As it turns out, that is a pretty serious offense... the last time I dropped anchor in the wrong place, I ended up in the drunk tank at the county jail with both indecent exposure and drunk in public charges.
You see, cancer was also a chance to have an operation where they inserted a tiny chip into his body to track his heart beat. In turn, it relays a message of his heart beat to his iPhone which is always on him. That relays it to a satellite receiver which sends the message back down to earth to the triggers on 4 pounds of C4 placed carefully around the support base of each Apple building telling it not to blow up. If it doesn't receive that message, no more Apple.
It's pretty impressive that Facebook has been able to grow so quickly and handle so much traffic. Their down time has been pretty insignificant related to the sheer number of requests that blow through their servers every day.
There's probably a thing or two that can be learned from their developers and IT folks. I just wish I knew more about the whole underlying structure so I could appreciate exactly what they've done.
The scam works by a victim clicking on a spam link that appears to be coming from one of their Facebook friends or someone in their address book which lodges spyware in their machine. This then records all the information, including passwords, when they log in to various sites.
The passwords can then be sent on to money-laundering gangs who use them to infiltrate users' bank accounts.
While this is true of any other networking site, I think this severe security issue needs to be address successfully one of these days.
I fear for the millions of homes where a kid logs onto Facebook, gets mail from Timmy. Clicks the link, finds nothing and leave. Mom and dad log into their online banking/credit card statement later that night and... it's only a matter of time.
Simple solution if you think this is unjust highway robbery targeting the technically gifted: Find a friend or family living in a different state and get their address. Call your credit card company and add their name and address to a billable location for your credit card. Then when you set up your credit card information on iTunes or Amazon or whatever, list their address as the billing address. They can't apply the tax even if you are downloading in NY.
This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute.
It's true, it improves to 100/100! The reason you need to leave the browser open for at least a minute is because that's how long it takes to download this extension, install it, run the extension and put the acid 3 URL into the extension's address bar.
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
Are you sure you can assert that?
No, the 90s where a turbulent time filled with drugs, rock music and Java. I've largely lost my way for the cheap harlot of a language that runs on any platform. In a way, I miss the sharp sting of the preachers segfault against my knuckles, the way I would allocate and deallocate memory night after night over and over. Sometimes I look back and long for the purity that once was... and curse the Sun Microsystem that lead me astray from the good letter.
Often at home I resolve to code only in an efficient language. But in the morning when I wake up, I take the paycheck and do what greed drives me to do: Java.
You can check out theopendisc.org's games and give that along with them. Those are four pretty solid games. Another thing to check out would be the open sourced quake or even freeDoom.
Are these primarily for kids? I'm also confused why you're installing XP but giving an Ubuntu CD? Live disc? That has a ton of great puzzle games you can start with and even a few decent starting learning games.
I think there's a lot to be said about just giving something news coverage. My coworker made the comment that sometimes it's ok--maybe even better--to just ignore the news and relax. I had to disagree with him. I pointed out that even today a lot of things happen and giving them coverage on the news would be fighting half the battle. Being in the minds of the general populace is indeed a powerful thing.
Take for instance Mark Twain & King Leopold of Belgium destroying the Congo Basin. Mark joined a group and tried to just inform people of what was going on. He wrote a pamphlet King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which a monologue dripping in satire of the King defending himself was designed to inform not only Americans but by and large his own people--who were unaware of the campaigns as they never saw the money. Were it not for a few brave people that could not be bribed, that information might never have gotten out! And think how easily this pamphlet might have been distributed across the internet!
And yet today, the campaigns were run so well that we don't know for sure how many millions were killed or had limbs hacked off and I don't recall it being mentioned in my primary or secondary school history books. Left largely unknown to me until relatively recently--much like the Philippine/American War & Iran/Iraq War.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
So I am in no doubt the internet--an advanced dissemination of information--at anytime of war would help people collectively discuss and understand and do the right thing. I only wish I could have written a review of Mein Kampf for Germans to read before so many of them bought into it...
