Maybe. I just find it hard to imagine that the citd chatroom "Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys" actually has any real women, let alone girls, in it, aside from perhaps (older) hookers and female FBI agents.
I never really thought about it before, but clothing ads for Sears, Wal-Mart, etc always seem to have models green-screened and then superimposed on a white background.
A watch is so incredibly limiting. Think of all that could be done with paper-thin displays!
* You can put health monitors under your skin. Diabetics, people with heart trouble, and so forth.
* You can put displays on credit cards. All you need is inductive power from a reader, and to stick the display and a couple of simple contact buttons on a credit card, and you have a smartcard that's immune to attacks with fake readers, since you have a trusted display and keypad. Huge security advance for consumers (and can be used online, too, without worries about the latest worm compromising consumer computers and swiping card numbers).
We should also have the government file kitchen knives down to dull metal objects, because if we're stupid, we can manage to hurt ourselves with them. And the government knows best. Hell, why don't we just all seal ourselves up in government-regulated personal spheres that can be rolled along government-prescribed paths with only government-censored content on the government-supplied monitors.
God *damn*, how did people survive for millions of years before the United States government came along to start eliminating terrible hazards? Especially *informational* hazards? My parents said "don't get into cars with strangers". Real simple. Somehow I survived, along with hundreds of millions of Americans, stunning as the thought is. And now the government is cracking down on a bunch of middle-aged people who are acting out some sexual fetish online. Great. In George Washington's time, there wasn't the *technology* necessary to monitor and punish people who violated social norms in their private lives, and yet *somehow*, *somehow*, we survived.
You know that there are cannibalism USENET groups too? You know how many people get killed and eaten? Not bloody many; it's a lot of people engaging in some random sexual fetish that they're into.
We have statuatory rape laws. We even have soliciting-sex-from-a-minor-laws. I don't understand why such laws are insufficient, and we have to start eliminating some people's fetish roleplaying.
Tomorrow, whose fetish gets eliminated? Is it those dangerous homosexuals (I notice Texas lawmakers playing a prominent role here -- they've already managed to get adopted children taken away from their adoptive parents if the parents happen to be homosexual -- way to go, conservative Texas.)
There's a little Victorianism in us all. In the United States, we call our Victorianism "Texas".
Now, admittedly the views that she pushes have about as much to do with reality as professional wrestling does with Olympic wrestling, but at least she works for herself.
Uh...because making misleading, unjustified claims and then spending money to spread them widely has worked up until now? I wouldn't say they're stupid -- they're just successfully using a strategy that is appallingly obvious.
The BSA's fraudulent activities cost Linus Torvalds over $300 billion dollars yearly in the United States alone.
Their bogus numbers have caused people to be frightened away from Linux, which Linus *could* potentially be selling for $1000. The fact that he is making *no money* from each copy of Linux used is due to the fact that the BSA has damaged the perception of Linux so much. As a product technically superior to Windows, it should have taken over by now. That's $1000 per person. There are ~300 million people in the United States, counting every man, woman, and child. (We all know that GNOME is simple enough for a baby to use, so counting babies is perfectly legitimate.) Since Linux is upgraded so frequently, people would buy a new copy about annually.
As you can see, since the BSA is COSTING LINUS TORVALDS OVER $300 BILLION DOLLARS IN THE UNITED STATES THIS YEAR ALONE, we desperately need laws to protect the starving open source software authors that are being victimized by the criminal activity of the BSA. It is crucial that we receive laws to protect these authors -- all companies choosing a non-open-source software product over an open-source software product should be required to annually submit a report with cost estimates and associated usability/compatibility testing as to why they choose not to use open source software.
No, it's just not the same. We need whatever PR people the BSA has.
Richard Boucher, Representative of Virginia, regularly lauded on Slashdot as pushing pro-geek legislation (this is not Rick Boucher, the White House PR guy).
Not every politician is an Orrin "Money Weasel" Hatch.
Everyone knows that it is possible to write malicious code in C. That's just because C gives you the near utmost control over your system, and does not discrminiate based on human emotions like "good", "bad", and "malicious". Perhaps a better idea would have been to try to write malicious code in a language such as Java, which tries to prevent a programmer from writing such code. That would be a real challenge.
Yeah, I just flip the "+good +bad -malicious" flags on javac when I want to trust code. Come on, that's ridiculous.
This is not a hard task, but it's kind of stupid, on the order of "who can break into the most computers today" (I dunno, who can run nmap the longest?)
There are so many *interesting* things that could be done as a programming contest, and the submitter chose something that's a pain in the ass for other people, doesn't really challenge the brain ("shortest version of X"), and can't be used for much other than bogus arguments that "C is dangerous" or the obvious card, "Open Source is insecure" (you can look at the much larger sample set of SourceForge and the lack of Trojans implanted and later discovered).
