I just have to write this: Can't you just take out and shot the people behind this bill? It seems be the most humane thing to do.
Compare this to Russia. There Putin is almost totally controlling the TV, but you can easily go online and discuss what-ever you want and you don't have the big powerful regime putting money into controlling what you think and read on the Internet. In USA the regime controls the TV in a more subtle way (huge fines on showing a breast, for example), but using all the public computers in a try to control the population?!?
Whenever I go to the library to find USEFUL information, it's pretty hard to find because the place is filled with crappy made up stories like Shakespeare and I don't know what. Not to mention all the resources spend on handling these fantasy tales!
It would be much better if those (mostly old) people could start to use sites where they can communicate with the world of today, instead of living in their made up stories.
I'm often getting irritated about that I find stuff with Google and then aren't able to read it. Who wants to find a short text describing what you're searching for, only to find out that I have to pay or go through some procedure to actually read the stuff?
I hope Google removes these sites totally. Then, as written by others too, we need a law that says that the ones putting stuff on the web has to write correct HTML and robot.txt files if they don't want their content cached. Google can't manually go through every site on the web and it would be even more impossible for Google's smaller competitors.
> It isn't so much Lycos' policy that's the problem (though that requires some scrutiny), but the response
What?!? Someone gets all their emails deleted by a company that has a really crappy policy, and then the BIGGEST problem is how the wording is? Is this the same culture that says that saying "fuck" is worse than killing people?
I personally wouldn't care a shit if the response was "Sorry Sir, but we have tried our very best, but due to how our system works, we just can't help you restore your emails." or "Hahaha! You lost your emails because you didn't follow our guidelines! Screw you!". What I care about is that the emails are lost.
Seems like some people just aren't able to put their finger on what is really important.
>I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines.
There has been a previous Slashdot article about this some year ago. It seems that otherwise smart people when they feel like they are part of a group tend to think as the group in all sorts of ways.
It's like as if the brain just stops working and says "My group thinks this, so it's probably so.", and then spend all it's power on motivating why it is so.
Therefore a group can sometimes get stuck with an obviously stupid idea that only a mad man would stay with if it was only one individual.
Another conclusion is that if a group totally agree on something, then it's probably a really stupid idea.
"Women aren't men, of course! That goes without saying. And slaves with human right, how stupid is that?!? They belong to their owner. Don't tell me how to treat my slaves! If you would be a slave owner, then you would know that this is the only way!"
This is the same sick slave-owning mentality that lead to the American civil war and generally turned slaves and slave-owners into beasts.
If you can't treat your kids as equals with lesser experience, I hope that they soon will grow stronger than you and lock you up in a room where do don't bother anyone. And you have trained to treat weaker people like that, so it's likely they do as soon as they get the chance.
BTW: I'm quite happy to commit felony to protect my costumers from their parents. Bring it on, you pathetic slave-owners. See if your arm can cross the Atlantic!
The reason I wouldn't feel bad about downloading a movie is not that I think it's OK to steal from rich people, but that I'm not stealing anything. It doesn't matter to them if I ignore the movie or if I download it.
Then it's their problem to figure out a way to make money out of people download the movie. Honestly: It shouldn't be that hard.
I do a lot of reports every day, mostly on Elfpack, from people who are reporting bullies.
There are a lot of people who do bad stuff just because they can. They need to be stopped. If someone is going around and are just trying to insult people, they will very soon get a very hard time to enter Elfpack anymore.
But it's also very common that people keep arguing with each other in the style "Stop messaging me!" "No, YOU stop messaging me!" "If you don't stop, I'll report you!" "I've already reported you, you idiot!". I respond to those reports with pointing out the fact that they both seem to like to fight as they continue to talk to each other instead of just stop messaging.
Another part of the bully-culture is naive persons who start to speak to someone with "You (some bad word) stop harassing my friend, or bla bla!!!". And in 66% of the cases the original case was built on some sort of misunderstanding and is about to be solved by the friend and "his foe". Their arguments for their right to start to harass someone is of course "But I'm just standing up for my friend!". So then they have to either explain exactly how their bullshit will help the situation in a good way, or face a ban next time they do it. (Guess what happens...)
A much harder problem is people who crack each others' account. No matter how secure you make a website, you aren't safe from people who "borrow" each others' logins when at school. There has been sad events where I had to ban people because they couldn't keep idiots out of their account.
But my general advice is to use a site where people are nice. Why go to MySpace just to read chain messages and insults?
