But, how would the elevator know to open the door when you get there? Do you drag the elevator and drop it on a dumpster outside the building? Or, do you hop on one leg while pressing the elevator button labeled "E"?;)
Hey wait a minute! I thought we were supposed to be razzing that hack Dvorak here, not Mac users??
But -- but -- but I thought the "mighty elevator" was the latest innovation! Mac users got confused by more than one button? Tell me it ain't so! I'm shocked!;)
Hey, some people actually PAY for those kinds of services. At least the Feds are offering these services for free, in presumably sterile environments! Did you really believe the current administration wants to outlaw these kinds of activities based on morals? They just want a monopoly on the sexual entertainment industry!;)
That's because "profiling" - you know, exercising actual forensic science, is DoublePlusUnGood in today's society because a minority might get "offended." Of course you don't want to offend anyone, that's not the goal. The goal is supposed to be to identify and check the most likely suspects, regardless of what the profile characteristics might be; the fact that in this particular case it's middle-eastern ancestry and subscribing to Islam is just an unfortunate thing. To search whitey just to be PC and not be accused of "racial profiling" is just plain ridiculous, because the truth is it IS racial profiling, based in forensics. Yes, we know most Muslims are not terrorists, most scorn the violence (evangelism via force) that Mohammed embraced for a short time in his life, but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs, so it only makes sense to focus scruitiny there.
(of course some uppity over-sensitive PC nitwit will mod this "flamebait" or some BS)
Actually bringing Compaq in would have been a good move, until they axed the Compaq products which mattered. I think Carly did it in order to extinguish competition.
That does not mean the government has any business categorizing honest citizens, unless of course, we are now regarded as a "threat" or an "enemy."
We are a threat to their power. The second amendment has still not been repealed, and although many states have attempted to effectively eliminate it they cannot remove guns from all citizens. We also still have the power to vote and the very idea that we (collectively speaking) finally wake up and learn to exercise that vote, and perhaps even vote wisely, is an extremely frightning concept to those who are on the take.
The current administration wants to "protect the children" by not only disallowing teenage tramps to not post pictures online, but legal consenting adults to not be able to post alluring pictures online either. We've gone from one extreme to the other. When can we get a reasonable, level-headed moderate? The more I think about the current administration, the more reasonable I think that libertarians are, because they're all about personal responsibility. Compared to today's "liberals" and "conservatives" our founding fathers would likely be considered to be libertarians. I'm registered as a Republican because I believe in true conservatism (small government, limited powers and no interference in private lives, etc) but in the last few years that seems to not be the Republican platform any more. It seems that both parties are out for totalitarianism, albeit through different methods but the end result is the same: powermongering and greed, with no thought or care about their "constituents." Tell them what they want to hear, then do what you want.
The saddest thing? Fewer than 50% of citizens bother to register to vote, and only about half of those bother to vote at elections. This is all our own fault. We have what may be in theory the best possible government (aside from communism, which is the theoretical ideal if it weren't for the greed aspect of human nature on the part of those in power). The reason our system hasn't been working is citizens squander their right to vote, and when they do vote, they don't vote wisely thinking about long-term ramifications of whom they place into power. It's not too late to fix the problem: the key is to vote! (I know, I just made the Captain Obvious "duh" statement of the year there)
How are they certain that the rules derived from these sites like MySpace or even Slashdot are even accurate? People post mis-information all the time & you can hardly call MySpace a reliable source for even seeding a semantic web.
This makes me want to start writing a story from the first-person perspective of a fictional terrorist. An ideal way to go about it would be to create a MySpace account, and the story would reference this "diary" where the terrorist would be posting "coded messages" to his fellow "cells" here in America. Making no indication on the MySpace account that it is actually tied in with an upcoming book (be it an eBook released under creative commons or in print) it would help to:
1. Show how STUPID and tyrannical our country's government has become (Hint: spying on citizens on our own soil is illegal/unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral) 2. Show that first amendment rights no longer exist 3. Skew their data, making it worthless and help to eliminate collecting data on citizens and legal residents
Of course, I don't have the time (and quite probably not the talent) to pull off writing a great, attention-gripping book and keep up with a fictional "journal" while maintaining total consistency between the book and the journal, but I'm sure that some career authors here do have that kind of time and talent. If some authors were to pull this off and end up being "investigated" by the NSA and it is revealed it was all part of a story project, can you imagine the egg on their face? "Guess what, intelligence failed AGAIN and while they were wasting tax dollars investigating legal citizens, real terrorists like Osama Bin Laden are still laughing at us."