The number of *interesting* security stories that could have challenged people and been useful is legion. "Can we have a system that is unbreakable and does X", (followed by the inevitable followup posts where people punch holes in the design) or other things. You could have asked "How can OSS projects avoid allowing malicious code being sumitted?", which would have started an interesting set of threads from people who work on proof-carrying code, would have taught readers something, and maybe provided improved security for the world at large. Instead, we're going to see a handful of bad, obfuscated C, and a bunch of halfassed arguments against C and OSS, neither of which has much connection with reality. There will be some language arguments, where someone says "we should use [LANGUAGE_WITH_BOUNDSCHECKING]", some security guy that will point out that this doesn't begin to avoid stopping malicious code, someone will make some stupid arguments about how their favorite OS is more secure than anyone else's, we'll get some rehash of NX features that have been done time and time again on Slashdot...seriously, goddammit. The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day is the day I jump ship.
But kids are shown behavior that would be unacceptable all the *time* in the real world. Arnold Schwartzenegger guns people down, burns down buildings, goes on vendettas, and does all kinds of things that would be completely illegal and unacceptable in real life, but people don't seem to mind their kids watching action movies. Heck, people grew up on Loony Toons, but you don't see every kid cross-dressing (Bugs), dropping anvils on people (just about every character), poisoning people (Tom and Jerry) or doing any of the other unacceptable things presented there.
And, heck, while there is a non-zero rate of child-executed arson and shootings, it's not anything that didn't exist before Arnie got popular.
You may well be right that I'd feel differently if I were a parent; sending one's kid off into the great unknown to fend for themselves all day has to be a bit nerve-wracking. But it just doesn't seem like, in the case of comparable content, a particularly high degree of damage has been done.
In general, my take is more that children lack understanding of the finer, more difficult-to-define-and-understand points of society. Social ettiquette, how to manipulate and avoid irritating people, how to establish mental control over yourself to do something boring or unpleasant for a long period of time. Distinguishing between a range of physical acts that are wildly unacceptable and real life does not, to my way of thinking, pose much of a problem.
It's the same with any other internet service - give it a few days, and watch the abuse roll on in. Web, Email, Chat, they can ALL be used for great things but the perpensity for abuse lurks just around the corner, and Tor isn't an exception to this.
No, it's because Slashcode lacks support for anonymous use. Until someone adds said support, Slashdot will not be anonymously usable.
If everyone created an account, no problem.
The thing is that Slashdot's codebase uses blacklisting as part of its functionality (it's how they keep abusers from flooding the board). Blacklisting does not work in a pure anonymous environment (that allows abuse if many entities collaborate to abuse the system, which is the case for most systems) without "expensive IDs" (the use of some resource which one cannot produce en-masse to identify onesself). Slashcode treats IP addresses as "expensive IDs", intending that those wanting to abuse the board have a limited set of IP addresses available to them, and those become blacklisted. Tor extends the availability of Tor-enabled IPs (expensive IDs) to anyone who wants. Slashcode cannot understand this. To make Slashcode work in an anonymous environment, support for expensive IDs that work in an anonymous environment must be added. There are many mechanisms for doing expensive IDs.
Slashcode currently uses both IPs (they can get banned) and accounts (they can get banned as well, and it takes a while to work up a high-post, low UIN account) as expensive IDs. IPs cannot be used in an anonymous environment. Accounts could, but probably must be boostrapped in a non-anonymous environment. That is, it would be possible for Slashdot to allow only registered users to use Slashdot from Tor systems (I could even register my IP as one that only allows registered use), but to prevent someone from mass-creating accounts, these accounts would have to be bootstrapped from a non-anonymous environment -- for example, perhaps an IP could only create an account a week, but once created, users could use their accounts on Tor systems.
Another popular expensive ID that saw some interest during the antispam discussion days is solved problems that require many CPU cycles. Generate a hard mathematical problem, to an anonymous user and the person has to burn 5 CPU-minutes of cycles solving a problem in order to post. They'll have a hard time flooding the board.
Another popular expensive ID is human time -- hence the OCRable letters that low-karma accounts and ACs have been seeing recently.
Another expensive ID is transitive trust -- allow accounts that have "trusted" accounts marking those accounts as, in turn, "trusted" (something like the friends system, but should not use the friend marking, which means something different) to use the board anonymously. If those accounts abuse the board, the abusing account loses his trust and the account that endorsed him loses some trust, transitively back to the source. This isn't *fully* anonymous (since the truster has to have some relationship with the trustee, even if it's nothing more than reading a Slashdot post made in non-anonymous mode).
Any other mechanism that uses expensive IDs that can function in an anonymous environment will also work.
