I don't think what goes on in Chinese prisons even begins to compare to what goes on in the prisons of most western nations. I may be a little off here, but I am guessing chinese prisoners don't have cable tv, internet access, libraries, and the other ammentities granted prisoners in the US. However, that doesn't mean I don't think the transgressions elsewhere are any less forgivable. I think the guards that participate, or turn a blind eye, should have their badges stripped and given a cell of their own, as far as the prisoners involved...well...they are sorta already in prison. I'm not entirely sure why you are attempting to justify what goes on in Chinese prisons by what goes on in American prisons and then expect me to justify what goes on in American prisons.
Now everyone watch as he justifies the rape that goes on in American prisons.
It's nice to see that Americans don't have a monopoly on childish crap.
Somehow I doubt this is not going to be abused in the worst ways. Just watch...they will name the group that monitors this beast Thought Police...and then later decide that sounds just as bad as Total Information Awareness, and go back and change it to Terrorist Police.
I also think its interesting that this really opens a MUCH larger can of worms in fact that this is a global thing. It really shouldn't be considered spying since it is looking at things that have been put out into the public, but it most certainly is an attempt to at least watch everyone.
But we don't have much to worry about, noone on slashdot posts dissenting views about anything...
I have seen something about a similar project that used graphical patterns and colors/intensity/patterns indicated potential problems. I think this would probably be alot nicer since it doesn't leave you staring at a monitor all day (yes I know most of us do this anyways). With networks getting larger and more complex things happening on them, projects like this are definetly an interesting avenue for monitoring. I know people that can read tcpdump screens at a truely disturbing rate, but being able to sit and "watch" all the logs of everything in their multitude of formats and indicators is going to be a huge leap forward in detection and prevention. Most intrusions aren't caught until well after the fact, if at all. Having something like this that could potentially alert admin and security folks of trouble on the network, malicious or not, would be awesome.
Well I really was mostly just trying to point out the hypocrasy in the situation. But I can and do expect a certain amount of privacy from companies, else they can expect lawsuits. If they share peoples SSN or CC # they are in for a world of hurt if it comes out. Granted, I don't think in Google's situation it really applies, but there are some very strict laws governing what a company can and cannot do with your personal information. You could argue that violating those laws goes counter to the making money priority, and that they only do it because not doing it could cost them money, but it still puts a vested interest in the companies to protect your information.
uhm, you missed the part where you put the... at. I'm not saying going to jail is a human rights violation, I am saying what goes on in chinese prisons are often human rights violations.
Uhm...you should reexamine that one. The west often does see political dissidents as criminals, and often treats them as such. Just recently everyones favorite anti-war mom was removed and from the State of the Union for wearing a Tshirt that they didn't agree with. She wasn't the only one removed, as a war supporter's tshirt got another woman removed...but the anti-war mom was the only one ARRESTED too. We just don't treat our criminals the same way the Chinese do, but to say political dissidents don't get treated like criminals here is pretty false these days.
Google is the real evil one here. While MSN and Yahoo have both been tied to getting people tossed in jail over there, directly putting them in the line of fire of the most heinious of human rights violations...Google is the real bad one here. I mean Google told the US Government that they wouldn't turn over search records! How can we trust them to do business in China with this censorship stuff when they will even tell the US Government they aren't giving out search information even if it doesn't have personal information tied to it! We can't trust Google to protect those peoples rights!
Well we all know that congress critters only use the internet at the office right? I mean none of them use their inflated salaries to have internet access at home, or any number of wireless internet doodads. I think blocking government networks will be incredibly effective.
The only thing this will change is whether or not they can do it from work. Why not just slap big warnings on the wiki pages that seem to be having this problem? So everyone surfing to that page to get info about their favorite congress critter will have a bright red warning slapped on there showing them what has been going on.
You can't really fix the problem effectively, but you can sure make it known to everyone visiting that they are viewing a problem page.
I think the idea that this is in response to budget problems is probably pretty accurate. It honestly probably is a better way to utilize what money they are getting these days. It worked with the X-Prize stuff, so maybe it will work out for them. I just hope this period of the religious policy of "Jesus is coming back to Earth, so we don't need to go anywhere" works its way out of our government soon.
Meanwhile on the far side of creation...
Jesus: "Dad? Where are these people? Shouldn't they be here by now? What happened?"
God: "Trust me son, you don't want to know."
