If someone doesn't know personal things about me, they can't harm my reputation through true facts (people can always lie and usually do). If someone does know personal things about me, and there is something personal about me that people would ill-conceive, then that person can harm my reputation--and reputation is not something useless in the survival sense either. Reputation IS necessary for survival. If the reputation of an individual is damaged, people will tend not to want to work with that person.
Some have compared us to the animals and stated that because privacy is a social thing, and the animals aren't apparently worried about social life--they are only worried with immediate survival--privacy can't be a biological defense. But this thinking is wrong because these people fail to place animals and humans in proper context of their surrounding environment (although it's interesting to note that animals do have a social hierarchy). Animals worry about their immediate survival and (some) worry about their offspring. However, humans have to worry about social perception because we are social animals. No one human can survive on his/her own. We need each other to survive. How we are perceived is important for our survival, and our perception can be controlled through privacy. Privacy allows us to share personal things about ourselves with only those we know and trust, and helps prevent others from using personal knowledge against us. This is what attorney/client or doctor/patient privacy privileges are all about.
A lot of our survival needs and reasons for doing things are based in our subconscious. We do things socially for survival reasons often without even realizing it. Our brains tend to process our environments and then they try to adjust their subconscious patterns to that environment--at least, the healthy brains do this.
Actually, there is a way to turn off transparency in Vista through the new redesigned desktop properties dialog.
I actually quite like the new UI in Vista--including the transparency effects, but that's about all I like. Beryl and XGL are actually a lot better, and they don't suck up the memory that Vista uses.
As others have pointed out here, this only works if you have your Google Calendar set to public. By default (at least with my account) my calendar is already set to private. This supposed "stealing" and "death by calendar" stuff is just hype. This public calendar feature is just that: it's a feature you can add manually to allow other people to see. This is nothing bad. I for one am glad that Google likes to add useful features into their products. If this was an attempt to make Google look evil, it was a pretty poor attempt. RTFA
I've used Firefox since it came out. I don't have any visual themes installed, but I do have my favorite extensions loaded. I've never had a problem with it before. In fact, I've found that IE does take up much more memory and does take longer to load. Plus the whole OS-integrated browser thing just makes matters worse what with ActiveX running everywhere.
Just for the heck of it, I'm running FF and IE right now (on Windows XP). I shut FF down and "shut" IE down (like that's even possible). I then loaded them up and browsed 2 pages on slashdot so far with IE and 6 pages with FF. The Windows Task Manager is telling me that IE is taking 28,108 Kb, and FF is using 27,744 Kb. While I realize that these numbers are not much different, don't forget that that's 3 times the amount of browsing (with cache enabled) in FF with slightly less memory used. IE is actually using more memory as it is constantly running and can never be shut down as it is integrated into the OS itself.
So I completely agree with you Foofoobar. FF is actually cleaner, more efficient, and generally less buggy IME. Even on my Windows box I don't use IE for anything except the occassional site that isn't written to play nicely with anything but IE. Don't you love wannabe web "developers"?
Look, I'm all for people NOT becoming addicted to anything. Human beings need a healthy dose of a wide variety of things. But I am a bit pissed off when any government attempts to do something this stupid.
Look, I'm the work-a-holic type of guy. I spend most of my time working (even late into the night), and when I finally come home and sleep, I'm almost too tired to get up in the morning. For people like me, doing the best job possible (I'm not forced to work this hard) is an obssession. I'm admitting it. I literally only get like one truly free day twice a month or something. And when I do get those days off, I want to be able to spend all day doing something fun. Is it wrong if I decide to spend all day some month playing that $50-$60 video game I bought last year? Is it any government's business whatsoever if I decide to use my equipment, my internet connection, on my time?
Come on!!! This is the f***ing Chinese government. They don't give two shits about your health. This is the same government that has one of the hardest and strictest death penalties available on the face of the earth. They allow people to work in low living conditions with low wages and constant over-work on at least a slavery level. A good friend of mine left China as soon as he could because the situation over there is so bad. He'll tell anyone not to emmigrate to China.
