A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
I suppose this guy had every right to carry his loaded firearm within shooting distance of Obama without being removed from the premises. Secret Service would not agree with you.
While it's quite possible that this lady has done nothing legally wrong, I'm afraid she's going to find herself in a similar legal boat as the guys from TPB. Her blog serves no purpose but to obstruct and foil the operations of police activity, not to mention puts the lives of these police officers in jeopardy. It's hard to think what her motive could be.
Another similar case was the website which listed the names and home and office addresses of abortionists. Just for informational purposes, of course... But some lunatics went out and killed several of those doctors. The website was held accountable for incitement.
While we're quote mining, let's look at the full quote:
"We are not seeing any technical reasons for why they are returning Linux machines so...we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux. We've been quite pleased with the stability and technical soundness of the Linux machines."
Why would Finch be talking about technical reasons for returns at all? It doesn't make any sense in context except to somehow prop up the claim that there is not a significant difference between the return rates of each OS. But there's no reason to hedge here if there is really no difference. The biggest question is what those ellipses gloss over.
Naturally, given that the same hardware is running both Windows and Linux, you would not expect to see very different return rates based on hardware problems alone. But why the conditional answer?
Microsoft's Turner said that Linux netbooks are being returned at a rate 4 to 5 times higher than Windows netbooks. Dell hasn't disputed this fact at all. Linux netbooks *are* being returned at a very high rate, and Dell's Finch says so right in the article:
Where consumers have returned machines, Finch said, it wasn't because of technical problems but because they'd bought a low-priced machine expecting Windows and opened it to find a different interface.
The difference is that people are returning the Windows netbooks because of technical reasons (broken hardware) and Linux netbooks because they don't want Linux.
That's a win for Microsoft, no matter how you spin it.
What is needed is a form of ID that is acceptable nationwide, is not replicable, and can be used in business and official situations. Many times a National ID card has been proposed only to be shot down by luddites and paranoid conservatives who feel any identification system is somehow related to the Mark of the Beast. Hopefully the latest rising tide of anti-conservatism will wash away these people.
If you want to see what happens when heuristic identification is used in lieu of formal identification, just consider the No-Fly list which only identifies prohibited flyers by name. This system is a complete mess with people who have similar names to terrorists now needing to pass through extra layers of security and hassle for nothing more than having the wrong name.
The SSN is only a problem because it is also your TIN. Other than that, it would be an ideal identifier. What we need is not more laws preventing the use of certain identifying numbers, but a better system of identification that doesn't expose one to fraud. A National ID card would be extremely helpful in this regard.
It's not just for bandwidth, but for the total maintenance of the system.
If you read deeper, there is a cap on fees per case of $2.40, so (using their example) if a case has 50 pages of documents, you would only need to pay $2.40 instead of the full $4.00.
I'm sure they would love someone to take this responsibility off their hands. Here's their FAQ for usage:
What are the acceptable uses of the data obtained from the PACER system? The PACER system provides electronic access to case information from federal courts across the United States. The information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission. However, the PACER customer assumes all responsibility for consequences that arise from use of the data.
There are only a handful of things that the government should be involved in. This is definitely one of them.
I never bought into any of this re-imagining crap. It's not like how Lucas was able to squeeze more story out of the Star Wars trilogy by adding in effects that brought it up to modern-day standards (and fixed the story in parts that didn't make sense). The re-imagining of BSG was almost a totally different show with only the thinnest of veneers tying it to the original series.
I liked the show, though it was definitely too dark (lighting-wise) and the overuse of 'frak' was annoying, but I felt that it could probably stand on its own as a series.
I went back and watched several Star Trek TOS episodes and found them to be clever, campy, and very forward thinking. If I were to watch TOS and DS9 back to back, I think I'd have the same reaction as I did to BSG. The difference, of course, is that there was the excellent TNG series which bridged the gap between TOS and DS9. Any re-imagining of a series that changes the fundamental aspects of the base concept is going to run into this problem.
It's not a re-imagining. It's a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept. I think it is nothing short of a rip off for those who loved the original series. It's also a rip off for those who like the new series itself but are forced to associate it with the original series.
