That hit close to home -- someone in Anonymous is an old Quake player that was familiar with my ancient, long-defunct site. I often joked about a DoS by repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a 33.3 modem there.
And when I made fun of a group of hackers (I was the Don Rickles of the Quake universe) they hacked my site and removed a picture of some Down's Syndrome kids I'd illustrated a story about them with. I'll bet I got more lulz from them hacking me than they did!
But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?
Nah, just laugh in his face. Far worse than a sucker punching and a pissing, 'cause when he gets up that young fellow is going to kick your fat old ass.
Could this be used to reverse or at least slow down age-related hearing loss?
I could be mistaken, but I think what most call "age related" just means that the damage to your ears over the years is cumulative. If I'm right, then yes, it would.
People are living so much longer than they used to
Only statistically; individuals are still having heart attacks in their forties and cancers even among children. The reason the statistics say we're living longer is because some diseases and injuries that would previously have been fatal are more easily treated or have been wiped out, industry has been made to be safer, cars are far safer (note that fatalities have been dropping yearly for decades). OTOH my grandmother was born in 1903 and lived a hundred years.
Statistics only give the odds; there are always outliers. An example is my great uncle, who started smoking at age 12, quit at age 82 and died ten years later. Statistics taken like most people take them would seem to suggest that my uncle was an impossibility, but statistics is just a game of the odds.
Stop putting images in presentations. 99% of the time you don't need them.
If you don't need images you don't need a presentation, speech alone will do fine. Presentations are for things easier to explain with pictures than with words.
Well, we warned you, but NOoooo, you just HAD to do that! Those of us who were good are now all rich, have no DRM, patents, copyrights, lawyers, and trolls don't exist, porn is pointless because all the supermodels want to fuck nerds... Man, I'm glad I didn't follow you!
Gotta love thos Mayans... or in your case, hate 'em.
Well, no, I think you're wrong and have it backwards. Listen to an old LP like Boston or Santana Abraxis and you're going to have to have it cranked to hear the soft parts while the loud parts will be LOUD. Back then, audio engineers did all they could to put that last decibel of dynamic range to use. Despite the fact that CDs have a superior range, today's engineers (like you say) have it all cranked. So you're not going to be listening to Pantera as loud as you listened to Led Zeppelin*.
That said, the only ones who are going to lose hearing from music are the musicians themselves. Most people lose their hearing from their jobs; hammers and chain saws and jet engines and factories are far louder than your super-duper high watt car stereo, and orders of magnatude louder than what comes out of an ear bud.
I'm 60 and have been listening to loud rock all my life and I have no hearing problems, although the Air Force doctors detected a 10% loss in my left ear when my enlistment was up, and I immediately knew why they had instituted the rule that the aircraft always has to be to the left of your vehicle -- it's so you only go deaf in one ear. But even after half a century of Led Zeppelin and Van halen and Ozzie and playing my own guitar, my hearing is about what it was back in 1975 when I got out of the USAF.
If you go hunting, wear ear protection. If you work construction wear ear protection. If you work in a factory it's probably mandated.
But don't worry about the music unless you're the drumer or bass player standing right in front of the speaker for four hours five nights a week. If you are, wear ear protection.
Here in Norway we are required to have it to do online banking:(
I refuse to bank online, and I would ESPECIALLY refuse to bank online if the bank demanded java. If I want to check my balance I'll call them; I never heard of anyone getting rooted over a voice-only phone call.
In fact, I use my credit card as little as possible online. Yes, I'm paranoid... but my computers haven't been infected with anything since my daughter installed the XCP trojan Sony provided on a CD she bought at the store she worked at.
If I do get rooted, there's no sensitive information whatever on my PCs or phone.
I was wondering what good a computer in a stove would do. Remote cooking? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense... leave the food in the shut-off oven to spoil for a few hours, then have the oven running when nobody's home. Yeah, that sounds REAL smart.
That's odd, the Budweiser brewery down in St Louis has no smell at all. Maybe the smell at the Corona brewery is the nastinaess that stays in Budweiser's beer?
