I think the sad facts are, idiots and psychos will always find something bad to emulate. If there were no games, they would been inspired to shoot at people by a movie. If there were no movies, they would have been inspired by the Washington sniper, or the US government.
If someone doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality then obviously playing computer games and watching TV could cause them to do something bad. But the problem is with them, not with the game or film.
Quite frankly, they desserve it. I've had no end of problems with one of my mailservers after it was incorrectly blacklisted by Osirusoft, even though:
It was not an open relay, and as far I could tell from my logs, prior to banning it they never actually checked to see if it was an open relay.
Their own online checker, which I activated several times, repeatedly showed that the server in question was not an open relay.
The online checker repeatedly told me that my server would be scheduled for more tests, and would then be removed from the blacklist.
But this never happened. No further checks were made. My server was never removed from the blacklist. And what's more, Osirusoft refused to reply to any of my e-mails. They refused to even explain why they were blacklisting, despite the fact on several occasions I politely requested either removal from the blacklist, or an explanation as to why I was on it. Ultimately I had to get a different IP address for the machine in question, which was exteremely inconvenient.
I'm strongly opposed to spam. However, any company that offers services to block spam have to accept that they will sometimes accidentally cause problems for legitemate users, and they have to have mechanisms in place for such users to sort the situation out. Ignoring people who have legitemate complaints against you is not the way to do it.
Even Greenpeace admits that no complete scientific study of the toxicity of nanomaterials
Er... of course they do. In fact, even though the author is clearly trying to twist this into some sort of admission of guilt by Greenpeace, this is in fact, exactly the point they want to make.
No complete scientific study has been done, and one is needed badly. In many other areas we have found that as particles become increasinly small, they also become increasingly toxic. This may or may not be the case for nanomaterials, and we really need to find out.
It's the job of the industry to prove nanotech safe, not to say it's safe and hope no-one produces contrary evidence.
This was the mistake made by the biotech industry over GM in Europe, and the nanotech industry needs to try hard to avoid falling down the same pit. If they start to look even a bit like the pro-GM lobby by ignoring peoples concerns, they'll be tarred with exactly the same brush.
Good explanation. Just one thing, I'm not an expert on these things, but it seems pretty unlikely that all the ice at one pole could melt without a significant amount of ice at the other pole melting as well. (Admittedly possibly in different seasons.)
And as you say, that WOULD be bad, because antarctic ice is on top of land, so will cause higher sea levels if it melts.
Incidentally, it will only take a pretty small rise in sea levels for much of the city I live in to disappear (along with much of Englands SW peninsula.)
Something along the lines of
mount failed: bad superblock or too many mounted file systems
Well, which one is it? Why give me a choice, it must be one or the other.
Looks more like a plotter than a printer. From the sound of the article it holds one can and traces a path with it, rather than sweeping across the "page" and marking dots at the appropriate point.
Interesting. So do other card games which involve tapping cards (um.. I've been out of the trading card scene now for ages, but say, the Lord of the Rings game) pay royalties to WotC?!
Would it be legal to build an open source magic "clone" that closely mirrors the MTG rules, but without using any of Wizards copyright material (rulebook, cardnames etc.).
Communities could run leagues and tornaments, issuing credits to each player to buy cards. The system would use cryptographic signatures to verify that player don't cheat, much like the WotC version does (I imagine, I've not played a game of magic in years).
Remeber, "environmentalists" are not one group
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
A bit off topic, but I really need to get this off my chest. Go ahead and mod me down, but this does relate to a lot of comments people have left on this thread.
There seems to be a really bad tendency amongst some people here to paint "environmentalists" as one single group of people. This lets people make out that "greenies" are completely hypocritical. "They want renewable energy, and then they complain whenever people try to build wind farms".
That's nonsense. It's like saying "Geeks go on about how great open source is, but half on them use Windows! See what hypocrits they are."
Unsurprisingly, the world just ain't that simple. Guess what? More than likely the people complaining about wind-farms being built in their back garden are probably not the same people calling for them to be built elsewhere. Just like the people who think open source is the best thing ever are not the same people who use Windows.
Just because there is some hypocracy within a group that YOU have chosen to assign a label to, doesn't mean everyone in that group is a hypocrit, It doesn't even mean than one single person within that group is making inconsistent demands. Probably a few idiots do, but there are idiots in any lobby group, be it environentalism, the open source movement, the pro-life lobby, etc. etc.