I'm going to see whether or not open source solves this one. The Slashcode codebase is there, free, and open, and any number of people with crypto and security design experience read this board and presumably want to use Tor.
I don't really care much about using Slashdot anonymously, so I'm not going to do it. I'll probably take advantage of it if someone else adds support to Slashcode for working in an anonymous environment, though.
To keep the spyware, viri off the windows machines, to keep the elementary school kids from accidentaly getting to pRon sites, etc
I'm not a parent, and I'm curious. Why do parents feel the need to hide pornography?
I can think of the fear that little Jane might become curious and get pregnant (or John get a girl pregnant), but every kid is aware of and curious about sex, and has been since the dawn of humanity, and society doesn't seem to be collapsing with pregnant kids.
I can think of it as, maybe, kind of a gut-instict emotional response triggered by all the negative things (Drugs! Crime! Disease!) that get vaguely mentally associated with pornography, but it doesn't seem to justify the strong response.
Finally, there's the well-worn "it teaches children that women are sex objects" mantra. *Most* characters that kids encounter -- in movies, in pictures (advertisements, teen magazines, etc) -- contain people who are essentially flat objects, that aren't treated as or portrayed as "real people". But nobody seems to have a problem with the other portrayals.
And the amount of man-hours and other economic costs each year associated with isolating children from pornography is just plain astounding.
The reason the that the rating would be 15+ (Actually 13+) is because the ratings are designed to cater to the most retarded kid in society.
I still can't figure out why we have age ratings instead of content ratings. "Realistic violence, sexual innuendo, swearing." Okay, great. That's useful information that lets people make a more informed judgement. A "PG-13" rating is a censor making a general decision, based on how long it's been since someone popped out of their mother, about whether that person is best off watching or not watching something.
When all the media criticizes Bush, I like to think to myself "they're all lying, and they've all got a political agenda", and then I stick my fingers in my ears and sing "LA LA LA LA LA!"
They believe that the Bible should not be taken literally
A literal reading of the Bible is self-inconsistent in many places. Anyone who takes a literal reading of the Bible to be truth is either not educated sufficiently to understand the document that they are reading or simply refuses to accept truth.
The best Christianity can hope to sell to people these days is a patchwork of literal and metaphorical-where-it-allows-the-Bible-not-to-be-w rong interpretation.
I don't know much about the platypus period, but the first two you mentioned never have existed in the wild in their current form. They have been domesticated for long enough that they have evolved to be significantly different than their ancestors.
Heavy breeding in a domesticated environment can accelerate alteration of a species much more quickly than evolution causes alteration. You can see what's been done in a few hundred years of careful dog breeding, for instance. The domestic dog never existed in the wild.
As a Judeo-Christian I find it amusing when people attempt to tell me that evolution/darwinism is a "bona-fide fact" rather than a theory.
(Who calls themselves a Judeo-Christian? Someone who isn't sure whether they're a Jew or a Christian?)
See, here's the thing. Evolution is scientifically sound. It's a reasonably simple theory that explains things that have happened pretty well. Creationism or intelligent design, or whatever the "God made everything and we didn't come from monkeys, dammit" people are calling it these days, is not scientifically sound. There have been a number of times that church views have been overturned by new scientific discoveries, and Biblical interpretation has constantly gotten more mangled and distorted to avoid being in conflict with modern knowledge.
Both creationism and evolution are both *philosophically* sound models. Neither is inherently self-inconsistent. You can't *prove* that creationism or evolution happens or doesn't happen.
Something not following the principles of science doesn't mean it's wrong. Science is just a set of practices that tend to lead people to accurate models of situations. However, because we agree that science does a good job of producing accurate models (which is what you, as a reasonably rational being, care about), it *is* correct to live your life as if those ideas that comply with science are correct, and not the other things.
Have you considered that it might not be self-esteem, but rather that in the past, when Microsoft acquired influence, they used it to transfer increasing amount of money from their customers to themselves?
the writers of Linux Desktop Environments were discovering that it's very easy to be fast and light when you don't do much
I think it had more to do with text antialiasing than anything else.
increased functionality almost always comes at the price of bloat.
The question is how much bloat for how much functionality.
Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!))
Here's some modern ones:
* Stupid mandatory file locking. Reboot, reboot, reboot, every installer!
* Ability of an application to block shutdown, make system unresponsive (granted, it wasn't long ago that someone was pointing out that you could forkbomb Linux).
* Pageable kernel memory (ugh) instead of unloadable modules.
* Win32 API is generally not very well designed.
* Software particularly automatable.
* While some amount of Linux-like diagnostic and power-user tools can be cropped together, requires digging through Resource Kits and the like for tools that not one in ten thousand users knows about, and almost no systems have installed.