Government in general tends to be notoriously inefficient, because for example once a department is granted a budget they are highly incentivized to use ALL of the budget lest it be reduced next year
True, but also true of any large organization, be it the Department of Agriculture, the Catholic Church, or AT&T. And the feds don't interact with LINK recipients, they dole the money to the states, who have offices throughout their respective states. As to efficiency, Catholic Charities runs a soup kitchen here in Springfield, and Bill Gates could lunch there for free if he were so inclined. OTOH you have to prove poverty to get a LINK card.
Additionally, when handing out foodstamps from the perspective of 1million customers, it is very difficult to police abuse effectively
But few if any public assistance offices serve that many recipients. There are ten million people total living in Chicago, and about a dozen human service offices there. And each office has a number of caseworkers, with a "limited" number of cases per worker. The problem is that many states, especially California and Illinois, have severe budget problems. Illinois' stems from the country teetering on another Great Depression right after imprisoning the previous two Governors, who bled the state dry funneling tax money to their rich cronies.
I know folks who eat in the soup kitchen then drink at Felber's later; I've spoken to them. They have to see their caseworker 4 times a year IINM, but the soup kitchen doesn't turn anyone away unless they're drunk or causing a disturbance.
Finally, as a rule departments tend to keep their funding regardless of need; even if a program is particularly effective and the need is cut in half, it is not likely that the budget would likewise be cut in half.
But again, that's not because of being government, it's because bureaucracy grows with any organization's growth, whether public, private, or whatever.
the Bible does indeed call christians to submit to earthly authorities in the proper domains (of which taxation is clearly one).
And taxation is specifically mentioned by Christ himself (I think it was Paul who said to submit to authority, wasn't it? Corinthians?). But again, why complain about the high rate of taxation when it's at a historic low?
I dont believe the first part to be 100% true, as special weight is given to sexual sins (1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18)
Leviticus also points out certain foods that are "unclean" (e.g., pork) that the eating of is a sin, but in one of the books in the NT I'm having trouble finding (my brain isn't working too well today), God tells one of the disciples that nothing he created was ever unclean. But I think we both agree on the sexual sin part, and I can't brag about my sinlessness because I have been and surely will be a sinner, as much as I try not to be and as much as I repent afterwards. Everyone sins, nobody has the right to judge others. We're all guilty.
In our own church we have at least one homosexual (former? or simply abstinate? dont know) and he was completely open about it / past sins thru it when he joined, and our highly conservative church has been very warm towards him AFAIK.
Well, any Christian church is going to be socially conservative, but yours doesn't sound any more conservative than mine. OTOH my lesbian friend has started attending my church because Abundant Faith baptist where she had previously attended seemed to bash homosexuals themselves every other week, and she didn't feel welcome. So there's at least one in my town and likely many more
the requirement is that you do not enslave yourself to wealth.
I don't see how anyone could amass a fortune without enslaving themselves to wealth, unless that was just what God had in store for them. And wealth and power are more addictive than drugs, which can likewise enslave you.
you seem to paint conservatives all with the same brush.
That sounds like right about the time I left. I posted on my own site for maybe a year (with nobody reading it) before discovering that/. had instituted journals. IINM I left after Crawford was banned but before he was reinstated.
And yeah, I agree completely, it was the admins that killed k5 when Foster stopped babysitting them. Whysall wasn't the only sociopath with power there.
But the amount of money they spent is still relevant.
That's true, if the counterfeiter charged $5 for photoshop it's a pretty good bet the buyer wouldn't have paid full price. $75 for office? Maybe.
"should have gotten"? That doesn't sound much different from the usual copyright infringement.
The difference is there's money involved. If I share a file with you it's the same as selling it for $0. That 0$ actually goes to the publisher. If I sell it for $5, that $5 does not, but it's $5 that belongs to the publisher. IMO the "potential profit" the fat cats speak of is bullshit. With counterfeiting like this, there is an actual, real, profit. It was proven that the people were willing to pay for it.
My opinion is that commercial infringement should be illegal, but noncommercial infringement should not.
Ethiopia has about as many Christians per capita as America does.
