You can't seriously expect normal people to know the ins and outs of computer security. That's technical stuff.
On the other hand: if you lose money in your investments then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If you get charged with a speeding ticket and accept the full penalty without arguing then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If your credit sucks because you were suckered by a predatory contract then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If you end up paying too much for a car or getting locked into a bad lease contract then it's your own fault. You should know about those things.
Yeah. I can see how society discriminates against people who have more interest in computers than in the more common social games that are played.
Which says quite a bit about the state of our society. It paints a very different picture than the one you here about in state of the union addresses or in the news. In some ways you can see why other nations might not want the "morals and values" of the US around.
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:... vii. restrict, inhibit, or otherwise interfer with the ability of any other person, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to use or enjoy the Service...
I'm sure that means not to interfere with anyone else on the network but it could be used to say that one is not supposed to lock down their wireless AP.
With respect to wifi the service agreement says that I'm prohibited from making the service available to anyone outside of my premesis. I don't live in a Faraday cage. It's also against the ToS for me to "connect multiple computers behind the cable modem to set up a LAN that in any manner would result in a violation of the terms of this Policy". If you take that point (x.) as cyclical then yes, setting up a multiple computers behind the cable modem does violate the terms of setting up multiple computers behind the cable modem. At the same time, though, they'll be happy to sell a wireless AP to you when you sign up for service so that you can connect your home network.
ISP ToS policies are like US law: everyone's a criminal in some way or another. That makes resolving disputes very quick, easy, and convenient.
It's supposed to mean a system of government which adheres to the rules in the charter which establishes its legitimacy. The federal level has been rationalizing its way out of the 9th and 10th Amednments almost since the inception. If you're educated it's nearly impossible to claim that our government is truly republican with any semblance of a straight face--unless you're also really good at lying.
F/OSS is the wave of the future. It is not the wave for CxOs, board members, and day traders to endlessly profit off of the work of other men. That's what has BusinessWeek worried. All of the middleman cruft which provides easy street positions in today's corporate culture is being seriously challenged by F/OSS projects. In many F/OSS projects the administrative branch is filled by developers who have an insight into the business applications of the project--much like a Union steward (usually) still works on the floor with everyone else. The currently dominant business model has layers and layers and layers of easy street cruft for the explicit purpose of justifying fat paychecks for people who do little more than attend meetings and push paperwork which are largely ceremonial and add little or no real value to the end product. True, in some of the largest F/OSS projects you may have dedicated administrative positions but their ratio of the total pie is far lower than that in the currently dominant business model.
Half duplex terminals printed data sent to the modem on the local terminal. Full duplex terminals only printed data received from the modem on the local terminal. Once connected the only reason why you ever saw anything you typed is because it was echoed back by the remote modem. There was not a single Hayes compatible modem that I owned that ever responded to +++ or AT command strings that didn't originate from the local terminal.
Either the parents here owned some seriously brain damaged modems or there's an urban myth being propagated.
Fascinating. Have you tried contacting the manufacturer to see if it's possible to reprogram some internal flash chip? Not that they would tell you if it is. I've often wondered what kind of firmware most network cards have and how accessible it is. Even if they only find out after production starts that there's an exploit in the hardware design which allows the firmware to be updated from the network side.
At random times the fusebox in my apartment makes buzzing sounds with a cyclical pattern. There isn't a single cell phone around. Not to offend your wife but I think she's noticing something which she's been instructed to notice. I'm still skeptical that it's related to cell phones. Perhaps certain models of telephones sold to business offices are designed specifically to track incoming cell phone calls for the purpose of the control freak sitting in the upper office. Why would the signal for the ring be much different than the signal for the call itself? Is the ringer circuit in your cell phone hooked to a 1000W amp? I'm not a cell phone engineer but I wouldn't expect the signal for the ring notification to be so extraordinarily different that it would affect, via an emag field, equipment nearby any more than a conversation. Does it happen when the cell is next to the desk phone? 1 foot away? 5 feet away? At the edge of your cube/office? Odd...
