Except athletic potential can be measured objectively (How fast can you run 100 metres, how much weight can you lift, how many goals you scored last season) and attractiveness can be measured through majoritary consensus (Regardless of how subjective attractiveness is, it's generally possible to find a consensus on whether someone is attractive or not according to the majority of human beings in a social group, which measures that person's ability to profit from said attractiveness.). But we don't have an appropriate working definition of intelligence, which means any attempt to measure it is inherently bogus and kludged together from approximations like arithmethic aptitude and reading comprehension. Anybody who believes there is a direct, linear correlation between success (Which also cannot be defined objectively - Most people use income as a measure of success, but that's a rough approximation, and I tend to believe that success is more meaningfully measured by psychological standards of well-being and social standards of positive impact on a society - The problem of what success is and how to measure it is definitely not trivial) hasn't thought very much about how IQ tests relate to reality. IQ results are approximations and need to be taken with a grain of salt, and beyond the 90-115 range, success and IQ definitely don't scale linearly (Or at all) with success, and whether they do inside that range is definitely arguable (See caveats above).
For the record, I have an IQ score above that range.
The article submitter probably meant spiritual fnord enlightenment and was clueless to the actual meaning of the section, or maybe intentionally used it as a sort of joke or lack of where to put it. Of course, the five guys who only read the Enlightenment section will be pissed.
Why do people continue to delude themselves that an alien intelligence will be able to comprehend communication as we consider it? And if they can that they'll be foolish enough to waste time on decoding, renderring and interpreting an unreachably distant point of light? And if they go that far, why the heck does anyone expect a usefull response?
Because that's what we would do in their place.
I'm not defending the government's action in poking into Orkut for information - What information can't be obtained already by reading Orkut is most likely useless, at any rate, and as several other people have pointed out, this opens a bad precedent.
I'm Brazilian. I gave up on Orkut for the same reasons: Excessive spam, inane discussion, idiotic communities, and, generally speaking, MySpacification. I'm going to sincerely apologize on behalf of my people for what happened to Orkut users.
Pedophiles and racists are chatting online. Read my lips. Big Fucking Deal. In a free society, people should be entitled both to their views, and to discuss those views with like minded individuals. The majority of society happens to find these views highly offensive. Tough Shit. Liberty isn't as selective as most mobs. I refuse to sacrafice society on the altar of public outrage because a few sickos are typing objectionable content. "Apology to crime". What kind of a fucking country is Brazil anyway!?
[...]
So fuck moral outrage. It's like a fashion fad. Google knows this. They respect peoples rights, even if they abhor their actions. And so should everyone. If you don't like it, then move to a totalitarian state. Or Brazil, where my above "apology to crime" is in fact illegal.
Er... no it isn't. The parent poster mistranslated 'apologia ao crime' as 'apology to crime'. What he meant was incitement, which is illegal. Talking about child pornography and racism isn't illegal, but encouraging people (Online or otherwise) to commit hate crimes or child abuse is, and guess what, so it is elsewhere.
Although this is better for speed, isn't it bad for anonimity? Traffic that has been over four hosts is harder to trace back than traffic that has hopped over a single host.
The reason games aren't respected by the lawmaker demographic is simple: Most people involved in the legislative process are around 40, usually pushing 50 or 60. Those people didn't experience gaming when they were young, and therefore it has no emotional or cultural value for them. It's likely that as the average year of birth among them increases, more senators and congressmen that were or are gamers are going to be involved with legislation surrounding it.
2. Have you ever, you know.. used Linux? It could be my memory playing tricks, but I can't for the life of me recall the "Run in Compatibility Mode" to run my DOS games in Linux.
Seriously. Who ever had the idea of lumping together several components that dissipate heat poorly inside a big box made of metal or worse, heat-insulating plastic? Computers aren't appliances. You don't have to buy them in a single cute little box. Why hasn't anyone thoght, yet, of lumping the motherboard and assorted off-board peripherals in one small case tucked away somewhere with a large fan and placing the parts you actually need access to - power button, USB ports, peripheral devices and optical disk drives - on your desk?