My point was that maybe Americans aren't so Christian after all. IMO Christianity isn't America's main religion, mammon is. Most Americans worship money, while God merely gets lip service.
And we treated the poor rather better when churches were handing out alms.
Churches still hand out alms, as do individual Christians. My church spent $80,000 providing every family with a kid in the poorest elementary school in the city with two week's groceries over Christmas, because a lot of those kids don't get much food except for school lunches and breakfasts, and go hungry over Christmas break. When you give a dollar to a bum, that's alms as well.
It all went to pot when the government got involved.
My parents, who were kids up in the 1930s, and my grandparents, who were kids about the turn of the century, and the history books, all disagree with you. However, Johnson's "war on poverty" was indeed a clusterfuck that was more a war on the poor themselves.
Now we actively penalize families that dare to actually have both parents
No, that's completely false. It was true under AFDC, but that's been gone since 1996. PWORA got rid of all welfare entitlements.
Damnit, I had just recalibrated my irony meter. Now it went off the scale again.
LOL! That wasn't a misspelling, it was a word you haven't encountered before. An aliterate is a person who can read, but doesn't. Look it up. And as Twain pointed out, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
Not trying to derail the argument and for that reason am glad they modded it down (the "no bonus" buttons don't seem to work). It was meant for the annoyingly undeducated commenter who has probably never finished a single book in his life. I just can't lend much credence to anyone who doesn't know the difference between there, their, and they're. I immediately think "what's that fucking moron doing at slashdot?"
But would you support them raising the minimum wage to a living wage if the corps said we are just gonna replace the workers with machines then so you get a handful making a living wage and tens of thousands out of a job?
It doesn't matter, if a company can replace you with a machine, it will. You don't think they hire people out of the goodness of their hearts, do you? They're going to get the job done as cheaply as possible, meaning they're going to pay as little as they can get away with and replace as many people with machines as possible.
And the time isn't far off when there are very few jobs that need to be done by humans. Look at agriculture -- an eighty acre farm used to hire hundreds of workers, now it only takes a few. The tractors drive themselves these days. Total Recall's "Johnnycab" will be here soon, and cab drivers don't earn shit (they're not considered employees so don't earn minimum wage).
raw material to finished product with no human hands involved and THAT is why I have been arguing capitalism is dead.
Kind of like the guy in the cart in the Holy Grail.
After all what IS capitalism? Its the trading of labor for capital
Your definition differs from both Wikipedia's and Webster's. Wikipedia says "Capitalism is an economic system that is based on the private ownership of capital goods, or the means of production, and the creation of goods and services for profit.[1][2] [3] Elements central to Capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.[4]" Webster says "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market." Labor has nothing to do with it.
bet if you forced all the corps to go to say a $15 an hour payscale that a good 80% of the jobs that are currently low wage would be taken by the machines.
If those jobs could be done by machines, they already would be.
Capitalism isn't dead yet, but it will surely die. I have no clue what will take its place.
As far as I know, this guy's actions had no direct effect on the people who made the original product.
Well, folks on the Pirate Bay usually have a positive effect on media sales (studies have shown this), but in the case of counterfeiters like this guy, there was actual harm. TPB users probably wouldn't buy anyway (unless they liked the movie they pirated and saw the DVD at Walmart), but these people spent money on the product -- money the producers should have gotten but never saw.
Who claims that everything in the world should be free?
I do, with the caveat that it will have to wait until it's possible, when robotics are good anough to do any job.
Well, I can't believe most of what that guy said, but I do believe him about he weed. I know dope dealers on food stamps, none of which is what I'd call "poor", but then, they don't collect taxes on dope sales. Not in Illinois, anyway.
Of course there's abuse, but these assholes would let people starve just to stop the abuse. That's stupid and cruel.
Slashdot Mirror
That hit close to home -- someone in Anonymous is an old Quake player that was familiar with my ancient, long-defunct site. I often joked about a DoS by repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a 33.3 modem there.
And when I made fun of a group of hackers (I was the Don Rickles of the Quake universe) they hacked my site and removed a picture of some Down's Syndrome kids I'd illustrated a story about them with. I'll bet I got more lulz from them hacking me than they did!