Buy a DVD player. If a doctor is on call, but can't forego being on the bleeding edge of the entertainment industry, perhaps they should look into changing professions.
Maybe the legal beagles will argue that a person using this sort of paint is broadcasting anti-signals, like dark or anti matter, and therefore violating broadcast laws. The world is a sick place when attorneys become armchair physicists.
> Hospitals it is more dangerous to have cell phones -- > because they can seriously interfere with equipment
I know this is a common belief but I'm really skeptical of it. The medical equipment used in hospitals isn't much more sensitive than any other electronic device. If this were true then one would expect cell phones to interfere with each other, or with laptops, or desktops, or DVD players, or garage door openers. Until someone holds a cellphone up to an oscilloscope and can pick up a signal without using a crystal specifically tuned to the cell phone's frequency I'm going to continue to think of this as 90% urban myth.
Except for one small detail. At no other time in history has it been easier for the ruling to class to so easily sap your wallet at a minimum of effort on their part. There has always been a definite distinction between the priveleged and the unpriveleged, the wealthy and the poor, the oppressed and the oppressors. In centuries past, though, it required a real amount of effort on the part of the ruling class to extract resources from their constituents. There was a feedback. When the peasantry decided that they could simply not pay any more the local lord would have to decide if his/her demands were worth the effort and the backlash of sending the militia into the town to shake down the citizens. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. Even if it was it required real manpower which meant that some of the citizens would profit from being the middle-man enforcer and could thus redistribute the wealth back to their own peasant family.
In today's society, though, the people have been completely stripped of any sort of feedback power. Taxes are automatically deducted from paychecks. Health care insurance costs are automatically deducted. Bank fees are automatically deducted. The mechanism for protest or reclamation has been completely decimated. Clearly the threat of barbarian hordes is no worse than in previous eras. Clearly previous eras had evidence of oppressive governments. Clearly there has been no other era in which the general populance is completely hamstrung by their rulers the way we are today.
They say that the most important vote you can make is with your wallet. What vote is left when even our wallets are cast automatically for us?
Theoretically and morally I buy into the "right to say no at any time" argument. But this isn't theory and it's not a world of morality. This is reality. Reality involves thinking ahead to stay out of situations. Increasingly it's becoming apparent that this is a society of actively working to get other people in trouble. It's like playing chicken for the amusement of watching the other person crash. You can't tell me that a 16 year old girl doesn't have any idea what boys want. Girls have that figured out by about age 9. Some are cautious about it and behave normally while others find out that it can be fun using it to tease, attract, or otherwise put boys in situations that provide a crackdown for the boy and smug amusement for themselves. The fact remains that the girls in the case I've heard about were actively flirting with guys on MySpace and were not dragged kicking and screaming off to meet. Though the news reports don't specifically talk about it one must really wonder why, if these girls wanted attention from a boy, they weren't flirting with boys in their own area or school. Maybe they'd already played out the tease hand and none of the boys would bother with them anymore and now they were looking for some fresh game.
I'm not saying that it's a free license for guys to go jumping all over girls. I'm saying that at some point society needs to start telling these attention freaks to begin taking responsibility for their own decisions--and begin cracking down on the parents who let their children go out, unsupervised, until all hours of the night and then get all up in arms when something like this happens. Kids don't just suddenly, one random day, decide they're going to go out and meet up with a stranger someplace. First they have to learn that they can get away with it. It takes a real parenting fault for kids to become comfortable with the idea that they can say,"I'm going over to so-and-so's house and yes their parents will be there" and go someplace completely different without any chance of getting caught.
It comes from both sides. In cases like this there should be some sort of concept of shared responsibility. Yes, the men should've known better (but who knows, in some cases the girls may have been misrepresenting themselves as 18 or 19 on the 'net) but the girls, and their parents, should've known better as well.
We get it from our politicians all the time: it's the taxpayer's fault for asking too much. It's all the voter's fault for not getting out in proper numbers. It's the people's fault for not educating themselves properly about the issues. At what point are we going to start demanding that the people who initiate and propagate the situation must accept at least their fair share of the responsibility for the outcome?