I think some of these projects are an order of magnatude easier to accomplish. Pressure suit, moon vehicle, rechargable power source (someone should really just send them a pack of duracells and claim the 5 mil)...all of these seem like they would be pretty simple to research, build, and prove here on earth. Orbiting fuel depot? I think the ammount of time, energy, and money involved in making that one work isn't anywhere near the same challenge level. How do you prove that one? You would have to spend an enormous ammount just getting the thing up there to see if it will work, and god help you if you have to make any changes to your design.
I don't think the capability is that far off, but I think the desire to do so is. Sending robots just isn't all that exciting really. Everyone watched to moon landing...but how many people do you think even know we have been sending satellites and robots to mars? I think the thing that is destroying our exploration more than anything is a terrible lack of excitement. Noone cares, and televising a robot isn't going to generate alot of interest. Throw some people up there, waving at a camera, saying "Hi mom" with a communications delay, etc. Reality shows are all the rage, space exploration would be good to capitolize on that interest and make a REAL reality show.
Tonight on FOX...Will the astronauts make it to Mars or will they die a horrible death on the trip?! Radiation and asteroids block their path, will they make it? Tune in tonight to find out!
Next week on Austronauts...Spacewalk challenge #1, will the loser get voted off the ship?!
Certainly. It isn't terribly difficult to believe that the populace thinks and acts differently than their leaders. Look at the current state of affairs with any number of issues right now. I think it is a little funny how everyone condemns Americans as all being the same, and then screams bloody murder when Americans do the same to them. I view a great deal of it like religion. The People, like God, are good on the whole, but both have some pretty crappy representitives. I'm not pro or anti France, I just dislike seeing both sides of the "Country X is always good/evil", it is always so one sided and rarely accepts the fact that their favorite country has done both good and evil things, and are rarely motivated by simply wanting to do good or evil.
Not that you don't have some valid points here. But half of your problems arise from not using the ID3 tags. There are plenty of iTunes things I'm not terribly fond of, but I still like it over all. Smart playlists are a very nice thing if you use the ID3 tags well. I rip all my music in linux, throw it on a samba share, and then use iTunes from there for my windows boxes. I name all my files in a sane pattern to make them easy to find in a command line/file search type enviroment, but I also maintain all my ID3 tags to make things work better in the majority of the media players. The idea behind smart playlists really shines in large collections. Say I want to listen to my alternative stuff one day, heavy stuff another, and punk on yet another. Instead of sorting through Xthousand mp3s I just create smart playlists that say everything in the alternative genre. Or maybe I just want a playlist with all of my music except for the few things on there that are humor songs, commedy routines, or speaches, I can create a smart playlist that excludes all of those by type instead of making a huge playlist of what I do want. Incidentally gtkpod supports smart playlists as well, and that is what I use to manage my pod.
I havn't even downloaded it and I know that its Mozilla-based.
"Built on the same platform as Firefox, Songbird acts like a specialized web browser for music."
Straight from the TFA. But hey its slashdot right?:)
Uhm before you get too excited about French aid in the American Revolution you should examine the motivating factors. They weren't exactly champions of freedom, they just really didn't like the British, and taking America away from the British would weaken them considerably. It was in their best interest for the revolutionaries to win that fight, but not wanting to get in the mix directly and make life a little more difficult, they just supported us. This is sorta the same way we supported various countries and "freedom fighters" against those evil commies. We wanted to communists weakend, but didn't want to risk a direct conflict, so we just help out the little guy who doesn't have much to lose by fighting.
Ok...so mothers get to live longer because of the left over cells. What about the years shaved off by dealing with youngins?
Child birth: +10 years
Raising a child: -7 years
Genetic design working out in your benefit: Priceless.
I kind of include legislators in those that profit from software patents. Sure they may not be the patent holders, and the ones directly profiting. But you can bet your ass that the ones raking in the big money with the patents are shelling out money to lobbyists, special interest groups, and campaign funds, etc. So I consider them in the same group, even if their profiting isn't quite so direct. Stopping software patents would stop the funds from rolling in to them to keep them quiet on the issue.
Today slashdotters were shocked when another tech writer repeated the idea that software patents are bad in yet another way.
I think most people here, and throughout the industry, already know the multitude of problems with software patents. I don't think the problem is convincing people on the working side of the industry that they are bad. The problem is convincing the people profiting from software patents that they are bad. I would be interested in seeing industry leaders that can actually influence the decisions, or some politician types with the power speak out against software patents, but seeing yet another tech person do it is just getting redundant. You have to convince people that really like their money, why they shouldn't make money the way they are now. Until things get so bad that the top starts feeling the pain I don't things are going to get much better.