But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?
I'm glad (and a little amused) to hear this.
Nah, just laugh in his face. Far worse than a sucker punching and a pissing, 'cause when he gets up that young fellow is going to kick your fat old ass.
More like tugging on Superman's cape
You don't piss into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't fuck with IBM!
"The PaperTab may one today overtake today's tablet." What's wrong with the grammar?? It looks fine to me.
Could this be used to reverse or at least slow down age-related hearing loss?
I could be mistaken, but I think what most call "age related" just means that the damage to your ears over the years is cumulative. If I'm right, then yes, it would.
People are living so much longer than they used to
Only statistically; individuals are still having heart attacks in their forties and cancers even among children. The reason the statistics say we're living longer is because some diseases and injuries that would previously have been fatal are more easily treated or have been wiped out, industry has been made to be safer, cars are far safer (note that fatalities have been dropping yearly for decades). OTOH my grandmother was born in 1903 and lived a hundred years.
Statistics only give the odds; there are always outliers. An example is my great uncle, who started smoking at age 12, quit at age 82 and died ten years later. Statistics taken like most people take them would seem to suggest that my uncle was an impossibility, but statistics is just a game of the odds.
I see you're a duck hunter and not a ball player. In case English is a second language (which I suspect), the word you're looking for is "foul".
The average lawful citizen commits three felonies a day.
I've seen this "statistic" often but I've never seen any logic or citations to back it up. Can you provide some, or should I simply remain skeptical?
Stop putting images in presentations. 99% of the time you don't need them.
If you don't need images you don't need a presentation, speech alone will do fine. Presentations are for things easier to explain with pictures than with words.
Well, we warned you, but NOoooo, you just HAD to do that! Those of us who were good are now all rich, have no DRM, patents, copyrights, lawyers, and trolls don't exist, porn is pointless because all the supermodels want to fuck nerds... Man, I'm glad I didn't follow you!
Gotta love thos Mayans... or in your case, hate 'em.
Well, no, I think you're wrong and have it backwards. Listen to an old LP like Boston or Santana Abraxis and you're going to have to have it cranked to hear the soft parts while the loud parts will be LOUD. Back then, audio engineers did all they could to put that last decibel of dynamic range to use. Despite the fact that CDs have a superior range, today's engineers (like you say) have it all cranked. So you're not going to be listening to Pantera as loud as you listened to Led Zeppelin*.
That said, the only ones who are going to lose hearing from music are the musicians themselves. Most people lose their hearing from their jobs; hammers and chain saws and jet engines and factories are far louder than your super-duper high watt car stereo, and orders of magnatude louder than what comes out of an ear bud.
I'm 60 and have been listening to loud rock all my life and I have no hearing problems, although the Air Force doctors detected a 10% loss in my left ear when my enlistment was up, and I immediately knew why they had instituted the rule that the aircraft always has to be to the left of your vehicle -- it's so you only go deaf in one ear. But even after half a century of Led Zeppelin and Van halen and Ozzie and playing my own guitar, my hearing is about what it was back in 1975 when I got out of the USAF.
If you go hunting, wear ear protection. If you work construction wear ear protection. If you work in a factory it's probably mandated.
But don't worry about the music unless you're the drumer or bass player standing right in front of the speaker for four hours five nights a week. If you are, wear ear protection.
Also, the licensing terms are less restrictive.
Only if you're evil.
Here in Norway we are required to have it to do online banking :(
I refuse to bank online, and I would ESPECIALLY refuse to bank online if the bank demanded java. If I want to check my balance I'll call them; I never heard of anyone getting rooted over a voice-only phone call.
In fact, I use my credit card as little as possible online. Yes, I'm paranoid... but my computers haven't been infected with anything since my daughter installed the XCP trojan Sony provided on a CD she bought at the store she worked at.
If I do get rooted, there's no sensitive information whatever on my PCs or phone.
I was wondering what good a computer in a stove would do. Remote cooking? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense... leave the food in the shut-off oven to spoil for a few hours, then have the oven running when nobody's home. Yeah, that sounds REAL smart.