Someone is here on a visa or is an illegal alien? They should certainly be tracked. Legal citizens? Recognize that they have inalienable essential liberties which are guaranteed by the Constitution, and using the War Powers Act to try to justify your actions is NOT legal, and is certainly not ethical. In fact, encroaching our Constitutionally-protected rights when you have taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution actually amounts to treason.
Well, whatever happens, Bender will NOT be happy about the price of titanium going down. He may be only 40% titanium but he did pull in a pretty penny the last time he hocked his body off for booze. Poor Bender!
. . . have just been sopoenaed along with millions' of other users' bookmarks, history and passwords by Homeland Security. Now the Bush administration can enjoy visiting the same pr0n sites you do, oh, and yes, now they know about that Real Doll you've been eyeing. Remain where you are, the morality police will be by shortly, as soon as Bush can figure out how to justify it under the War Powers Act.
(If you don't find this post funny, then ignore this post. If you think I'm bashing Bush, then s/Bush/genericpolitician/ mentally. Thanks in advance.)
You forgot a step. Remember, here in America it's all about saving on costs. The process is to ship European beer to India, (or ship it here and bring in a few H1B or L1 workers) hire a few Indians to drink the good stuff, then pee into tankers, then ship back to US. When the tankers reach American ports, it is then taken to bottling plants where this "concentrate" is then watered down.:-D
Actually I think blaming every storm on global warming is funny. You may not, and in that case what you ought to do is just pass my post by and mod up an insightful post.
My problem with so-called "environmentalists:" When (at least partial) solutions are offered, like wind farms (re: nantucket sound wind farm), incinerators (burn trash to produce electrical power - proposed in the old Quonset Navy Base in Rhode Island, and one here in the Greater Boston area) get knocked down, moden nuclear power plants get knocked down, natural gas depots (proposed for Quincy MA and Fall River, MA) get knocked down. It's really more about NIMBY than solving problems. Everyone wants to solve the problem, but not if the solution is in their area. The proposed solution is to "stop using foreign oil" without accepting available alternatives. It seems that (at least the extremist) environmentalists want nuclear fusion NOW, and they don't want it in their own town/city/state/etc. and don't want it off shore either. There is no happy medium.
The reality of the matter is we don't have practical sustainable nuclear fusion yet, we don't have perpetual energy machines, we don't have "zero point modules" from Stargate. Right now the basic solutions we have a nuclear, wind, and solar power, and in some localized areas of the country, geothermal. We need to use technology we currently have until the utopia of fusion becomes practical, because ther only alternative is to either call it a day and go back to living in tents, or to continue using fossil fuels until fusion is made practical and economical.
Me? I consider myself a conservationist: I believe in not halting progress, but using resources wisely. I think we should open up the gulf and east coast for drilling, open up Alaska for drilling, and make it a criminal offense (where the execs and board of director seats are liable) for a company to not clean a spill if one happens, and a criminal offense to not make resonable efforts to leave the land in a hospitable state when the company shuts down and dismantles a pump or pipeline. I believe that we should keep oil-powered automobiles well-maintained (as an example: My car gets 27mpg combined with the stock EPROM profile and folks with sedans which get less fuel mileage criticize me for driving a "gas guzzler" until we compare real-world fuel economy. If I switch to the performance profile I get only 16mpg combined but when I drive that car I obviously don't run that profile all time), and I think that new homes should incorporate geothermal heat pumps and/or solar panels to reduce energy requirements. When I can afford to have my dream house built, I plan to have a photovolatic panels installed on the roof, and solar heating, using underground tanks as a heat sink for heat storage. It only makes sense to for each person to exercise personal responsibility - you can continue to enjoy things like cars, electric lights, heating and AC, etc. and NOT be wasteful. I'm no environazi, but then I am not the other end of the extreme; I conserve whenever I can, and exercise personal responsibility, and when proposals for things like wind farms or incinerator/power generators come up, I vote for those projects (unless there is a stink of political corruption involved).
