I just moved into a new apartment in Pawtucket, RI and the SLOWEST internet available to me (other than dial-up...if you can do dial-up via cable or FiOS -- I don't have phone lines...) is 15/5. I decided to go up one level and get 50/25. It's nice on the rare occasion that I'm hitting servers that will actually deliver those speeds, but that's not really all that often.
I know, I know -- of course not, this is Slashdot.
Seriously though, that's not the point. They don't WANT everyone to switch to their distro. It sounds more like an internal thing purely for testing and development. What's wrong with that?
Ah, yes. Some sources do indeed put nicotine above Heroin and Coke in 'addictiveness'. Here's one medical professional, from a quick Google: http://nyp.org/news/health/051116.html
However, I suppose it would have been better to say it is 'ONE OF the most addictive drugs'. There can certainly be no argument there, and the rest of my point still stands. Addiction is a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue -- and it's time we start to realize that.
Yea, I realize that...I struggled for a while with how to word that part, and in the end decided to go with how it _should_ work, figuring I didn't want to get into all of that yet...ya just can't win on Slashdot:)
You got any links for these 'documented cases' though? I have no doubt that it happens, but I haven't actually heard of any specific lawsuits or anything over it.
In Kleberg County, where Kingsville is the county seat, Sheriff Ed Mata drives a gleaming new police-package Ford Expedition bought with drug funds. This year, he went to his commissioners to ask for more new vehicles.
"They said, 'Well, there ain't no money, use your assets,' " he says. He says his office needs the money "to continue to operate on the magnitude we need."
Another county agency, the Kingsville Specialized Crimes and Narcotics Task Force, survives solely on seized cash. Said one neighboring lawman, "They eat what they kill." A review by NPR shows at least three other Texas task forces that also are funded exclusively by confiscated drug assets.
And it's mostly in the south because that's where a lot of the drugs are coming from. I mean I know a lot comes in from Canada too, but we just don't police that border as heavily.
You pay a high premium on Silk Road, apparently for quality and convenience...from what I've heard it's a hell of a lot more expensive than what these things would cost on the street, so unless these kids are selling at a loss.....
I know someone who's considered using this site. He already owns test kits, capable of testing pretty much any common recreational drug for purity. They're apparently not too hard to find. And yea, I know, the average drug user isn't going to go buy test kits -- but they're also not going to be buying off Tor, are they?
Why? They bust a big dealer they get cash, they get great PR, and if you have any faith in the war on drugs (which most Americans don't, but assuming the DEA agents do...) you get to keep some product out of the hands of a whole bunch of kids.
Bust the kid, you get no cash, you get terrible PR from his friends and family for ruining the rest of his life (I've got a friend, smartest person I've ever known, who went from aiming for a PhD in Chemistry to flipping burgers at McDonalds over ONE drug charge.)...the only upside is you MAY have stopped a single kid from using drugs.
Well, you aren't going to be able to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin in the trunk of a car on its way out of the country. That's one of their favorite tactics -- prove it's drug money and you get to keep the cash.
That's also part of the reason why they don't attempt to catch the drugs entering the country, they just wait to bust the dealers leaving with the cash. Confiscated drugs aren't much use....
All the while destroying other people's lives while they're high, breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit, and a whole host of other issues, including medical as their bodies get ravaged but which I have to pay for (thanks Roberts).
Nicotine is the most addictive drug known to man. But you don't generally see people breaking into homes for money to buy a pack of smokes. Why? Because it's legal, so it's cheaper and more available. You don't generally see people worrying about paying for other peoples' lung cancer either. Why? Well, partly because the people who bitch about these things tend to be smokers themselves, power of the industry lobby, etc....but there's also a big part that is IT'S LEGAL. If it's legal, you aren't going to get fired for being addicted, you aren't going to avoid seeking help for your addiction due to fear of criminal prosecution, so you're more likely to have a job and be able to take care of your own medical needs.
The problems that you cite as reasons why drugs must remain illegal are not problems caused by drugs, but problems caused by _drug prohibition_.
I contributed a bit of code to the 0.5 network several years ago...I've been meaning to go back and see if that's still alive now that I have a stable, good internet connection. Just graduated college; didn't really have a connection I could run it on the whole time there. But last I checked 0.5 (FCON) was still populated, and I still can't quite trust the new network. Last I checked there was still better content on the old one anyway! Though certainly not much of it...nothing like it used to be...