Argue in favour of wind-farms. Argue against them. Don't try to paint all environmentalists as idiots just because one says something is good and another says it's bad.
Who gives a flying crap if your/etc directory remains untouched when ~ (where the irreplacable files are) has been wiped out?
I don't care about/etc or/home. Both are small enough that I can send them out to the second hand DAT drive I bought for £20 every night.
If one of the users on my system (various non-geeks that use my computer for various reasons) are stupid enough to run an untrusted executable, I don't care if their home directory gets trashed. If they really care, I'll dig out the backup.
But if they had root access and the virus trashed/usr I would have to reinstall my OS, which is a lot of hassle. Or worse, it could install spyware or a backdoor on my computer.
So the seperation of users is clearly extremely valuble to me. The only person likely to completely screw up my computer is me, which is good because I trust myself not to. But I don't trust other people not to, but I still want them to have access to my machine.
This is a bad thing for one very clear reason: People who can't be bothered to walk 15 minutes to their polling station should not be encouraged to vote. They clearly have far too little interest in politics to make an informed decision. If they have genuine reasons for not being able to get to the polling station, they can already register for a postal vote.
This is a typical politicians solution to a problem. Instead of reducing the effort required to vote, they should be increasing peoples desire to vote. If people felt that voting could make a difference to their lives, they would make damn well sure they got to the voting booth. As it is, we have a political system which is rigged to maintain the status quo. The two main political parties in the UK are virtually indistinguishable, and the first past the post constituency based system ensures that no-one else ever has a chance at power.
OK, I'm talking mainly about national elections here, the article linked is talking about local elections.. but it all filters through. Apathy with national politics breeds apathy with local politics.
I still feel obligated to cast my votes for the most freedom-oriented Republicans (or Democrats), until the Libertarian Party has a chance of winning
And that is exactly why they have no chance of winning. Not voting for a party because they have no chance of winning is a self fulfilling prophecy. How will they ever have a chance of winning when no-one votes for them because they have no chance of winning?
People need to realise that to effect change you need to vote with your conscience. That may mean you will "lose" some elections, but it also means that the people you really want in power have a chance.
Telephone numbers are hard to remember, and they change. Why do we still have them? Surely it would be trivial to implement a DNS type system that maps human readable usernames to telephone numbers.
This has the advantage the it's also backward compatible - people without access just use phone numbers.
I expect people will suggest the BBC. They are unbiased compared to a lot of media (especially more US centric outlets) but they are not by any means unbiased. I can't find links any more, but for example, university studies have shown that their reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict is often very biased in favour if Israel. Of course, this doesn't mean coverage of the war is/isn't biased, it's just something to bear in mind.
I'm not suggesting BBC coverage is terrible - it is very good in fact, just that any suggestions it is unbiased are exagerated.
Also, the BBC, especially on TV, has a nasty habit of wildly speculating about things. More than once I have seen them suggest that something is certainly going to happen, only for it to later not happen. Quire often the truth gets less coverage than the original incorrect speculation.
I think this is one of the nastier symptoms of "I WANT NEWS NOW!" syndrome. The media is so eager to report news the instant it happens (and public demand drives this) that by the time something has actually happened people are already moving on to speculating what will happen next.
Send pagers to foreign countries? Are you insane? Aren't foreign countries full of terrorists who are just desperate to you foreign pagers to orchestrate the killing of freedom lovin' people?
What they really need to do is make it a crime to plan a felony face-to-face in a secluded location without government supervision
Don't know about the US, but this is already a crime in the UK. Agreeing with another on a course of action which will result in the law being broken is called "Conspiracy", and the maximum punishment is equal to the maxiumum punishment of the crime the person agreed to commit.
Another fine example of the proliferation of pointless laws.
If something is a crime, why is it any more damaging to use cryptography in the process? If I rob a bank, I am not doing extra extra harm to the bank or the public if I use encryption to plan the robbery. There is no moral, financial or environmental harm done by using encryption - it is te actual crime which does this damage. There are already laws against and punishments set out for the crime
Why stop with encryption? Why not make it a crime to use a telephone, letter, car, mobile phone etc to commit a crime?
Maybe. But I think it's good to give people a second chance.