You can talk about portability, but my computer isn't going anywhere, and I dispute the notion that a huge gaming case with a handle on top is "portable". It's as portable as an Osbourne. If I want something to carry around with me, I'll get a largish laptop and an USB mouse, problem solved, even for gaming.
You're confusing contextual levels though - "Car literate" isn't the same as "Vehicle Literate". I'd say being vehicle literate precludes knowing how to operate and maybe repair a single type of vehicle and knowing the general principles underlying all types of vehicles; that is, how different types of engines work, what is more likely to break with them and how to fix them, basic notions of mechanics and electronics, and knowing the difference between different types of vehicles, hopefully with a considerable knowledge about how they are different, how they are similar, and what makes them move. Being car literate only involves knowing how to operate a car and the basic maintenance every car owner needs to know.
Similarly, computer literacy involves knowing the most basic concepts about how computers and the internet work; knowing what the Web is, what email is, what a protocol is, what a server and a client are, and being able to tell the difference. Knowing what is software and what is hardware. Knowing how software is created (Not necessarily knowing how to create software) and being able to comfortably operate a single environment, without being utterly clueless in another; a truly computer literate user can teach himself to use a new operating system in a matter of hours (As long as it is similar enough as his previous environment; you can't expect a computer literate Windows user to be perfectly comfortable with bash, but you can expect him to understand and use Gnome), and doesn't take too long to learn its quirks. Knowing how to use Windows and Office isn't being computer-literate, it's being Windows-literate. The same goes for any other environment, although most Linux users (Besides hackers) come from the Windows world and are reasonably computer literate.
If the internet was regionalised, interest in it would simply start to disappear, particularly outside the US; accessing US sites is basically what I do with the internet. Playing games hosted in the US. Talking to people who live in the US. Skype would die quickly, since their greatest appeal is bypassing the cost of international phone calls. IM services which basically do the same thing would take a huge hit. ISPs would die by the thousand outside the US, as the total content accessible by the Internet would go down 50% or more, depending on country. Amazon.com, ThinkGeek and pretty much anyone who sells through the web would lose money from this, more or less, since a good part of their revenue comes from overseas buyers.
Even worse, people would lose contact with friends and relatives in other countries. Spam wouldn't go down; most of the spam I get is originated in the US. The Internet would simply wither and die on several countries that haven't developed a strong internet culture; that includes most of the world. Private companies would start running their own international gateways. Wikipedia would take a huge hit and lose all of its non-english language versions. Open Source software would take a huge hit as well; numerous idiotic IP laws in the US stop some software from being distributed there, and worse, numerous crucial programmers in numerous important projects would simply disappear from the network and have to fork their own regional versions which would quickly become incompatible as Open Source died outside the US and nearly disappeared inside it. Slashdot would lose at least 25% of its readers. The Internet's main corporate use (Connecting offices between different countries and saving millions worth of international calls and mail in the process) would suddenly disappear, and any interest in it (And custom applications) would go away too. Computers as a whole would become immensely less useful, and become a niche market again in some countries. Software would be put back years by the change as everything shifts to the closed-source development model, which would be more viable.
I probably missed some of the consequences. My point is, don't go there, man.
The best way of encrypting your hard drive is by having the encryption key stored in a physical key - An USB pendrive - that you carry around with yourself.
However, security against this kind of attack is usually unnecessary; most people don't have data so valuable they have to worry about someone breaking into their houses at night and stealing their files.
Security against an attack if you have physical, unsupervised access to the box is nil, in any case. Carry a pendrive or a bootable CD containing a rescue Linux distro with you and boot from it. There, you can mess around with system config files and do things like creating your very own SSH account on the machine. Due to the way PCs work, the only way to protect your machine against attacks by someone with physical access to it is to raise a BIOS password or encrypt your files, not a bad idea in any case.