You would think that Governments--who exist to serve the people--would constantly look for avenues of already successful community sites as venues for returning information to the public. With privacy & security in mind, I wish that more governments would release this sort of stuff under a creative commons... even if citizens of the world then have access to it, I don't think the taxpayers would mind. Wikipedia & other Wikimedia sites have shown to be very successful non-profit sites that are community owned and driven. Can anyone think of a good reason why we shouldn't extend the Freedom of Information Act a little further with recent advancements in communications and technology?
I really don't know who are actually going to purchase the game, but I hope that schoolchildren will play.
I couldn't agree more. For those of you thinking that this will offer high quality tracks from all eras of music, guess again.
I could go into a lengthy diatribe about the shortages of Wii Music but instead, I'll referrence IGN that pointed out the biggest deficiency:
Before we even get to the gameplay breakdown, though, take a second and think about what you might value in a game dedicated to music. I imagine a robust roster of popular, classic and contemporary songs tops the list for obvious reasons. What about an assurance that the songs included will be presented in the highest audio quality possible? I mean, people went nuts when they found out that the musical tracks in the Wii version of Guitar Hero were outputted in mono, and with good reason: we expect a certain caliber of presentation from today's software. Unfortunately, with Wii Music Nintendo has demonstrated that it doesn't care to satisfy expectations. Not only are most of the 50-plus tracks lifted from the public domain -- such timeless hits as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, O Christmas Tree, My Grandfather's Clock and Bridal Chorus -- but they are also rendered in archaic, amateur MIDI. I've heard some good MIDI renditions in my day and let me tell you, you won't find any of them in Wii Music. It is a good thing that Beethoven is long dead because he would not ever wish to hear the game's lifeless version of Ode to Joy.
Seriously, Ode to Joy done in MIDI? Are you trying to scare your children away from Beethoven?
They gave this game a 5.0 out of 10.0 and I think that's a tad generous. This game is seriously only for the very young. Great for that and introduction to music but no more.
Probably Also Contending with OpenLaszlo
on
Sun Releases JavaFX
·
· Score: 4, Informative
... in a bid to take on Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight technologies
Well, I will throw out there a heads up to folks about OpenLaszlo which is the "run-anywhere, no-lock-in rich Internet platform. Period."
Unfortunately it still has a massive adoption curve ahead of it so maybe there's no reason to list it as a contender. While there are neat demos, a few companies have employed it: Wal-Mart, Pandora even MSN's music service.
*sigh* I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?
Like always, I welcome the competition, diversity and options this brings while I cringe at the thought of yet another schism in the open source community.
Virtual memory and pagefiles still exist so that there will be persistent, recoverable storage of your browsing and search history, illegally downloaded music, and furrie porn should anybody come a-knockin after you hit the power switch.
[/tinfoil hat]
</worrying>
You're close but do you know why I only drink rain memory and grain memory, Mandrake? It's because virtual memory and pagefiles are the greatest Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious computerly processes. <love the bomb>
In China, because a large number of the players do not own the computer they use to play games (e.g. Internet cafes), the CD keys required to create an account can be purchased independently of the software package. In order to play the game, players must also purchase prepaid game cards that can be played for 66 hours and 40 minutes.[43] A monthly fee model is not available to players of this region. The Chinese government and The9, the licensee for World of Warcraft in China, have imposed a modification on Chinese versions of the game which places flesh on bare-boned skeletons and transforms dead character corpses into tidy graves. These changes were imposed by the Chinese government in an attempt to "promote a healthy and harmonious online game environment" in World of Warcraft.
If you don't think Red Flag is meant to be a Windows replacement, take a look at Wikipedia's screen shot of Version 6 (presumably out of the box).
Isn't this the part where Gates shits his gourd and asks to meet with Hu Jintao? Then baits the large part of greater China with free software that he writes off as a goodwill donation? I mean, we are talking a serious part of the world's population...
Obviously questions about spying and surveillance have arisen...
Um, it uses RPM as a package manager so as long as the government isn't forcing Cafes to use a certain package repository or use certain packages, where does the danger of surveillance lie? I mean, I wouldn't trust the Chinese government either but I am confused why a mandate of Red Flag Linux upsets people in this case... and a recommendation from the DoD is probably heralded?
Yeah, they're running an industry's tech core, yeah they're stating exactly what OSS to use but where is the danger?
Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services...