Who knows. Maybe the letter got lost in the post. Maybe they are working hard behind the scenes to resolve the issue. You don't really know what the situation is, their might be some legitemate reason for delay
Write again to the ethics committee
on
On Taking the Data?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Explain that you are deeply unhappy with the situation. Make it clear that you are not going to let this drop. Say that you have written to them before and received no response. Say that your next step will be to go the public/media.
I bet you will have a response within a week. If not, wait a reasonable time (1 month) and then carry out your threat.
So? A password on a post-it on a monitor is still far more secure than no password. Luckily remote worms and script kiddies have no way of reading that post it.
I'm not saying that having your password on your computer is a good idea, but it's a much better idea than having no password.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the sad facts are, idiots and psychos will always find something bad to emulate. If there were no games, they would been inspired to shoot at people by a movie. If there were no movies, they would have been inspired by the Washington sniper, or the US government.
If someone doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality then obviously playing computer games and watching TV could cause them to do something bad. But the problem is with them, not with the game or film.
The online checker repeatedly told me that my server would be scheduled for more tests, and would then be removed from the blacklist.
But this never happened. No further checks were made. My server was never removed from the blacklist. And what's more, Osirusoft refused to reply to any of my e-mails. They refused to even explain why they were blacklisting, despite the fact on several occasions I politely requested either removal from the blacklist, or an explanation as to why I was on it. Ultimately I had to get a different IP address for the machine in question, which was exteremely inconvenient.
I'm strongly opposed to spam. However, any company that offers services to block spam have to accept that they will sometimes accidentally cause problems for legitemate users, and they have to have mechanisms in place for such users to sort the situation out. Ignoring people who have legitemate complaints against you is not the way to do it.
Er... of course they do. In fact, even though the author is clearly trying to twist this into some sort of admission of guilt by Greenpeace, this is in fact, exactly the point they want to make.
No complete scientific study has been done, and one is needed badly. In many other areas we have found that as particles become increasinly small, they also become increasingly toxic. This may or may not be the case for nanomaterials, and we really need to find out.
It's the job of the industry to prove nanotech safe, not to say it's safe and hope no-one produces contrary evidence.
This was the mistake made by the biotech industry over GM in Europe, and the nanotech industry needs to try hard to avoid falling down the same pit. If they start to look even a bit like the pro-GM lobby by ignoring peoples concerns, they'll be tarred with exactly the same brush.
I imagine it will go something along the lines of...
user@mac:~$ tcsh
mac:~>
Good explanation. Just one thing, I'm not an expert on these things, but it seems pretty unlikely that all the ice at one pole could melt without a significant amount of ice at the other pole melting as well. (Admittedly possibly in different seasons.)
And as you say, that WOULD be bad, because antarctic ice is on top of land, so will cause higher sea levels if it melts.
Incidentally, it will only take a pretty small rise in sea levels for much of the city I live in to disappear (along with much of Englands SW peninsula.)
Something along the lines of mount failed: bad superblock or too many mounted file systems Well, which one is it? Why give me a choice, it must be one or the other.
Spamfighter gets holds of spammers inbox. 99% of it is junk. 1 e-mail is of minor passing interest.
Looks more like a plotter than a printer. From the sound of the article it holds one can and traces a path with it, rather than sweeping across the "page" and marking dots at the appropriate point.
Interesting. So do other card games which involve tapping cards (um.. I've been out of the trading card scene now for ages, but say, the Lord of the Rings game) pay royalties to WotC?!
Would it be legal to build an open source magic "clone" that closely mirrors the MTG rules, but without using any of Wizards copyright material (rulebook, cardnames etc.). Communities could run leagues and tornaments, issuing credits to each player to buy cards. The system would use cryptographic signatures to verify that player don't cheat, much like the WotC version does (I imagine, I've not played a game of magic in years).
A bit off topic, but I really need to get this off my chest. Go ahead and mod me down, but this does relate to a lot of comments people have left on this thread.
There seems to be a really bad tendency amongst some people here to paint "environmentalists" as one single group of people. This lets people make out that "greenies" are completely hypocritical. "They want renewable energy, and then they complain whenever people try to build wind farms".
That's nonsense. It's like saying "Geeks go on about how great open source is, but half on them use Windows! See what hypocrits they are."
Unsurprisingly, the world just ain't that simple. Guess what? More than likely the people complaining about wind-farms being built in their back garden are probably not the same people calling for them to be built elsewhere. Just like the people who think open source is the best thing ever are not the same people who use Windows.
