual stages like real organic matter - on the net you have an innovation which changes everything overnight (like Cisco's cool new networking stuff). I can't think of any organic life that has a large gap in it's evolutionary history except... Homo Sapiens!!! Maybe the Internet will help us find the Missing Link!!!
People are authoring from scratch.
Blimey, what a shattering statement!!! Next thing you know, these industry pundits will be telling us "computer data is made up of 0's and 1's"... Sheesh...
The reason for attacking these areas in the Ruhr valley was critical to the subduing of the perceived threat by the Nazis. As mentioned in an Einstein post earlier, there were concerns about the Nazis having this uber weapon to bring countries to it's knees.
The British intelligence knew that this weapon was to be atomic. To make the atomic weapons, a large supply of Deuterium ("heavy" water) was required - it slows activity of radioactive materials.
That was why the dams were so heavily fortified, and why the British had to destroy them.
BTW, they said that the Lancaster would never fly...
Hey, quit bashing South Africans, would you? Geez, if people on /. bashed Americans like this there'd be flame wars like you wouldn't believe and Rob would have his mail box full of whining emails.
I used to think that way, too. Poor, poor Nelson Mandela, locked away by the evil Afrikaans, those wicked racist pigs, the poor underpriveleged kids with their spaniel eyes and empty bellies...
All on the TV news piped into my safe and warm front room; hell, I'm glad we're imposing sanctions on those evil scum, destroy apartheid by economic means. Easy, and we can all sleep safe in our beds because we're doing our bit to end racism.
Then I talked to a few South Africans. My girlfriend who grew up with black children as equal playmates - something I'd have said was impossible, after viewing all those TV specials about the evil of the governmental regime. About how she spoke Kosa(sp?), the native black language of the region she lived in better than Afrikaans. And more that I won't bore you with right now.
I'm not trying to defend apartheid, or racism in any way. But the whole situation there has never been as clear cut as your TV would lead you to believe; getting the story from the horses mouth (so to speak - don't tell my GF!) certainly opened my eyes to the slant that the media put on it. And what else has TV "educated" you about?
Scared me so much, I quit reading the news or watching TV - don't believe all that you hear until you've spoken to the people that were there.
1. There will be a new closed domain (.perv) where like-minded people can play by themselves. :)
Shouldn't that be "with themselves?"
"Some will own a Quantum Computer and offer free (quantum) encryption (in return for banner ads). "
Hmm, not at first. The economics of the thing will probably preclude this form of "free" usage - ie you pay only for downloading the banner. If you charge a nominal fee, say a few quid a month, it will prevent the masses from _really_ wanting it - I don't think people on the net as a whole _really_ understand what's at risk. Still, give it a few years, and maybe the populace will be more privacy-savvy - we can only hope...
"Questioning the decisions that Government makes, and the laws they pass, is supposed to be a central element of a functioning democracy."
/. readers needed me to type a few extra paragraphs on the basic process of democracy and lawmaking - you have proved me wrong. But at the end of the day, it is the "elected representatives." (my words from original post) who will effect the change in the law, not you or I. Unless you're a judge! :) Although I'd like to think the legislative changes are at our behest.
:) with a few laptops... Hmmmm... And we all know how much respect politicians have for judges and courts... Jeffrey Archer, anyone?
*sigh*.
I was actually trying to imply this; I didn't think
But hey, that's your definition of democracy and not mine. I'd go further to state that my definition of democracy would also encompass a bit more influence on Government than mere "Questioning" - I'd like to think that they may actually take the feelings of the populace into consideration...
This isn't a just a personal rights issue, it also incorporates business law. Which I suppose is the great pity - who can shout the loudest? Huge companies with expansive expense accounts vs a bunch of [geeks|nerds] - see recent articles
A few things came up from reading this - the guy seems to think "the punishment is harsh for what he did".
I don't agree with this punishment for computer intruders, but the law is the law until it is changed by your elected representatives. And if you got caught, then tough tittie. You knew the risks. HNN has an excellent article about it.
Basically, this type of activity is like trespass & vandalism. In the UK, that's more like a slap on the wrist community service type punishment. I'm not going to go on about ethics or morals; that's been done to death and everybody has a different standpoint.
What would ultimately benefit society more - imprisoning this kid for a year, or making him teach (under supervision) underpriveleged kids how to use computers?
ROTFLMAO!!! We've have riots in London this year (next "protest" coming 30th of this month, btw - if you live in london, be careful!), basically dregs of society bitchin' because they have no money (apart from the free state handouts they get from our taxes... Hmm - we're paying them to wreck our streets?).
Anyway, back on topic, what would a "riot nrrrd" do on a protest march? I can see
Free the Penguin protest signs
Handouts of various Linux distros
Beowulf clusters being formed over wireless LAN's, all over the city
Public speakers explaining how that STW thingy was finally unravelled
Obviously, the police would lose control of the crowd, who would then go on a 12 hour marathon spree of:
Fixing broken ATM's
Realigning street lamps
A mass recompiling of their kernel of choice in the park
And I'd like to think those who slammed you yesterday will find forgiveness in themselves also.
Congratulations on having the guts to admit your mistakes.
I forget if it's a traditional, or some eminently quotable source, but "If you've never made a mistake, you've never made anything".