And right from the get-go it's main purpose is overshadowed by some every Telnic employee's desire to be THE Henry on the.tel TLD. That must be awfully helpful to us in our need for 'internet communication' services.
More garbage for the tubes, I guess.
What the hell is the point in wasting DNS space
Are we really concerned about "DNS space?" I guess I'm a bit of an idiot when it comes to why we need to be concerned about 'space' on DNS names... perhaps you mean IP address space? And if so, people are basically flushing those down the toilet by giving every device one (including their toilet).
That's the problem; since it's automated, that 1% blocked could be anything. cnn/bbc/etc could be blocked for talking about a child porn news item. That would seem unacceptable to me.
Well, according to the last part of one of the articles
The trial is expected to use a blacklist of 10,000 banned Web pages, using the rumoured 1300-page blacklist held by the ACMA mixed with dummy data.
If that's true, they are simply going to blacklist a bunch of websites. I heavily doubt cnn/bbc/etc will ever negligently be put on that list. I know little to nothing about this scheme but if it's a blacklist, you probably have little worry about with major news sites. A lot more to worry about things labeled as "counter-culture" or "low brow humor."
Opponents said the most accurate filter chosen by the government will incorrectly block up to 10,000 Web pages out of 1 million.
Uh, why didn't they use the metric of 10^4:10^6 or 1:100? Sounds like somebody wanted that statement to be heard as much more impacting than it is. The thing that worries me is that if we look at other technologies designed to "protect the people from themselves," a false positive rate of 1% really isn't that bad--especially on a fully automated system. A high false positive rate is--in my opinion--what's holding back facial recognition but I fear that 1% blockage of websites is completely acceptable to most folks. Maybe a better analogy is that of the FCC in America and the words you can't say on TV... even though there is no research showing how these words negatively affect people, this small percent of our language and expression is blocked. This analogy (like all) is flawed, however, as you might never know what was on that website that caused the super happy and helpful animated kangaroo to appear on your computer and gently chide you that this site is not for Aussies.
Hopefully (and I'm betting on this) it will turn out to be a lot like prohibition. The outlawing of these sites and data cause their value to skyrocket, the government is made to look a mockery, your average citizen (I've heard talk of simple SSL encryption stopping this) knows how to reach them, in so doing they inadvertently supply criminals with capital and the very stupid law is repealed. Twenty years later, everyone is joking about "the Grand Experiment" and how pathetically futile it was to begin with.
Lastly, how is this any different than what China is doing? I'm surprised nobody has made this connection and accused the government of being no better than anti-free-speech China.
After reading a bit of the plan on Australia's Cyber-Safety, it's evident this quickly degrades into a "think of the children" mentality:
While the internet has created substantial benefits for children, it has also exposed them to a number of dangers, including exposure to illegal and prohibited content. Parents rightly expect the Australian Government to play its part in helping protect children online.
So why isn't there an "opt-out" plan for those Aussie adults who like our interwebs a little dirty (and are over 18 years of age)?
The issue I have here is that bringing someone back from suspended animation where they were alive to begin with...
Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure? Think about it, you're taking a perfectly alive human being and... putting them at risk of death? For the purposes of? I know someone will compare this to the risk of life we took putting someone on the moon but I see little to no merit in this procedure.
If you think they're going to run into federal problems, that's only the start of it. This is probably going to be a always-20-years-away technology although it does make for entertainment.
This reminds me of a This American Life episode I listened to (and you can too by clicking on Full Episode here). Basically it explores a very bad chapter of early cryogenics. Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
Also, isn't Ikaria the worst name to pick? "Hey, our company hopes to aim too high and fail hard." They should have gone with Promethea in my opinion.
While the handwriting is a novelty (and the PDF is actually small for a PDF), I question how long that server is going to last.
Also (and yes this is nitpicking), I must contest this:
Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer
I submit for consideration Alan Turing who may have designed the ACE and worked on the earliest computer (The Manchester Mark I) although never really owned it or any other computer. I think a lot of people identify him as not only a hero of World War II but also the father of all computers.