Fox did a piece last night about the foot whirlpools at pedicure salons where the drain filters were cleaned, maybe, once a day and many women had contracted Staph infections from them.
Apparently there were 7 girls, 12-16, in a small community on the upper east coast who claimed to have been enticed by men they met on MySpace. Not to be too cynical, but knowing the mannerisms of young girls in need of attention, it's just as likely that they enticed the men and now looking to further their attention getting venture. I'm sure there will be some indignant parent to come out of the wood work and shout loudly,"How could you say that? _MY_ child would never!"
Uh-huh... spare me. Your child is human, with human behavior, not some perfect deity.
Wow. That just goes to show how different thought patterns are. When you quoted the teacher with,"The icon for the internet" my brain dumped. The internet has an icon? As soon as I hear the word "internet" I'm not thinking of an application. I'm thinking of an infrastructure.
I think that teacher is doing a serious disservice to their students. No wonder kids and parents don't speak the same language.
Not all Microsoft software is crap. Some of it's pretty nice in terms of ease of configuration and use. They picked up a bad name from Win95 which shipped with BSOD written all over it. A good portion of the bad taste came from the OEMs, as well, who used hardware with outright broken drivers and rarely provided CDs or floppies to restore even the faulty drivers in the event that the user wanted to reinstall the OS. Win98 first edition wasn't much better and by the time that Win98SE shipped everyone had already plunked down hard-earned money for yet another broken OS. Personally I thought that, for a single-user OS, Win98SE was pretty smooth. I never used Win2k or ME much. I heard the same moans, groans, and complaints but it seemed that most of it was due to hardware manufacturers who were again rolling out hardware with crappy drivers. To be fair, at the time, everyone was forging ahead at their own pace and with MS trying to outinnovate everyone to keep the entire industry under its thumb they created just as many problems as everyone else.
Now with WinXP the core OS and the host of drivers to support the hardware underneath it has become more or less clean. The problem still lies with the OEMs. I just today received my new laptop (Mmmm. AMD64. Yum) and I've been futzing with it for the last 12 hours (yes, I did stop to cook and eat lunch and dinner in there) and still don't have a fully functional OS on it. Why not? When it arrived I planned on configuring Windows, updating everything as necessary, fixing a few of the questionable security settings, and then using Knoppix to steal all but the bare-bones necessary space so that I Debianize it. It took a little bit of work and effort to get everything in place for the qtParted venture (mostly because Windows insists on having DHCP or NBT and I didn't have a samba server installed). On this laptop it took a little over an hour to resize the Windows partition down to 9 gig, giving me 30 gig for Linux happiness. After stealing the space I rebooted to Windows to make sure that the resizing hadn't broken anything and found that, while nothing was broken, the OS and OEM installed crap was taking up 7.9 gig!!! Well, we can't have that since I am going to need some space for the Office 2003 that should be in the mail in the next few days so I proceeded to use cfdisk to completely wipe the partition table and began reinstalling Windows from the OEM WinXP CD. I had two partitions, one NTFS and one FAT, and I used the Windows Setup to format both. Since I formatted the FAT second, though, and WinXP doesn't ask you which partition to install on after the reboot (when you get to the graphical installer), it installed on the FAT partition. So now I'm installing. Again. On the upside I know I can shoe the whole thing into 2.5 gig... I have no idea what crack pipe my OEM was smoking. Even if I put WinDVD and Java back on that's only another 400 meg.
I can install Debian three times over by the time the Windows installer finishes formatting a 5 gig partition (yes, I'm exaggerating a little and I was using full format), copying all of the necessary files, and installing. To be fair, though, once Windows is installed I can be up and running in another 15-20 minutes. With Debian I spend that difference in time fine-tuning and configuring the system. I'm not complaining about Debian, though. If I wanted a drop-click installation I'd use Gentoo or Ubuntu (so I've heard). I like Debian.
