and so long as it still exists the next day, we can take they're friendly.
If they turn out to be hostile, just beam them the rules of cricket - if that doesn't act as an interplanteary virus, they'll think we're all crazy and won't want to come anywhere close, in case it's catching.
Congratulations - you're about to get a life-lesson.
In the real world, if you want freedom to do as you please you have to pay for it yourself. In this case it might mean you have to fork out for your own 3G internet connection and pay accordingly (oh yes, and comply with the providers rules) or go and live somewhere where you can get a normal net connection from an ISP (oh yes, and comply with their rules).
This is all good experience for when / if you graduate and get a job. Suddenly you'll find that you can't goof around on other people's networks all day - downloading whatever the hell you please and doing whatever you want, they'll expect you to DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO. Consider this and the restrictions your university is imposing to be one, small step down this road. if you don't like it, well you can always go and buy your own ISP and then create whatever rules or freedoms you want.
There is some scientific value in stopping the tech (all of it, not merely the apollo stuff for sentimental reasons) from getting contaminated. That's to help us assess how materials and electronics survive in the harsh, irradiated environment. I realise the electronics is decades obsolete, but the components may yield usable data if they are analysed - not just left to rot away.
After all we explore wrecks on the ocean floors, the landers should be afforded the same status for scientific investigation.
As it is, We've still got Neil's boot, so we can make more footprints anytime.
Honestly, if they need to use it that much why have they not bought their own
Deep down he likes it. Maybe it's the only way to get women to talk to him - I don't know.
The thing is that he wants people to keep using his stuff, if he was too inconvenienced, or the risk was too high to balance the benefits he gets (or at least, thinks he gets) he'd stop doing it. What he wants though, is to prevent them from screwing up his stuff (or planting viruses/backdoors - either inadvertently or maliciously). What he should be more worried about is physical damage - like someone he's lent it to dropping it.
There's no remedy for that, as if these people can't afford a lappy of their own they won't be in a position to pay for the damage they do. The guy should think about that as a bigger problem.
You obviously don't need a laptop for your studies (or every student would have one of their own), so the implication is that you carry it as a status symbol. In that case having other people ask to use it is part of the status you have chosen to pursue. It's the price of your vanity.
BTW, I wouldn't buy any justification based on the idea that you do other things while supposedly studying which mean you "need" to have it. Hopefully the course you have decided to take is sufficiently interesting and rewarding - otherwise maybe you're in the wrong place, studying the wrong subject.
You obviously haven't checked out the wikipedia front page recently. In many languages it says (english version):
The Free Encyclopedia
So privately owned? yes. However you can't make something free and then withdraw that freedom just because people you don't like are altering it. Either it's free or it's not. Of course the main problem is that the wiki-people didn't bother to set up the correct safeguards when they started out. They ran headlong into it all, naively thinking that everyone would play by their rules. Well, they don't. Now the wiki-people are having to use extreme measures to counter a threat they they forget to consider when they were setting things up.
Oh no. I understand perfectly. Wikipedia are trying to censor the censors.
No matter how you wrap it up, there's still active suppression taking place of people / organisations that wikipedia don't like - that's censorship.
The second point is that merely barring some IP addresses is in itself futile - they'll just use other ones. So all the wiki-people do is make themselves look like totalitarians without actually obtaining the outcome they wanted.
The test of a democracy (democracy? on the internet? hah!) is how it reacts under pressure. We now know how wiki acts under pressure: badly.
As advocates of free software and speech, people in the FOSS community are always saying that censorship on the internet doesn't work. That people will find a way around the "problem". Well now the shoe is on the other foot and we're seeing that the proponents of liberty and free speech fail the first time their principles are challenged - complete hypocrites. While I do not support Scientology (not even sure what it is - it seems to be an american thing, so it doesn't have much effect on the other 95% of the world) as a bystander I can see that censorship simply won't work.
It's also saddening to see how quickly otherwise liberal minded people revert to the old, dictatorial, oppressive and ultimately ineffective ways of trying to silence people they don't like.
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to...
They don't count until they've been around for 1 generation or more.
Until then, they either count as fads or don't count at all as they won't have or have had a lasting effect on the world.
As an example, 8-track stereo doesn't count as an "exciting (new) technology" except in the minds of the marketing departments as it had no effect on the world as a whole, and didn't change our society. A.M. radio, however did make changes and is still around 70, 80 years on.