It sounds interesting, but I have to wonder about the long-term viability of a game based on legitimizing trolls. As we've seen on many discussion boards, trolls can cause a huge disruption with their presence. They say outlandish things, or do things which irk the existing audience. This leads to retaliation and "troll hunting" which doesn't serve the purpose of discussion or anything else. In the end, the troll is as successful in proportion to the disruption he causes.
So what happens when the prime motivator is to be a troll? There were several pure troll sites a few years back. Adequacy.org, Kuro5hin, and GNAA were all sites dedicated specifically to trolling. It ended up being mostly a circlejerk and these sites are no longer around or are so diminished in audience as to be moot.
I have to wonder what the result will be in APB when everyone is seeking their 15 minutes of fame. It sounds like something that may be fun for a short while, but when everyone is out to whore attention, the players lose their personal connections to each other.
When it comes to having a choice between private enterprise providing a good or service and the government providing that good or service, I tend to lean towards the choice that doesn't expand the government. I can always choose whether to use a particular company's service, but I can't choose easily to ignore the government.
Maybe that makes me out of touch with today's society, but I just don't think growing the size and powers of government is a good idea.
Which is why I think enabling ISPs to police themselves is a good idea. I would much rather ISPs who I can choose from do this monitoring than the government which I can't.
Asia (well, Japan and Korea) is a huge gaming market for several reasons.
First, games allow a user to step outside of themselves for a short period. One of the central tenets of Asian culture is adherence to hive mentality. If one were to step outside of what is universally acceptable, they would find themselves shunned, ridiculed, and possibly physically threatened. Gaming provides an outlet for the frustration brought on by such external oppression. Now, instead of being Kenji the juku slave, he can be Wang Hung Lo the Lvl40 Mage.
Another reason is that gaming takes the player out of the milieu of socializing with peers and puts the gamer in a very secluded world. This is a well known phenomenon and is used to great effect in the military where removing the soldiers from the battlefield allows them to make kills remotely without suffering from the shock of actually killing someone. The technical term for this mental state is solipsism. Most gamers are losers in real life and need to find a way to either take revenge on their tormentors or to become something they can never be. Games provide this in spades. A young kid can lead a platoon into battle or he can pick off enemies as a sniper. To the gamer, the other objects on the screen have no significance as other human beings. They are just another part of the game.
The last reason that Asians find gaming to be more rewarding (and thus take part in it more than North Americans) is that their popular culture lends itself to the cartoonish graphical descriptions of games. Anything from wide-eyed Cho-bits to tentacle rape fantasies to huge mechanical suits to feminized men, Asian culture identifies these things as good, and the games can easily reflect them. Real life would frown on rape, but games give some players the ability to practice their sociopathic misogyny on a carefully-drawn crying anime character. North Americans identify strongly with such archetypes like gangsters, so games like GTA appeal very directly to that feeling. Asians, OTOH, due to their small stature and relatively weak political power, want to augment their bodies (through Gundam suits, for example) and take out their aggressions on their oppressors (as in Boss Kancho).
To sum up, it's not necessary to emulate or try to learn anything from Asian gaming. Their culture is fundamentally different from ours, so things like negative points for kills would only frustrate American players. We have our ways, they have theirs.
While there are a lot of Chinese women on there, they are mostly Americanized Chinese, so it's not like the pristine virgins of the Chinese mainland are at risk of ogling eyes.
Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.
Sadly to say, for all the people eagerly anticipating BattleCruiser 3000AD, the game sucked.
Let's hope Steenberg and his little game are headed in the right direction.
Yes, it is probably not the best idea to upload crash information without user consent, but seriously folks, it's crash data. It's a way for Palm to find bugs in the field that would have been undiscovered in the testing labs.
Google does this all the time. Oh sure, it happens on the server where you can't see it, but the bugs occur and they need some way to log them.
Man jailed for ID theft. This is a good outcome, I'd say.
The Limewire connection is only interesting because it shows social vulnerabilities inherent in the filesharing mechanism. As long as you make it simple to share files and folders, people are going to be lazy and end up sharing files that they never meant to share.