So, you're right, not all MS is crap but between their follies from '95 until XP solidified and the OEM nightmare that still exists... well... Debian's never given me any trouble that I didn't expect. When I plunk down cash for an OS that's advertised everywhere by a company that holds the world's wealthiest man, though, I'd expect there to be a lot less hassle. I'm not saying it's all Gates' fault but the business practices of the company which he founded directly led to the hardware/OEM nightmare that is really the basis for all of the slamming that MS gets.
EULA or not... never charge good money for a beta product. A company releasing a beta product definitely shouldn't be singing its own praises, trouncing competition using shady tactics, and making life in general difficult for the users.
Rich people don't steal. They know how to work the system and they have the money to do it. Take this guy for example.
(NYT warning) At the end of the year, he gave $165 million to a tiny charity set up to benefit the golf program at Oklahoma State University, reaping Mr. Pickens a tax deduction. Records show that the money spent less than an hour on Dec. 30 in the account of the university's charity, O.S.U. Cowboy Golf Inc., before it was invested in a hedge fund controlled by Mr. Pickens, BP Capital Management...By giving the money before 2005 expired, Mr. Pickens was able to take advantage of a provision in Hurricane Katrina relief legislation that allowed him a deduction for a charitable gift equal to 100 percent of his adjusted gross income
So not only does he get the tax deduction, which means he's not paying a dime in income taxes this year, but that money has been reinvested back in a fund that he already controls. Now what do you think a $165 million investment is going to do to his fund? It's going to make it look darn juicy to other investors who will probably end up pouring 401(k) money into it and inflating it further. Do you really think, at the end of the year, he's going to take the profits from that fund and dole them back out fairly to the charity and the 401(k)? Hell no. He knows how to work the skim. He'll take the lion's share for himself, reinvest most of it back in his own investments, and give the charity what... 8%? How much were your 401(k)s averaging last year? 7%?
So he skips out on 100% of his income taxes (which the rest of the taxpayers get to pay for) and then uses the windfall to ensure that he can continue making probably close to 12-14% on his own personal take while leaving 7-8% for the poor fools that got suckered in by the pyramid scheme. I wouldn't be surprised if, because of the verbage "adjusted gross earnings", he doesn't even need to pay taxes on the earnings for the money which his fund will earn!
And he's not the only one. That's the primary mode of operation for people who can afford both $165 million dollar donations and their own funds. What could you, as a private citizen, do? Donate maybe a few hundred to a local charity and hope that they use it for good? They sure as hell aren't going to put it back into CDs which you control.
Motivates to do what? Run around chasing skirts? Other than the purpose of making babies and promoting promiscuity the benefits of that are arguable and, if they do exist, dubious. Guys with baby batter up to their eyeballs are more likely to nail anything that moves--including your 16 year old daughter. Maybe it's a ploy by women who are pissed because they don't have it so easy anymore. Why should they get to sit back and pick and choose? If guys are wanking and not chasing then maybe the ladies will have to start demonstrating that they're willing to put out for the relationship and I don't mean sexually. Too many women just prance around society knowing that, while they act all indignant about not having the same rights as men and moan and bitch about a glass ceiling, they don't have to do jack to attract a partner.
Seems to me like porn is a natural equalizer for men who, at least in our society, are trained to have a greater desire for sex.
I don't actually have any experience with this but I do have a question based on cursory observations.
While your coworkers idea is fantastic, it seems to me that the corporate overlords of the internet have specifically created thing to discourage things like this. When I use Hotmail, or Yahoo, or/., or many informational sites, the requested pages often make requests to other pages on other servers, some of them entirely outside of the original domain. To add to the confusion these other servers may rotate on a weekly or even daily basis. It would be a very tedious chore for most parents to try and add each and every one of them to the whitelist so that their children aren't surfing web pages that look broken, have mislaid tables, with styles and graphics all out of place and misaligned. Is this not an issue or should it be argued that this is simply the responsibility of parenting in the modern age?