The only thing that will move these toys from a historical footnote to really earth-shattering is when someone gives them a measurable IQ. It wouldn't have to be very high, provided it recognosed speech and had the ability to learn. until then - nah!
SF writing has to be popular. Either to get readers or to get sales.
That means it's got to strike a chord with the readership (or buyer) and either play on their desires or, provoke their fears. If a writer was to extrapolate the future, they'd end up with a rather boring SF piece - because tomorrow tends to be a lot like today and because most of the changes are social, not technological.
There are no radical shifts (call 'em paradigm shifts if you must) that society goes through. The only two current major tech. shifts are both to do with communication - either internet or the ubiquity of mobile phones. Thtey've both been around for about 20 year and will take at least that much more before the full effects are established. Plus, when the efects are known, I'd be willing to bet that they won't be the ones everybody is predicting.
Since the (social) changes aren't predictable, they don't make for great SF as the readers / buyers wouldn't expect or believe those outcomes. As has been said many times, SF has got to make sense, whereas real life doesn't have to. That's what makes writing SF hard.
which save their lives, what chance is there to voluntarily inconvenience themselves, to stop bad things happening to others.
Most of the hazards in this article don't materially affect the hacked individual. Yes, if your machine sends spam out, that's bad, but only for the people who receive it. So their selfish natures come to the fore: on the one hand I can do nothing, on the other I can make my life harder so that a bunch of people I've never met get a small amount of less SPAM / porn / whatever.
Couple with this, the article is full of fuzzy words like: potential, could, may, can, possibly. There's nothing in it that says, authoritatively that anything bad will CERTAINLY happen if you don't secure your machine. Hell, people exceed the speed limit 'cause they don't think they'll get caught. Imagine what they'd do if there's not even a chance of any financial penalty for wrong-doing or laziness.
In the end, appealing to the average Joe's sense of community responibility is a non-starter. There's got to be mandated security that cannot be disabled. It's got to work all the time and it's got to be ubiquitous. Until then, the situation won't get any better.
and if we wish to protect the free speech rights of Americans online, we should not allow Internet domain names to be hostage to foreign standards
So the americans want to keep control of the internet in order to keep rights that are only upheld within their country. Since the americans don't apply these rights elsewhere - (a small thing called sovereignty) their desires to retain control of the internet are merely selfish.
As it is, every country wants to do exactly this: control the internet for their own purposes - just because the americans got there first is no reason why the situation should continue as it is.
I've only seen it through it's window, which needs a good cleaning, as I can't think of any reasdon why I'd ever want to go inside - unless there was a large poster offering money to the 1000th person through the door, and the counter stood at 999.
However, I digress. It did look like it was rows and rows of comics, with posters on the walls and a few spotty-faced children inside. So from that I wouldn't say it was a stereotype - I'd say it was an accurate depiction.
If you don't like the image they have, you're free to start one of your own in whatever style you like. Drop me an email from your yacht if it works out.
You can't bring any food that the security guard like the look of (presuming they're hungry). It'll just get arbitrarily confiscated, without any appeal, receipt, review or reason needed.
But you can also bring a magazine or something else to read, if you need to relieve your boredom. There are other ways of passing your time than goofing around on the internet.
It's not as if you can do any high-quality work at an airport: surrounded by screaming children, incoherent announcements and people overflowing their seats and squeezing into your space,
What possible incentive would they have for giving up a revenue stream?
It's not as if you'll decide to not fly somewhere, or use another airport. They have you by the @@lls and are happy to charge you whatever they can get away with.
As it is, taking money from people whe choose to use the internet at airports is fine by me, as if reduces the other incidental costs I'd otherwise have to stump-up. Thanks for the subsidy!
Surely it's possible for an individual to spend a few hours away from an internet connection?
Even for a "business" user, you should be well enough organised that your employer can afford to be out of touch with you for a short period, without suffering catastrophic business failure (if not, they should fire you immediately as you are obviously a single point of failure and as such a total liability to the organisation).
If you do suffer symptoms of stress or anxiety when disconnected from the 'net this sounds a lot like a personality disorder - even if you do use the old line: "No, really, I just like the internet. I could give up any time".
After all a robot won't be vulnerable to it, so hell: dump every nasty little bug out of every research lab into the biosphere. We could probably eliminate humanity (and every other furry thing with 2 or more legs) with what we have today.
However these humanity vs. machine fantasies are more about people's techno-phobia than about real-life.
Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television
From my memory of series 1, it was almost exclusively "uh-oh, here comes the boogie man" and "here comes the boogie man again". It was one long yawn-fest of relentless pursuit, that got boring after the first few episodes.
