That's not to say that bloggers aren't moronic and pretentious and full of their own self-importance, but they are "real", and form a "real" community, which should have a real word to describe it.
That's a nice thought. What if the powers that be require you to use the crap?
For one class, I was required to use this total POS "videoconferencing" web2.0 dancing, glitsy flash-enabled, java-enabled, quicktime-enabled web app. Which basically let the instructor stream you slides while you did voice chat. I never got it to work, even on windows with IE. I've got a novel idea! why not just mail us the slides, and we can talk over IRC? or, if you really want voice, why not use skype? Why not use technology that actually works, instead of throwing us pre-alpha web 2 shit? That one incident made me angrier than I've ever been.
And there's more shit like this, that tends to be sold to schools who want to be hip and online and all that. I was also required to take an alcohol education "online course" before I could register. That bitch of a site streamed audio and video over flash. Of course, sometimes the audio didn't work. Sometimes it crashed firefox, so that I had to listen to the "lesson" again, and again, and again. They could have done the same damn thing with pictures and text on a static web page. But no, it had to be streaming.
Finally, the bitches can't even get text right. The best ones just have an mailing list, with answers submitted via a POST form, or better yet, just emailed to the instructor. The worst ones... ugh. I've done a few classes where we were supposed to use the school's own proprietary "message board". Which, of course, spews everything onto one page and cuts off messages at 1024 characters. Keep in mind this class was like seven sections, and we were supposed to write a lot, and respond to each other. Needless to say, that got unmanageable really fast.
phpbb would have fit their needs perfectly, but they HAD to roll their own. Likewise, IM would have worked perfectly for what little realtime stuff we actually needed, but instead we used some ancient perl crap.
Yes, Tesla was crazy. Actually, he experienced hallucinations all his life, although he managed to use them as a sort of design tool for visualizing 3D machines.
On the other hand, the guy fucking invented electrical engineering. He invented the AC motor and the radio, among other things. He also invented robotics, but it was so ahead of its time that nobody gave a shit.
Oh, sure, he probably didn't have a superweapon. But he really did think of the kinds of things nobody else would have thought of. If he had lived in modern times I would have no trouble believing that he had a superweapon.
Also, keep in mind that a non-neglegible chunk of us here in the US live in a rural environment. A gun might be necessary for hunting, protection from predators, or for putting down an animal.
Of course, I can't claim to know how useful handguns actually are for self-defense in cities, and whether they serve as an effective deterrent, etc.
I meant that, even if you use a secure interpreter, as the parent suggested, you can still write insecure code. Nothing can keep you from writing insecure code, just like nothing can keep you from writing buggy code. Your higher-level language might save you from buffer overflows, but it might create other easy security mistakes, as with PHP. And with some random language X, the common security mistakes are less well-known than with C.
Sure, a functional language with static typing might make it easier to see your own mistakes, because your code might be "closer" to the proof of the algorithm. And hence, it might be more "secure". But there is no language on earth that will save you from your own stupidity. If you make unnecessary assumptions in your precondition (or you don't quite understand the nuances of your favorite weird language) you are still screwed.
Movie theaters are obsolete. A good monitor is just a quarter the resolution of a movie projector. All you're really paying for is a bunch of blown-up pixels. And nowdays, movie screens aren't that big anyway. In a few years, it won't be worth the $20 to stand in line for the extra resolution. I'd expect movie theaters to die an even harder death than high-budget films.
Ultimately, every business model is made possible only by law. For example, the only reason car makers exist is because it's illegal to steal cars. You could, of course, make it legal to steal cars, in which case everyone would have to carry shotguns around with them when they went shopping. Automalls would be few and far between, and they would be surrounded by machine-gun nests. Which would suck, and make life difficult. It would mean that almost nobody would have cars. Stealing is bad because it undermines the operation of society, not because it is "wrong".