I'm not saying that it would be impossible and I'm not saying that all sites exercise the extremities of the situation. Most sites at least stay within their own domain. Hope seriously that your children don't take interest in some checkers club whose members all have pages on big ISP sites, or geocities. There's no way I'd add all of aol.com to a whitelist for my kids (if I had any). Though, again, this may be the responsibility of parenting. Parents should take an interest in the web groups that their children are frequenting and that means taking the time to surf those pages and whitelist the proper membership.
Fantastic idea.:) You've talked me into convincing myself.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't seriously expect normal people to know the ins and outs of computer security. That's technical stuff.
On the other hand: if you lose money in your investments then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If you get charged with a speeding ticket and accept the full penalty without arguing then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If your credit sucks because you were suckered by a predatory contract then it's your fault. You should know about those things. If you end up paying too much for a car or getting locked into a bad lease contract then it's your own fault. You should know about those things.
Yeah. I can see how society discriminates against people who have more interest in computers than in the more common social games that are played.
Which says quite a bit about the state of our society. It paints a very different picture than the one you here about in state of the union addresses or in the news. In some ways you can see why other nations might not want the "morals and values" of the US around.
They already have the light bulb.
With respect to wifi the service agreement says that I'm prohibited from making the service available to anyone outside of my premesis. I don't live in a Faraday cage. It's also against the ToS for me to "connect multiple computers behind the cable modem to set up a LAN that in any manner would result in a violation of the terms of this Policy". If you take that point (x.) as cyclical then yes, setting up a multiple computers behind the cable modem does violate the terms of setting up multiple computers behind the cable modem. At the same time, though, they'll be happy to sell a wireless AP to you when you sign up for service so that you can connect your home network.
ISP ToS policies are like US law: everyone's a criminal in some way or another. That makes resolving disputes very quick, easy, and convenient.
It's supposed to mean a system of government which adheres to the rules in the charter which establishes its legitimacy. The federal level has been rationalizing its way out of the 9th and 10th Amednments almost since the inception. If you're educated it's nearly impossible to claim that our government is truly republican with any semblance of a straight face--unless you're also really good at lying.
F/OSS is the wave of the future. It is not the wave for CxOs, board members, and day traders to endlessly profit off of the work of other men. That's what has BusinessWeek worried. All of the middleman cruft which provides easy street positions in today's corporate culture is being seriously challenged by F/OSS projects. In many F/OSS projects the administrative branch is filled by developers who have an insight into the business applications of the project--much like a Union steward (usually) still works on the floor with everyone else. The currently dominant business model has layers and layers and layers of easy street cruft for the explicit purpose of justifying fat paychecks for people who do little more than attend meetings and push paperwork which are largely ceremonial and add little or no real value to the end product. True, in some of the largest F/OSS projects you may have dedicated administrative positions but their ratio of the total pie is far lower than that in the currently dominant business model.
Half duplex terminals printed data sent to the modem on the local terminal. Full duplex terminals only printed data received from the modem on the local terminal. Once connected the only reason why you ever saw anything you typed is because it was echoed back by the remote modem. There was not a single Hayes compatible modem that I owned that ever responded to +++ or AT command strings that didn't originate from the local terminal.
Either the parents here owned some seriously brain damaged modems or there's an urban myth being propagated.
That's one helluva cell phone you have there. Are you sure the output power is within the limits allowed for that class of device?
Fascinating. Have you tried contacting the manufacturer to see if it's possible to reprogram some internal flash chip? Not that they would tell you if it is. I've often wondered what kind of firmware most network cards have and how accessible it is. Even if they only find out after production starts that there's an exploit in the hardware design which allows the firmware to be updated from the network side.
Also in related news:
Conducting reconnaisance on a used car by kicking the tires or requesting vehicle histories is illegal.
Looking at houses becomes a terrorist activity.