Season 2 was largely a mish-mash of disconnected and irrelevant episodes that didn't move the story along. It also gave the distinct impression of being mostly filler, or budget-constrained programming, just waiting for the final episode to wrap it up (or as we found out, kill it off).
What it really needed was for some directoin (maybe from a director?) to say "no, you're not writing that episode, it doesn't contribute to the plot". Although I didn't see much evidence that the writers had a plot. It frequently seemed as if they were making up each weeks offering on the spur of the moment to meet a deadline.
I'm sad that it, err, terminated. But since they were plainly incapable of writing coherent stories, with a vision and some intelligent commentary, it's probably best that it's over.
Slashdot Mirror
If they turn out to be hostile, just beam them the rules of cricket - if that doesn't act as an interplanteary virus, they'll think we're all crazy and won't want to come anywhere close, in case it's catching.
so go live elsewhere and pay a different landlord - and get a different ISP
In the real world, if you want freedom to do as you please you have to pay for it yourself. In this case it might mean you have to fork out for your own 3G internet connection and pay accordingly (oh yes, and comply with the providers rules) or go and live somewhere where you can get a normal net connection from an ISP (oh yes, and comply with their rules).
This is all good experience for when / if you graduate and get a job. Suddenly you'll find that you can't goof around on other people's networks all day - downloading whatever the hell you please and doing whatever you want, they'll expect you to DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO. Consider this and the restrictions your university is imposing to be one, small step down this road. if you don't like it, well you can always go and buy your own ISP and then create whatever rules or freedoms you want.
Whereas computer scientists go into research or teaching - to produce more computer scientists.
Which kinda reinforces my view of TV comedy - recycled, plagiarised and derivative. Now I know why
After all we explore wrecks on the ocean floors, the landers should be afforded the same status for scientific investigation.
As it is, We've still got Neil's boot, so we can make more footprints anytime.
Honestly, if they need to use it that much why have they not bought their own
Deep down he likes it. Maybe it's the only way to get women to talk to him - I don't know.
The thing is that he wants people to keep using his stuff, if he was too inconvenienced, or the risk was too high to balance the benefits he gets (or at least, thinks he gets) he'd stop doing it. What he wants though, is to prevent them from screwing up his stuff (or planting viruses/backdoors - either inadvertently or maliciously). What he should be more worried about is physical damage - like someone he's lent it to dropping it.
There's no remedy for that, as if these people can't afford a lappy of their own they won't be in a position to pay for the damage they do. The guy should think about that as a bigger problem.
He might prefer it the other way round (so to speak) - make no assumptions !
BTW, I wouldn't buy any justification based on the idea that you do other things while supposedly studying which mean you "need" to have it. Hopefully the course you have decided to take is sufficiently interesting and rewarding - otherwise maybe you're in the wrong place, studying the wrong subject.
The Free Encyclopedia
So privately owned? yes. However you can't make something free and then withdraw that freedom just because people you don't like are altering it. Either it's free or it's not. Of course the main problem is that the wiki-people didn't bother to set up the correct safeguards when they started out. They ran headlong into it all, naively thinking that everyone would play by their rules. Well, they don't. Now the wiki-people are having to use extreme measures to counter a threat they they forget to consider when they were setting things up.
I think you misunderstand censorship:
Oh no. I understand perfectly. Wikipedia are trying to censor the censors. No matter how you wrap it up, there's still active suppression taking place of people / organisations that wikipedia don't like - that's censorship. The second point is that merely barring some IP addresses is in itself futile - they'll just use other ones. So all the wiki-people do is make themselves look like totalitarians without actually obtaining the outcome they wanted. The test of a democracy (democracy? on the internet? hah!) is how it reacts under pressure. We now know how wiki acts under pressure: badly.
It's also saddening to see how quickly otherwise liberal minded people revert to the old, dictatorial, oppressive and ultimately ineffective ways of trying to silence people they don't like.
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to ...
They don't count until they've been around for 1 generation or more.
Until then, they either count as fads or don't count at all as they won't have or have had a lasting effect on the world.
As an example, 8-track stereo doesn't count as an "exciting (new) technology" except in the minds of the marketing departments as it had no effect on the world as a whole, and didn't change our society. A.M. radio, however did make changes and is still around 70, 80 years on.
The only thing that will move these toys from a historical footnote to really earth-shattering is when someone gives them a measurable IQ. It wouldn't have to be very high, provided it recognosed speech and had the ability to learn. until then - nah!