It is this kind of partisan willful ignorance on the part of many that has enabled the political agenda among some to drive the notion that the US is in a severe recession caused by the ineptness and reckless irresponsibility of the Bush administration, when the US had nothing but growth in the GDP until only a month ago. If you asked most people how long they thought the economy had been shrinking for negative, they'd probably say things like, "A year? Two years?"
Why do you jump to the defense of Bush? Where did anyone attack Bush for this? Is it in the article? Are you responding to... to what exactly? Yeah, when shit hits the fan, people tend to blame those in charge... but where is he being blamed?
From the article:
The Bush administration won approval from Congress on Oct. 3 for a $700 billion rescue package for the financial system. Bush said in an interview with ABC's "World News" to be aired Monday that he would support additional intervention if necessary to end the recession.
Note: you are one of the last hard core republicans with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears screaming "I CAN'T HEAR YOU" as my relatives that don't have high paying jobs are having to pawn stuff and as my friend's fathers become unemployed.
Capitalistic systems only work when the participants have faith in the system -- when that faith collapses, for whatever reason, you get a recession. And that's a normal and accepted part of the cycle.
You must think you're a lot smarter than the economists like Alan Greenspan because they've been going on and on this whole time thinking we could forever avoid another shrinking of the economy. And the people who all said we needed that package to reverse/save us from this recession? They must be idiots if it's only "a normal and accepted part of the cycle." Who exactly has accepted this, by the way? I would like to know so I can better manage my 401k in the future (half my retirement funds are now gone).
Rockstar says that all versions of the game will feature SecuROM, including digital versions online
Not quite all, I imagine.
I don't even play these games. The humor I see in it is that Spore was cracked on September 3rd--four days before its launch date. Um, are they really under the impression that one of these schemes might stop the hackers?
At some point you have to acknowledge that you're just annoying your entire fan base to play a cat-and-mouse game with some hackers (that you're losing in an embarrassing way).
Slashdot Mirror
dropped anchor in the wrong place.
As it turns out, that is a pretty serious offense ... the last time I dropped anchor in the wrong place, I ended up in the drunk tank at the county jail with both indecent exposure and drunk in public charges.
How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs
No, I'm sorry, it's just not possible.
You see, cancer was also a chance to have an operation where they inserted a tiny chip into his body to track his heart beat. In turn, it relays a message of his heart beat to his iPhone which is always on him. That relays it to a satellite receiver which sends the message back down to earth to the triggers on 4 pounds of C4 placed carefully around the support base of each Apple building telling it not to blow up. If it doesn't receive that message, no more Apple.
A bit eccentric, I know--but most geniuses are.
It's pretty impressive that Facebook has been able to grow so quickly and handle so much traffic. Their down time has been pretty insignificant related to the sheer number of requests that blow through their servers every day.
There's probably a thing or two that can be learned from their developers and IT folks. I just wish I knew more about the whole underlying structure so I could appreciate exactly what they've done.
Well, call me cynical but the things that interest me about Facebook are what has gone wrong. Like hackers selling account details for pennies. This is the end result:
The scam works by a victim clicking on a spam link that appears to be coming from one of their Facebook friends or someone in their address book which lodges spyware in their machine. This then records all the information, including passwords, when they log in to various sites.
The passwords can then be sent on to money-laundering gangs who use them to infiltrate users' bank accounts.
While this is true of any other networking site, I think this severe security issue needs to be address successfully one of these days.
... it's only a matter of time.
All I've seen Facebook do to remedy this is explain how to clean it off your computer.
I fear for the millions of homes where a kid logs onto Facebook, gets mail from Timmy. Clicks the link, finds nothing and leave. Mom and dad log into their online banking/credit card statement later that night and
Simple solution if you think this is unjust highway robbery targeting the technically gifted: Find a friend or family living in a different state and get their address. Call your credit card company and add their name and address to a billable location for your credit card. Then when you set up your credit card information on iTunes or Amazon or whatever, list their address as the billing address. They can't apply the tax even if you are downloading in NY.
This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute.
It's true, it improves to 100/100! The reason you need to leave the browser open for at least a minute is because that's how long it takes to download this extension, install it, run the extension and put the acid 3 URL into the extension's address bar.
I recommend anyone who loves IE to do this!
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
Are you sure you can assert that?