This is a consequence of Ubuntu's different security model. You can't be root in Ubuntu; you have to consciously make the decision to run software as root by typing 'sudo' before it. (Actually you can run a shell under sudo, but still.) The idea was that since you can't login as root, the system is more secure and resists exploits that try to gain root access. This vulnerability is the kind of stupid mistake people make sometimes. A brain fart. Nothing really malicious, and not the sign of an incompetent programmer. Something you could've done.
Most Windows vulnerabilities are that, too. There's just more of them. And the system is inherently less secure, so it doesn't resist those quite as well. And it's harder to update because it's a monolithic kludge. Of course, some Windows vulnerabilities are just the product of poor design.
And another thing, if this happened,/. would bash Microsoft insanely. True. There is a bias. But still, I highly doubt the issue would be fixed in the same day, on a Sunday, and the update would be availiable quickly and painlessly.
VB wasn't a good beginner language from the start; it was intended as a language for non-programmers to write simple GUI applications. For someone who wants to do that, it now has morphed into a full-fledged programming language (Knowing Microsoft, probably with lots of cruft). That means it isn't good for those people anymore.
A good language to learn to code in (If you plan on actually being a programmer) is Python, or Lisp if you're taking the long road and learning something less useful for the sake of better theorical knowledge.
A good language for non-programers to write GUIs in is TCL/TK. They're cross-platform, simple, and take minutes to learn.
I'm not saying VB is a crappy language or a toy (When I looked at it, years ago, it was, but that's not the matter and I haven't see the 'new' VB) but I am saying that it was never a good language to learn how to code in, (Much like BASIC before it) even if it was a good language for non-coders to write simple scripts in. It hasn't gotten any simpler or easier to learn. Of course, nowadays, simply the fact that it is neither cross-platform nor compiles in more than on operating system on a single architecture just irks me to no end and makes me think it's silly to learn something that only runs on an OS that is losing market share. I also think it's silly for someone just learning to program, or who'll only do casual program, to pay the full price for an obscenely-priced license while you can get Python, TCL, Perl, Lisp, C/C++ and Java for free on any platform you choose.
So, you mean only leet smart-arse people should get to use computers? That it's the users' fault computer security has gone down the drain? Get off your bloody high horse. Users aren't stupid. Most of them are quite smart people under different circumstances, they just need to be educated. The reason we have Slashdot to whine and piss in the first place is that we have things like the Web and OSDN which wouldn't exist if there wasn't demand, and demand means end-users. Stop thinking we don't need users and that computing would be so much better if you needed a CS degree to touch a keyboard. I find it easier to just stop caring. Don't give out free tech support to people, or do it on your terms; install a end-user-ish Linux distro on their boxes. Don't try to fix crappy Windows boxes that you know will just get infected again. Don't let them continue to be ignorant; educate them. And if they still want to use Windows, and install malware, then let them throw away their boxes and buy new ones. It's good for the industry, at least.
Because that's not cheating; Gamasutra shows its content to Google and that helps Google index it. Even if you do need a registration to read Gamasutra, it benefits both the site, the search engine, and the user if the crawler is able to read all of the site's content. Gamasutra isn't providing fake content with lots of keywords to trick search engines, it's letting the search engine read all of its content.
Which version are you using? On 2.2, which isn't even the newest version, you crop by clicking on the crop button, dragging a square on the image, and clicking on the crop button on the crop dialog that pops up. The dialog is there to let you fine tune the cropping to a specific size, if you need to, along with a couple of other features.