The question, of course, is whether or not the same protection should be afforded to a creative work. Would it be better for society to have free music, free movies, and free books for everyone, given that these works will probably now have much less funding? I don't know. For works of non-fiction, the answer seems clear: they are better off not copyrighted; free education benefits everyone. For music, video, and fiction, the answer is less clear. Could I spend the rest of my life reading free internet fiction? Maybe. Some of the stuff that gets published on paper now isn't much better. Now that people like Piers Anthony and Margaret Weis get published in hardcover, the gap between "free" and "not" is really rather small. And Margaret Weis is one of the _better_ ones!
Video is harder to justify. Certainly, high-value stuff like Star Wars III would be impossible. Of course, good low-budget stuff like Star Wars IV would still be very doable. I've also heard that cheap anime is "only" tens of grand per episode. So film might survive, if it were funded by hardcore fans.
For music, I don't think it makes a difference. Professional musicians make their money playing for live audiences. Period. It's only recently that live performances have turned into a kind of advertising.
Wellhung: Hello, Sweetheart. What do you look like?
Sweetheart: I am wearing a red silk blouse, a miniskirt and high heels. I work out every day, I'm toned and perfect. My measurements are 36-24-36. What do you look like?
Wellhung: I'm 6'3" and about 250 pounds.I wear glasses and I have on a pair of blue sweat pants I just bought from Walmart.I'm also wearing a T-shirt with a few spots of barbecue sauce on it from dinner...it smells funny.
Sweetheart: I want you.Would you like to screw me?
I see this "X language is magically secure" stuff all the time. No, it isn't. The fact that your language is higher-level does not make it more secure. Look at PHP. It's horrible, far worse than C.
Or perhaps you prefer Java, and think that running your code in a VM is a silver bullet. Think again. If you want that code to actually do anything, you're going to have to give it access to the outside world. Your web app can still let people do things they shouldn't. Security is not just about buffer overflows and SQL injection; it's about anything that could let someone get access they shouldn't have. Which can happen from plain old bad logic.
Admittedly, it is easy to make mistakes with C. But C is pretty much the only thing to write a kernel in. In a device driver, you have to mess around with real memory, and real IO, and that sort of thing. More importantly, C is old enough so that its common security mistakes are already known. You'd have a much harder time with some random language.
Basically, a "secure" language is not one that prevents you from doing things you shouldn't. What you want is a language that makes it easier to write secure code than to write insecure code.
My aunt's boyfriend's niece (yeah, I know this is sort of hearsay) was supposedly held without charge for 3 days in a warehouse. Not only were they nonviolent (just typical hippies in organic clothes waving signs), she wasn't even one of the protesters.
My mother is friends with a certain elderly female author, who happens to be on the do-not-fly list. Of course, she has no clue why she's on there, and they won't tell her why.
So, yeah. They only let you have your rights if they want to. It isn't terribly new, but it does happen.
While you can certainly find whole seasons of shows on youtube, the more usual thing is to just make a short clip of the relevant part. Then, the youtube superstars post their replies, followed by their hanger-ons, all the way down to the fat, ugly dregs of the internet. As with slashdot, the original article doesn't really matter. The news is more of a starting point than an end in itself.
It seems to me that "old media" is really being rather obsessive about infringement. So what if a couple thousand people watched your small, grainy, old clip. So what if a crazy, half-naked scot provides more interesting political commentary than your own guys. OK, that one must hurt a lot. But still. You've got loads of money. You've got publishing expertise; you know what the public wants. Probably. Most likely, net neutrality won't go through, so you might be able to clamp down on digital distribution. It'll be just like cable TV, distributed through the same cable providers, but routed over the internet instead. Unlike, say, book publishers, your business model isn't totally shot, not if you adapt.
Well, if the cops come knocking on your door, you're owned regardless, anyway. But formatting won't delete the data or anything. To do it properly, you need to use a file shredder, or encrypt your whole volume. Or maybe you meant to clean out the rootkits? *shrug*
Actually, I checked, and I realized I'm using Filterset.G, not PGL. But any flat list of domains would work. I'm pretty sure konqueror just matches regular expressions.