That's odd, the Budweiser brewery down in St Louis has no smell at all. Maybe the smell at the Corona brewery is the nastinaess that stays in Budweiser's beer?
Government in general tends to be notoriously inefficient, because for example once a department is granted a budget they are highly incentivized to use ALL of the budget lest it be reduced next year
True, but also true of any large organization, be it the Department of Agriculture, the Catholic Church, or AT&T. And the feds don't interact with LINK recipients, they dole the money to the states, who have offices throughout their respective states. As to efficiency, Catholic Charities runs a soup kitchen here in Springfield, and Bill Gates could lunch there for free if he were so inclined. OTOH you have to prove poverty to get a LINK card.
Additionally, when handing out foodstamps from the perspective of 1million customers, it is very difficult to police abuse effectively
But few if any public assistance offices serve that many recipients. There are ten million people total living in Chicago, and about a dozen human service offices there. And each office has a number of caseworkers, with a "limited" number of cases per worker. The problem is that many states, especially California and Illinois, have severe budget problems. Illinois' stems from the country teetering on another Great Depression right after imprisoning the previous two Governors, who bled the state dry funneling tax money to their rich cronies.
I know folks who eat in the soup kitchen then drink at Felber's later; I've spoken to them. They have to see their caseworker 4 times a year IINM, but the soup kitchen doesn't turn anyone away unless they're drunk or causing a disturbance.
Finally, as a rule departments tend to keep their funding regardless of need; even if a program is particularly effective and the need is cut in half, it is not likely that the budget would likewise be cut in half.
But again, that's not because of being government, it's because bureaucracy grows with any organization's growth, whether public, private, or whatever.
the Bible does indeed call christians to submit to earthly authorities in the proper domains (of which taxation is clearly one).
And taxation is specifically mentioned by Christ himself (I think it was Paul who said to submit to authority, wasn't it? Corinthians?). But again, why complain about the high rate of taxation when it's at a historic low?
I dont believe the first part to be 100% true, as special weight is given to sexual sins (1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18)
Leviticus also points out certain foods that are "unclean" (e.g., pork) that the eating of is a sin, but in one of the books in the NT I'm having trouble finding (my brain isn't working too well today), God tells one of the disciples that nothing he created was ever unclean. But I think we both agree on the sexual sin part, and I can't brag about my sinlessness because I have been and surely will be a sinner, as much as I try not to be and as much as I repent afterwards. Everyone sins, nobody has the right to judge others. We're all guilty.
In our own church we have at least one homosexual (former? or simply abstinate? dont know) and he was completely open about it / past sins thru it when he joined, and our highly conservative church has been very warm towards him AFAIK.
Well, any Christian church is going to be socially conservative, but yours doesn't sound any more conservative than mine. OTOH my lesbian friend has started attending my church because Abundant Faith baptist where she had previously attended seemed to bash homosexuals themselves every other week, and she didn't feel welcome. So there's at least one in my town and likely many more
the requirement is that you do not enslave yourself to wealth.
I don't see how anyone could amass a fortune without enslaving themselves to wealth, unless that was just what God had in store for them. And wealth and power are more addictive than drugs, which can likewise enslave you.
you seem to paint conservatives all with the same brush.
It seems to me th
No, it's just that every time I use "aliterate" someone comments about misspelling "illiterate".
That sounds like right about the time I left. I posted on my own site for maybe a year (with nobody reading it) before discovering that /. had instituted journals. IINM I left after Crawford was banned but before he was reinstated.
And yeah, I agree completely, it was the admins that killed k5 when Foster stopped babysitting them. Whysall wasn't the only sociopath with power there.
Once bitten, twice shy.
But the amount of money they spent is still relevant.
That's true, if the counterfeiter charged $5 for photoshop it's a pretty good bet the buyer wouldn't have paid full price. $75 for office? Maybe.
"should have gotten"? That doesn't sound much different from the usual copyright infringement.