Melancholy Elephants is an excellent short story by Spider Robinson about the end game of this situation we have these days. (It isn't terribly long, and it really is a good read) Enjoy!
Honestly...the various search engines have let this gone on for so long, I don't really blame anyone for doing it. It is a bit like blaming a snake for eating those cute little mice. It sure is easy to make the snake out to look bad, but realisitically, if the snake didn't eat it, a fox, a cat, or something else probably would and the snake still needs to eat to survive. When the search engines tolerate it, it only makes sense to do it to stay on top, once they start cracking down, the companies are left crying over nothing, or they just suck it up and clean up and play by the new rules.
That is kinda interesting, havn't seen that part of the history of it, I do remember the escape/suicide bit though. The part that I remember had to do with the way the gods were viewed in relation to the city. Cities were named after their patron/matron god (Athens, Athena, etc) and a loss in battle or other terrible event was viewed as the result of the city not being pious enough and their god deciding not to aid them. My understanding was that was part of the reason they wanted him dealt with is to clean up their image in the eyes of their god. However, political motives seem to often get blurred with religious motives so it could be one, the other, a bit of both, or neither if we really have history jacked up.
Now for the normal/. Current history being the history of electronics right? Since its hard to have "history" any newer than "recent" because current events aren't quite history yet?:)
I don't see how this will combat spam in the least, but I certainly don't see it helping spammers either. So I don't know why I should even care about this. Hell, if they want to make a quick buck off spammers willing to shell out the money then so be it, less money in the spammer's pockets. AOL/Yahoo are in a position to do this because of the money they have spent in the past building a large user base. If it does turn out to make the situation worse for users, or legit people trying to contact their users...I am confindent the free market remedy it given time. The PR backlash alone of them blocking a significant ammount of legit email would be nasty for them, even outside of the users that would leave BEFORE the backlash convinced others to jump ship too.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think what goes on in Chinese prisons even begins to compare to what goes on in the prisons of most western nations. I may be a little off here, but I am guessing chinese prisoners don't have cable tv, internet access, libraries, and the other ammentities granted prisoners in the US. However, that doesn't mean I don't think the transgressions elsewhere are any less forgivable. I think the guards that participate, or turn a blind eye, should have their badges stripped and given a cell of their own, as far as the prisoners involved...well...they are sorta already in prison. I'm not entirely sure why you are attempting to justify what goes on in Chinese prisons by what goes on in American prisons and then expect me to justify what goes on in American prisons.
Now everyone watch as he justifies the rape that goes on in American prisons.
It's nice to see that Americans don't have a monopoly on childish crap.
Somehow I doubt this is not going to be abused in the worst ways. Just watch...they will name the group that monitors this beast Thought Police...and then later decide that sounds just as bad as Total Information Awareness, and go back and change it to Terrorist Police.
I also think its interesting that this really opens a MUCH larger can of worms in fact that this is a global thing. It really shouldn't be considered spying since it is looking at things that have been put out into the public, but it most certainly is an attempt to at least watch everyone.
But we don't have much to worry about, noone on slashdot posts dissenting views about anything...
And on Patch Tuesday it plays Darth Vader's theme.
misspelling or frankenfruit you decide.
I have seen something about a similar project that used graphical patterns and colors/intensity/patterns indicated potential problems. I think this would probably be alot nicer since it doesn't leave you staring at a monitor all day (yes I know most of us do this anyways). With networks getting larger and more complex things happening on them, projects like this are definetly an interesting avenue for monitoring. I know people that can read tcpdump screens at a truely disturbing rate, but being able to sit and "watch" all the logs of everything in their multitude of formats and indicators is going to be a huge leap forward in detection and prevention. Most intrusions aren't caught until well after the fact, if at all. Having something like this that could potentially alert admin and security folks of trouble on the network, malicious or not, would be awesome.
Well I really was mostly just trying to point out the hypocrasy in the situation. But I can and do expect a certain amount of privacy from companies, else they can expect lawsuits. If they share peoples SSN or CC # they are in for a world of hurt if it comes out. Granted, I don't think in Google's situation it really applies, but there are some very strict laws governing what a company can and cannot do with your personal information. You could argue that violating those laws goes counter to the making money priority, and that they only do it because not doing it could cost them money, but it still puts a vested interest in the companies to protect your information.
uhm, you missed the part where you put the ... at. I'm not saying going to jail is a human rights violation, I am saying what goes on in chinese prisons are often human rights violations.