Once your identity is stolen, it doesn't matter what precautions the leaking company took or what their reputation is.
And if your identity hasn't been stolen yet, it might be better to go with a company that has suffered an attack because they likely won't make the same mistake twice.
Reputations are just rationalizations. Real security is not measurable by reputation.
None of my systems have root passwords. But I am not vulnerable.
While this may, at first glance, seem to be foolhardy, the key to this is that there are no root accounts on any of my systems. A root account is itself the biggest vulnerability, exploitable by any root-access flaw. By removing the account and accounts like it, there is no surface area to attack. At least, there is no vulnerability that puts my whole system at risk.
Is it difficult to work without root access? No, not really. The key is to take frequent backups to return the system to a known state if there is any chance of infiltration.
Not counting this post, as of the time I write this reply to you, a full 40% of the comments in this article are about the topic I brought up in my original comment.
Maybe you find discussing currency farming something worthy of discussion. Good for you. I'm glad you find it to be so. I don't think I said anything to the contrary in my original post.
So let's recap. My post is about the topic in question. My post is one of the most-commented upon in this whole thread. And my post is fully at the mercy of the moderators, who while attractive and successful, are smart and well-skilled at sexual arts.
This kind of petty problem is a luxury for us to fret over. I'm not going to say we should give all our money away and live like monks or that we should be depressed all the time because someone somewhere is suffering, but worrying about how some gamer will be enjoying a game less because someone else is buying their way to the top of the rankings? Well, that's really something to be thankful for.
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
Let's see. An investment firm is refusing to invest in you because you wasted money on parking tickets instead of investing a little and gotten a parking space.
This is a slippery slope you're walking. Assuming that you want to demand that employers have concrete reasons to deny you a job, you must give them access to your medical history as well as the history of your family? Sure, they can't deny you because they can only show a correlation between bad credit and bad job performance, but then should they be able to dig deeper into the reason for your bad credit?
If you are going to prevent them from accessing personal information, where does this stop? Can they request job performance information from your previous employers? Should they even be able to ask you questions in the interview, and if so, can they reject you on the basis that you refuse to answer a question?
If you think that an employer can't do due diligence on a hire, what can they do?
An employee who is frequently ill or absent due to injuries sustained in his private activities is a liability. However, I would be uncomfortable allowing a company to access his medical records searching for causation. I'm much more willing to allow the company to make judgments based on correlations which tend to be fuzzier and allow for some flexibility in interpretation.
In this economy, there are literally dozens of out of work people applying for just about every opening. Assuming you were turned down for a position, how would you ever know that the reason was due to a background check? Maybe you smell bad or your facial hair is unkempt. Maybe your fingers were stained orange from the Cheetos you eat all day long in your mom's basement. It could have been your broken flip-flops or the raggedy jeans you haven't washed since January. It's possible that the interviewer was put off by your labored breathing and the whistling sound from your nose. I'd bet the abundance of nose hairs was also a factor. While perfectly natural, it probably wasn't the best idea to let loose a SBD in the interview. Shampooing with RID or conditioning with Nix might have kept those jumping lice to a minimum. Finally, ranting about the GPL and Open Source might be friendly banter here on Slashdot, the interviewer was probably asking about the festering open sore on your leg.
It reminds me of people who send random requests under the FOIA. Sure, there is a chance that you may hit on something, but without any actual evidence, how could you ever really know whether there is something there?
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For companies that would otherwise create IP based on GPL-licensed software, there is almost no distinction between commercialization and proprietary. They cannot commercialize their IP because to do so would force them to make the IP non-proprietary. For companies that create products, the two typically go hand in hand.
However, you're completely correct in pointing out that GPL-licensed software can be commercialized. Linux itself would not exists as it is today if it weren't for the commercialization of it by companies like RedHat and Suse (and Caldera, et al). Commercialization has a very big positive effect on GPL-licensed software. It actually funds the development of the product so as to be useful for the greatest number of customers.
