WiFi at these places is a privilege, not a right. You don't get to just buy a $2 drink, take over a table and hog it for hours during the busier part of the day. These cafes should have made it clear that if you want to stay during the busier time, that's fine and welcome, but you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee.
It'd be painful in the short term because they'd have to tell some of these entitled hoity-toities that it is a privilege, not an entitlement and if they want to complain they can just GTFO.
Verizon would have been better served all along by approaching this from a positive angle along the lines of "how we can get your content to our users, faster" than "you are screwing us by not paying us." Everyone likes a company that says "what can we do for you" a lot better than one that stamps its feet like a brat.
I am one. So are about half of the people I associate with, most of whom believe similar along doctrinal lines.
Thanks for playing...
Don't blame Christianity for any of this
on
Child Porn As a Weapon
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This stems from the completely broken Christian concept that children are innocent and therefore must be protected at all costs from anything and everything.
No, that is a Victorian Era concept. Christian theology and philosophy hold that no one is born innocent and hold that no good can be achieved through evil means (which is what happens when innocent people are sacrificed "for the children.") This is basic theology 101 stuff.
Law enforcement and intelligence were too compartmentalized according to the 9/11 commission. They didn't share enough data, didn't make it available across the board and all that. Problem is that the more sharing there is, the more likely some asshat in a place like the Pentagon or FBI can leak data from the CIA or military intelligence (NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, etc.) or vice versa.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone on Slashdot. It's generally taken for granted by most posters here that the more people that can get on a system, the more likely it is that security will be compromised.
Of course, the solution is quite simple. We treat whistleblowers who revealed classified docs the way we should treat people who send prisoners off for rendition: you are judged by the outcome, not your intentions. If you reveal classified docs that show clear, unequivocal felonious behavior, you get pardoned for breaking the law. If you misinterpreted it and are wrong, you get sent to Leavenworth for the better part of the remainder of your life.
Google needs to fully open source it
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Google needs to release the source code to their client. I think if it were available as a reference implementation to be tweaked and forked for free that it could be turned into something very useful, especially in corporate settings.
If Google was that brazen in attempting to give major ISPs marching orders, you would see all of the major players throttle their bandwidth and prioritize Yahoo and Bing just to make it clear that Google can't control them.
Norman Spinrad has some interesting points about how the publishing and book sales businesses operate. They're like the music industry, only a lot worse in how they calculate the acceptable level of risk... even if an author has proved to be a fairly safe bet.
would be to make a game that is extremely realistic about Afghanistan. From the ridiculous rules of engagement like now having to carry rifles in "non-threatening ways" (kinda stupid when your guys are on patrol for actual, armed Taliban fighters!), to fighting in a highly fluid, tribal society where the AI bots that fight alongside you at the start of the mission will turn on you if the enemy gets too much of an advantage. Throw in heaping doses of scenes like Taliban AND our "allies" cutting off women's noses and ears for leaving their husbands and you'll have the moodiest, most depressing, "WHY ARE WE HERE" war game ever.
You couldn't make a propaganda film has as effective.
Walled gardens are safer than open spaces. Facebook is a walled garden. Open Source Project X is an open space. Facebook is safer for my children than Project X.
As I said, it's about perception. There's stopping someone from signing up as "Barry Obama" from the Great State of Kenya, devout Islamic family man.
Facebook provides a few things, in no small part because of its sheer size:
1) Ability to find most of the people you know easily. 2) Ability to share a lot of information in a really, really easy with people. 3) Ability to do web-based social gaming in that same context. 4) Bring together basic blog and community organizing features.
The open source hurdles are really:
1) Discovering users. 2) Sharing assets between sites. 3) Coordinating communications between sites (if one wants to create something analogous to Facebook's wall).
Those are big hurdles, especially the ability (or perception of being able) to accurately discover other users one knows. Most of us here know that there is no guarantee that someone who claims to be a particular identity on Facebook isn't Chester the Molester, an enemy masquerading as a friend who didn't have an account before, etc. However, Facebook is perceived as safe by a lot of people, and an open environment would be perceived of in quite different terms.