At random times the fusebox in my apartment makes buzzing sounds with a cyclical pattern. There isn't a single cell phone around. Not to offend your wife but I think she's noticing something which she's been instructed to notice. I'm still skeptical that it's related to cell phones. Perhaps certain models of telephones sold to business offices are designed specifically to track incoming cell phone calls for the purpose of the control freak sitting in the upper office. Why would the signal for the ring be much different than the signal for the call itself? Is the ringer circuit in your cell phone hooked to a 1000W amp? I'm not a cell phone engineer but I wouldn't expect the signal for the ring notification to be so extraordinarily different that it would affect, via an emag field, equipment nearby any more than a conversation. Does it happen when the cell is next to the desk phone? 1 foot away? 5 feet away? At the edge of your cube/office? Odd...
and a high speed connection I'll be more than happy to help him out.
Buy a DVD player. If a doctor is on call, but can't forego being on the bleeding edge of the entertainment industry, perhaps they should look into changing professions.
Ooooh. Clear coat. :)
Maybe the legal beagles will argue that a person using this sort of paint is broadcasting anti-signals, like dark or anti matter, and therefore violating broadcast laws. The world is a sick place when attorneys become armchair physicists.
> Hospitals it is more dangerous to have cell phones --
> because they can seriously interfere with equipment
I know this is a common belief but I'm really skeptical of it. The medical equipment used in hospitals isn't much more sensitive than any other electronic device. If this were true then one would expect cell phones to interfere with each other, or with laptops, or desktops, or DVD players, or garage door openers. Until someone holds a cellphone up to an oscilloscope and can pick up a signal without using a crystal specifically tuned to the cell phone's frequency I'm going to continue to think of this as 90% urban myth.
Except for one small detail. At no other time in history has it been easier for the ruling to class to so easily sap your wallet at a minimum of effort on their part. There has always been a definite distinction between the priveleged and the unpriveleged, the wealthy and the poor, the oppressed and the oppressors. In centuries past, though, it required a real amount of effort on the part of the ruling class to extract resources from their constituents. There was a feedback. When the peasantry decided that they could simply not pay any more the local lord would have to decide if his/her demands were worth the effort and the backlash of sending the militia into the town to shake down the citizens. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. Even if it was it required real manpower which meant that some of the citizens would profit from being the middle-man enforcer and could thus redistribute the wealth back to their own peasant family.
In today's society, though, the people have been completely stripped of any sort of feedback power. Taxes are automatically deducted from paychecks. Health care insurance costs are automatically deducted. Bank fees are automatically deducted. The mechanism for protest or reclamation has been completely decimated. Clearly the threat of barbarian hordes is no worse than in previous eras. Clearly previous eras had evidence of oppressive governments. Clearly there has been no other era in which the general populance is completely hamstrung by their rulers the way we are today.
They say that the most important vote you can make is with your wallet. What vote is left when even our wallets are cast automatically for us?
Theoretically and morally I buy into the "right to say no at any time" argument. But this isn't theory and it's not a world of morality. This is reality. Reality involves thinking ahead to stay out of situations. Increasingly it's becoming apparent that this is a society of actively working to get other people in trouble. It's like playing chicken for the amusement of watching the other person crash. You can't tell me that a 16 year old girl doesn't have any idea what boys want. Girls have that figured out by about age 9. Some are cautious about it and behave normally while others find out that it can be fun using it to tease, attract, or otherwise put boys in situations that provide a crackdown for the boy and smug amusement for themselves. The fact remains that the girls in the case I've heard about were actively flirting with guys on MySpace and were not dragged kicking and screaming off to meet. Though the news reports don't specifically talk about it one must really wonder why, if these girls wanted attention from a boy, they weren't flirting with boys in their own area or school. Maybe they'd already played out the tease hand and none of the boys would bother with them anymore and now they were looking for some fresh game.
I'm not saying that it's a free license for guys to go jumping all over girls. I'm saying that at some point society needs to start telling these attention freaks to begin taking responsibility for their own decisions--and begin cracking down on the parents who let their children go out, unsupervised, until all hours of the night and then get all up in arms when something like this happens. Kids don't just suddenly, one random day, decide they're going to go out and meet up with a stranger someplace. First they have to learn that they can get away with it. It takes a real parenting fault for kids to become comfortable with the idea that they can say,"I'm going over to so-and-so's house and yes their parents will be there" and go someplace completely different without any chance of getting caught.