I think that was their biggest problem. They had a decent network, with great content. I still have thousands of pages printed out of...well, I'll call them books, because what else do you call an 800 page (8.5x11 paper, 10pt font!) website? And they were written on, and exclusive to, Freenet (as far as I know; I tried and failed many times to find them elsewhere). Then the devs screwed the 0.7 release up as bad as they possibly could. Tried to force the entire community over to pre-alpha software. Some went, some stayed, and some moved to other networks. As far as I know, it never recovered.
Perhaps. But why? The war on drugs is largely about publicity and money. Making big, quick busts to show off on the evening news, and confiscating cash to use to buy police equipment (in some southern US states, there are MASSIVE police departments with practically ZERO public funding -- they fund themselves with confiscated drug cash.) You can't really confiscate bitcoin easily, and going after the buyers is going to be a lot of police effort for very little PR win and no real cash win (particularly since the buyers are located all over the globe)
Compared to the ease of snapping up kids selling drugs on the street corner, I don't think it's worth their time to go after this kind of traffic. At least not yet.
It's not strictly about trust though, it's about if you want a single point of failure, or compartmentalized data. My father's hotmail was hacked (most likely phished I'd guess) not too long ago and he wasn't able to get it back. So he lost his hotmail. It's been a pain in the ass, but he got everything that he uses switched over to a new email within a week or two. If the government provides all authentication, what happens if someone hacks that? Or gets your credentials some other way? You lose absolutely everything.
The reason I'll never recommend Geek Squad or Best Buy, or shop there, stems from a series of news articles I read (possibly in Wired? Or maybe local news) a couple years back. They took a number of computers, created various stupid easy faults in them (unplugging the power cable from the motherboard, pulling an IDE cable, nothing that should have taken more than half an hour tops to find and fix) and took them to various Best Buy locations to have them repaired. In almost every situation, the Geek Squad rep told them that the computer was hopelessly broken and they needed to buy an entire new computer.
Oh, then there's the friend of mine who applied for a job with Geek Squad while studying in college -- and when he went to interview, they actually said they couldn't give him the job because he was "over qualified". Which, I know, makes no goddamn sense. But that's what he was told.
I'm sure there are some good stores, but from what I've seen that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
And once again you guys blow it all out of proportion. Nobody is "guilty" here. All that NASA (or anybody else) needs to do is reply to the DMCA takedown request with this response: "This material does not infringe upon anybody's copyright."
The video has been removed and replaced with a message that it was removed due to copyright infringement. That sounds like 'guilty' to me. That's like saying that a criminal isn't proven guilty because they still have an appeal left. Sure, the decision could be reversed, but that decision still exists.
The problems with Chick-fil-a aren't entirely speech though, depending on how you look at it. The corporation directly spends money that it receives from sales on organizations whose sole purpose is to encourage legislation that violates the rights of others (like NOM.) Not to mention the direct discrimination within the organization itself (like WinShape.) They way I see it, it's more like a local mayor spending taxpayer dollars to keep oil and gas companies out of the city. The mayor has an obligation to do what they feel best protects the rights of their citizens -- and if the people disagree, they can vote him out.
It was my understanding that the Pi was more of a hobbyist/educational market -- it's not for people who want a cheap computer (which is what your android device is) but for people who want a REALLY POWERFUL Arduino. Find me an Android device with SPI/I2C/OneWire. Or with GPI/O pins in general. I know there are devices to do that, but what kind of cost is that adding to your Android phone. Plus your phone seems cheaper because it's contract-free -- but that's only a benefit if you plan to use it in a way that it can still be your phone. I was considering a Pi for a barbot (though I'll probably just use my old laptop and an MSP430 for I/O) -- I'm certainly not building my phone into my bar...
It depends on the class in my opinion. In a math or science class? Yes, always take notes, because you'll need to refer back to those formulas...and it's a good chance that the way it was explained and the way you write it down will make a lot more sense than what's in the book.
In humanities classes...not so much. I find that if I don't have to memorize specific numbers or formulas or anything, I do a LOT better in class when I put all my attention on what's being said. It tends to be more of a narrative, less of straight disconnected facts, so it's easier to remember the details. On a related note, I suspect that's part of why I did so terrible in my college math classes -- of the dozen or so math classes I took in college, not a single one gave real-world meanings and applications. Pure numbers and theory. And I'm the kind of person who's COMPLETELY lost if I can't visualize what I'm doing.