But the GPL itself was written to protect software freedom, not specifically to enable (or destroy) commercialization of the software. It prevents the software from being made proprietary, and through prickly requirements like opening of all code which comes into linkage with GPL-covered software it ensures that the software remains free.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose this guy had every right to carry his loaded firearm within shooting distance of Obama without being removed from the premises. Secret Service would not agree with you.
While it's quite possible that this lady has done nothing legally wrong, I'm afraid she's going to find herself in a similar legal boat as the guys from TPB. Her blog serves no purpose but to obstruct and foil the operations of police activity, not to mention puts the lives of these police officers in jeopardy. It's hard to think what her motive could be.
Another similar case was the website which listed the names and home and office addresses of abortionists. Just for informational purposes, of course... But some lunatics went out and killed several of those doctors. The website was held accountable for incitement.
This website is, in its own way, inciteful.
While we're quote mining, let's look at the full quote:
Why would Finch be talking about technical reasons for returns at all? It doesn't make any sense in context except to somehow prop up the claim that there is not a significant difference between the return rates of each OS. But there's no reason to hedge here if there is really no difference. The biggest question is what those ellipses gloss over.
Naturally, given that the same hardware is running both Windows and Linux, you would not expect to see very different return rates based on hardware problems alone. But why the conditional answer?
Microsoft's Turner said that Linux netbooks are being returned at a rate 4 to 5 times higher than Windows netbooks. Dell hasn't disputed this fact at all. Linux netbooks *are* being returned at a very high rate, and Dell's Finch says so right in the article:
The difference is that people are returning the Windows netbooks because of technical reasons (broken hardware) and Linux netbooks because they don't want Linux.
That's a win for Microsoft, no matter how you spin it.
What is needed is a form of ID that is acceptable nationwide, is not replicable, and can be used in business and official situations. Many times a National ID card has been proposed only to be shot down by luddites and paranoid conservatives who feel any identification system is somehow related to the Mark of the Beast. Hopefully the latest rising tide of anti-conservatism will wash away these people.
If you want to see what happens when heuristic identification is used in lieu of formal identification, just consider the No-Fly list which only identifies prohibited flyers by name. This system is a complete mess with people who have similar names to terrorists now needing to pass through extra layers of security and hassle for nothing more than having the wrong name.
The SSN is only a problem because it is also your TIN. Other than that, it would be an ideal identifier. What we need is not more laws preventing the use of certain identifying numbers, but a better system of identification that doesn't expose one to fraud. A National ID card would be extremely helpful in this regard.
It's not just for bandwidth, but for the total maintenance of the system.
If you read deeper, there is a cap on fees per case of $2.40, so (using their example) if a case has 50 pages of documents, you would only need to pay $2.40 instead of the full $4.00.
I'm sure they would love someone to take this responsibility off their hands. Here's their FAQ for usage:
There are only a handful of things that the government should be involved in. This is definitely one of them.
I never bought into any of this re-imagining crap. It's not like how Lucas was able to squeeze more story out of the Star Wars trilogy by adding in effects that brought it up to modern-day standards (and fixed the story in parts that didn't make sense). The re-imagining of BSG was almost a totally different show with only the thinnest of veneers tying it to the original series.
I liked the show, though it was definitely too dark (lighting-wise) and the overuse of 'frak' was annoying, but I felt that it could probably stand on its own as a series.
I went back and watched several Star Trek TOS episodes and found them to be clever, campy, and very forward thinking. If I were to watch TOS and DS9 back to back, I think I'd have the same reaction as I did to BSG. The difference, of course, is that there was the excellent TNG series which bridged the gap between TOS and DS9. Any re-imagining of a series that changes the fundamental aspects of the base concept is going to run into this problem.
It's not a re-imagining. It's a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept. I think it is nothing short of a rip off for those who loved the original series. It's also a rip off for those who like the new series itself but are forced to associate it with the original series.
It sounds interesting, but I have to wonder about the long-term viability of a game based on legitimizing trolls. As we've seen on many discussion boards, trolls can cause a huge disruption with their presence. They say outlandish things, or do things which irk the existing audience. This leads to retaliation and "troll hunting" which doesn't serve the purpose of discussion or anything else. In the end, the troll is as successful in proportion to the disruption he causes.