There are several games online right now that attract people besides clueless, leetspeaking kids. I've been playing Lusternia for several months now, and I haven't found any person that couldn't speak proper English and lasted more than an hour or so. The game has an immersive roleplay environment, a very strong social aspect, and is generally a lot of fun; people who can't roleplay, and take part in the virtual world simply don't spend much time there, and if they do, they get their speaking priviledges gradually reduced until they can learn to roleplay. The game is text-based, but it has absolutely no relationship to Diku MUDs and the such; it's professionally run, and still free to play. There are several of those games running on the internet, and while none of them have a playerbase big enough to be called 'massive', I think they're a lot more fun compared to the constant, threadmill grinding that are most MMO games.
Slashdot Mirror
You could've said 'Only the Sith deal in absolutes', and everyone would've gotten it. Instead, you chose to appeal to mathematics.
Except athletic potential can be measured objectively (How fast can you run 100 metres, how much weight can you lift, how many goals you scored last season) and attractiveness can be measured through majoritary consensus (Regardless of how subjective attractiveness is, it's generally possible to find a consensus on whether someone is attractive or not according to the majority of human beings in a social group, which measures that person's ability to profit from said attractiveness.). But we don't have an appropriate working definition of intelligence, which means any attempt to measure it is inherently bogus and kludged together from approximations like arithmethic aptitude and reading comprehension. Anybody who believes there is a direct, linear correlation between success (Which also cannot be defined objectively - Most people use income as a measure of success, but that's a rough approximation, and I tend to believe that success is more meaningfully measured by psychological standards of well-being and social standards of positive impact on a society - The problem of what success is and how to measure it is definitely not trivial) hasn't thought very much about how IQ tests relate to reality. IQ results are approximations and need to be taken with a grain of salt, and beyond the 90-115 range, success and IQ definitely don't scale linearly (Or at all) with success, and whether they do inside that range is definitely arguable (See caveats above). For the record, I have an IQ score above that range.
The article submitter probably meant spiritual fnord enlightenment and was clueless to the actual meaning of the section, or maybe intentionally used it as a sort of joke or lack of where to put it. Of course, the five guys who only read the Enlightenment section will be pissed.
Why do people continue to delude themselves that an alien intelligence will be able to comprehend communication as we consider it? And if they can that they'll be foolish enough to waste time on decoding, renderring and interpreting an unreachably distant point of light? And if they go that far, why the heck does anyone expect a usefull response? Because that's what we would do in their place.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You missed how it went on to comment on how bullshitting politicians have been using that to pass TOFTC laws; the article does make a good point.
I'm not defending the government's action in poking into Orkut for information - What information can't be obtained already by reading Orkut is most likely useless, at any rate, and as several other people have pointed out, this opens a bad precedent.
I'm Brazilian. I gave up on Orkut for the same reasons: Excessive spam, inane discussion, idiotic communities, and, generally speaking, MySpacification. I'm going to sincerely apologize on behalf of my people for what happened to Orkut users.
Although this is better for speed, isn't it bad for anonimity? Traffic that has been over four hosts is harder to trace back than traffic that has hopped over a single host.
The reason games aren't respected by the lawmaker demographic is simple: Most people involved in the legislative process are around 40, usually pushing 50 or 60. Those people didn't experience gaming when they were young, and therefore it has no emotional or cultural value for them. It's likely that as the average year of birth among them increases, more senators and congressmen that were or are gamers are going to be involved with legislation surrounding it.
Seriously. Who ever had the idea of lumping together several components that dissipate heat poorly inside a big box made of metal or worse, heat-insulating plastic? Computers aren't appliances. You don't have to buy them in a single cute little box. Why hasn't anyone thoght, yet, of lumping the motherboard and assorted off-board peripherals in one small case tucked away somewhere with a large fan and placing the parts you actually need access to - power button, USB ports, peripheral devices and optical disk drives - on your desk?
You can talk about portability, but my computer isn't going anywhere, and I dispute the notion that a huge gaming case with a handle on top is "portable". It's as portable as an Osbourne. If I want something to carry around with me, I'll get a largish laptop and an USB mouse, problem solved, even for gaming.