If you want to collaborate with musicians from different genres from the entire globe, you can do that any month at MusMakers. But I'll make sure we get onto the spanking-musicians-in-February-train too;)
It seems that you fail to see all the hoards of starving musicians who didn't get featured on the mixtape and therefore don't get their fraction of the money of CD-sales.
But if this "piracy" can be stopped, then no one can make mixtapes anymore, except the record companies. And that is a service, which the musicians have to pay a lot for, in one form or another.
So if you thought RIAA was evil, then rethink. It's really evil. It's only goal is to steal as much money as possible, without creating anything as almost any other organization with similar goals do.
Have a guess about how much I and my sites in Sweden care about your stupid laws.
But please do your best to destroy the sites in USA. It can be good for my business. But of course I'm afraid that the bullshit comes here too, so that I have to move to yet another country.
Of course I know how to translate it. But it's very inconvenient and the impression is that someone who is using these obsolete units are just talking bullshit for old baseball fans, so it can't really be anything important or scientific about it. It's as bad as bad spelling.
But if you want to look everything up, then I can speak Swedish: Bork bork bork!
If you go into a British pub you'll get a pint of beer, and if you go into a pub somewhere east of Netherlands (Germany, Poland, The Baltic states, Russia) you'll get a half a litre.
If you go into a Swedish pub... You'll get the Guinness and Newcastle in pints, Strong Belgium beers in 33% bottles (with special glasses), German beer in half litre bottles and Swedish/Danish/Standard beers on draught are sold as "stor stark" (big strong) and are between 37 and 47 cl (usually 40cl) unless it's a big "stor stark" because then it's half a litre. Then there is of course small (usually 33cl) and huge (1 litre) glasses.
So how drunk are you after drinking 5 beers? Well, at least you're way drunker when you finally have figured out how drunk you where...
What I'm saying with this example is that in pubs, it can be complicated, and it's mostly OK because you're drunk and can stand it if the beer is good. But we non-Americans will discard any scientific work by someone using imperial units. It's way worse than bad spelling or the fact that it's written in a language which probably isn't our native tongue.
You walk into a shop and buy the new movie Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV. You come home and open the package that contains the official Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV t-shirt, the official Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV puking-bag, a poster, a mini-magazine and something horrible to put on your car. There might be some sort of disk or something in the box, but you give that to the kids.
But inside the box there is a code that you either type directly into Google or in your device connected to your TV. That will download and install the movie on your harddisk. But if you want to see the movie on the train, you simply download it to the USB-stick and watch it on your 14" pocket-size screen. Who would carry around a huge disk?
For Splatter, Blood and Gore XV, they are planing to sell the Official Splatter, Blood and Gore XV drink in bars and you will get your favorite gore scene played on the glass while drinking it. Like 99% of the music bands today, selling disks is just not something the movie-company gets any big money from.
On Vista you simply can't do a lot of the stuff you can on a standard Linux distribution today without installing a lot of extra programs. Which is a pain i a body-part or in your wallet.
And what about the price? It doesn't mean a lot to a Slashtoter who just bought a new graphics card for $4000, but most people actually care about the cost and rather have some nice dinners instead of paying for computers.
Linux might still be harder for a Window-user to use, but it's way easier for me to use than any Windows. I think that Linux will take Window's place as "The stuff that everyone has, always is complaining about, but it turns out that you can't use anything else because there is some program that is only for this system." in 10 years. And Mac... I don't get it and most people will never like it. >;)
Nice that you actually can email nice letters like ÅÄÖ and (OK, Slashdot can't handle Russian characters? What is this? 1994?), but if you answer with stuff that isn't English letters, they become messed up.
So this is a good example of: USE UTF-8 DAMN IT! How hard can it be?
By the way: "10minutemail.com" is of course banned to use as an email-address on my sites now.
I've also had that idea, but never implemented it.
Right now my biggest problem is that SPAM-bots are emailing invented addresses like krhfej@[mydomain].com And if I have to read all new addresses, it's of course bad.
If the format 205.245.222.222.061113@[mydomain].com becomes common, there will be spams to SPAM-bot-created addresses like that too.
(Statistics taken from www.elfpack.com which is basically people that want cool stuff on web, so I think that microsoft.com has a lower rate of Windows-users...)
But here's the thing: Microsoft can't win. Sure, it can theoretically maintain its dominance, but Linux will never run out of money, will never fail totally because some boss thinks that it should be developed differently and Microsoft can never offer a product to a lower price.
So in the end, Microsoft will be the high-price alternative for a few and there will be a Linux that just works that all "normal" users use. Millions of small developers sooner or later are better than one big one, because the big one will make a fatal mistake some day, but the small ones are making mistakes all the time, but that's only fatal to them, not to Linux.