* Only one desktop. I have a Windows box with twin 21" monitors at work, and a Linux box with a single 19" monitor at home -- the Linux box does far more work, and I comfortably deal with far more windows at once due to viewports. In Windows window manager is not very powerful, and third party hacks to improve it are suffer from sluggishness or flakiness.
* The Windows development tools kind of suck for the advanced user, though they have a shallower learning curve -- someone that knows GNU make, emacs, and gcc can easily automate and make portable their build, testing, and what-have-you.
* Remote administration on Windows sucks (though it has more comprehensive tools for administering mass numbers of systems from one machine at once)
* Windows has a complex, IPC/network filesystem daemon running out of the box on every Windows box that has had a plethora of security problems in the past.
* Windows lacks those wonderfully convenient symlinks.
* If you know Unix, you know what everything-is-a-file does for you -- it makes scripting vastly more powerful, and lets you do things that would be quite difficult on Windows (want to overwrite every block on a disk with random data seven times? That's a short one-liner on Unix and a specialized piece of software on Windows.)
* The Windows sockets implementation sucks.
* Extraneous confirmation dialogs. Everywhere. God.
* Not a technical problem, but Windows software generally costs money. The Windows equivalent of a full Linux distribution, with all applications included, would cost an absolutely insane amount of money.
It's true that the stability woes of the late 90s (where all general purpose consumer OSes were horribly unstable) have greatly decreased. That doesn't mean that Windows is a Linux, though. Not by a long shot. And the people that are unhappy with Windows have quite solid technical grounds.
Look at just about *any* large software company that sells to businesses. Their goal is to get you locked-in to a software package, and then milk as much money as they possibly can from you. The real money to be made is in hidden costs. Sure, Bob the Purchasing Manager *thinks* that he's bought a copy of the software, but in fact he's signed off on spending money on the software package for the next fifteen years until the company is frusterated enough to ante up enough money to jump ship to another package.
And the best tool of all in the software world to squeeze those-money engorged corporate udders is incompatibility -- file formats, APIs and protocols that only *you* can provide. (And user expertise in your software.)
The smart purchaser stays the hell away from any proprietary file formats, APIs and protocols.
The main reason that the open source world is nice for the corporate world is not the up-front price benefits. It's the fact that open source software inherently has non-proprietary file formats, APIs, and protocols, means that a choice of open source software ensures that you can't be milked (well, *too* much) or else someone else will toddle on in and start providing an alternative.
Consider an example: People using Subversion for their source control aren't going to pay a cent for anything in the future. Even if Subversion cost $5000 a seat, instead of being gratis, it would still mean only a one-time payment. People using ClearCase have many years of rich milk-giving ahead of them.
Microsoft lets people use Windows for minimal cost in areas that it wants to enter because it establishes one of the above pillars of lock-in -- it builds user expertise in their software. Any software with a different interface or behavior immediately represents a barrier to change. That retraining has a cost, that cost can have a dollar value assigned to it, and that dollar value is exactly how much Microsoft can milk you for in the future.
Microsoft's most-used mechanism to help *spread* lock-in is not contracts or dirty legal tactics, but bundling. Get one element of lock-in into play (say, file formats, with Windows binary compatibility), and use it to get Windows deployed, then try to use that to get people to use another element of Windows that can provide its own lock-in benefits. The economic potential, the amount of money that Microsoft can milk users for, increases with every increment of lock-in.
Microsoft didn't give away Internet Explorer for free because they love you and like petting kitties and giving candy to babies. They did it because (a) it builds user expertise in a feature of their software that then is difficult to move away from, increasing lock-in, (b) enough use of Internet Explorer results in network-spanning lock-in as people start dabbling in things like ActiveX, which are a big milk-producing mechanism for Microsoft, and (c) it provides another, significant, platform to use to introduce file format and protocol incompatibility, and thus further milk-producing lock-in. Internet Explorer is an *investment* in producing economic potential, lock-in, which they can cash in for loads of money over time in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok so the paedophiles shouldn't be around in the first place, but that's not the point: bad people _do_ exist...
.sig:
And then your
Saudi Arabia - where school girls are prevented from leaving a burning building because they have no head scarves on
Don't you love people who refuse to recognize different value systems?
There are probably plenty of people in Saudi Arabia who think that lingerie model ads are peverse, obscene, and disgusting...
Maybe. I just find it hard to imagine that the citd chatroom "Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys" actually has any real women, let alone girls, in it, aside from perhaps (older) hookers and female FBI agents.
"Men into FBI agents, sign in here"
Dude, get your models away from the backgrounds
I never really thought about it before, but clothing ads for Sears, Wal-Mart, etc always seem to have models green-screened and then superimposed on a white background.