Is to have the FTC and FCC start gaining real statutory powers to mandate product design. It's one thing like with the FCC to have a program that requires that wireless devices follow certain guidelines to keep from interfering with one another or emergency responders, but this? No way. This sort of mandate would only be the beginning of the federal government telling software developers how to do their job in ways that are dubiously related to the common good.
and start accepting the fact that intelligence is not evenly distributed. Not in groups, not even in individuals. People of average or below average are never going to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. They're not going to compete for jobs in high-paying, intelligence and education-heavy fields because you cannot educate a mind of low capacity.
The fact is that our policies are being set by a bunch of arrogant elitists who think that if they cram down enough education, they can make a clean, office-dwelling, never-get-your-hands-dirty, middle class hipster society and outsource all of the menial labor, manufacturing and other jobs that people of average and below average intelligence used to do. Well, you can't because most people aren't cut out for that work, and our society cannot continue to maintain the facade of so many people who would have been working in the fields, working in factories, etc. being middle and upper-middle class professionals.
Part of the reason we are so close to national bankruptcy is that we don't respect hard-working blue collar workers. Whether they are digging ditches or doing intricate plumbing work, their work is as necessary as 95% of the white collar labor force. How about instead of cramming down unnecessary education, people start actually respecting each other for what they do with their lives rather than a bunch of pieces of paper for diploma mills like the average high school or college.
Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.
If this were RedState warning the exact opposite, it would never make front page. It'd be written off as right-wing paranoia.
Here's a little interesting bit of news: the Republicans aren't the majority party. Here's another one: the Democrats are at least as much in bed with the telecoms as the Republicans. Franken's own damn party is as likely to create a pro-telecom, anti-everyone else regulatory environment as the Republicans if their past behavior on... pretty much any issue that concerns Democratic donors is any indication.
The FCC is, at this point, a textbook example of regulatory capture. Like it or not, that's what it is. Stridently defending what could be is not even remotely compatible with what currently is and likely will be if the FCC is given the power to act. The odds are much greater that the FCC will end up fucking Google, Apple, etc. up the ass than maintaining a policy of genuine openness.
I actually think society is just getting dumber
on
The End of Forgetting
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I am technically generation Y. I'm right on the border with generation X, so my first exposure to the Internet came at 1995 when I was in middle school. There is a marked difference between the older half and the younger half of gen Y in how we view the Internet. The younger half puts it all out there without any attempt to make it hard for busy bodies and ne'erdowells to connect the dots or find them. When people act like this culture of letting it all hang out online is something inherent to the Internet, I take great offense to that because I am old enough to remember how mainstream culture first interacted with the Internet and it was with a hell of a lot more sense than we often have today.
The fact is that society is getting dumber. Systematically dumber. I know this not just from watching how my own generation is starting to behave, but from listening to how my dad recounts how law enforcement **used to be**. He was a cop in the post-Vietnam era. He retired in 1996 and has very little good to say about how cops behave today. No common sense, no independent thought, no questioning whether following orders actually helps the rule of law. It touches everything. Our society is getting dumber, more legalistic and less capable of sensible behavior.
It's also getting a lot more judgmental. I think this is a natural reaction to people seeing all of this stuff that went on behind closed doors, but the fact remains that either people have to learn how to compartmentalize behavior (like disregard a politician's past, if they have what it takes to be an effect, informed leader) or actually dramatically reduce the visibility-by-internet of society.
Game quality is often taking a back seat to graphics. Case in point, Final Fantasy 13 versus Final Fantasy 7. The story and game play took a back seat to the cinematics. FF13 was just an action game with RPG elements, with a perfectly linear gameplay and lost a lot of what made the game play of Final Fantasy games what they were.
In business terms, this is a loss of **value**. Get that, business people? A spit-polished, so shiny it burns your retina turd is still a turd. Game companies would be far better off focusing on reusing existing technology and focusing on the **content** instead.
This insane focus on bleeding edge everything is killing the actual products.
If the people of Australia ever needed proof that their government now regards them as "subjects" in the most pejorative sense of the term now that they are largely unarmed and defenseless against the state, openly talking about "premature unnecessary debate" should do it.
Movable Type Open Source and Melody (a fork of MTOS) are GPL, but their templates are actually a HTML-like language that is interpreted by MTOS or Melody. As such, they are akin to XSL documents, not PHP files, in part because they never link with MTOS or Melody the way WordPress PHP files and WordPress theme PHP code link together. Therefore, if Thesis were rewritten as a theme for Movable Type or Melody, it would have a very strong position.