Just wait until you folks get the 'free speach zones'.
Uhm...you should reexamine that one. The west often does see political dissidents as criminals, and often treats them as such. Just recently everyones favorite anti-war mom was removed and from the State of the Union for wearing a Tshirt that they didn't agree with. She wasn't the only one removed, as a war supporter's tshirt got another woman removed...but the anti-war mom was the only one ARRESTED too. We just don't treat our criminals the same way the Chinese do, but to say political dissidents don't get treated like criminals here is pretty false these days.
Google is the real evil one here. While MSN and Yahoo have both been tied to getting people tossed in jail over there, directly putting them in the line of fire of the most heinious of human rights violations...Google is the real bad one here. I mean Google told the US Government that they wouldn't turn over search records! How can we trust them to do business in China with this censorship stuff when they will even tell the US Government they aren't giving out search information even if it doesn't have personal information tied to it! We can't trust Google to protect those peoples rights!
We now return you back to normal reality.
Well we all know that congress critters only use the internet at the office right? I mean none of them use their inflated salaries to have internet access at home, or any number of wireless internet doodads. I think blocking government networks will be incredibly effective.
The only thing this will change is whether or not they can do it from work. Why not just slap big warnings on the wiki pages that seem to be having this problem? So everyone surfing to that page to get info about their favorite congress critter will have a bright red warning slapped on there showing them what has been going on.
You can't really fix the problem effectively, but you can sure make it known to everyone visiting that they are viewing a problem page.
I think the idea that this is in response to budget problems is probably pretty accurate. It honestly probably is a better way to utilize what money they are getting these days. It worked with the X-Prize stuff, so maybe it will work out for them. I just hope this period of the religious policy of "Jesus is coming back to Earth, so we don't need to go anywhere" works its way out of our government soon.
Meanwhile on the far side of creation...
Jesus: "Dad? Where are these people? Shouldn't they be here by now? What happened?"
God: "Trust me son, you don't want to know."
I think some of these projects are an order of magnatude easier to accomplish. Pressure suit, moon vehicle, rechargable power source (someone should really just send them a pack of duracells and claim the 5 mil)...all of these seem like they would be pretty simple to research, build, and prove here on earth. Orbiting fuel depot? I think the ammount of time, energy, and money involved in making that one work isn't anywhere near the same challenge level. How do you prove that one? You would have to spend an enormous ammount just getting the thing up there to see if it will work, and god help you if you have to make any changes to your design.
I don't think the capability is that far off, but I think the desire to do so is. Sending robots just isn't all that exciting really. Everyone watched to moon landing...but how many people do you think even know we have been sending satellites and robots to mars? I think the thing that is destroying our exploration more than anything is a terrible lack of excitement. Noone cares, and televising a robot isn't going to generate alot of interest. Throw some people up there, waving at a camera, saying "Hi mom" with a communications delay, etc.
Reality shows are all the rage, space exploration would be good to capitolize on that interest and make a REAL reality show. Tonight on FOX...Will the astronauts make it to Mars or will they die a horrible death on the trip?! Radiation and asteroids block their path, will they make it? Tune in tonight to find out!
Next week on Austronauts...Spacewalk challenge #1, will the loser get voted off the ship?!
Certainly. It isn't terribly difficult to believe that the populace thinks and acts differently than their leaders. Look at the current state of affairs with any number of issues right now. I think it is a little funny how everyone condemns Americans as all being the same, and then screams bloody murder when Americans do the same to them. I view a great deal of it like religion. The People, like God, are good on the whole, but both have some pretty crappy representitives. I'm not pro or anti France, I just dislike seeing both sides of the "Country X is always good/evil", it is always so one sided and rarely accepts the fact that their favorite country has done both good and evil things, and are rarely motivated by simply wanting to do good or evil.