So, yes, I will continue to make wisecracks about global warming because there are already solutions, but self-proclaimed environmentalist politicians block those solutions at every turn, and expect the problem to be solved through either magick or to be solved by someone else in lands far, far away.
Just some stats...... here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes - and how long it usually takes to fix:
Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days.. yawn.
That's pretty funny. I wouldn't be surprised if TBB and allofmp3.com ("IP"-related actions) weren't the straw that broke the camel's back and ultimately lead to sanctions against the US. Even though I'm an American I'd welcome collective sanctions against the US because our government really is getting out of hand with all of the corruption lately, and we (collectively speaking) as voters are not doing what it takes to fix things, because only a minority of us even bother to exercise our responsibility to vote, and the majority of us who do throw our votes away on keeping the same career politicians in office rather than electing new candidates who might actually give a crap about what citizens care about.
If underground Martians intercepted broadcasts of BPI-licensed music, and have a thriving business of large-scale commercial distribution and relicensing of that same music - Purely on Mars, of course - Have they broken the law?
Based on recent actions, I'd say that the current administration would claim that American law applies on Mars.
I break the encryption all the time so I can keep copies of my DVDs on my PC so I can transfer them to my PocketPC when I travel. This is actually legal since it is for the purpose of interoperability (see the interoperability clause of the DMCA).
Funny that the **AA organizations love to selectively quote various laws in pursuit of their agenda, and totally disregard:
- Fair Use
- First right of sale
- That when you buy an over-the-counter good, you are BUYING the product, not buying a license to use it
With that said, I'm going to go to the market to buy a license (using **AA/BSA terminology) to eat a banana.
"High Definition" Radio is actually lower-definition than standard FM broadcasts. It is in theory better than AM broadcasts, but if you've ever been fortunate to hear AM Stereo on a receiver which can tune to a.5 or.1Khz resolution, you'd know that AM Stereo fidelity (both dynamic range and frequency response, not to mention excellent channel separation) is actually QUITE good when you have a good, clean signal. However, in a car AM Stereo is far more susceptible to noise than FM ever was or will be, plus AM is notorious for AC hum and interference from weather (especially lightning). It would be a downgrade when you have a quality AM Stereo signal, but where AM Stereo is very scarce (When I had an AM Stereo receiver I could only find one classical station and one classic rock station, and one talk station - I have NO idea why that talk radio station invested in very expensive AM Stereo transmission equipment) I see no reason to not drop analog AM Stereo and use the sidebands for HD Radio instead. This would lead to widespread AM Stereo stations which can boast a much, much larger broadcast range than FM stations can muster.
But drop analog FM in favor of lower-fidelity "high definition" FM radio? Um, no thanks. This is obviously a case of the RIAA's wanting to implement a broadcast flag to prevent recording of over-the-air signals, and to block release of receivers with analog line-level outputs.
Just to nitpick: It's not that it's not possible but just impractical. If it is going to take you >30 hours to find all the rootkits (you may obviously have to put the drive in another machine to detect and remove all of them) or 20 hours to reinstall EVERYTHING on the system (the OS, all apps and patches, restore your data) then obviously it's more sensible to install from a ROI perpsective. If you figure it's going to take say, 12 hours by comparison, it's more logical to spend the time cleaning it.
On the other hand, if you have fully configured disk images on hand and all of the data is backed up, I'd argue that it makes no sense whatsoever to clean the system unless it's something really simple like gater or weatherbug; just re-image the box and restore the data. Done in a half hour in that case.
Watch it, making cracks about global warning is fightin' words!! I got modded down by some treehugger with no sense of humor last time I made a global warming crack.
Slashdot Mirror
But, how would the elevator know to open the door when you get there? Do you drag the elevator and drop it on a dumpster outside the building? Or, do you hop on one leg while pressing the elevator button labeled "E"? ;)
Hey wait a minute! I thought we were supposed to be razzing that hack Dvorak here, not Mac users??