What amazes me... absolutely amazes me... is how people can honestly be so stupid (yes, stupid) as to believe that Bush III^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HObama would actually go for genuine network neutrality, openness and freedom (or even an approximation of those).
This is a nothing more than a second attempt at a power grab. There is only 1 thing worse than the current system, and that's the current system backed by force of law and convoluted regulation from the FCC which will only entrench the established players even more.
Do what Radley Balko, probably the most important civil liberties reporter out there right now, does: actually go after the nitty gritty details of the stories that rub you the wrong way from the police reports. He's taken "mundane" stories and turned them into WTF?! controversies (which they deserved to be) by doing that. To my knowledge, he rarely has to fight with other reporters over the same stories because, well, he actually **investigates** rather than do a few phone calls and call it a day.
These are probably the same guys who, in high school, thought it would kick ass to be a Gynecologist. It never seemed to enter their heads that if a woman is paying them to check out her vagina, chances are... it's because of something a typical man would never want to see...
I see someone already brought up Virtual Case File. That's a great example of what's wrong with the federal government. The FBI selected SAIC, despite the fact that SAIC has a horrible reputation. I am not exaggerating when I say that their reputation is so bad that they make Microsoft look like it has the engineering reputation that NASA had in the mid 60s. I would sooner believe that Microsoft created a XBox that could reliably withstand combat conditions in Afghanistan in the middle of the summer with nothing more than its internal cooling (or that Windows 8 was actually fit now to be used as the weapons control system in our carrier battle groups) than someone saying that SAIC could deploy a $500M system that is the heart and soul of a major agency.
Yet... they're still getting contracts all the time, and no federal PM is thinking "sweet Jesus, if I accept their bid, my career is over" because they won't get axed for enabling the tax payer's pooch to get so screwed it can't sit for a year. The real problem is not that the feds fail spectacularly from time to time, it's that they reliably keep enabling the same fail over and over again by keeping the same civil servants and retaining the same contractors.
Just pass a federal law stating that it is an illegal restraint of interstate trade for a state or municipality to restrict the ability of new service providers to enter their markets. The only regulations they should be able to impose are civil and criminal penalties for damaging infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
WiFi at these places is a privilege, not a right. You don't get to just buy a $2 drink, take over a table and hog it for hours during the busier part of the day. These cafes should have made it clear that if you want to stay during the busier time, that's fine and welcome, but you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee.
It'd be painful in the short term because they'd have to tell some of these entitled hoity-toities that it is a privilege, not an entitlement and if they want to complain they can just GTFO.
Verizon would have been better served all along by approaching this from a positive angle along the lines of "how we can get your content to our users, faster" than "you are screwing us by not paying us." Everyone likes a company that says "what can we do for you" a lot better than one that stamps its feet like a brat.
I am one. So are about half of the people I associate with, most of whom believe similar along doctrinal lines.
Thanks for playing...
No, that is a Victorian Era concept. Christian theology and philosophy hold that no one is born innocent and hold that no good can be achieved through evil means (which is what happens when innocent people are sacrificed "for the children.") This is basic theology 101 stuff.
Law enforcement and intelligence were too compartmentalized according to the 9/11 commission. They didn't share enough data, didn't make it available across the board and all that. Problem is that the more sharing there is, the more likely some asshat in a place like the Pentagon or FBI can leak data from the CIA or military intelligence (NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, etc.) or vice versa.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone on Slashdot. It's generally taken for granted by most posters here that the more people that can get on a system, the more likely it is that security will be compromised.
Of course, the solution is quite simple. We treat whistleblowers who revealed classified docs the way we should treat people who send prisoners off for rendition: you are judged by the outcome, not your intentions. If you reveal classified docs that show clear, unequivocal felonious behavior, you get pardoned for breaking the law. If you misinterpreted it and are wrong, you get sent to Leavenworth for the better part of the remainder of your life.
Google needs to release the source code to their client. I think if it were available as a reference implementation to be tweaked and forked for free that it could be turned into something very useful, especially in corporate settings.
If Google was that brazen in attempting to give major ISPs marching orders, you would see all of the major players throttle their bandwidth and prioritize Yahoo and Bing just to make it clear that Google can't control them.