We need to shape political thought before the politicians get involved, so that when they finally do, they will be guided by an already established body of enlightened thought rather than reacting to their lobbyists or whims of the day. Political scientists need to anticipate the political issues well ahead of time and illuminate our collective consciousness so that we will be better prepared to guide our political representatives or be able to react quickly when legislation is proposed that goes against what should be pre-established principles.
You have some very scary ideas. "Shape political thought." "An establish body of enlightened thought." "Illuminate our collective consciousness." "What should be pre-established principles." Do you know what you sound like? You sound like you want to make other people think the way you do. You sound like Anakin, before he went off the deep end.
This is why I prefer the internet the way it is. There's no "political correctness" on here. Nobody tells me how to think. Or rather, they try, but I'm free to argue with them.
I block ads at my firewall with moblock/bluetack. Then, I block them again with privoxy. Then, I use the pgl blocklists with konqueror. I also change my MAC address every 3 hours, do all my browsing through Tor, and clear my cookies when I'm done.
What, you think Google is using all that power for their "data center"? No, this is really part of a conspiracy. They've developed strong AI, and now they're trying to build a bopple generator.
If I had a choice between Wikipedia and those history textbooks they use in gradeschools, I'd use wikipedia. Oh, sure, it may not be completely accurate. But it also hasn't been filtered for "political correctness" by the school board. There are several "classic" omissions: The Aztecs violently conquered everyone in the region, and carried out mass human sacrifice. Helen Keller was a vocal anarchist. Henry Ford sent money to Hitler. That sort of thing.
Wikipedia has this too. It has a slight liberal bias, a strong nerd bias, and a bias towards the special interest groups who edit their own pages (read: BDSM, Wicca, etc.). But usually, there's more of a chance of it including crackpot stuff than leaving important stuff out.
And, of course, compared to the rest of the internet, wikipedia is pretty good. If you're blocking wikipedia, you might as well block everything. Most likely, they're blocking wikipedia but allowing Uncyclopedia, Wikichan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Conservapedia, etc, etc. Oh, the irony.
Also, believe it or not, not every homework assignment is a term paper. Wikipedia is a good reference on math, chemistry, and physics. Oh, I wouldn't cite it. But I would use it to look up the definition of a "ring", or the molecular weight of Tyrosine. Sure, maybe they got it wrong. But am I going to worry about it? No.
All right. You did it. I finally snapped. Here goes my karma.
Why the fuck do people keep bashing the UAC? What the fuck is wrong with finally having a real "sudo" in windows? Instead of having to run as administrator all the time, you can now escalate when you want to. Microsoft finally adds better security, and all the whiners come out of the woodwork.
This sort of shit reminds me of my uncle, who thinks he's a computer person:
"I really miss windows 98. It was a simple, no-frills operating system." "It didn't have a firewall." "You can download a free one." "It didn't have any kind of access controls." "???"
That kind of thing. The hell of it is, the people who are moaning about the UAC must be running as administrator. This poses two questions. First, why are they running as administrator? Second, if it bugs them so much, why don't they turn it off?
I'm not a windows fanboy by any means, nor do I like Vista, but this hypocritical bullshit just drives me totally crazy. You wanted security, you got it. Go ahead. Surf the web as root, and get owned. But don't come back and whine about how windows is insecure. You don't know the meaning of the word.
If you want a reason to complain about Vista, complain about DRM. You can't turn that off in control panel, and its hooks reach deep into the display system. It's a deliberate attempt to lock you out of your own computer. They'd probably love it if PCs were like xboxes, with everything signed out to wazoo. Hell, it's happenning already with hd-dvd.
But no, you take the time to bitch about window's advantages.
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
But really, it's so easy, and it takes so little time to format a drive for a modern filesystem, it doesn't make much of a difference if it is unformatted.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah. The right word would be "blogspace".