It also matters how google-able the material is. I never took a single word of notes in my computer science classes. I also never purchased the textbooks. Hell if the professor wasn't halfway decent I usually wouldn't even go to class half the time. Everything you need is explained better online, why bother? On the other hand, my Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry class, notes were essential -- because it was universally agreed that the book was absolutely the worst textbook any of us had the misfortune of using and Google is completely hopeless for concepts that advanced, so the notes were all I had to go by.
I just graduated last May. For a humanities class (where notes were all text) you might have 10% of the students taking notes on a laptop. For science or math classes, it was below 1%. There's a reason for that. Paper and pencil is still the easiest, cheapest, and most effective method.
The only place I saw any significant number of students using laptops were computer science classes -- and then it was still at most five out of thirty students using them, and those five were either playing games/checking Facebook, or just following along with the slides not taking any notes at all (and I don't see any point to that...) The most productive way of using technology in class? I had a job doing freelance web development while I was in college, and when I was working on something big I'd bring my laptop to the more useless classes and do work. That way I was there for the 5 minutes of information I actually needed, but still productive for the rest of the class.
What the hell is wrong with the UK mail system??? Here in the US, in my entire life there has been _ONE_ instance where I have even HEARD of something getting lost in the mail! And that was sketchy shareware that I suspect may have never been sent in the first place! You lose one in _TWENTY_ in the standard post? Seriously?
They care about more than just corporations. They also care about things like banning free speech to "fight terrorism" and banning abortions to "protect a right to life" while encouraging an increasing number of deaths at the hands of our police and military...
It had ATTEMPTS to get horrible anti-gun measures slipped in, along with a metric fuckton of other absurd amendments. I don't believe any of them were actually passed and added on to the bill though. Big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I just moved into a new apartment in Pawtucket, RI and the SLOWEST internet available to me (other than dial-up...if you can do dial-up via cable or FiOS -- I don't have phone lines...) is 15/5. I decided to go up one level and get 50/25. It's nice on the rare occasion that I'm hitting servers that will actually deliver those speeds, but that's not really all that often.
Did you even bother to read the _summary_?
I know, I know -- of course not, this is Slashdot.
Seriously though, that's not the point. They don't WANT everyone to switch to their distro. It sounds more like an internal thing purely for testing and development. What's wrong with that?
Ah, yes. Some sources do indeed put nicotine above Heroin and Coke in 'addictiveness'. Here's one medical professional, from a quick Google:
http://nyp.org/news/health/051116.html
However, I suppose it would have been better to say it is 'ONE OF the most addictive drugs'. There can certainly be no argument there, and the rest of my point still stands. Addiction is a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue -- and it's time we start to realize that.
Yea, I realize that...I struggled for a while with how to word that part, and in the end decided to go with how it _should_ work, figuring I didn't want to get into all of that yet...ya just can't win on Slashdot :)
You got any links for these 'documented cases' though? I have no doubt that it happens, but I haven't actually heard of any specific lawsuits or anything over it.
A quick Google reveals plenty of sources; here's the one I had in mind:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91490480
In Kleberg County, where Kingsville is the county seat, Sheriff Ed Mata drives a gleaming new police-package Ford Expedition bought with drug funds. This year, he went to his commissioners to ask for more new vehicles.
"They said, 'Well, there ain't no money, use your assets,' " he says. He says his office needs the money "to continue to operate on the magnitude we need."
Another county agency, the Kingsville Specialized Crimes and Narcotics Task Force, survives solely on seized cash. Said one neighboring lawman, "They eat what they kill." A review by NPR shows at least three other Texas task forces that also are funded exclusively by confiscated drug assets.
And it's mostly in the south because that's where a lot of the drugs are coming from. I mean I know a lot comes in from Canada too, but we just don't police that border as heavily.
You pay a high premium on Silk Road, apparently for quality and convenience...from what I've heard it's a hell of a lot more expensive than what these things would cost on the street, so unless these kids are selling at a loss.....
I know someone who's considered using this site. He already owns test kits, capable of testing pretty much any common recreational drug for purity. They're apparently not too hard to find. And yea, I know, the average drug user isn't going to go buy test kits -- but they're also not going to be buying off Tor, are they?