Norman Spinrad has some interesting points about how the publishing and book sales businesses operate. They're like the music industry, only a lot worse in how they calculate the acceptable level of risk... even if an author has proved to be a fairly safe bet.
would be to make a game that is extremely realistic about Afghanistan. From the ridiculous rules of engagement like now having to carry rifles in "non-threatening ways" (kinda stupid when your guys are on patrol for actual, armed Taliban fighters!), to fighting in a highly fluid, tribal society where the AI bots that fight alongside you at the start of the mission will turn on you if the enemy gets too much of an advantage. Throw in heaping doses of scenes like Taliban AND our "allies" cutting off women's noses and ears for leaving their husbands and you'll have the moodiest, most depressing, "WHY ARE WE HERE" war game ever.
You couldn't make a propaganda film has as effective.
This is how the general public tends to see it:
Walled gardens are safer than open spaces.
Facebook is a walled garden.
Open Source Project X is an open space.
Facebook is safer for my children than Project X.
As I said, it's about perception. There's stopping someone from signing up as "Barry Obama" from the Great State of Kenya, devout Islamic family man.
Facebook provides a few things, in no small part because of its sheer size:
1) Ability to find most of the people you know easily.
2) Ability to share a lot of information in a really, really easy with people.
3) Ability to do web-based social gaming in that same context.
4) Bring together basic blog and community organizing features.
The open source hurdles are really:
1) Discovering users.
2) Sharing assets between sites.
3) Coordinating communications between sites (if one wants to create something analogous to Facebook's wall).
Those are big hurdles, especially the ability (or perception of being able) to accurately discover other users one knows. Most of us here know that there is no guarantee that someone who claims to be a particular identity on Facebook isn't Chester the Molester, an enemy masquerading as a friend who didn't have an account before, etc. However, Facebook is perceived as safe by a lot of people, and an open environment would be perceived of in quite different terms.
Is to have the FTC and FCC start gaining real statutory powers to mandate product design. It's one thing like with the FCC to have a program that requires that wireless devices follow certain guidelines to keep from interfering with one another or emergency responders, but this? No way. This sort of mandate would only be the beginning of the federal government telling software developers how to do their job in ways that are dubiously related to the common good.
and start accepting the fact that intelligence is not evenly distributed. Not in groups, not even in individuals. People of average or below average are never going to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. They're not going to compete for jobs in high-paying, intelligence and education-heavy fields because you cannot educate a mind of low capacity.
The fact is that our policies are being set by a bunch of arrogant elitists who think that if they cram down enough education, they can make a clean, office-dwelling, never-get-your-hands-dirty, middle class hipster society and outsource all of the menial labor, manufacturing and other jobs that people of average and below average intelligence used to do. Well, you can't because most people aren't cut out for that work, and our society cannot continue to maintain the facade of so many people who would have been working in the fields, working in factories, etc. being middle and upper-middle class professionals.
Part of the reason we are so close to national bankruptcy is that we don't respect hard-working blue collar workers. Whether they are digging ditches or doing intricate plumbing work, their work is as necessary as 95% of the white collar labor force. How about instead of cramming down unnecessary education, people start actually respecting each other for what they do with their lives rather than a bunch of pieces of paper for diploma mills like the average high school or college.
If this were RedState warning the exact opposite, it would never make front page. It'd be written off as right-wing paranoia.
Here's a little interesting bit of news: the Republicans aren't the majority party. Here's another one: the Democrats are at least as much in bed with the telecoms as the Republicans. Franken's own damn party is as likely to create a pro-telecom, anti-everyone else regulatory environment as the Republicans if their past behavior on... pretty much any issue that concerns Democratic donors is any indication.
The FCC is, at this point, a textbook example of regulatory capture. Like it or not, that's what it is. Stridently defending what could be is not even remotely compatible with what currently is and likely will be if the FCC is given the power to act. The odds are much greater that the FCC will end up fucking Google, Apple, etc. up the ass than maintaining a policy of genuine openness.
I am technically generation Y. I'm right on the border with generation X, so my first exposure to the Internet came at 1995 when I was in middle school. There is a marked difference between the older half and the younger half of gen Y in how we view the Internet. The younger half puts it all out there without any attempt to make it hard for busy bodies and ne'erdowells to connect the dots or find them. When people act like this culture of letting it all hang out online is something inherent to the Internet, I take great offense to that because I am old enough to remember how mainstream culture first interacted with the Internet and it was with a hell of a lot more sense than we often have today.