That's not to say that bloggers aren't moronic and pretentious and full of their own self-importance, but they are "real", and form a "real" community, which should have a real word to describe it.
Oh, shit. I must be really screwed, just cause I fap to guro sometimes.
Get over it.
That's a nice thought. What if the powers that be require you to use the crap?
... ugh. I've done a few classes where we were supposed to use the school's own proprietary "message board". Which, of course, spews everything onto one page and cuts off messages at 1024 characters. Keep in mind this class was like seven sections, and we were supposed to write a lot, and respond to each other. Needless to say, that got unmanageable really fast.
For one class, I was required to use this total POS "videoconferencing" web2.0 dancing, glitsy flash-enabled, java-enabled, quicktime-enabled web app. Which basically let the instructor stream you slides while you did voice chat. I never got it to work, even on windows with IE. I've got a novel idea! why not just mail us the slides, and we can talk over IRC? or, if you really want voice, why not use skype? Why not use technology that actually works, instead of throwing us pre-alpha web 2 shit? That one incident made me angrier than I've ever been.
And there's more shit like this, that tends to be sold to schools who want to be hip and online and all that. I was also required to take an alcohol education "online course" before I could register. That bitch of a site streamed audio and video over flash. Of course, sometimes the audio didn't work. Sometimes it crashed firefox, so that I had to listen to the "lesson" again, and again, and again. They could have done the same damn thing with pictures and text on a static web page. But no, it had to be streaming.
Finally, the bitches can't even get text right. The best ones just have an mailing list, with answers submitted via a POST form, or better yet, just emailed to the instructor. The worst ones
phpbb would have fit their needs perfectly, but they HAD to roll their own. Likewise, IM would have worked perfectly for what little realtime stuff we actually needed, but instead we used some ancient perl crap.
So no, in many cases, you don't have a choice.
Yes, Tesla was crazy. Actually, he experienced hallucinations all his life, although he managed to use them as a sort of design tool for visualizing 3D machines.
On the other hand, the guy fucking invented electrical engineering. He invented the AC motor and the radio, among other things. He also invented robotics, but it was so ahead of its time that nobody gave a shit.
Oh, sure, he probably didn't have a superweapon. But he really did think of the kinds of things nobody else would have thought of. If he had lived in modern times I would have no trouble believing that he had a superweapon.
There's a left-handed dvorak layout too, I think. It's probably a mirror image.
Of course, I can't claim to know how useful handguns actually are for self-defense in cities, and whether they serve as an effective deterrent, etc.
I meant that, even if you use a secure interpreter, as the parent suggested, you can still write insecure code. Nothing can keep you from writing insecure code, just like nothing can keep you from writing buggy code. Your higher-level language might save you from buffer overflows, but it might create other easy security mistakes, as with PHP. And with some random language X, the common security mistakes are less well-known than with C.
Sure, a functional language with static typing might make it easier to see your own mistakes, because your code might be "closer" to the proof of the algorithm. And hence, it might be more "secure". But there is no language on earth that will save you from your own stupidity. If you make unnecessary assumptions in your precondition (or you don't quite understand the nuances of your favorite weird language) you are still screwed.
Movie theaters are obsolete. A good monitor is just a quarter the resolution of a movie projector. All you're really paying for is a bunch of blown-up pixels. And nowdays, movie screens aren't that big anyway. In a few years, it won't be worth the $20 to stand in line for the extra resolution. I'd expect movie theaters to die an even harder death than high-budget films.
Ultimately, every business model is made possible only by law. For example, the only reason car makers exist is because it's illegal to steal cars. You could, of course, make it legal to steal cars, in which case everyone would have to carry shotguns around with them when they went shopping. Automalls would be few and far between, and they would be surrounded by machine-gun nests. Which would suck, and make life difficult. It would mean that almost nobody would have cars. Stealing is bad because it undermines the operation of society, not because it is "wrong".