Gecko is the last engine that doesn't have a working "display: block-inline". Quite annoying. I have even ignored a few of IE6.0's bugs as 7.0 is shipping now, but it's hard to ignore the lastest Firefox.
As I am running a couple of Internet-communities, I think I have more understand of these matters than most others, MySpace included.
On my sites there is a simple "report this member" button. If someone is trying to pick up kids, they will be reported. It's that simple and it works just fine.
As for name-searching: Some people really really didn't like an older guy that dated a 17-year old girl. So what to do? Of course register a user in his name and pretend to search for kids to molester.
Once I've worked with the police. It was a 13-year old girl that was supposed to be kidnapped by her boyfriend. And he got convicted to 2 years because USA has a law-system stuffed with morons, bribed people and psychopats that care nothing about justice. The real story was that he resqued her from a molestering father and she had a nice time on the run before they got caught partly from me and partly from MSN-logs. She was at least saved from her father in the end.
And then we have the reports that say "He talked to me and I'm 15 and he's like 30!!!" (And the talk was something like "I really like the style you draw in").
But I've had one real offender. He threatened a lot of girls and got kicked out (He tried to get back in some times, but I hope he's in jail now) and then he threatened to report me to the police because it was possible to do illegal stuff with kids on my sites. Good luck to get that through Interpol and to Sweden!
After reading about Spamhaus I realize that it however is a real problem for me, so I'm not planing to go to USA. It's much safer to run a Internet community from another country because the accusations have to go through two legal systems. I'm quite small in Sweden and 50% or more of the users are in USA.
MySpace is in the USA though, so please sue them out of business and I'll have a competitor less!;)
Do that and I'll make sure your Internet-access is cut and that you get blacklisted as SPAM-terrorist, because you're so stupid that you think that the email-addresses in the SPAM have to do with the SPAM.
It's quite common to have fake email-addresses and fake URLs in the SPAM. Generally because it makes it harder to suspect the right person or because the SPAM is actually made to attack someone.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to write this: Can't you just take out and shot the people behind this bill? It seems be the most humane thing to do.
Compare this to Russia. There Putin is almost totally controlling the TV, but you can easily go online and discuss what-ever you want and you don't have the big powerful regime putting money into controlling what you think and read on the Internet. In USA the regime controls the TV in a more subtle way (huge fines on showing a breast, for example), but using all the public computers in a try to control the population?!?
Whenever I go to the library to find USEFUL information, it's pretty hard to find because the place is filled with crappy made up stories like Shakespeare and I don't know what. Not to mention all the resources spend on handling these fantasy tales!
It would be much better if those (mostly old) people could start to use sites where they can communicate with the world of today, instead of living in their made up stories.
I'm often getting irritated about that I find stuff with Google and then aren't able to read it. Who wants to find a short text describing what you're searching for, only to find out that I have to pay or go through some procedure to actually read the stuff?
I hope Google removes these sites totally. Then, as written by others too, we need a law that says that the ones putting stuff on the web has to write correct HTML and robot.txt files if they don't want their content cached. Google can't manually go through every site on the web and it would be even more impossible for Google's smaller competitors.
> It isn't so much Lycos' policy that's the problem (though that requires some scrutiny), but the response
What?!? Someone gets all their emails deleted by a company that has a really crappy policy, and then the BIGGEST problem is how the wording is? Is this the same culture that says that saying "fuck" is worse than killing people?
I personally wouldn't care a shit if the response was "Sorry Sir, but we have tried our very best, but due to how our system works, we just can't help you restore your emails." or "Hahaha! You lost your emails because you didn't follow our guidelines! Screw you!". What I care about is that the emails are lost.
Seems like some people just aren't able to put their finger on what is really important.
>I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines.
There has been a previous Slashdot article about this some year ago. It seems that otherwise smart people when they feel like they are part of a group tend to think as the group in all sorts of ways.
It's like as if the brain just stops working and says "My group thinks this, so it's probably so.", and then spend all it's power on motivating why it is so.
Therefore a group can sometimes get stuck with an obviously stupid idea that only a mad man would stay with if it was only one individual.
Another conclusion is that if a group totally agree on something, then it's probably a really stupid idea.
I blame it all on the spell-checker that has made me way too lazy to check my spelling. It was correctly spelled anyway, just wrong word ;)
"All men are created equal! "
"Women aren't men, of course! That goes without saying. And slaves with human right, how stupid is that?!? They belong to their owner. Don't tell me how to treat my slaves! If you would be a slave owner, then you would know that this is the only way!"