But -- but -- but I thought the "mighty elevator" was the latest innovation! Mac users got confused by more than one button? Tell me it ain't so! I'm shocked! ;)
So extremest middle-eastern Muslims will suddenly become, I don't know, Chinese? Japanese? Blonde-hair-blue-eyed Aryan?
Did you have problems with people weilding banana magnets in high school? Is your name Michele?
Hey, some people actually PAY for those kinds of services. At least the Feds are offering these services for free, in presumably sterile environments! Did you really believe the current administration wants to outlaw these kinds of activities based on morals? They just want a monopoly on the sexual entertainment industry! ;)
(couldn't resist the off-colour on this one)
That's because "profiling" - you know, exercising actual forensic science, is DoublePlusUnGood in today's society because a minority might get "offended." Of course you don't want to offend anyone, that's not the goal. The goal is supposed to be to identify and check the most likely suspects, regardless of what the profile characteristics might be; the fact that in this particular case it's middle-eastern ancestry and subscribing to Islam is just an unfortunate thing. To search whitey just to be PC and not be accused of "racial profiling" is just plain ridiculous, because the truth is it IS racial profiling, based in forensics. Yes, we know most Muslims are not terrorists, most scorn the violence (evangelism via force) that Mohammed embraced for a short time in his life, but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs, so it only makes sense to focus scruitiny there.
(of course some uppity over-sensitive PC nitwit will mod this "flamebait" or some BS)
Actually bringing Compaq in would have been a good move, until they axed the Compaq products which mattered. I think Carly did it in order to extinguish competition.
Not true. Everybody likes tits. Not everybody likes Darl McBride. Therefore, Darl McBride is not a tit.
We are a threat to their power. The second amendment has still not been repealed, and although many states have attempted to effectively eliminate it they cannot remove guns from all citizens. We also still have the power to vote and the very idea that we (collectively speaking) finally wake up and learn to exercise that vote, and perhaps even vote wisely, is an extremely frightning concept to those who are on the take.
We are at war with Iraq, therefore we have always been at war with Iraq.
;)
Freedom is slavery. It is essential that we give up our essential liberties in order to preserve freedom. (which leads me to ask: what is freedom?)
Oh, and by the way: I hear the economy is doing well and America is as strong as ever; our current administration says so therefore it must be true!
The proles were not spied on and did not have the telescreen, but were happy (bread and circuses) and didn't care one way or the other about politics.
Party members at large were spied on, had telecreens and could turn the sound down but could not turn them off.
Inner power members (our analog would be elected officials at higher levels) could turn their telecreens off and were corrupt to the core.
Just FYI for those who have never read 1984 (if you haven't, it's a must-read) or haven't read it in a while.
No, that was the previous administration.
The current administration wants to "protect the children" by not only disallowing teenage tramps to not post pictures online, but legal consenting adults to not be able to post alluring pictures online either. We've gone from one extreme to the other. When can we get a reasonable, level-headed moderate? The more I think about the current administration, the more reasonable I think that libertarians are, because they're all about personal responsibility. Compared to today's "liberals" and "conservatives" our founding fathers would likely be considered to be libertarians. I'm registered as a Republican because I believe in true conservatism (small government, limited powers and no interference in private lives, etc) but in the last few years that seems to not be the Republican platform any more. It seems that both parties are out for totalitarianism, albeit through different methods but the end result is the same: powermongering and greed, with no thought or care about their "constituents." Tell them what they want to hear, then do what you want.
The saddest thing? Fewer than 50% of citizens bother to register to vote, and only about half of those bother to vote at elections. This is all our own fault. We have what may be in theory the best possible government (aside from communism, which is the theoretical ideal if it weren't for the greed aspect of human nature on the part of those in power). The reason our system hasn't been working is citizens squander their right to vote, and when they do vote, they don't vote wisely thinking about long-term ramifications of whom they place into power. It's not too late to fix the problem: the key is to vote! (I know, I just made the Captain Obvious "duh" statement of the year there)
This makes me want to start writing a story from the first-person perspective of a fictional terrorist. An ideal way to go about it would be to create a MySpace account, and the story would reference this "diary" where the terrorist would be posting "coded messages" to his fellow "cells" here in America. Making no indication on the MySpace account that it is actually tied in with an upcoming book (be it an eBook released under creative commons or in print) it would help to:
1. Show how STUPID and tyrannical our country's government has become (Hint: spying on citizens on our own soil is illegal/unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral)
2. Show that first amendment rights no longer exist
3. Skew their data, making it worthless and help to eliminate collecting data on citizens and legal residents
Of course, I don't have the time (and quite probably not the talent) to pull off writing a great, attention-gripping book and keep up with a fictional "journal" while maintaining total consistency between the book and the journal, but I'm sure that some career authors here do have that kind of time and talent. If some authors were to pull this off and end up being "investigated" by the NSA and it is revealed it was all part of a story project, can you imagine the egg on their face? "Guess what, intelligence failed AGAIN and while they were wasting tax dollars investigating legal citizens, real terrorists like Osama Bin Laden are still laughing at us."