The question, of course, is whether or not the same protection should be afforded to a creative work. Would it be better for society to have free music, free movies, and free books for everyone, given that these works will probably now have much less funding? I don't know. For works of non-fiction, the answer seems clear: they are better off not copyrighted; free education benefits everyone. For music, video, and fiction, the answer is less clear. Could I spend the rest of my life reading free internet fiction? Maybe. Some of the stuff that gets published on paper now isn't much better. Now that people like Piers Anthony and Margaret Weis get published in hardcover, the gap between "free" and "not" is really rather small. And Margaret Weis is one of the _better_ ones!
Video is harder to justify. Certainly, high-value stuff like Star Wars III would be impossible. Of course, good low-budget stuff like Star Wars IV would still be very doable. I've also heard that cheap anime is "only" tens of grand per episode. So film might survive, if it were funded by hardcore fans.
For music, I don't think it makes a difference. Professional musicians make their money playing for live audiences. Period. It's only recently that live performances have turned into a kind of advertising.
There are a lot of people who use MSN, but generally they're the very lowest of the low, the people who can't be bothered to install AIM.
Wellhung: Hello, Sweetheart. What do you look like?
Sweetheart: I am wearing a red silk blouse, a miniskirt and high heels. I work out every day, I'm toned and perfect. My measurements are 36-24-36. What do you look like?
Wellhung: I'm 6'3" and about 250 pounds.I wear glasses and I have on a pair of blue sweat pants I just bought from Walmart.I'm also wearing a T-shirt with a few spots of barbecue sauce on it from dinner...it smells funny.
Sweetheart: I want you.Would you like to screw me?
Wellhung: OK
I see this "X language is magically secure" stuff all the time. No, it isn't. The fact that your language is higher-level does not make it more secure. Look at PHP. It's horrible, far worse than C.
Or perhaps you prefer Java, and think that running your code in a VM is a silver bullet. Think again. If you want that code to actually do anything, you're going to have to give it access to the outside world. Your web app can still let people do things they shouldn't. Security is not just about buffer overflows and SQL injection; it's about anything that could let someone get access they shouldn't have. Which can happen from plain old bad logic.
Admittedly, it is easy to make mistakes with C. But C is pretty much the only thing to write a kernel in. In a device driver, you have to mess around with real memory, and real IO, and that sort of thing. More importantly, C is old enough so that its common security mistakes are already known. You'd have a much harder time with some random language.
Basically, a "secure" language is not one that prevents you from doing things you shouldn't. What you want is a language that makes it easier to write secure code than to write insecure code.
My aunt's boyfriend's niece (yeah, I know this is sort of hearsay) was supposedly held without charge for 3 days in a warehouse. Not only were they nonviolent (just typical hippies in organic clothes waving signs), she wasn't even one of the protesters.
My mother is friends with a certain elderly female author, who happens to be on the do-not-fly list. Of course, she has no clue why she's on there, and they won't tell her why.
So, yeah. They only let you have your rights if they want to. It isn't terribly new, but it does happen.
While you can certainly find whole seasons of shows on youtube, the more usual thing is to just make a short clip of the relevant part. Then, the youtube superstars post their replies, followed by their hanger-ons, all the way down to the fat, ugly dregs of the internet. As with slashdot, the original article doesn't really matter. The news is more of a starting point than an end in itself.
It seems to me that "old media" is really being rather obsessive about infringement. So what if a couple thousand people watched your small, grainy, old clip. So what if a crazy, half-naked scot provides more interesting political commentary than your own guys. OK, that one must hurt a lot. But still. You've got loads of money. You've got publishing expertise; you know what the public wants. Probably. Most likely, net neutrality won't go through, so you might be able to clamp down on digital distribution. It'll be just like cable TV, distributed through the same cable providers, but routed over the internet instead. Unlike, say, book publishers, your business model isn't totally shot, not if you adapt.