This is the same sick slave-owning mentality that lead to the American civil war and generally turned slaves and slave-owners into beasts.
If you can't treat your kids as equals with lesser experience, I hope that they soon will grow stronger than you and lock you up in a room where do don't bother anyone. And you have trained to treat weaker people like that, so it's likely they do as soon as they get the chance.
BTW: I'm quite happy to commit felony to protect my costumers from their parents. Bring it on, you pathetic slave-owners. See if your arm can cross the Atlantic!
Then it's their problem to figure out a way to make money out of people download the movie. Honestly: It shouldn't be that hard.
There are a lot of people who do bad stuff just because they can. They need to be stopped. If someone is going around and are just trying to insult people, they will very soon get a very hard time to enter Elfpack anymore.
But it's also very common that people keep arguing with each other in the style "Stop messaging me!" "No, YOU stop messaging me!" "If you don't stop, I'll report you!" "I've already reported you, you idiot!". I respond to those reports with pointing out the fact that they both seem to like to fight as they continue to talk to each other instead of just stop messaging.
Another part of the bully-culture is naive persons who start to speak to someone with "You (some bad word) stop harassing my friend, or bla bla!!!". And in 66% of the cases the original case was built on some sort of misunderstanding and is about to be solved by the friend and "his foe". Their arguments for their right to start to harass someone is of course "But I'm just standing up for my friend!". So then they have to either explain exactly how their bullshit will help the situation in a good way, or face a ban next time they do it. (Guess what happens...)
A much harder problem is people who crack each others' account. No matter how secure you make a website, you aren't safe from people who "borrow" each others' logins when at school. There has been sad events where I had to ban people because they couldn't keep idiots out of their account.
But my general advice is to use a site where people are nice. Why go to MySpace just to read chain messages and insults?
It's a well known fact that perfect stuff never get noticed. Apple has smart marketing people that can fool Slashdot to write about their store.
In this case I guess the crappiness comes from legal crap, but Apple still profits from it.
If you want to collaborate with musicians from different genres from the entire globe, you can do that any month at MusMakers. But I'll make sure we get onto the spanking-musicians-in-February-train too ;)
It seems that you fail to see all the hoards of starving musicians who didn't get featured on the mixtape and therefore don't get their fraction of the money of CD-sales.
But if this "piracy" can be stopped, then no one can make mixtapes anymore, except the record companies. And that is a service, which the musicians have to pay a lot for, in one form or another.
So if you thought RIAA was evil, then rethink. It's really evil. It's only goal is to steal as much money as possible, without creating anything as almost any other organization with similar goals do.
Have a guess about how much I and my sites in Sweden care about your stupid laws.
But please do your best to destroy the sites in USA. It can be good for my business. But of course I'm afraid that the bullshit comes here too, so that I have to move to yet another country.
Of course I know how to translate it. But it's very inconvenient and the impression is that someone who is using these obsolete units are just talking bullshit for old baseball fans, so it can't really be anything important or scientific about it. It's as bad as bad spelling.
But if you want to look everything up, then I can speak Swedish: Bork bork bork!
And what is an lbs? I thought Slashdot was supposed to be an international site, not a neighbourhood backyard magazine.
If you're going to use that crap, then at least give us a translation!
If you go into a British pub you'll get a pint of beer, and if you go into a pub somewhere east of Netherlands (Germany, Poland, The Baltic states, Russia) you'll get a half a litre.
If you go into a Swedish pub... You'll get the Guinness and Newcastle in pints, Strong Belgium beers in 33% bottles (with special glasses), German beer in half litre bottles and Swedish/Danish/Standard beers on draught are sold as "stor stark" (big strong) and are between 37 and 47 cl (usually 40cl) unless it's a big "stor stark" because then it's half a litre. Then there is of course small (usually 33cl) and huge (1 litre) glasses.
So how drunk are you after drinking 5 beers? Well, at least you're way drunker when you finally have figured out how drunk you where...
What I'm saying with this example is that in pubs, it can be complicated, and it's mostly OK because you're drunk and can stand it if the beer is good. But we non-Americans will discard any scientific work by someone using imperial units. It's way worse than bad spelling or the fact that it's written in a language which probably isn't our native tongue.
You walk into a shop and buy the new movie Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV. You come home and open the package that contains the official Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV t-shirt, the official Splatter, Blood and Gore XIV puking-bag, a poster, a mini-magazine and something horrible to put on your car. There might be some sort of disk or something in the box, but you give that to the kids.
But inside the box there is a code that you either type directly into Google or in your device connected to your TV. That will download and install the movie on your harddisk. But if you want to see the movie on the train, you simply download it to the USB-stick and watch it on your 14" pocket-size screen. Who would carry around a huge disk?