A watch is so incredibly limiting. Think of all that could be done with paper-thin displays!
* You can put health monitors under your skin. Diabetics, people with heart trouble, and so forth.
* You can put displays on credit cards. All you need is inductive power from a reader, and to stick the display and a couple of simple contact buttons on a credit card, and you have a smartcard that's immune to attacks with fake readers, since you have a trusted display and keypad. Huge security advance for consumers (and can be used online, too, without worries about the latest worm compromising consumer computers and swiping card numbers).
We should also have the government file kitchen knives down to dull metal objects, because if we're stupid, we can manage to hurt ourselves with them. And the government knows best. Hell, why don't we just all seal ourselves up in government-regulated personal spheres that can be rolled along government-prescribed paths with only government-censored content on the government-supplied monitors.
God *damn*, how did people survive for millions of years before the United States government came along to start eliminating terrible hazards? Especially *informational* hazards? My parents said "don't get into cars with strangers". Real simple. Somehow I survived, along with hundreds of millions of Americans, stunning as the thought is. And now the government is cracking down on a bunch of middle-aged people who are acting out some sexual fetish online. Great. In George Washington's time, there wasn't the *technology* necessary to monitor and punish people who violated social norms in their private lives, and yet *somehow*, *somehow*, we survived.
You know that there are cannibalism USENET groups too? You know how many people get killed and eaten? Not bloody many; it's a lot of people engaging in some random sexual fetish that they're into.
We have statuatory rape laws. We even have soliciting-sex-from-a-minor-laws. I don't understand why such laws are insufficient, and we have to start eliminating some people's fetish roleplaying.
Tomorrow, whose fetish gets eliminated? Is it those dangerous homosexuals (I notice Texas lawmakers playing a prominent role here -- they've already managed to get adopted children taken away from their adoptive parents if the parents happen to be homosexual -- way to go, conservative Texas.)
There's a little Victorianism in us all. In the United States, we call our Victorianism "Texas".
I don't believe that Ann Coulter is a paid shill.
I believe that she is an independent entertainer.
Now, admittedly the views that she pushes have about as much to do with reality as professional wrestling does with Olympic wrestling, but at least she works for herself.
The number of independent IPs downloading updates for a given software package.
Of course, that has its own inaccuracies, but they're on the low side, not the high.
Uh...because making misleading, unjustified claims and then spending money to spread them widely has worked up until now? I wouldn't say they're stupid -- they're just successfully using a strategy that is appallingly obvious.
The BSA's fraudulent activities cost Linus Torvalds over $300 billion dollars yearly in the United States alone.
Their bogus numbers have caused people to be frightened away from Linux, which Linus *could* potentially be selling for $1000. The fact that he is making *no money* from each copy of Linux used is due to the fact that the BSA has damaged the perception of Linux so much. As a product technically superior to Windows, it should have taken over by now. That's $1000 per person. There are ~300 million people in the United States, counting every man, woman, and child. (We all know that GNOME is simple enough for a baby to use, so counting babies is perfectly legitimate.) Since Linux is upgraded so frequently, people would buy a new copy about annually.
As you can see, since the BSA is COSTING LINUS TORVALDS OVER $300 BILLION DOLLARS IN THE UNITED STATES THIS YEAR ALONE, we desperately need laws to protect the starving open source software authors that are being victimized by the criminal activity of the BSA. It is crucial that we receive laws to protect these authors -- all companies choosing a non-open-source software product over an open-source software product should be required to annually submit a report with cost estimates and associated usability/compatibility testing as to why they choose not to use open source software.
No, it's just not the same. We need whatever PR people the BSA has.
Richard Boucher, Representative of Virginia, regularly lauded on Slashdot as pushing pro-geek legislation (this is not Rick Boucher, the White House PR guy).
Not every politician is an Orrin "Money Weasel" Hatch.
(No, it's not strange. He happens to be very good at both but finds ancient languages more interesting.)
Does he take the Joseph Smith "fictional approach" to translation?
Actually, the headlines up there look interesting and more accurate than Slashdot's. I'll give it a try. Thank you.
Everyone knows that it is possible to write malicious code in C. That's just because C gives you the near utmost control over your system, and does not discrminiate based on human emotions like "good", "bad", and "malicious". Perhaps a better idea would have been to try to write malicious code in a language such as Java, which tries to prevent a programmer from writing such code. That would be a real challenge.
Yeah, I just flip the "+good +bad -malicious" flags on javac when I want to trust code. Come on, that's ridiculous.
This is not a hard task, but it's kind of stupid, on the order of "who can break into the most computers today" (I dunno, who can run nmap the longest?)