Hang in there, Viacom. We're rooting for you.
Well, if the cops come knocking on your door, you're owned regardless, anyway. But formatting won't delete the data or anything. To do it properly, you need to use a file shredder, or encrypt your whole volume. Or maybe you meant to clean out the rootkits? *shrug*
Actually, I checked, and I realized I'm using Filterset.G, not PGL. But any flat list of domains would work. I'm pretty sure konqueror just matches regular expressions.
This is why I prefer the internet the way it is. There's no "political correctness" on here. Nobody tells me how to think. Or rather, they try, but I'm free to argue with them.
And look at boobies. Don't forget boobies.
I block ads at my firewall with moblock/bluetack. Then, I block them again with privoxy. Then, I use the pgl blocklists with konqueror. I also change my MAC address every 3 hours, do all my browsing through Tor, and clear my cookies when I'm done.
Yeah, I'm a little obsessive.
What, you think Google is using all that power for their "data center"? No, this is really part of a conspiracy. They've developed strong AI, and now they're trying to build a bopple generator.
If I had a choice between Wikipedia and those history textbooks they use in gradeschools, I'd use wikipedia. Oh, sure, it may not be completely accurate. But it also hasn't been filtered for "political correctness" by the school board. There are several "classic" omissions: The Aztecs violently conquered everyone in the region, and carried out mass human sacrifice. Helen Keller was a vocal anarchist. Henry Ford sent money to Hitler. That sort of thing.
Wikipedia has this too. It has a slight liberal bias, a strong nerd bias, and a bias towards the special interest groups who edit their own pages (read: BDSM, Wicca, etc.). But usually, there's more of a chance of it including crackpot stuff than leaving important stuff out.
And, of course, compared to the rest of the internet, wikipedia is pretty good. If you're blocking wikipedia, you might as well block everything. Most likely, they're blocking wikipedia but allowing Uncyclopedia, Wikichan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Conservapedia, etc, etc. Oh, the irony.
Also, believe it or not, not every homework assignment is a term paper. Wikipedia is a good reference on math, chemistry, and physics. Oh, I wouldn't cite it. But I would use it to look up the definition of a "ring", or the molecular weight of Tyrosine. Sure, maybe they got it wrong. But am I going to worry about it? No.
All right. You did it. I finally snapped. Here goes my karma.
Why the fuck do people keep bashing the UAC? What the fuck is wrong with finally having a real "sudo" in windows? Instead of having to run as administrator all the time, you can now escalate when you want to. Microsoft finally adds better security, and all the whiners come out of the woodwork.
This sort of shit reminds me of my uncle, who thinks he's a computer person:
"I really miss windows 98. It was a simple, no-frills operating system."
"It didn't have a firewall."
"You can download a free one."
"It didn't have any kind of access controls."
"???"
That kind of thing. The hell of it is, the people who are moaning about the UAC must be running as administrator. This poses two questions. First, why are they running as administrator? Second, if it bugs them so much, why don't they turn it off?
I'm not a windows fanboy by any means, nor do I like Vista, but this hypocritical bullshit just drives me totally crazy. You wanted security, you got it. Go ahead. Surf the web as root, and get owned. But don't come back and whine about how windows is insecure. You don't know the meaning of the word.
If you want a reason to complain about Vista, complain about DRM. You can't turn that off in control panel, and its hooks reach deep into the display system. It's a deliberate attempt to lock you out of your own computer. They'd probably love it if PCs were like xboxes, with everything signed out to wazoo. Hell, it's happenning already with hd-dvd.
But no, you take the time to bitch about window's advantages.
Why not use NTFS? Linux has fairly good support for it now. Some distros will even install on it.
Stay away from FAT32; it's a crap filesystem.
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
But really, it's so easy, and it takes so little time to format a drive for a modern filesystem, it doesn't make much of a difference if it is unformatted.
This is some sweet hacking.
How ironic that we need to hack hardware that we ourselves own.