Not that you don't have some valid points here. But half of your problems arise from not using the ID3 tags. There are plenty of iTunes things I'm not terribly fond of, but I still like it over all. Smart playlists are a very nice thing if you use the ID3 tags well. I rip all my music in linux, throw it on a samba share, and then use iTunes from there for my windows boxes. I name all my files in a sane pattern to make them easy to find in a command line/file search type enviroment, but I also maintain all my ID3 tags to make things work better in the majority of the media players. The idea behind smart playlists really shines in large collections. Say I want to listen to my alternative stuff one day, heavy stuff another, and punk on yet another. Instead of sorting through Xthousand mp3s I just create smart playlists that say everything in the alternative genre. Or maybe I just want a playlist with all of my music except for the few things on there that are humor songs, commedy routines, or speaches, I can create a smart playlist that excludes all of those by type instead of making a huge playlist of what I do want. Incidentally gtkpod supports smart playlists as well, and that is what I use to manage my pod.
I havn't even downloaded it and I know that its Mozilla-based. "Built on the same platform as Firefox, Songbird acts like a specialized web browser for music." :)
Straight from the TFA. But hey its slashdot right?
Uhm before you get too excited about French aid in the American Revolution you should examine the motivating factors. They weren't exactly champions of freedom, they just really didn't like the British, and taking America away from the British would weaken them considerably. It was in their best interest for the revolutionaries to win that fight, but not wanting to get in the mix directly and make life a little more difficult, they just supported us. This is sorta the same way we supported various countries and "freedom fighters" against those evil commies. We wanted to communists weakend, but didn't want to risk a direct conflict, so we just help out the little guy who doesn't have much to lose by fighting.
Ok...so mothers get to live longer because of the left over cells. What about the years shaved off by dealing with youngins?
Child birth: +10 years
Raising a child: -7 years
Genetic design working out in your benefit: Priceless.
I can see him giving a speach to congress now. "We aren't in the business of putting objects in space!"
I kind of include legislators in those that profit from software patents. Sure they may not be the patent holders, and the ones directly profiting. But you can bet your ass that the ones raking in the big money with the patents are shelling out money to lobbyists, special interest groups, and campaign funds, etc. So I consider them in the same group, even if their profiting isn't quite so direct. Stopping software patents would stop the funds from rolling in to them to keep them quiet on the issue.
Today slashdotters were shocked when another tech writer repeated the idea that software patents are bad in yet another way. I think most people here, and throughout the industry, already know the multitude of problems with software patents. I don't think the problem is convincing people on the working side of the industry that they are bad. The problem is convincing the people profiting from software patents that they are bad. I would be interested in seeing industry leaders that can actually influence the decisions, or some politician types with the power speak out against software patents, but seeing yet another tech person do it is just getting redundant. You have to convince people that really like their money, why they shouldn't make money the way they are now. Until things get so bad that the top starts feeling the pain I don't things are going to get much better. Melancholy Elephants is an excellent short story by Spider Robinson about the end game of this situation we have these days. (It isn't terribly long, and it really is a good read) Enjoy!
Honestly...the various search engines have let this gone on for so long, I don't really blame anyone for doing it. It is a bit like blaming a snake for eating those cute little mice. It sure is easy to make the snake out to look bad, but realisitically, if the snake didn't eat it, a fox, a cat, or something else probably would and the snake still needs to eat to survive. When the search engines tolerate it, it only makes sense to do it to stay on top, once they start cracking down, the companies are left crying over nothing, or they just suck it up and clean up and play by the new rules.
That is kinda interesting, havn't seen that part of the history of it, I do remember the escape/suicide bit though. The part that I remember had to do with the way the gods were viewed in relation to the city. Cities were named after their patron/matron god (Athens, Athena, etc) and a loss in battle or other terrible event was viewed as the result of the city not being pious enough and their god deciding not to aid them. My understanding was that was part of the reason they wanted him dealt with is to clean up their image in the eyes of their god. However, political motives seem to often get blurred with religious motives so it could be one, the other, a bit of both, or neither if we really have history jacked up. Now for the normal /. Current history being the history of electronics right? Since its hard to have "history" any newer than "recent" because current events aren't quite history yet? :)
I don't see how this will combat spam in the least, but I certainly don't see it helping spammers either. So I don't know why I should even care about this. Hell, if they want to make a quick buck off spammers willing to shell out the money then so be it, less money in the spammer's pockets. AOL/Yahoo are in a position to do this because of the money they have spent in the past building a large user base. If it does turn out to make the situation worse for users, or legit people trying to contact their users...I am confindent the free market remedy it given time. The PR backlash alone of them blocking a significant ammount of legit email would be nasty for them, even outside of the users that would leave BEFORE the backlash convinced others to jump ship too.