No, the 90s where a turbulent time filled with drugs, rock music and Java. I've largely lost my way for the cheap harlot of a language that runs on any platform. In a way, I miss the sharp sting of the preachers segfault against my knuckles, the way I would allocate and deallocate memory night after night over and over. Sometimes I look back and long for the purity that once was ... and curse the Sun Microsystem that lead me astray from the good letter.
Often at home I resolve to code only in an efficient language. But in the morning when I wake up, I take the paycheck and do what greed drives me to do: Java.
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
You can check out theopendisc.org's games and give that along with them. Those are four pretty solid games. Another thing to check out would be the open sourced quake or even freeDoom.
Are these primarily for kids? I'm also confused why you're installing XP but giving an Ubuntu CD? Live disc? That has a ton of great puzzle games you can start with and even a few decent starting learning games.
I think there's a lot to be said about just giving something news coverage. My coworker made the comment that sometimes it's ok--maybe even better--to just ignore the news and relax. I had to disagree with him. I pointed out that even today a lot of things happen and giving them coverage on the news would be fighting half the battle. Being in the minds of the general populace is indeed a powerful thing.
... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
...
Take for instance Mark Twain & King Leopold of Belgium destroying the Congo Basin. Mark joined a group and tried to just inform people of what was going on. He wrote a pamphlet King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which a monologue dripping in satire of the King defending himself was designed to inform not only Americans but by and large his own people--who were unaware of the campaigns as they never saw the money. Were it not for a few brave people that could not be bribed, that information might never have gotten out! And think how easily this pamphlet might have been distributed across the internet!
And yet today, the campaigns were run so well that we don't know for sure how many millions were killed or had limbs hacked off and I don't recall it being mentioned in my primary or secondary school history books. Left largely unknown to me until relatively recently--much like the Philippine/American War & Iran/Iraq War.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat
So I am in no doubt the internet--an advanced dissemination of information--at anytime of war would help people collectively discuss and understand and do the right thing. I only wish I could have written a review of Mein Kampf for Germans to read before so many of them bought into it
You would think that Governments--who exist to serve the people--would constantly look for avenues of already successful community sites as venues for returning information to the public. With privacy & security in mind, I wish that more governments would release this sort of stuff under a creative commons ... even if citizens of the world then have access to it, I don't think the taxpayers would mind. Wikipedia & other Wikimedia sites have shown to be very successful non-profit sites that are community owned and driven. Can anyone think of a good reason why we shouldn't extend the Freedom of Information Act a little further with recent advancements in communications and technology?
I really don't know who are actually going to purchase the game, but I hope that schoolchildren will play.
I couldn't agree more. For those of you thinking that this will offer high quality tracks from all eras of music, guess again.
I could go into a lengthy diatribe about the shortages of Wii Music but instead, I'll referrence IGN that pointed out the biggest deficiency:
Before we even get to the gameplay breakdown, though, take a second and think about what you might value in a game dedicated to music. I imagine a robust roster of popular, classic and contemporary songs tops the list for obvious reasons. What about an assurance that the songs included will be presented in the highest audio quality possible? I mean, people went nuts when they found out that the musical tracks in the Wii version of Guitar Hero were outputted in mono, and with good reason: we expect a certain caliber of presentation from today's software. Unfortunately, with Wii Music Nintendo has demonstrated that it doesn't care to satisfy expectations. Not only are most of the 50-plus tracks lifted from the public domain -- such timeless hits as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, O Christmas Tree, My Grandfather's Clock and Bridal Chorus -- but they are also rendered in archaic, amateur MIDI. I've heard some good MIDI renditions in my day and let me tell you, you won't find any of them in Wii Music. It is a good thing that Beethoven is long dead because he would not ever wish to hear the game's lifeless version of Ode to Joy.
Seriously, Ode to Joy done in MIDI? Are you trying to scare your children away from Beethoven?
They gave this game a 5.0 out of 10.0 and I think that's a tad generous. This game is seriously only for the very young. Great for that and introduction to music but no more.
Well, I will throw out there a heads up to folks about OpenLaszlo which is the "run-anywhere, no-lock-in rich Internet platform. Period."