You're confusing contextual levels though - "Car literate" isn't the same as "Vehicle Literate". I'd say being vehicle literate precludes knowing how to operate and maybe repair a single type of vehicle and knowing the general principles underlying all types of vehicles; that is, how different types of engines work, what is more likely to break with them and how to fix them, basic notions of mechanics and electronics, and knowing the difference between different types of vehicles, hopefully with a considerable knowledge about how they are different, how they are similar, and what makes them move. Being car literate only involves knowing how to operate a car and the basic maintenance every car owner needs to know.
Similarly, computer literacy involves knowing the most basic concepts about how computers and the internet work; knowing what the Web is, what email is, what a protocol is, what a server and a client are, and being able to tell the difference. Knowing what is software and what is hardware. Knowing how software is created (Not necessarily knowing how to create software) and being able to comfortably operate a single environment, without being utterly clueless in another; a truly computer literate user can teach himself to use a new operating system in a matter of hours (As long as it is similar enough as his previous environment; you can't expect a computer literate Windows user to be perfectly comfortable with bash, but you can expect him to understand and use Gnome), and doesn't take too long to learn its quirks. Knowing how to use Windows and Office isn't being computer-literate, it's being Windows-literate. The same goes for any other environment, although most Linux users (Besides hackers) come from the Windows world and are reasonably computer literate.
If the internet was regionalised, interest in it would simply start to disappear, particularly outside the US; accessing US sites is basically what I do with the internet. Playing games hosted in the US. Talking to people who live in the US. Skype would die quickly, since their greatest appeal is bypassing the cost of international phone calls. IM services which basically do the same thing would take a huge hit. ISPs would die by the thousand outside the US, as the total content accessible by the Internet would go down 50% or more, depending on country. Amazon.com, ThinkGeek and pretty much anyone who sells through the web would lose money from this, more or less, since a good part of their revenue comes from overseas buyers.
Even worse, people would lose contact with friends and relatives in other countries. Spam wouldn't go down; most of the spam I get is originated in the US. The Internet would simply wither and die on several countries that haven't developed a strong internet culture; that includes most of the world. Private companies would start running their own international gateways. Wikipedia would take a huge hit and lose all of its non-english language versions. Open Source software would take a huge hit as well; numerous idiotic IP laws in the US stop some software from being distributed there, and worse, numerous crucial programmers in numerous important projects would simply disappear from the network and have to fork their own regional versions which would quickly become incompatible as Open Source died outside the US and nearly disappeared inside it. Slashdot would lose at least 25% of its readers. The Internet's main corporate use (Connecting offices between different countries and saving millions worth of international calls and mail in the process) would suddenly disappear, and any interest in it (And custom applications) would go away too. Computers as a whole would become immensely less useful, and become a niche market again in some countries. Software would be put back years by the change as everything shifts to the closed-source development model, which would be more viable.
I probably missed some of the consequences. My point is, don't go there, man.
The best way of encrypting your hard drive is by having the encryption key stored in a physical key - An USB pendrive - that you carry around with yourself. However, security against this kind of attack is usually unnecessary; most people don't have data so valuable they have to worry about someone breaking into their houses at night and stealing their files.
Security against an attack if you have physical, unsupervised access to the box is nil, in any case. Carry a pendrive or a bootable CD containing a rescue Linux distro with you and boot from it. There, you can mess around with system config files and do things like creating your very own SSH account on the machine. Due to the way PCs work, the only way to protect your machine against attacks by someone with physical access to it is to raise a BIOS password or encrypt your files, not a bad idea in any case.
This is a consequence of Ubuntu's different security model. You can't be root in Ubuntu; you have to consciously make the decision to run software as root by typing 'sudo' before it. (Actually you can run a shell under sudo, but still.) The idea was that since you can't login as root, the system is more secure and resists exploits that try to gain root access. This vulnerability is the kind of stupid mistake people make sometimes. A brain fart. Nothing really malicious, and not the sign of an incompetent programmer. Something you could've done.