The difference is there's money involved. If I share a file with you it's the same as selling it for $0. That 0$ actually goes to the publisher. If I sell it for $5, that $5 does not, but it's $5 that belongs to the publisher. IMO the "potential profit" the fat cats speak of is bullshit. With counterfeiting like this, there is an actual, real, profit. It was proven that the people were willing to pay for it.
My opinion is that commercial infringement should be illegal, but noncommercial infringement should not.
Ethiopia has about as many Christians per capita as America does.
My point was that maybe Americans aren't so Christian after all. IMO Christianity isn't America's main religion, mammon is. Most Americans worship money, while God merely gets lip service.
And we treated the poor rather better when churches were handing out alms.
Churches still hand out alms, as do individual Christians. My church spent $80,000 providing every family with a kid in the poorest elementary school in the city with two week's groceries over Christmas, because a lot of those kids don't get much food except for school lunches and breakfasts, and go hungry over Christmas break. When you give a dollar to a bum, that's alms as well.
It all went to pot when the government got involved.
My parents, who were kids up in the 1930s, and my grandparents, who were kids about the turn of the century, and the history books, all disagree with you. However, Johnson's "war on poverty" was indeed a clusterfuck that was more a war on the poor themselves.
Now we actively penalize families that dare to actually have both parents
No, that's completely false. It was true under AFDC, but that's been gone since 1996. PWORA got rid of all welfare entitlements.
Damnit, I had just recalibrated my irony meter. Now it went off the scale again.
LOL! That wasn't a misspelling, it was a word you haven't encountered before. An aliterate is a person who can read, but doesn't. Look it up. And as Twain pointed out, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
Not trying to derail the argument and for that reason am glad they modded it down (the "no bonus" buttons don't seem to work). It was meant for the annoyingly undeducated commenter who has probably never finished a single book in his life. I just can't lend much credence to anyone who doesn't know the difference between there, their, and they're. I immediately think "what's that fucking moron doing at slashdot?"
But would you support them raising the minimum wage to a living wage if the corps said we are just gonna replace the workers with machines then so you get a handful making a living wage and tens of thousands out of a job?
It doesn't matter, if a company can replace you with a machine, it will. You don't think they hire people out of the goodness of their hearts, do you? They're going to get the job done as cheaply as possible, meaning they're going to pay as little as they can get away with and replace as many people with machines as possible.
And the time isn't far off when there are very few jobs that need to be done by humans. Look at agriculture -- an eighty acre farm used to hire hundreds of workers, now it only takes a few. The tractors drive themselves these days. Total Recall's "Johnnycab" will be here soon, and cab drivers don't earn shit (they're not considered employees so don't earn minimum wage).
raw material to finished product with no human hands involved and THAT is why I have been arguing capitalism is dead.
Kind of like the guy in the cart in the Holy Grail.
After all what IS capitalism? Its the trading of labor for capital
Your definition differs from both Wikipedia's and Webster's. Wikipedia says "Capitalism is an economic system that is based on the private ownership of capital goods, or the means of production, and the creation of goods and services for profit.[1][2] [3] Elements central to Capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.[4]" Webster says "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market." Labor has nothing to do with it.
bet if you forced all the corps to go to say a $15 an hour payscale that a good 80% of the jobs that are currently low wage would be taken by the machines.
If those jobs could be done by machines, they already would be.
Capitalism isn't dead yet, but it will surely die. I have no clue what will take its place.
As far as I know, this guy's actions had no direct effect on the people who made the original product.
Well, folks on the Pirate Bay usually have a positive effect on media sales (studies have shown this), but in the case of counterfeiters like this guy, there was actual harm. TPB users probably wouldn't buy anyway (unless they liked the movie they pirated and saw the DVD at Walmart), but these people spent money on the product -- money the producers should have gotten but never saw.
Who claims that everything in the world should be free?
I do, with the caveat that it will have to wait until it's possible, when robotics are good anough to do any job.
Well, I can't believe most of what that guy said, but I do believe him about he weed. I know dope dealers on food stamps, none of which is what I'd call "poor", but then, they don't collect taxes on dope sales. Not in Illinois, anyway.
Of course there's abuse, but these assholes would let people starve just to stop the abuse. That's stupid and cruel.