Unfortunately it still has a massive adoption curve ahead of it so maybe there's no reason to list it as a contender. While there are neat demos, a few companies have employed it: Wal-Mart, Pandora even MSN's music service.
*sigh* I wonder if this means Sun is going to pull out of Orbit and come up with some J2ME version of JavaFX?
Like always, I welcome the competition, diversity and options this brings while I cringe at the thought of yet another schism in the open source community.
Virtual memory and pagefiles still exist so that there will be persistent, recoverable storage of your browsing and search history, illegally downloaded music, and furrie porn should anybody come a-knockin after you hit the power switch. [/tinfoil hat]
</worrying> You're close but do you know why I only drink rain memory and grain memory, Mandrake? It's because virtual memory and pagefiles are the greatest Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious computerly processes. <love the bomb>
In China, because a large number of the players do not own the computer they use to play games (e.g. Internet cafes), the CD keys required to create an account can be purchased independently of the software package. In order to play the game, players must also purchase prepaid game cards that can be played for 66 hours and 40 minutes.[43] A monthly fee model is not available to players of this region. The Chinese government and The9, the licensee for World of Warcraft in China, have imposed a modification on Chinese versions of the game which places flesh on bare-boned skeletons and transforms dead character corpses into tidy graves. These changes were imposed by the Chinese government in an attempt to "promote a healthy and harmonious online game environment" in World of Warcraft.
If you don't think Red Flag is meant to be a Windows replacement, take a look at Wikipedia's screen shot of Version 6 (presumably out of the box).
...
Isn't this the part where Gates shits his gourd and asks to meet with Hu Jintao? Then baits the large part of greater China with free software that he writes off as a goodwill donation? I mean, we are talking a serious part of the world's population
Obviously questions about spying and surveillance have arisen ...
Um, it uses RPM as a package manager so as long as the government isn't forcing Cafes to use a certain package repository or use certain packages, where does the danger of surveillance lie? I mean, I wouldn't trust the Chinese government either but I am confused why a mandate of Red Flag Linux upsets people in this case ... and a recommendation from the DoD is probably heralded?
Yeah, they're running an industry's tech core, yeah they're stating exactly what OSS to use but where is the danger?
Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services ...
And right from the get-go it's main purpose is overshadowed by some every Telnic employee's desire to be THE Henry on the .tel TLD. That must be awfully helpful to us in our need for 'internet communication' services.
More garbage for the tubes, I guess.
What the hell is the point in wasting DNS space
Are we really concerned about "DNS space?" I guess I'm a bit of an idiot when it comes to why we need to be concerned about 'space' on DNS names ... perhaps you mean IP address space? And if so, people are basically flushing those down the toilet by giving every device one (including their toilet).
That's the problem; since it's automated, that 1% blocked could be anything. cnn/bbc/etc could be blocked for talking about a child porn news item. That would seem unacceptable to me.
Well, according to the last part of one of the articles
The trial is expected to use a blacklist of 10,000 banned Web pages, using the rumoured 1300-page blacklist held by the ACMA mixed with dummy data.
If that's true, they are simply going to blacklist a bunch of websites. I heavily doubt cnn/bbc/etc will ever negligently be put on that list. I know little to nothing about this scheme but if it's a blacklist, you probably have little worry about with major news sites. A lot more to worry about things labeled as "counter-culture" or "low brow humor."
Opponents said the most accurate filter chosen by the government will incorrectly block up to 10,000 Web pages out of 1 million.
Uh, why didn't they use the metric of 10^4:10^6 or 1:100? Sounds like somebody wanted that statement to be heard as much more impacting than it is. The thing that worries me is that if we look at other technologies designed to "protect the people from themselves," a false positive rate of 1% really isn't that bad--especially on a fully automated system. A high false positive rate is--in my opinion--what's holding back facial recognition but I fear that 1% blockage of websites is completely acceptable to most folks. Maybe a better analogy is that of the FCC in America and the words you can't say on TV ... even though there is no research showing how these words negatively affect people, this small percent of our language and expression is blocked. This analogy (like all) is flawed, however, as you might never know what was on that website that caused the super happy and helpful animated kangaroo to appear on your computer and gently chide you that this site is not for Aussies.