So what happens when the prime motivator is to be a troll? There were several pure troll sites a few years back. Adequacy.org, Kuro5hin, and GNAA were all sites dedicated specifically to trolling. It ended up being mostly a circlejerk and these sites are no longer around or are so diminished in audience as to be moot.
I have to wonder what the result will be in APB when everyone is seeking their 15 minutes of fame. It sounds like something that may be fun for a short while, but when everyone is out to whore attention, the players lose their personal connections to each other.
When it comes to having a choice between private enterprise providing a good or service and the government providing that good or service, I tend to lean towards the choice that doesn't expand the government. I can always choose whether to use a particular company's service, but I can't choose easily to ignore the government.
Maybe that makes me out of touch with today's society, but I just don't think growing the size and powers of government is a good idea.
Which is why I think enabling ISPs to police themselves is a good idea. I would much rather ISPs who I can choose from do this monitoring than the government which I can't.
Asia (well, Japan and Korea) is a huge gaming market for several reasons.
First, games allow a user to step outside of themselves for a short period. One of the central tenets of Asian culture is adherence to hive mentality. If one were to step outside of what is universally acceptable, they would find themselves shunned, ridiculed, and possibly physically threatened. Gaming provides an outlet for the frustration brought on by such external oppression. Now, instead of being Kenji the juku slave, he can be Wang Hung Lo the Lvl40 Mage.
Another reason is that gaming takes the player out of the milieu of socializing with peers and puts the gamer in a very secluded world. This is a well known phenomenon and is used to great effect in the military where removing the soldiers from the battlefield allows them to make kills remotely without suffering from the shock of actually killing someone. The technical term for this mental state is solipsism. Most gamers are losers in real life and need to find a way to either take revenge on their tormentors or to become something they can never be. Games provide this in spades. A young kid can lead a platoon into battle or he can pick off enemies as a sniper. To the gamer, the other objects on the screen have no significance as other human beings. They are just another part of the game.
The last reason that Asians find gaming to be more rewarding (and thus take part in it more than North Americans) is that their popular culture lends itself to the cartoonish graphical descriptions of games. Anything from wide-eyed Cho-bits to tentacle rape fantasies to huge mechanical suits to feminized men, Asian culture identifies these things as good, and the games can easily reflect them. Real life would frown on rape, but games give some players the ability to practice their sociopathic misogyny on a carefully-drawn crying anime character. North Americans identify strongly with such archetypes like gangsters, so games like GTA appeal very directly to that feeling. Asians, OTOH, due to their small stature and relatively weak political power, want to augment their bodies (through Gundam suits, for example) and take out their aggressions on their oppressors (as in Boss Kancho).
To sum up, it's not necessary to emulate or try to learn anything from Asian gaming. Their culture is fundamentally different from ours, so things like negative points for kills would only frustrate American players. We have our ways, they have theirs.
www.asianthumbs.org
While there are a lot of Chinese women on there, they are mostly Americanized Chinese, so it's not like the pristine virgins of the Chinese mainland are at risk of ogling eyes.
It makes my blood run cold.
It lightens the skin of black folks. It sharpens the zits of the chubby white girls. And it advertises for Pedro.
This is magic at its finest!
Derek Smart. BattleCruiser 3000AD
Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.
Sadly to say, for all the people eagerly anticipating BattleCruiser 3000AD, the game sucked.
Let's hope Steenberg and his little game are headed in the right direction.
Yes, it is probably not the best idea to upload crash information without user consent, but seriously folks, it's crash data. It's a way for Palm to find bugs in the field that would have been undiscovered in the testing labs.
Google does this all the time. Oh sure, it happens on the server where you can't see it, but the bugs occur and they need some way to log them.
Man jailed for ID theft. This is a good outcome, I'd say.
The Limewire connection is only interesting because it shows social vulnerabilities inherent in the filesharing mechanism. As long as you make it simple to share files and folders, people are going to be lazy and end up sharing files that they never meant to share.
Once your identity is stolen, it doesn't matter what precautions the leaking company took or what their reputation is.
And if your identity hasn't been stolen yet, it might be better to go with a company that has suffered an attack because they likely won't make the same mistake twice.