Most Windows vulnerabilities are that, too. There's just more of them. And the system is inherently less secure, so it doesn't resist those quite as well. And it's harder to update because it's a monolithic kludge. Of course, some Windows vulnerabilities are just the product of poor design.
And another thing, if this happened, /. would bash Microsoft insanely. True. There is a bias. But still, I highly doubt the issue would be fixed in the same day, on a Sunday, and the update would be availiable quickly and painlessly.
VB wasn't a good beginner language from the start; it was intended as a language for non-programmers to write simple GUI applications. For someone who wants to do that, it now has morphed into a full-fledged programming language (Knowing Microsoft, probably with lots of cruft). That means it isn't good for those people anymore.
A good language to learn to code in (If you plan on actually being a programmer) is Python, or Lisp if you're taking the long road and learning something less useful for the sake of better theorical knowledge.
A good language for non-programers to write GUIs in is TCL/TK. They're cross-platform, simple, and take minutes to learn.
I'm not saying VB is a crappy language or a toy (When I looked at it, years ago, it was, but that's not the matter and I haven't see the 'new' VB) but I am saying that it was never a good language to learn how to code in, (Much like BASIC before it) even if it was a good language for non-coders to write simple scripts in. It hasn't gotten any simpler or easier to learn. Of course, nowadays, simply the fact that it is neither cross-platform nor compiles in more than on operating system on a single architecture just irks me to no end and makes me think it's silly to learn something that only runs on an OS that is losing market share. I also think it's silly for someone just learning to program, or who'll only do casual program, to pay the full price for an obscenely-priced license while you can get Python, TCL, Perl, Lisp, C/C++ and Java for free on any platform you choose.
So, you mean only leet smart-arse people should get to use computers? That it's the users' fault computer security has gone down the drain? Get off your bloody high horse. Users aren't stupid. Most of them are quite smart people under different circumstances, they just need to be educated. The reason we have Slashdot to whine and piss in the first place is that we have things like the Web and OSDN which wouldn't exist if there wasn't demand, and demand means end-users. Stop thinking we don't need users and that computing would be so much better if you needed a CS degree to touch a keyboard. I find it easier to just stop caring. Don't give out free tech support to people, or do it on your terms; install a end-user-ish Linux distro on their boxes. Don't try to fix crappy Windows boxes that you know will just get infected again. Don't let them continue to be ignorant; educate them. And if they still want to use Windows, and install malware, then let them throw away their boxes and buy new ones. It's good for the industry, at least.
Because that's not cheating; Gamasutra shows its content to Google and that helps Google index it. Even if you do need a registration to read Gamasutra, it benefits both the site, the search engine, and the user if the crawler is able to read all of the site's content. Gamasutra isn't providing fake content with lots of keywords to trick search engines, it's letting the search engine read all of its content.
Which version are you using? On 2.2, which isn't even the newest version, you crop by clicking on the crop button, dragging a square on the image, and clicking on the crop button on the crop dialog that pops up. The dialog is there to let you fine tune the cropping to a specific size, if you need to, along with a couple of other features.
Google's beta products don't count as vaporware since they work better than other people's 1.0 versions, and come out sooner.
There are several games online right now that attract people besides clueless, leetspeaking kids. I've been playing Lusternia for several months now, and I haven't found any person that couldn't speak proper English and lasted more than an hour or so. The game has an immersive roleplay environment, a very strong social aspect, and is generally a lot of fun; people who can't roleplay, and take part in the virtual world simply don't spend much time there, and if they do, they get their speaking priviledges gradually reduced until they can learn to roleplay. The game is text-based, but it has absolutely no relationship to Diku MUDs and the such; it's professionally run, and still free to play. There are several of those games running on the internet, and while none of them have a playerbase big enough to be called 'massive', I think they're a lot more fun compared to the constant, threadmill grinding that are most MMO games.