To reiterate, I don't think it's good for people to have an unhealthy addiction to anything. But when rules get as picky as "you can't play this game online for more than 3 hours a day", well, let's just say you'll have me up in arms against the asshole government who wants to play 1948 (George Orwell) with me ! I like my rights. If I decide to overwork to make extra money one day, and my boss has no problem letting me take the next day off to finally finish Doom 3 because I've covered that day's work already, I sure as hell better be able to do that with no constrictions from the government that I pay taxes to.
What about children? It's the job of parents, not the job of any government, to deal with their own kids. If parents think it's OK for their kids to spend over 3 hours playing a MMORPG, then let their kids do that. Since when is having good fun morally wrong? And who is the government to decide what is right or wrong for us? Conversely, if parents decide to limit their kid's gaming time to "prevent addiction", what's wrong with that? The parents had to raise their kids, not the government.
And by the way, addiction is not always prevented with enforced limitations on "access" to the object in question. In my own case, the more I have of anything the more I get tired of it and want to do something else. I guess that's a healthy human reaction, I don't know. But I can only play a video game generally for around a couple hours max, and then I get sick of it. However, I have occassionally spent all day finishing a game. But I'm an adult, going to college and working, and I feel that I have a right in my own spare time to do what I please.
Yeah, I'm in the U.S. and these people are in China. But just because you live in a different continent doesn't mean you have to abide by stupid government-imposed addiction "prevention" regulations. China wants to take away an open-information internet from its people, China wants to force their people into accepting a communist government (not that I'm against that form in its true self), China now wants to take away our video gaming rights!? WTF? Does that sound assinine to anyone else besides me? It's not like we're talking about drugs here. We're talking about games like WOW, Half-Life 2, Doom3, Halo, Halo 2, etc...what gives anyone above a child's mom and dad the right to limit their video gaming useage? What the hell?
When I got I8kfanGUI (http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/).
It doesn't work on all Dell models, but I've been using it on my Inspiron 9300 with no problems at all. My dad also uses it on his laptop and it works just great. One problem with Dell laptops is they don't kick the fans on soon enough or high enough - not to mention the cooling pathways are rather poorly designed. If you're going to bypass the built-in rules Dell provides on the BIOS, however, you need to make sure you know what you're doing or you can cause even more damage. My notebook got ridiculously hot before bypassing the default BIOS settings but works fine now - even in my lap.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just going to say that.
If someone doesn't know personal things about me, they can't harm my reputation through true facts (people can always lie and usually do). If someone does know personal things about me, and there is something personal about me that people would ill-conceive, then that person can harm my reputation--and reputation is not something useless in the survival sense either. Reputation IS necessary for survival. If the reputation of an individual is damaged, people will tend not to want to work with that person.
Some have compared us to the animals and stated that because privacy is a social thing, and the animals aren't apparently worried about social life--they are only worried with immediate survival--privacy can't be a biological defense. But this thinking is wrong because these people fail to place animals and humans in proper context of their surrounding environment (although it's interesting to note that animals do have a social hierarchy). Animals worry about their immediate survival and (some) worry about their offspring. However, humans have to worry about social perception because we are social animals. No one human can survive on his/her own. We need each other to survive. How we are perceived is important for our survival, and our perception can be controlled through privacy. Privacy allows us to share personal things about ourselves with only those we know and trust, and helps prevent others from using personal knowledge against us. This is what attorney/client or doctor/patient privacy privileges are all about.
A lot of our survival needs and reasons for doing things are based in our subconscious. We do things socially for survival reasons often without even realizing it. Our brains tend to process our environments and then they try to adjust their subconscious patterns to that environment--at least, the healthy brains do this.
Actually, there is a way to turn off transparency in Vista through the new redesigned desktop properties dialog.
I actually quite like the new UI in Vista--including the transparency effects, but that's about all I like. Beryl and XGL are actually a lot better, and they don't suck up the memory that Vista uses.
As others have pointed out here, this only works if you have your Google Calendar set to public. By default (at least with my account) my calendar is already set to private. This supposed "stealing" and "death by calendar" stuff is just hype. This public calendar feature is just that: it's a feature you can add manually to allow other people to see. This is nothing bad. I for one am glad that Google likes to add useful features into their products. If this was an attempt to make Google look evil, it was a pretty poor attempt. RTFA
I've used Firefox since it came out. I don't have any visual themes installed, but I do have my favorite extensions loaded. I've never had a problem with it before. In fact, I've found that IE does take up much more memory and does take longer to load. Plus the whole OS-integrated browser thing just makes matters worse what with ActiveX running everywhere.