There are so many *interesting* things that could be done as a programming contest, and the submitter chose something that's a pain in the ass for other people, doesn't really challenge the brain ("shortest version of X"), and can't be used for much other than bogus arguments that "C is dangerous" or the obvious card, "Open Source is insecure" (you can look at the much larger sample set of SourceForge and the lack of Trojans implanted and later discovered).
The number of *interesting* security stories that could have challenged people and been useful is legion. "Can we have a system that is unbreakable and does X", (followed by the inevitable followup posts where people punch holes in the design) or other things. You could have asked "How can OSS projects avoid allowing malicious code being sumitted?", which would have started an interesting set of threads from people who work on proof-carrying code, would have taught readers something, and maybe provided improved security for the world at large. Instead, we're going to see a handful of bad, obfuscated C, and a bunch of halfassed arguments against C and OSS, neither of which has much connection with reality. There will be some language arguments, where someone says "we should use [LANGUAGE_WITH_BOUNDSCHECKING]", some security guy that will point out that this doesn't begin to avoid stopping malicious code, someone will make some stupid arguments about how their favorite OS is more secure than anyone else's, we'll get some rehash of NX features that have been done time and time again on Slashdot...seriously, goddammit. The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day is the day I jump ship.
But kids are shown behavior that would be unacceptable all the *time* in the real world. Arnold Schwartzenegger guns people down, burns down buildings, goes on vendettas, and does all kinds of things that would be completely illegal and unacceptable in real life, but people don't seem to mind their kids watching action movies. Heck, people grew up on Loony Toons, but you don't see every kid cross-dressing (Bugs), dropping anvils on people (just about every character), poisoning people (Tom and Jerry) or doing any of the other unacceptable things presented there.
And, heck, while there is a non-zero rate of child-executed arson and shootings, it's not anything that didn't exist before Arnie got popular.
You may well be right that I'd feel differently if I were a parent; sending one's kid off into the great unknown to fend for themselves all day has to be a bit nerve-wracking. But it just doesn't seem like, in the case of comparable content, a particularly high degree of damage has been done.
In general, my take is more that children lack understanding of the finer, more difficult-to-define-and-understand points of society. Social ettiquette, how to manipulate and avoid irritating people, how to establish mental control over yourself to do something boring or unpleasant for a long period of time. Distinguishing between a range of physical acts that are wildly unacceptable and real life does not, to my way of thinking, pose much of a problem.
Because Tor works, apparently.
It's the same with any other internet service - give it a few days, and watch the abuse roll on in. Web, Email, Chat, they can ALL be used for great things but the perpensity for abuse lurks just around the corner, and Tor isn't an exception to this.
No, it's because Slashcode lacks support for anonymous use. Until someone adds said support, Slashdot will not be anonymously usable.
If everyone created an account, no problem.
The thing is that Slashdot's codebase uses blacklisting as part of its functionality (it's how they keep abusers from flooding the board). Blacklisting does not work in a pure anonymous environment (that allows abuse if many entities collaborate to abuse the system, which is the case for most systems) without "expensive IDs" (the use of some resource which one cannot produce en-masse to identify onesself). Slashcode treats IP addresses as "expensive IDs", intending that those wanting to abuse the board have a limited set of IP addresses available to them, and those become blacklisted. Tor extends the availability of Tor-enabled IPs (expensive IDs) to anyone who wants. Slashcode cannot understand this. To make Slashcode work in an anonymous environment, support for expensive IDs that work in an anonymous environment must be added. There are many mechanisms for doing expensive IDs.
Slashcode currently uses both IPs (they can get banned) and accounts (they can get banned as well, and it takes a while to work up a high-post, low UIN account) as expensive IDs. IPs cannot be used in an anonymous environment. Accounts could, but probably must be boostrapped in a non-anonymous environment. That is, it would be possible for Slashdot to allow only registered users to use Slashdot from Tor systems (I could even register my IP as one that only allows registered use), but to prevent someone from mass-creating accounts, these accounts would have to be bootstrapped from a non-anonymous environment -- for example, perhaps an IP could only create an account a week, but once created, users could use their accounts on Tor systems.
Another popular expensive ID that saw some interest during the antispam discussion days is solved problems that require many CPU cycles. Generate a hard mathematical problem, to an anonymous user and the person has to burn 5 CPU-minutes of cycles solving a problem in order to post. They'll have a hard time flooding the board.
Another popular expensive ID is human time -- hence the OCRable letters that low-karma accounts and ACs have been seeing recently.
Another expensive ID is transitive trust -- allow accounts that have "trusted" accounts marking those accounts as, in turn, "trusted" (something like the friends system, but should not use the friend marking, which means something different) to use the board anonymously. If those accounts abuse the board, the abusing account loses his trust and the account that endorsed him loses some trust, transitively back to the source. This isn't *fully* anonymous (since the truster has to have some relationship with the trustee, even if it's nothing more than reading a Slashdot post made in non-anonymous mode).