Hopefully (and I'm betting on this) it will turn out to be a lot like prohibition. The outlawing of these sites and data cause their value to skyrocket, the government is made to look a mockery, your average citizen (I've heard talk of simple SSL encryption stopping this) knows how to reach them, in so doing they inadvertently supply criminals with capital and the very stupid law is repealed. Twenty years later, everyone is joking about "the Grand Experiment" and how pathetically futile it was to begin with.
Lastly, how is this any different than what China is doing? I'm surprised nobody has made this connection and accused the government of being no better than anti-free-speech China.
After reading a bit of the plan on Australia's Cyber-Safety, it's evident this quickly degrades into a "think of the children" mentality:
While the internet has created substantial benefits for children, it has also exposed them to a number of dangers, including exposure to illegal and prohibited content. Parents rightly expect the Australian Government to play its part in helping protect children online.
So why isn't there an "opt-out" plan for those Aussie adults who like our interwebs a little dirty (and are over 18 years of age)?
The issue I have here is that bringing someone back from suspended animation where they were alive to begin with ...
Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure? Think about it, you're taking a perfectly alive human being and ... putting them at risk of death? For the purposes of? I know someone will compare this to the risk of life we took putting someone on the moon but I see little to no merit in this procedure.
If you think they're going to run into federal problems, that's only the start of it. This is probably going to be a always-20-years-away technology although it does make for entertainment.
This reminds me of a This American Life episode I listened to (and you can too by clicking on Full Episode here). Basically it explores a very bad chapter of early cryogenics. Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
Also, isn't Ikaria the worst name to pick? "Hey, our company hopes to aim too high and fail hard." They should have gone with Promethea in my opinion.
While the handwriting is a novelty (and the PDF is actually small for a PDF), I question how long that server is going to last.
Also (and yes this is nitpicking), I must contest this:
Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer
I submit for consideration Alan Turing who may have designed the ACE and worked on the earliest computer (The Manchester Mark I) although never really owned it or any other computer. I think a lot of people identify him as not only a hero of World War II but also the father of all computers.
It is this kind of partisan willful ignorance on the part of many that has enabled the political agenda among some to drive the notion that the US is in a severe recession caused by the ineptness and reckless irresponsibility of the Bush administration, when the US had nothing but growth in the GDP until only a month ago. If you asked most people how long they thought the economy had been shrinking for negative, they'd probably say things like, "A year? Two years?"
Why do you jump to the defense of Bush? Where did anyone attack Bush for this? Is it in the article? Are you responding to ... to what exactly? Yeah, when shit hits the fan, people tend to blame those in charge ... but where is he being blamed?
From the article:
The Bush administration won approval from Congress on Oct. 3 for a $700 billion rescue package for the financial system. Bush said in an interview with ABC's "World News" to be aired Monday that he would support additional intervention if necessary to end the recession.
Note: you are one of the last hard core republicans with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears screaming "I CAN'T HEAR YOU" as my relatives that don't have high paying jobs are having to pawn stuff and as my friend's fathers become unemployed.
Capitalistic systems only work when the participants have faith in the system -- when that faith collapses, for whatever reason, you get a recession. And that's a normal and accepted part of the cycle.
You must think you're a lot smarter than the economists like Alan Greenspan because they've been going on and on this whole time thinking we could forever avoid another shrinking of the economy. And the people who all said we needed that package to reverse/save us from this recession? They must be idiots if it's only "a normal and accepted part of the cycle." Who exactly has accepted this, by the way? I would like to know so I can better manage my 401k in the future (half my retirement funds are now gone).
Not quite all, I imagine.
I don't even play these games. The humor I see in it is that Spore was cracked on September 3rd--four days before its launch date. Um, are they really under the impression that one of these schemes might stop the hackers?
At some point you have to acknowledge that you're just annoying your entire fan base to play a cat-and-mouse game with some hackers (that you're losing in an embarrassing way).
You see, I can't even begin to help you until you concede that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good tool.
I can hammer a nail in with my fist. But I wouldn't call my fist a good tool for hammering nails. It works, but it's not pleasant.
Come on, man, that's a bit extreme. It's not like any of us are suggesting we should use Microsoft Visual Basic here ...