Why? They bust a big dealer they get cash, they get great PR, and if you have any faith in the war on drugs (which most Americans don't, but assuming the DEA agents do...) you get to keep some product out of the hands of a whole bunch of kids.
Bust the kid, you get no cash, you get terrible PR from his friends and family for ruining the rest of his life (I've got a friend, smartest person I've ever known, who went from aiming for a PhD in Chemistry to flipping burgers at McDonalds over ONE drug charge.)...the only upside is you MAY have stopped a single kid from using drugs.
Well, you aren't going to be able to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin in the trunk of a car on its way out of the country. That's one of their favorite tactics -- prove it's drug money and you get to keep the cash.
That's also part of the reason why they don't attempt to catch the drugs entering the country, they just wait to bust the dealers leaving with the cash. Confiscated drugs aren't much use....
All the while destroying other people's lives while they're high, breaking into people's homes so they can steal to feed their habit, and a whole host of other issues, including medical as their bodies get ravaged but which I have to pay for (thanks Roberts).
Nicotine is the most addictive drug known to man. But you don't generally see people breaking into homes for money to buy a pack of smokes. Why? Because it's legal, so it's cheaper and more available. You don't generally see people worrying about paying for other peoples' lung cancer either. Why? Well, partly because the people who bitch about these things tend to be smokers themselves, power of the industry lobby, etc....but there's also a big part that is IT'S LEGAL. If it's legal, you aren't going to get fired for being addicted, you aren't going to avoid seeking help for your addiction due to fear of criminal prosecution, so you're more likely to have a job and be able to take care of your own medical needs.
The problems that you cite as reasons why drugs must remain illegal are not problems caused by drugs, but problems caused by _drug prohibition_.
I contributed a bit of code to the 0.5 network several years ago...I've been meaning to go back and see if that's still alive now that I have a stable, good internet connection. Just graduated college; didn't really have a connection I could run it on the whole time there. But last I checked 0.5 (FCON) was still populated, and I still can't quite trust the new network. Last I checked there was still better content on the old one anyway! Though certainly not much of it...nothing like it used to be...
I think that was their biggest problem. They had a decent network, with great content. I still have thousands of pages printed out of...well, I'll call them books, because what else do you call an 800 page (8.5x11 paper, 10pt font!) website? And they were written on, and exclusive to, Freenet (as far as I know; I tried and failed many times to find them elsewhere). Then the devs screwed the 0.7 release up as bad as they possibly could. Tried to force the entire community over to pre-alpha software. Some went, some stayed, and some moved to other networks. As far as I know, it never recovered.
Perhaps. But why? The war on drugs is largely about publicity and money. Making big, quick busts to show off on the evening news, and confiscating cash to use to buy police equipment (in some southern US states, there are MASSIVE police departments with practically ZERO public funding -- they fund themselves with confiscated drug cash.) You can't really confiscate bitcoin easily, and going after the buyers is going to be a lot of police effort for very little PR win and no real cash win (particularly since the buyers are located all over the globe)
Compared to the ease of snapping up kids selling drugs on the street corner, I don't think it's worth their time to go after this kind of traffic. At least not yet.
We could implement his ideas, but the only safe way to do so would be to create an inherently anonymous infrastructure. Not a trivial task.
So...like Freenet then? As someone else has already mentioned, this does (at least to me) sound a LOT like the way Freenet addresses files.
It's not strictly about trust though, it's about if you want a single point of failure, or compartmentalized data. My father's hotmail was hacked (most likely phished I'd guess) not too long ago and he wasn't able to get it back. So he lost his hotmail. It's been a pain in the ass, but he got everything that he uses switched over to a new email within a week or two. If the government provides all authentication, what happens if someone hacks that? Or gets your credentials some other way? You lose absolutely everything.
The reason I'll never recommend Geek Squad or Best Buy, or shop there, stems from a series of news articles I read (possibly in Wired? Or maybe local news) a couple years back. They took a number of computers, created various stupid easy faults in them (unplugging the power cable from the motherboard, pulling an IDE cable, nothing that should have taken more than half an hour tops to find and fix) and took them to various Best Buy locations to have them repaired. In almost every situation, the Geek Squad rep told them that the computer was hopelessly broken and they needed to buy an entire new computer.