Any other mechanism that uses expensive IDs that can function in an anonymous environment will also work.
I'm going to see whether or not open source solves this one. The Slashcode codebase is there, free, and open, and any number of people with crypto and security design experience read this board and presumably want to use Tor.
I don't really care much about using Slashdot anonymously, so I'm not going to do it. I'll probably take advantage of it if someone else adds support to Slashcode for working in an anonymous environment, though.
To keep the spyware, viri off the windows machines, to keep the elementary school kids from accidentaly getting to pRon sites, etc
I'm not a parent, and I'm curious. Why do parents feel the need to hide pornography?
I can think of the fear that little Jane might become curious and get pregnant (or John get a girl pregnant), but every kid is aware of and curious about sex, and has been since the dawn of humanity, and society doesn't seem to be collapsing with pregnant kids.
I can think of it as, maybe, kind of a gut-instict emotional response triggered by all the negative things (Drugs! Crime! Disease!) that get vaguely mentally associated with pornography, but it doesn't seem to justify the strong response.
Finally, there's the well-worn "it teaches children that women are sex objects" mantra. *Most* characters that kids encounter -- in movies, in pictures (advertisements, teen magazines, etc) -- contain people who are essentially flat objects, that aren't treated as or portrayed as "real people". But nobody seems to have a problem with the other portrayals.
And the amount of man-hours and other economic costs each year associated with isolating children from pornography is just plain astounding.
The reason the that the rating would be 15+ (Actually 13+) is because the ratings are designed to cater to the most retarded kid in society.
I still can't figure out why we have age ratings instead of content ratings. "Realistic violence, sexual innuendo, swearing." Okay, great. That's useful information that lets people make a more informed judgement. A "PG-13" rating is a censor making a general decision, based on how long it's been since someone popped out of their mother, about whether that person is best off watching or not watching something.
When the government is telling scientists what they should be concluding, we might as well be IN SOVIET RUSSIA.
Actually, Russia (admittedly, not *Soviet* Russia) ratified Kyoto.
Sadly enough, one could start saying "IN THE UNITED STATES..."
When all the media criticizes Bush, I like to think to myself "they're all lying, and they've all got a political agenda", and then I stick my fingers in my ears and sing "LA LA LA LA LA!"
They believe that the Bible should not be taken literally
w rong interpretation.
A literal reading of the Bible is self-inconsistent in many places. Anyone who takes a literal reading of the Bible to be truth is either not educated sufficiently to understand the document that they are reading or simply refuses to accept truth.
The best Christianity can hope to sell to people these days is a patchwork of literal and metaphorical-where-it-allows-the-Bible-not-to-be-
I don't know much about the platypus period, but the first two you mentioned never have existed in the wild in their current form. They have been domesticated for long enough that they have evolved to be significantly different than their ancestors.
Heavy breeding in a domesticated environment can accelerate alteration of a species much more quickly than evolution causes alteration. You can see what's been done in a few hundred years of careful dog breeding, for instance. The domestic dog never existed in the wild.
As a Judeo-Christian I find it amusing when people attempt to tell me that evolution/darwinism is a "bona-fide fact" rather than a theory.
(Who calls themselves a Judeo-Christian? Someone who isn't sure whether they're a Jew or a Christian?)
See, here's the thing. Evolution is scientifically sound. It's a reasonably simple theory that explains things that have happened pretty well. Creationism or intelligent design, or whatever the "God made everything and we didn't come from monkeys, dammit" people are calling it these days, is not scientifically sound. There have been a number of times that church views have been overturned by new scientific discoveries, and Biblical interpretation has constantly gotten more mangled and distorted to avoid being in conflict with modern knowledge.
Both creationism and evolution are both *philosophically* sound models. Neither is inherently self-inconsistent. You can't *prove* that creationism or evolution happens or doesn't happen.
Something not following the principles of science doesn't mean it's wrong. Science is just a set of practices that tend to lead people to accurate models of situations. However, because we agree that science does a good job of producing accurate models (which is what you, as a reasonably rational being, care about), it *is* correct to live your life as if those ideas that comply with science are correct, and not the other things.
Windows Resource Kits come with all kind of software that's useless to me because no machine I use ever has the damn software present.
It *is* a significant deal that perl is not only *available* for *IX boxes, but is installed on every one that I sit down at.
Have you considered that it might not be self-esteem, but rather that in the past, when Microsoft acquired influence, they used it to transfer increasing amount of money from their customers to themselves?
the writers of Linux Desktop Environments were discovering that it's very easy to be fast and light when you don't do much
I think it had more to do with text antialiasing than anything else.
increased functionality almost always comes at the price of bloat.