The fact is that society is getting dumber. Systematically dumber. I know this not just from watching how my own generation is starting to behave, but from listening to how my dad recounts how law enforcement **used to be**. He was a cop in the post-Vietnam era. He retired in 1996 and has very little good to say about how cops behave today. No common sense, no independent thought, no questioning whether following orders actually helps the rule of law. It touches everything. Our society is getting dumber, more legalistic and less capable of sensible behavior.
It's also getting a lot more judgmental. I think this is a natural reaction to people seeing all of this stuff that went on behind closed doors, but the fact remains that either people have to learn how to compartmentalize behavior (like disregard a politician's past, if they have what it takes to be an effect, informed leader) or actually dramatically reduce the visibility-by-internet of society.
Game quality is often taking a back seat to graphics. Case in point, Final Fantasy 13 versus Final Fantasy 7. The story and game play took a back seat to the cinematics. FF13 was just an action game with RPG elements, with a perfectly linear gameplay and lost a lot of what made the game play of Final Fantasy games what they were.
In business terms, this is a loss of **value**. Get that, business people? A spit-polished, so shiny it burns your retina turd is still a turd. Game companies would be far better off focusing on reusing existing technology and focusing on the **content** instead.
This insane focus on bleeding edge everything is killing the actual products.
The insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan are winning. Do you see them using tanks, choppers and nukes?
No, they rely on small explosives and small arms.
If the people of Australia ever needed proof that their government now regards them as "subjects" in the most pejorative sense of the term now that they are largely unarmed and defenseless against the state, openly talking about "premature unnecessary debate" should do it.
Movable Type Open Source and Melody (a fork of MTOS) are GPL, but their templates are actually a HTML-like language that is interpreted by MTOS or Melody. As such, they are akin to XSL documents, not PHP files, in part because they never link with MTOS or Melody the way WordPress PHP files and WordPress theme PHP code link together. Therefore, if Thesis were rewritten as a theme for Movable Type or Melody, it would have a very strong position.
If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period. Whatever he could have argued about API calls is now irrelevant.
At this point, the only thing I'm curious about is what would happen to WordPress users who start to distribute Thesis without his permission.
What amazes me... absolutely amazes me... is how people can honestly be so stupid (yes, stupid ) as to believe that Bush III^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HObama would actually go for genuine network neutrality, openness and freedom (or even an approximation of those).
This is a nothing more than a second attempt at a power grab. There is only 1 thing worse than the current system, and that's the current system backed by force of law and convoluted regulation from the FCC which will only entrench the established players even more.
Do what Radley Balko, probably the most important civil liberties reporter out there right now, does: actually go after the nitty gritty details of the stories that rub you the wrong way from the police reports. He's taken "mundane" stories and turned them into WTF?! controversies (which they deserved to be) by doing that. To my knowledge, he rarely has to fight with other reporters over the same stories because, well, he actually **investigates** rather than do a few phone calls and call it a day.
These are probably the same guys who, in high school, thought it would kick ass to be a Gynecologist. It never seemed to enter their heads that if a woman is paying them to check out her vagina, chances are... it's because of something a typical man would never want to see...
I see someone already brought up Virtual Case File. That's a great example of what's wrong with the federal government. The FBI selected SAIC, despite the fact that SAIC has a horrible reputation. I am not exaggerating when I say that their reputation is so bad that they make Microsoft look like it has the engineering reputation that NASA had in the mid 60s. I would sooner believe that Microsoft created a XBox that could reliably withstand combat conditions in Afghanistan in the middle of the summer with nothing more than its internal cooling (or that Windows 8 was actually fit now to be used as the weapons control system in our carrier battle groups) than someone saying that SAIC could deploy a $500M system that is the heart and soul of a major agency.
Yet... they're still getting contracts all the time, and no federal PM is thinking "sweet Jesus, if I accept their bid, my career is over" because they won't get axed for enabling the tax payer's pooch to get so screwed it can't sit for a year. The real problem is not that the feds fail spectacularly from time to time, it's that they reliably keep enabling the same fail over and over again by keeping the same civil servants and retaining the same contractors.
Just pass a federal law stating that it is an illegal restraint of interstate trade for a state or municipality to restrict the ability of new service providers to enter their markets. The only regulations they should be able to impose are civil and criminal penalties for damaging infrastructure.