Oh, then there's the friend of mine who applied for a job with Geek Squad while studying in college -- and when he went to interview, they actually said they couldn't give him the job because he was "over qualified". Which, I know, makes no goddamn sense. But that's what he was told.
I'm sure there are some good stores, but from what I've seen that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
And once again you guys blow it all out of proportion. Nobody is "guilty" here. All that NASA (or anybody else) needs to do is reply to the DMCA takedown request with this response: "This material does not infringe upon anybody's copyright."
The video has been removed and replaced with a message that it was removed due to copyright infringement. That sounds like 'guilty' to me. That's like saying that a criminal isn't proven guilty because they still have an appeal left. Sure, the decision could be reversed, but that decision still exists.
The problems with Chick-fil-a aren't entirely speech though, depending on how you look at it. The corporation directly spends money that it receives from sales on organizations whose sole purpose is to encourage legislation that violates the rights of others (like NOM.) Not to mention the direct discrimination within the organization itself (like WinShape.) They way I see it, it's more like a local mayor spending taxpayer dollars to keep oil and gas companies out of the city. The mayor has an obligation to do what they feel best protects the rights of their citizens -- and if the people disagree, they can vote him out.
It was my understanding that the Pi was more of a hobbyist/educational market -- it's not for people who want a cheap computer (which is what your android device is) but for people who want a REALLY POWERFUL Arduino. Find me an Android device with SPI/I2C/OneWire. Or with GPI/O pins in general. I know there are devices to do that, but what kind of cost is that adding to your Android phone. Plus your phone seems cheaper because it's contract-free -- but that's only a benefit if you plan to use it in a way that it can still be your phone. I was considering a Pi for a barbot (though I'll probably just use my old laptop and an MSP430 for I/O) -- I'm certainly not building my phone into my bar...
It depends on the class in my opinion. In a math or science class? Yes, always take notes, because you'll need to refer back to those formulas...and it's a good chance that the way it was explained and the way you write it down will make a lot more sense than what's in the book.
In humanities classes...not so much. I find that if I don't have to memorize specific numbers or formulas or anything, I do a LOT better in class when I put all my attention on what's being said. It tends to be more of a narrative, less of straight disconnected facts, so it's easier to remember the details. On a related note, I suspect that's part of why I did so terrible in my college math classes -- of the dozen or so math classes I took in college, not a single one gave real-world meanings and applications. Pure numbers and theory. And I'm the kind of person who's COMPLETELY lost if I can't visualize what I'm doing.
It also matters how google-able the material is. I never took a single word of notes in my computer science classes. I also never purchased the textbooks. Hell if the professor wasn't halfway decent I usually wouldn't even go to class half the time. Everything you need is explained better online, why bother? On the other hand, my Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry class, notes were essential -- because it was universally agreed that the book was absolutely the worst textbook any of us had the misfortune of using and Google is completely hopeless for concepts that advanced, so the notes were all I had to go by.
I just graduated last May. For a humanities class (where notes were all text) you might have 10% of the students taking notes on a laptop. For science or math classes, it was below 1%. There's a reason for that. Paper and pencil is still the easiest, cheapest, and most effective method.
The only place I saw any significant number of students using laptops were computer science classes -- and then it was still at most five out of thirty students using them, and those five were either playing games/checking Facebook, or just following along with the slides not taking any notes at all (and I don't see any point to that...) The most productive way of using technology in class? I had a job doing freelance web development while I was in college, and when I was working on something big I'd bring my laptop to the more useless classes and do work. That way I was there for the 5 minutes of information I actually needed, but still productive for the rest of the class.
What the hell is wrong with the UK mail system??? Here in the US, in my entire life there has been _ONE_ instance where I have even HEARD of something getting lost in the mail! And that was sketchy shareware that I suspect may have never been sent in the first place! You lose one in _TWENTY_ in the standard post? Seriously?
They care about more than just corporations. They also care about things like banning free speech to "fight terrorism" and banning abortions to "protect a right to life" while encouraging an increasing number of deaths at the hands of our police and military...
It had ATTEMPTS to get horrible anti-gun measures slipped in, along with a metric fuckton of other absurd amendments. I don't believe any of them were actually passed and added on to the bill though. Big difference.
Who let this one through?
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/08/02/1236203/valve-shares-performance-numbers-on-port-of-left4dead
Yup. My old Dell Vostro 1000 laptop. That could be it I suppose...