For Splatter, Blood and Gore XV, they are planing to sell the Official Splatter, Blood and Gore XV drink in bars and you will get your favorite gore scene played on the glass while drinking it. Like 99% of the music bands today, selling disks is just not something the movie-company gets any big money from.
On Vista you simply can't do a lot of the stuff you can on a standard Linux distribution today without installing a lot of extra programs. Which is a pain i a body-part or in your wallet.
And what about the price? It doesn't mean a lot to a Slashtoter who just bought a new graphics card for $4000, but most people actually care about the cost and rather have some nice dinners instead of paying for computers.
Linux might still be harder for a Window-user to use, but it's way easier for me to use than any Windows. I think that Linux will take Window's place as "The stuff that everyone has, always is complaining about, but it turns out that you can't use anything else because there is some program that is only for this system." in 10 years. And Mac... I don't get it and most people will never like it. >;)
Nice that you actually can email nice letters like ÅÄÖ and (OK, Slashdot can't handle Russian characters? What is this? 1994?), but if you answer with stuff that isn't English letters, they become messed up.
So this is a good example of: USE UTF-8 DAMN IT! How hard can it be?
By the way: "10minutemail.com" is of course banned to use as an email-address on my sites now.
I've also had that idea, but never implemented it.
Right now my biggest problem is that SPAM-bots are emailing invented addresses like krhfej@[mydomain].com
And if I have to read all new addresses, it's of course bad.
If the format 205.245.222.222.061113@[mydomain].com becomes common, there will be spams to SPAM-bot-created addresses like that too.
The current state of the Desktop-war is this:
Windows: 97.88%
MacOS: 1.49%
Unknown: 0.32%
Linux: 0.32%
(Statistics taken from www.elfpack.com which is basically people that want cool stuff on web, so I think that microsoft.com has a lower rate of Windows-users...)
But here's the thing: Microsoft can't win. Sure, it can theoretically maintain its dominance, but Linux will never run out of money, will never fail totally because some boss thinks that it should be developed differently and Microsoft can never offer a product to a lower price.
So in the end, Microsoft will be the high-price alternative for a few and there will be a Linux that just works that all "normal" users use. Millions of small developers sooner or later are better than one big one, because the big one will make a fatal mistake some day, but the small ones are making mistakes all the time, but that's only fatal to them, not to Linux.
It's called "display:inline-block;", nothing else.
So we have to wait for 3.0 until "display: block-inline" works and we finally get rid of the horrible tricks explained on http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/centered_ima ge_gallery_with_captions.htm ?
Gecko is the last engine that doesn't have a working "display: block-inline". Quite annoying. I have even ignored a few of IE6.0's bugs as 7.0 is shipping now, but it's hard to ignore the lastest Firefox.
As I am running a couple of Internet-communities, I think I have more understand of these matters than most others, MySpace included.
;)
On my sites there is a simple "report this member" button. If someone is trying to pick up kids, they will be reported. It's that simple and it works just fine.
As for name-searching: Some people really really didn't like an older guy that dated a 17-year old girl. So what to do? Of course register a user in his name and pretend to search for kids to molester.
Once I've worked with the police. It was a 13-year old girl that was supposed to be kidnapped by her boyfriend. And he got convicted to 2 years because USA has a law-system stuffed with morons, bribed people and psychopats that care nothing about justice. The real story was that he resqued her from a molestering father and she had a nice time on the run before they got caught partly from me and partly from MSN-logs. She was at least saved from her father in the end.
And then we have the reports that say "He talked to me and I'm 15 and he's like 30!!!" (And the talk was something like "I really like the style you draw in").
But I've had one real offender. He threatened a lot of girls and got kicked out (He tried to get back in some times, but I hope he's in jail now) and then he threatened to report me to the police because it was possible to do illegal stuff with kids on my sites. Good luck to get that through Interpol and to Sweden!
After reading about Spamhaus I realize that it however is a real problem for me, so I'm not planing to go to USA. It's much safer to run a Internet community from another country because the accusations have to go through two legal systems. I'm quite small in Sweden and 50% or more of the users are in USA.
MySpace is in the USA though, so please sue them out of business and I'll have a competitor less!
Do that and I'll make sure your Internet-access is cut and that you get blacklisted as SPAM-terrorist, because you're so stupid that you think that the email-addresses in the SPAM have to do with the SPAM.
It's quite common to have fake email-addresses and fake URLs in the SPAM. Generally because it makes it harder to suspect the right person or because the SPAM is actually made to attack someone.