Someone is here on a visa or is an illegal alien? They should certainly be tracked. Legal citizens? Recognize that they have inalienable essential liberties which are guaranteed by the Constitution, and using the War Powers Act to try to justify your actions is NOT legal, and is certainly not ethical. In fact, encroaching our Constitutionally-protected rights when you have taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution actually amounts to treason.
Well, whatever happens, Bender will NOT be happy about the price of titanium going down. He may be only 40% titanium but he did pull in a pretty penny the last time he hocked his body off for booze. Poor Bender!
. . . have just been sopoenaed along with millions' of other users' bookmarks, history and passwords by Homeland Security. Now the Bush administration can enjoy visiting the same pr0n sites you do, oh, and yes, now they know about that Real Doll you've been eyeing. Remain where you are, the morality police will be by shortly, as soon as Bush can figure out how to justify it under the War Powers Act.
(If you don't find this post funny, then ignore this post. If you think I'm bashing Bush, then s/Bush/genericpolitician/ mentally. Thanks in advance.)
You forgot a step. Remember, here in America it's all about saving on costs. The process is to ship European beer to India, (or ship it here and bring in a few H1B or L1 workers) hire a few Indians to drink the good stuff, then pee into tankers, then ship back to US. When the tankers reach American ports, it is then taken to bottling plants where this "concentrate" is then watered down. :-D
I'd have guessed plutonium stolen from Libyan terrorists for using fission to generate the 1.21 jiggawatts. . .
eh, nevermind. I got nothing.
Yeah, but. . . 220mph!! 220mph, and not even enclosed by an aircraft!
Sorry, I'm just addicted to speed (not the drug).
Actually I think blaming every storm on global warming is funny. You may not, and in that case what you ought to do is just pass my post by and mod up an insightful post.
My problem with so-called "environmentalists:" When (at least partial) solutions are offered, like wind farms (re: nantucket sound wind farm), incinerators (burn trash to produce electrical power - proposed in the old Quonset Navy Base in Rhode Island, and one here in the Greater Boston area) get knocked down, moden nuclear power plants get knocked down, natural gas depots (proposed for Quincy MA and Fall River, MA) get knocked down. It's really more about NIMBY than solving problems. Everyone wants to solve the problem, but not if the solution is in their area. The proposed solution is to "stop using foreign oil" without accepting available alternatives. It seems that (at least the extremist) environmentalists want nuclear fusion NOW, and they don't want it in their own town/city/state/etc. and don't want it off shore either. There is no happy medium.
The reality of the matter is we don't have practical sustainable nuclear fusion yet, we don't have perpetual energy machines, we don't have "zero point modules" from Stargate. Right now the basic solutions we have a nuclear, wind, and solar power, and in some localized areas of the country, geothermal. We need to use technology we currently have until the utopia of fusion becomes practical, because ther only alternative is to either call it a day and go back to living in tents, or to continue using fossil fuels until fusion is made practical and economical.