Reputations are just rationalizations. Real security is not measurable by reputation.
This is an ex-bee!
None of my systems have root passwords. But I am not vulnerable.
While this may, at first glance, seem to be foolhardy, the key to this is that there are no root accounts on any of my systems. A root account is itself the biggest vulnerability, exploitable by any root-access flaw. By removing the account and accounts like it, there is no surface area to attack. At least, there is no vulnerability that puts my whole system at risk.
Is it difficult to work without root access? No, not really. The key is to take frequent backups to return the system to a known state if there is any chance of infiltration.
Not counting this post, as of the time I write this reply to you, a full 40% of the comments in this article are about the topic I brought up in my original comment.
Maybe you find discussing currency farming something worthy of discussion. Good for you. I'm glad you find it to be so. I don't think I said anything to the contrary in my original post.
So let's recap. My post is about the topic in question. My post is one of the most-commented upon in this whole thread. And my post is fully at the mercy of the moderators, who while attractive and successful, are smart and well-skilled at sexual arts.
So double-dumbass on you too.
This kind of petty problem is a luxury for us to fret over. I'm not going to say we should give all our money away and live like monks or that we should be depressed all the time because someone somewhere is suffering, but worrying about how some gamer will be enjoying a game less because someone else is buying their way to the top of the rankings? Well, that's really something to be thankful for.
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
Let's see. An investment firm is refusing to invest in you because you wasted money on parking tickets instead of investing a little and gotten a parking space.
2001 wasn't 1998, you know.
This is a slippery slope you're walking. Assuming that you want to demand that employers have concrete reasons to deny you a job, you must give them access to your medical history as well as the history of your family? Sure, they can't deny you because they can only show a correlation between bad credit and bad job performance, but then should they be able to dig deeper into the reason for your bad credit?
If you are going to prevent them from accessing personal information, where does this stop? Can they request job performance information from your previous employers? Should they even be able to ask you questions in the interview, and if so, can they reject you on the basis that you refuse to answer a question?
If you think that an employer can't do due diligence on a hire, what can they do?
An employee who is frequently ill or absent due to injuries sustained in his private activities is a liability. However, I would be uncomfortable allowing a company to access his medical records searching for causation. I'm much more willing to allow the company to make judgments based on correlations which tend to be fuzzier and allow for some flexibility in interpretation.
In this economy, there are literally dozens of out of work people applying for just about every opening. Assuming you were turned down for a position, how would you ever know that the reason was due to a background check? Maybe you smell bad or your facial hair is unkempt. Maybe your fingers were stained orange from the Cheetos you eat all day long in your mom's basement. It could have been your broken flip-flops or the raggedy jeans you haven't washed since January. It's possible that the interviewer was put off by your labored breathing and the whistling sound from your nose. I'd bet the abundance of nose hairs was also a factor. While perfectly natural, it probably wasn't the best idea to let loose a SBD in the interview. Shampooing with RID or conditioning with Nix might have kept those jumping lice to a minimum. Finally, ranting about the GPL and Open Source might be friendly banter here on Slashdot, the interviewer was probably asking about the festering open sore on your leg.
It reminds me of people who send random requests under the FOIA. Sure, there is a chance that you may hit on something, but without any actual evidence, how could you ever really know whether there is something there?
For companies that would otherwise create IP based on GPL-licensed software, there is almost no distinction between commercialization and proprietary. They cannot commercialize their IP because to do so would force them to make the IP non-proprietary. For companies that create products, the two typically go hand in hand.
However, you're completely correct in pointing out that GPL-licensed software can be commercialized. Linux itself would not exists as it is today if it weren't for the commercialization of it by companies like RedHat and Suse (and Caldera, et al). Commercialization has a very big positive effect on GPL-licensed software. It actually funds the development of the product so as to be useful for the greatest number of customers.
But the GPL itself was written to protect software freedom, not specifically to enable (or destroy) commercialization of the software. It prevents the software from being made proprietary, and through prickly requirements like opening of all code which comes into linkage with GPL-covered software it ensures that the software remains free.