6. Technologies that demonstrate just how wide the divide is between those who "can" and disenfranchised many who "can't" use or afford them.
That means it's got to strike a chord with the readership (or buyer) and either play on their desires or, provoke their fears. If a writer was to extrapolate the future, they'd end up with a rather boring SF piece - because tomorrow tends to be a lot like today and because most of the changes are social, not technological.
There are no radical shifts (call 'em paradigm shifts if you must) that society goes through. The only two current major tech. shifts are both to do with communication - either internet or the ubiquity of mobile phones. Thtey've both been around for about 20 year and will take at least that much more before the full effects are established. Plus, when the efects are known, I'd be willing to bet that they won't be the ones everybody is predicting.
Since the (social) changes aren't predictable, they don't make for great SF as the readers / buyers wouldn't expect or believe those outcomes. As has been said many times, SF has got to make sense, whereas real life doesn't have to. That's what makes writing SF hard.
Couple with this, the article is full of fuzzy words like: potential, could, may, can, possibly. There's nothing in it that says, authoritatively that anything bad will CERTAINLY happen if you don't secure your machine. Hell, people exceed the speed limit 'cause they don't think they'll get caught. Imagine what they'd do if there's not even a chance of any financial penalty for wrong-doing or laziness.
In the end, appealing to the average Joe's sense of community responibility is a non-starter. There's got to be mandated security that cannot be disabled. It's got to work all the time and it's got to be ubiquitous. Until then, the situation won't get any better.
and if we wish to protect the free speech rights of Americans online, we should not allow Internet domain names to be hostage to foreign standards
So the americans want to keep control of the internet in order to keep rights that are only upheld within their country. Since the americans don't apply these rights elsewhere - (a small thing called sovereignty) their desires to retain control of the internet are merely selfish.
As it is, every country wants to do exactly this: control the internet for their own purposes - just because the americans got there first is no reason why the situation should continue as it is.
I've only seen it through it's window, which needs a good cleaning, as I can't think of any reasdon why I'd ever want to go inside - unless there was a large poster offering money to the 1000th person through the door, and the counter stood at 999. However, I digress. It did look like it was rows and rows of comics, with posters on the walls and a few spotty-faced children inside. So from that I wouldn't say it was a stereotype - I'd say it was an accurate depiction.
If you don't like the image they have, you're free to start one of your own in whatever style you like. Drop me an email from your yacht if it works out.
... you can program in what you want the dice to come up with - and get it into a Vegas casino
You can't bring any food that the security guard like the look of (presuming they're hungry). It'll just get arbitrarily confiscated, without any appeal, receipt, review or reason needed.
It's not as if you can do any high-quality work at an airport: surrounded by screaming children, incoherent announcements and people overflowing their seats and squeezing into your space,
As it is, taking money from people whe choose to use the internet at airports is fine by me, as if reduces the other incidental costs I'd otherwise have to stump-up. Thanks for the subsidy!
Even for a "business" user, you should be well enough organised that your employer can afford to be out of touch with you for a short period, without suffering catastrophic business failure (if not, they should fire you immediately as you are obviously a single point of failure and as such a total liability to the organisation).
If you do suffer symptoms of stress or anxiety when disconnected from the 'net this sounds a lot like a personality disorder - even if you do use the old line: "No, really, I just like the internet. I could give up any time".
After all a robot won't be vulnerable to it, so hell: dump every nasty little bug out of every research lab into the biosphere. We could probably eliminate humanity (and every other furry thing with 2 or more legs) with what we have today.
However these humanity vs. machine fantasies are more about people's techno-phobia than about real-life.
Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television
From my memory of series 1, it was almost exclusively "uh-oh, here comes the boogie man" and "here comes the boogie man again". It was one long yawn-fest of relentless pursuit, that got boring after the first few episodes.
Season 2 was largely a mish-mash of disconnected and irrelevant episodes that didn't move the story along. It also gave the distinct impression of being mostly filler, or budget-constrained programming, just waiting for the final episode to wrap it up (or as we found out, kill it off).
What it really needed was for some directoin (maybe from a director?) to say "no, you're not writing that episode, it doesn't contribute to the plot". Although I didn't see much evidence that the writers had a plot. It frequently seemed as if they were making up each weeks offering on the spur of the moment to meet a deadline.
I'm sad that it, err, terminated. But since they were plainly incapable of writing coherent stories, with a vision and some intelligent commentary, it's probably best that it's over.