Just for the heck of it, I'm running FF and IE right now (on Windows XP). I shut FF down and "shut" IE down (like that's even possible). I then loaded them up and browsed 2 pages on slashdot so far with IE and 6 pages with FF. The Windows Task Manager is telling me that IE is taking 28,108 Kb, and FF is using 27,744 Kb. While I realize that these numbers are not much different, don't forget that that's 3 times the amount of browsing (with cache enabled) in FF with slightly less memory used. IE is actually using more memory as it is constantly running and can never be shut down as it is integrated into the OS itself.
So I completely agree with you Foofoobar. FF is actually cleaner, more efficient, and generally less buggy IME. Even on my Windows box I don't use IE for anything except the occassional site that isn't written to play nicely with anything but IE. Don't you love wannabe web "developers"?
Look, I'm all for people NOT becoming addicted to anything. Human beings need a healthy dose of a wide variety of things. But I am a bit pissed off when any government attempts to do something this stupid.
Look, I'm the work-a-holic type of guy. I spend most of my time working (even late into the night), and when I finally come home and sleep, I'm almost too tired to get up in the morning. For people like me, doing the best job possible (I'm not forced to work this hard) is an obssession. I'm admitting it. I literally only get like one truly free day twice a month or something. And when I do get those days off, I want to be able to spend all day doing something fun. Is it wrong if I decide to spend all day some month playing that $50-$60 video game I bought last year? Is it any government's business whatsoever if I decide to use my equipment, my internet connection, on my time?
Come on!!! This is the f***ing Chinese government. They don't give two shits about your health. This is the same government that has one of the hardest and strictest death penalties available on the face of the earth. They allow people to work in low living conditions with low wages and constant over-work on at least a slavery level. A good friend of mine left China as soon as he could because the situation over there is so bad. He'll tell anyone not to emmigrate to China.
To reiterate, I don't think it's good for people to have an unhealthy addiction to anything. But when rules get as picky as "you can't play this game online for more than 3 hours a day", well, let's just say you'll have me up in arms against the asshole government who wants to play 1948 (George Orwell) with me ! I like my rights. If I decide to overwork to make extra money one day, and my boss has no problem letting me take the next day off to finally finish Doom 3 because I've covered that day's work already, I sure as hell better be able to do that with no constrictions from the government that I pay taxes to.
What about children? It's the job of parents, not the job of any government, to deal with their own kids. If parents think it's OK for their kids to spend over 3 hours playing a MMORPG, then let their kids do that. Since when is having good fun morally wrong? And who is the government to decide what is right or wrong for us? Conversely, if parents decide to limit their kid's gaming time to "prevent addiction", what's wrong with that? The parents had to raise their kids, not the government.
And by the way, addiction is not always prevented with enforced limitations on "access" to the object in question. In my own case, the more I have of anything the more I get tired of it and want to do something else. I guess that's a healthy human reaction, I don't know. But I can only play a video game generally for around a couple hours max, and then I get sick of it. However, I have occassionally spent all day finishing a game. But I'm an adult, going to college and working, and I feel that I have a right in my own spare time to do what I please.
Yeah, I'm in the U.S. and these people are in China. But just because you live in a different continent doesn't mean you have to abide by stupid government-imposed addiction "prevention" regulations. China wants to take away an open-information internet from its people, China wants to force their people into accepting a communist government (not that I'm against that form in its true self), China now wants to take away our video gaming rights!? WTF? Does that sound assinine to anyone else besides me? It's not like we're talking about drugs here. We're talking about games like WOW, Half-Life 2, Doom3, Halo, Halo 2, etc...what gives anyone above a child's mom and dad the right to limit their video gaming useage? What the hell?
When I got I8kfanGUI (http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/).
It doesn't work on all Dell models, but I've been using it on my Inspiron 9300 with no problems at all. My dad also uses it on his laptop and it works just great. One problem with Dell laptops is they don't kick the fans on soon enough or high enough - not to mention the cooling pathways are rather poorly designed. If you're going to bypass the built-in rules Dell provides on the BIOS, however, you need to make sure you know what you're doing or you can cause even more damage. My notebook got ridiculously hot before bypassing the default BIOS settings but works fine now - even in my lap.