Just because there is some hypocracy within a group that YOU have chosen to assign a label to, doesn't mean everyone in that group is a hypocrit, It doesn't even mean than one single person within that group is making inconsistent demands. Probably a few idiots do, but there are idiots in any lobby group, be it environentalism, the open source movement, the pro-life lobby, etc. etc.
Argue in favour of wind-farms. Argue against them. Don't try to paint all environmentalists as idiots just because one says something is good and another says it's bad.
Who gives a flying crap if your /etc directory remains untouched when ~ (where the irreplacable files are) has been wiped out?
/etc or /home. Both are small enough that I can send them out to the second hand DAT drive I bought for £20 every night.
/usr I would have to reinstall my OS, which is a lot of hassle. Or worse, it could install spyware or a backdoor on my computer.
I don't care about
If one of the users on my system (various non-geeks that use my computer for various reasons) are stupid enough to run an untrusted executable, I don't care if their home directory gets trashed. If they really care, I'll dig out the backup.
But if they had root access and the virus trashed
So the seperation of users is clearly extremely valuble to me. The only person likely to completely screw up my computer is me, which is good because I trust myself not to. But I don't trust other people not to, but I still want them to have access to my machine.
This is a bad thing for one very clear reason: People who can't be bothered to walk 15 minutes to their polling station should not be encouraged to vote. They clearly have far too little interest in politics to make an informed decision. If they have genuine reasons for not being able to get to the polling station, they can already register for a postal vote. This is a typical politicians solution to a problem. Instead of reducing the effort required to vote, they should be increasing peoples desire to vote. If people felt that voting could make a difference to their lives, they would make damn well sure they got to the voting booth. As it is, we have a political system which is rigged to maintain the status quo. The two main political parties in the UK are virtually indistinguishable, and the first past the post constituency based system ensures that no-one else ever has a chance at power. OK, I'm talking mainly about national elections here, the article linked is talking about local elections.. but it all filters through. Apathy with national politics breeds apathy with local politics.
I still feel obligated to cast my votes for the most freedom-oriented Republicans (or Democrats), until the Libertarian Party has a chance of winning And that is exactly why they have no chance of winning. Not voting for a party because they have no chance of winning is a self fulfilling prophecy. How will they ever have a chance of winning when no-one votes for them because they have no chance of winning? People need to realise that to effect change you need to vote with your conscience. That may mean you will "lose" some elections, but it also means that the people you really want in power have a chance.
This has the advantage the it's also backward compatible - people without access just use phone numbers.
I'm not suggesting BBC coverage is terrible - it is very good in fact, just that any suggestions it is unbiased are exagerated.
Also, the BBC, especially on TV, has a nasty habit of wildly speculating about things. More than once I have seen them suggest that something is certainly going to happen, only for it to later not happen. Quire often the truth gets less coverage than the original incorrect speculation.
I think this is one of the nastier symptoms of "I WANT NEWS NOW!" syndrome. The media is so eager to report news the instant it happens (and public demand drives this) that by the time something has actually happened people are already moving on to speculating what will happen next.
Send pagers to foreign countries? Are you insane? Aren't foreign countries full of terrorists who are just desperate to you foreign pagers to orchestrate the killing of freedom lovin' people?
Don't know about the US, but this is already a crime in the UK. Agreeing with another on a course of action which will result in the law being broken is called "Conspiracy", and the maximum punishment is equal to the maxiumum punishment of the crime the person agreed to commit.
Another fine example of the proliferation of pointless laws. If something is a crime, why is it any more damaging to use cryptography in the process? If I rob a bank, I am not doing extra extra harm to the bank or the public if I use encryption to plan the robbery. There is no moral, financial or environmental harm done by using encryption - it is te actual crime which does this damage. There are already laws against and punishments set out for the crime Why stop with encryption? Why not make it a crime to use a telephone, letter, car, mobile phone etc to commit a crime?
Who knows. Maybe the letter got lost in the post. Maybe they are working hard behind the scenes to resolve the issue. You don't really know what the situation is, their might be some legitemate reason for delay
That doesn't mean they don't. :)
I bet you will have a response within a week. If not, wait a reasonable time (1 month) and then carry out your threat.
I'm not saying that having your password on your computer is a good idea, but it's a much better idea than having no password.
... a beowulf cluster of those!! -1, cliched
By signing someone's key you are not declaring that you trust that person, only that you trust that they are who they say they are.