Me? I consider myself a conservationist: I believe in not halting progress, but using resources wisely. I think we should open up the gulf and east coast for drilling, open up Alaska for drilling, and make it a criminal offense (where the execs and board of director seats are liable) for a company to not clean a spill if one happens, and a criminal offense to not make resonable efforts to leave the land in a hospitable state when the company shuts down and dismantles a pump or pipeline. I believe that we should keep oil-powered automobiles well-maintained (as an example: My car gets 27mpg combined with the stock EPROM profile and folks with sedans which get less fuel mileage criticize me for driving a "gas guzzler" until we compare real-world fuel economy. If I switch to the performance profile I get only 16mpg combined but when I drive that car I obviously don't run that profile all time), and I think that new homes should incorporate geothermal heat pumps and/or solar panels to reduce energy requirements. When I can afford to have my dream house built, I plan to have a photovolatic panels installed on the roof, and solar heating, using underground tanks as a heat sink for heat storage. It only makes sense to for each person to exercise personal responsibility - you can continue to enjoy things like cars, electric lights, heating and AC, etc. and NOT be wasteful. I'm no environazi, but then I am not the other end of the extreme; I conserve whenever I can, and exercise personal responsibility, and when proposals for things like wind farms or incinerator/power generators come up, I vote for those projects (unless there is a stink of political corruption involved).
So, yes, I will continue to make wisecracks about global warming because there are already solutions, but self-proclaimed environmentalist politicians block those solutions at every turn, and expect the problem to be solved through either magick or to be solved by someone else in lands far, far away.
That's pretty funny. I wouldn't be surprised if TBB and allofmp3.com ("IP"-related actions) weren't the straw that broke the camel's back and ultimately lead to sanctions against the US. Even though I'm an American I'd welcome collective sanctions against the US because our government really is getting out of hand with all of the corruption lately, and we (collectively speaking) as voters are not doing what it takes to fix things, because only a minority of us even bother to exercise our responsibility to vote, and the majority of us who do throw our votes away on keeping the same career politicians in office rather than electing new candidates who might actually give a crap about what citizens care about.
Based on recent actions, I'd say that the current administration would claim that American law applies on Mars.
I break the encryption all the time so I can keep copies of my DVDs on my PC so I can transfer them to my PocketPC when I travel. This is actually legal since it is for the purpose of interoperability (see the interoperability clause of the DMCA).
Funny that the **AA organizations love to selectively quote various laws in pursuit of their agenda, and totally disregard:
- Fair Use
- First right of sale
- That when you buy an over-the-counter good, you are BUYING the product, not buying a license to use it
With that said, I'm going to go to the market to buy a license (using **AA/BSA terminology) to eat a banana.
"High Definition" Radio is actually lower-definition than standard FM broadcasts. It is in theory better than AM broadcasts, but if you've ever been fortunate to hear AM Stereo on a receiver which can tune to a .5 or .1Khz resolution, you'd know that AM Stereo fidelity (both dynamic range and frequency response, not to mention excellent channel separation) is actually QUITE good when you have a good, clean signal. However, in a car AM Stereo is far more susceptible to noise than FM ever was or will be, plus AM is notorious for AC hum and interference from weather (especially lightning). It would be a downgrade when you have a quality AM Stereo signal, but where AM Stereo is very scarce (When I had an AM Stereo receiver I could only find one classical station and one classic rock station, and one talk station - I have NO idea why that talk radio station invested in very expensive AM Stereo transmission equipment) I see no reason to not drop analog AM Stereo and use the sidebands for HD Radio instead. This would lead to widespread AM Stereo stations which can boast a much, much larger broadcast range than FM stations can muster.
But drop analog FM in favor of lower-fidelity "high definition" FM radio? Um, no thanks. This is obviously a case of the RIAA's wanting to implement a broadcast flag to prevent recording of over-the-air signals, and to block release of receivers with analog line-level outputs.
Just to nitpick: It's not that it's not possible but just impractical. If it is going to take you >30 hours to find all the rootkits (you may obviously have to put the drive in another machine to detect and remove all of them) or 20 hours to reinstall EVERYTHING on the system (the OS, all apps and patches, restore your data) then obviously it's more sensible to install from a ROI perpsective. If you figure it's going to take say, 12 hours by comparison, it's more logical to spend the time cleaning it.
On the other hand, if you have fully configured disk images on hand and all of the data is backed up, I'd argue that it makes no sense whatsoever to clean the system unless it's something really simple like gater or weatherbug; just re-image the box and restore the data. Done in a half hour in that case.
Watch it, making cracks about global warning is fightin' words!! I got modded down by some treehugger with no sense of humor last time I made a global warming crack.