It comes from both sides. In cases like this there should be some sort of concept of shared responsibility. Yes, the men should've known better (but who knows, in some cases the girls may have been misrepresenting themselves as 18 or 19 on the 'net) but the girls, and their parents, should've known better as well.
We get it from our politicians all the time: it's the taxpayer's fault for asking too much. It's all the voter's fault for not getting out in proper numbers. It's the people's fault for not educating themselves properly about the issues. At what point are we going to start demanding that the people who initiate and propagate the situation must accept at least their fair share of the responsibility for the outcome?
> "Dangers lurking in your sink! Details at 11!"
Fox did a piece last night about the foot whirlpools at pedicure salons where the drain filters were cleaned, maybe, once a day and many women had contracted Staph infections from them.
Apparently there were 7 girls, 12-16, in a small community on the upper east coast who claimed to have been enticed by men they met on MySpace. Not to be too cynical, but knowing the mannerisms of young girls in need of attention, it's just as likely that they enticed the men and now looking to further their attention getting venture. I'm sure there will be some indignant parent to come out of the wood work and shout loudly,"How could you say that? _MY_ child would never!"
Uh-huh... spare me. Your child is human, with human behavior, not some perfect deity.
Wow. That just goes to show how different thought patterns are. When you quoted the teacher with,"The icon for the internet" my brain dumped. The internet has an icon? As soon as I hear the word "internet" I'm not thinking of an application. I'm thinking of an infrastructure.
I think that teacher is doing a serious disservice to their students. No wonder kids and parents don't speak the same language.
Not all Microsoft software is crap. Some of it's pretty nice in terms of ease of configuration and use. They picked up a bad name from Win95 which shipped with BSOD written all over it. A good portion of the bad taste came from the OEMs, as well, who used hardware with outright broken drivers and rarely provided CDs or floppies to restore even the faulty drivers in the event that the user wanted to reinstall the OS. Win98 first edition wasn't much better and by the time that Win98SE shipped everyone had already plunked down hard-earned money for yet another broken OS. Personally I thought that, for a single-user OS, Win98SE was pretty smooth. I never used Win2k or ME much. I heard the same moans, groans, and complaints but it seemed that most of it was due to hardware manufacturers who were again rolling out hardware with crappy drivers. To be fair, at the time, everyone was forging ahead at their own pace and with MS trying to outinnovate everyone to keep the entire industry under its thumb they created just as many problems as everyone else.
Now with WinXP the core OS and the host of drivers to support the hardware underneath it has become more or less clean. The problem still lies with the OEMs. I just today received my new laptop (Mmmm. AMD64. Yum) and I've been futzing with it for the last 12 hours (yes, I did stop to cook and eat lunch and dinner in there) and still don't have a fully functional OS on it. Why not? When it arrived I planned on configuring Windows, updating everything as necessary, fixing a few of the questionable security settings, and then using Knoppix to steal all but the bare-bones necessary space so that I Debianize it. It took a little bit of work and effort to get everything in place for the qtParted venture (mostly because Windows insists on having DHCP or NBT and I didn't have a samba server installed). On this laptop it took a little over an hour to resize the Windows partition down to 9 gig, giving me 30 gig for Linux happiness. After stealing the space I rebooted to Windows to make sure that the resizing hadn't broken anything and found that, while nothing was broken, the OS and OEM installed crap was taking up 7.9 gig!!! Well, we can't have that since I am going to need some space for the Office 2003 that should be in the mail in the next few days so I proceeded to use cfdisk to completely wipe the partition table and began reinstalling Windows from the OEM WinXP CD. I had two partitions, one NTFS and one FAT, and I used the Windows Setup to format both. Since I formatted the FAT second, though, and WinXP doesn't ask you which partition to install on after the reboot (when you get to the graphical installer), it installed on the FAT partition. So now I'm installing. Again. On the upside I know I can shoe the whole thing into 2.5 gig... I have no idea what crack pipe my OEM was smoking. Even if I put WinDVD and Java back on that's only another 400 meg.