The question is how much bloat for how much functionality.
Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!))
Here's some modern ones:
* Stupid mandatory file locking. Reboot, reboot, reboot, every installer!
* Ability of an application to block shutdown, make system unresponsive (granted, it wasn't long ago that someone was pointing out that you could forkbomb Linux).
* Pageable kernel memory (ugh) instead of unloadable modules.
* Win32 API is generally not very well designed.
* Software particularly automatable.
* While some amount of Linux-like diagnostic and power-user tools can be cropped together, requires digging through Resource Kits and the like for tools that not one in ten thousand users knows about, and almost no systems have installed.
* Only one desktop. I have a Windows box with twin 21" monitors at work, and a Linux box with a single 19" monitor at home -- the Linux box does far more work, and I comfortably deal with far more windows at once due to viewports. In Windows window manager is not very powerful, and third party hacks to improve it are suffer from sluggishness or flakiness.
* The Windows development tools kind of suck for the advanced user, though they have a shallower learning curve -- someone that knows GNU make, emacs, and gcc can easily automate and make portable their build, testing, and what-have-you.
* Remote administration on Windows sucks (though it has more comprehensive tools for administering mass numbers of systems from one machine at once)
* Windows has a complex, IPC/network filesystem daemon running out of the box on every Windows box that has had a plethora of security problems in the past.
* Windows lacks those wonderfully convenient symlinks.
* If you know Unix, you know what everything-is-a-file does for you -- it makes scripting vastly more powerful, and lets you do things that would be quite difficult on Windows (want to overwrite every block on a disk with random data seven times? That's a short one-liner on Unix and a specialized piece of software on Windows.)
* The Windows sockets implementation sucks.
* Extraneous confirmation dialogs. Everywhere. God.
* Not a technical problem, but Windows software generally costs money. The Windows equivalent of a full Linux distribution, with all applications included, would cost an absolutely insane amount of money.
It's true that the stability woes of the late 90s (where all general purpose consumer OSes were horribly unstable) have greatly decreased. That doesn't mean that Windows is a Linux, though. Not by a long shot. And the people that are unhappy with Windows have quite solid technical grounds.
Look at just about *any* large software company that sells to businesses. Their goal is to get you locked-in to a software package, and then milk as much money as they possibly can from you. The real money to be made is in hidden costs. Sure, Bob the Purchasing Manager *thinks* that he's bought a copy of the software, but in fact he's signed off on spending money on the software package for the next fifteen years until the company is frusterated enough to ante up enough money to jump ship to another package.
And the best tool of all in the software world to squeeze those-money engorged corporate udders is incompatibility -- file formats, APIs and protocols that only *you* can provide. (And user expertise in your software.)
The smart purchaser stays the hell away from any proprietary file formats, APIs and protocols.
The main reason that the open source world is nice for the corporate world is not the up-front price benefits. It's the fact that open source software inherently has non-proprietary file formats, APIs, and protocols, means that a choice of open source software ensures that you can't be milked (well, *too* much) or else someone else will toddle on in and start providing an alternative.
Consider an example: People using Subversion for their source control aren't going to pay a cent for anything in the future. Even if Subversion cost $5000 a seat, instead of being gratis, it would still mean only a one-time payment. People using ClearCase have many years of rich milk-giving ahead of them.
Microsoft lets people use Windows for minimal cost in areas that it wants to enter because it establishes one of the above pillars of lock-in -- it builds user expertise in their software. Any software with a different interface or behavior immediately represents a barrier to change. That retraining has a cost, that cost can have a dollar value assigned to it, and that dollar value is exactly how much Microsoft can milk you for in the future.
Microsoft's most-used mechanism to help *spread* lock-in is not contracts or dirty legal tactics, but bundling. Get one element of lock-in into play (say, file formats, with Windows binary compatibility), and use it to get Windows deployed, then try to use that to get people to use another element of Windows that can provide its own lock-in benefits. The economic potential, the amount of money that Microsoft can milk users for, increases with every increment of lock-in.
Microsoft didn't give away Internet Explorer for free because they love you and like petting kitties and giving candy to babies. They did it because (a) it builds user expertise in a feature of their software that then is difficult to move away from, increasing lock-in, (b) enough use of Internet Explorer results in network-spanning lock-in as people start dabbling in things like ActiveX, which are a big milk-producing mechanism for Microsoft, and (c) it provides another, significant, platform to use to introduce file format and protocol incompatibility, and thus further milk-producing lock-in. Internet Explorer is an *investment* in producing economic potential, lock-in, which they can cash in for loads of money over time in the future.
You're right. I was thinking of local sockets, not named pipes, which I was having to deal with recently.