I can install Debian three times over by the time the Windows installer finishes formatting a 5 gig partition (yes, I'm exaggerating a little and I was using full format), copying all of the necessary files, and installing. To be fair, though, once Windows is installed I can be up and running in another 15-20 minutes. With Debian I spend that difference in time fine-tuning and configuring the system. I'm not complaining about Debian, though. If I wanted a drop-click installation I'd use Gentoo or Ubuntu (so I've heard). I like Debian.
So, you're right, not all MS is crap but between their follies from '95 until XP solidified and the OEM nightmare that still exists... well... Debian's never given me any trouble that I didn't expect. When I plunk down cash for an OS that's advertised everywhere by a company that holds the world's wealthiest man, though, I'd expect there to be a lot less hassle. I'm not saying it's all Gates' fault but the business practices of the company which he founded directly led to the hardware/OEM nightmare that is really the basis for all of the slamming that MS gets.
EULA or not... never charge good money for a beta product. A company releasing a beta product definitely shouldn't be singing its own praises, trouncing competition using shady tactics, and making life in general difficult for the users.
So he skips out on 100% of his income taxes (which the rest of the taxpayers get to pay for) and then uses the windfall to ensure that he can continue making probably close to 12-14% on his own personal take while leaving 7-8% for the poor fools that got suckered in by the pyramid scheme. I wouldn't be surprised if, because of the verbage "adjusted gross earnings", he doesn't even need to pay taxes on the earnings for the money which his fund will earn!
And he's not the only one. That's the primary mode of operation for people who can afford both $165 million dollar donations and their own funds. What could you, as a private citizen, do? Donate maybe a few hundred to a local charity and hope that they use it for good? They sure as hell aren't going to put it back into CDs which you control.
A big assed pyramid scheme.
Motivates to do what? Run around chasing skirts? Other than the purpose of making babies and promoting promiscuity the benefits of that are arguable and, if they do exist, dubious. Guys with baby batter up to their eyeballs are more likely to nail anything that moves--including your 16 year old daughter. Maybe it's a ploy by women who are pissed because they don't have it so easy anymore. Why should they get to sit back and pick and choose? If guys are wanking and not chasing then maybe the ladies will have to start demonstrating that they're willing to put out for the relationship and I don't mean sexually. Too many women just prance around society knowing that, while they act all indignant about not having the same rights as men and moan and bitch about a glass ceiling, they don't have to do jack to attract a partner.
Seems to me like porn is a natural equalizer for men who, at least in our society, are trained to have a greater desire for sex.
I don't actually have any experience with this but I do have a question based on cursory observations.
/., or many informational sites, the requested pages often make requests to other pages on other servers, some of them entirely outside of the original domain. To add to the confusion these other servers may rotate on a weekly or even daily basis. It would be a very tedious chore for most parents to try and add each and every one of them to the whitelist so that their children aren't surfing web pages that look broken, have mislaid tables, with styles and graphics all out of place and misaligned. Is this not an issue or should it be argued that this is simply the responsibility of parenting in the modern age?
:) You've talked me into convincing myself.
While your coworkers idea is fantastic, it seems to me that the corporate overlords of the internet have specifically created thing to discourage things like this. When I use Hotmail, or Yahoo, or
I'm not saying that it would be impossible and I'm not saying that all sites exercise the extremities of the situation. Most sites at least stay within their own domain. Hope seriously that your children don't take interest in some checkers club whose members all have pages on big ISP sites, or geocities. There's no way I'd add all of aol.com to a whitelist for my kids (if I had any). Though, again, this may be the responsibility of parenting. Parents should take an interest in the web groups that their children are frequenting and that means taking the time to surf those pages and whitelist the proper membership.
Fantastic idea.