Since I've been 'religiously' reading slashdot for over a decade now, incalculably more regularly than I've gone to church, shall I assume that slashdot is likely delivering me malware right now?
Seriously, since CmdrTaco left, and to be honest, many years prior to that and the recent SlashBI goodness, things have been going way downhill. This past year I've still skimmed each 600+ post global warming article, because it seems important enough, and the slashdot flamefests, despite the signal to noise ratio, sadly seem more intelligent than any other conversation on the topic. But threads like this, where every last highly moderated comment seems like nothing more than a troll-response bounty for the pageview-centric new management... Ehh. If there is one comment that breaks me of my slashdot religion, it was probably the first Score:5 comment on this thread- "Obama ate a a dog!". I guess the planet will just have to burn...
"There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get."
Yes. URPMI is why I used and loved Mandrake... about a million years ago. Funny how in that sentence you fail to mention yum, which is exactly the thing that caused the rest of the RPM based distros to finally erase Mandrake's core advantage. It's been a long time since then. Mandrake is dead, let it R.I.P.
Disclaimer: While I did work at Keyhole(what became GoogleEarth) for 1.75 years back in 2k3, and while my older brother is Google's VP-Engineering, Geo division, I have had no significant insider knowledge or discussions about this, or anything related to it, since I left that job. I also would probably be written off as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic by many, but I'll refrain from shilling half a dozen interesting tidbits about myself here. Anyway, my comment is this:
"This would be evil if Google:
1) Collaborated with the government to alert the government about potential "illegal" activities being conducted"
Now, I will mention that it is public knowledge that the CIA through it's venture capital investment arm 'In-Q-Tel' did more or less save Keyhole from going under during the hard times of 2003ish, a year or two before they were acquired by google.
I honestly can't see how people, even the author of the parent comment, can ignore that angle of the parent comment. Do you really, in any universe after the last decade, think the CIA wouldn't start scratching their heads regarding the possibilities of a dragnet of roving signals intelligence vehicles canvasing the nation, neigh, the world?? I mean, Really??. Do you really think that if they had done something illegal, or debatably unconstitutional on that scale, that they couldn't succeed in getting it brushed under the rug, under the cover that it was just a couple silly engineers stretching some bounds? Really? If so, enjoy your lack of paranoia. Ignorance is bliss.
Pessimistic Sci-Fi IMHO is an attempt, through social communication of complex ideas, to effect changes within society, that would have the result of turning the pessimistic author into a more optimistic person.
You could be a troll, but I'll guess you're not, and respond to some of your anti-christianity, that, was expressed much as I probably would have expressed it 10 or 20 years ago when I was still a lifelong atheist.
As to the bible referring to people allegorically as 'sheep', yes. The bible speaks of people allegorically and parable-ly(parabolicly can't be right:)), in many ways. A whole lot of 'flocks' and 'sheeps', and perhaps more than that, as fields of crops and other such collections to be harvested by God. What you might interestingly trip out on, is how it is perhaps your belief, that in all the life in the universe, or perhaps an isolated pond of it here on earth, you believe that you are of the one single unique species that is not, effectively going to be harvested or otherwise feeding and providing needs of a larger ecosystem, so complex you're limited grey-matter faculties cannot even begin to fully comprehend.
As for your point about translations- translations are all we have, and if you think about it, the best we could have, so I'd advize you come to grips with that, and begin to appreciate translations, if imperfect and/or varying, rather than arrogantly cast them asside as unworthy of respect and educational value.
As to "the whole Christian promotion of ignorance with regards to Abortion/Global Warming etc"... Stereotype much? One of the key first things I learned as a christian when I became a christian, was how non-homogoneous (not a sexuality thing, read slowly) christians are as a whole. Once you, Phrogman, get to the point of spending more effort looking at how others might actually be people roughly as smart and decent as you despite their strange beliefs you clearly despise, you will see that Christians as a whole have incredibly varied personal positions with regards to Abortion/Global Warming, etc. Perhaps as much variance as non-christians. I mean, there was this whole roman catholic, protestant, martin luther, thing in history you might want to look up. Don't get me wrong, I had a similarly vile view of christianity 15 years ago. You might have a pretty different view 15 years from now. Even today, I'll certainly grant a kernel of truth within your second to last sentence. Maybe by the time you are willing to spend more time granting a kernel of truth in the teachings of various mainstream religions, you will agree that blindly hating christians is about as useless as blindly hating anti-christians.
As to the further ancestors of this thread, and Jesus wielding a whip in the temple. First, I imagine one could wield a whip and drive people and/or animals from an area, without actually inflicting violent contact with humans (I'm inexperienced with cattle to know if warning shots are sufficient there). Next, the beginning of christian humility for some might be to reflect on, in context, the story of Jesus getting angry in the temple on that occasion. It's pretty remarkable, as there really aren't that many stories in the bible of Jesus getting angry. One could take that as a cue to meditate on the story in particular. Clearly it is an interesting example of the kind of vitriol animosity towards the established mainstream religion of the day, and how it was practiced, that you Phrogman, could perhaps appreciate in a 'through the looking glass' sort of way.
" It would offend them for me to say that Religion was invented "
My christian (36yo, atheist for the first 27 or so) response to this would be don't go (pre-)judging them too quickly. Maybe you aren't, maybe you know them well enough, but if I were you, or had been you when I was younger, my advice now is, say it. They sound like overall/more-or-less decent folk if you've bothered to continue hanging out with them despire your disbelief. As a christian, I'm advocating that more christians do what they can to expose themselves to others real beliefs, in a core non-judgemental ('judge not...') way, rather than what has historically, and is still the case in greater and lesser degrees in many christians, i.e. anything that looks even the slightest bit remotely to be in the same vein as the midevil catholic church's use of torture[1] devices to terroristicly coerce and compel false 'confessions of belief' (either directly, or indirectly). Most of us older folks remember the sodomy laws(any homosexual sex, at points in the past, even oral sex amongst married heterosexual couples) that were until relatively historicly recently, on the books and enforced in texas, kansas(my home state), etc. All due to the worst sort of impulses in people to control minorities and those different from them, due to their selective interpretation of one particular translation, of a particular collection of books, that despite those qualifiers, present a groundwork for anyone on the planet beginning to understand the 'mainstream'(or rather, one healthy and unarguably significant fraction of it) human cultural history of the last couple thousand years.
"The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them."
This is the thing. It'll happen. It took royalty getting caught up in the Murdoch phone hacking thing, but now that cat is starting to come out of the bag. I think it's safe to say that the U.K. has a more evolved, through experience, and more enlightened view of the dangers of digital network communications security these days than they did in the ugly post-9/11 big brother (cities blanketed with 24/7 video surveillance, etc...) phase. Before the Murdoch thing, the govt could hammer away the company line (that you quote above, i.e. the threats will never hit those you know or care about, any more than lightning and car crashes do). But now after seeing the top eschelon of the paragons of terrorist-fighting elite professional police, succumb to simple bribery for tabloid exploitation purposes to further enrich the owner of FOX news??
Things evolve, technology, perceptions. People learn. They aren't as stupid, both now and in the future, as the above sentiment suggests you believe.
" Me? Sure, if I'm walking a street alone (especially in New Orleans) and I see some black teen males walking behind me or coming near me...I keep a very wary eye out on them, and often will cross to the other side of the road and keep an eye out for my options to get to safety in case of a mugging. "
This is where you _really_ lost me. As the current end of page +5 comment suggests, the real deciding factor for my near-instinctual threat-level meters is based fairly colorblindedly on subtler things than race, mostly towards wealth. Though if the others appear wealthy and young, say 20-25ish, I'll admit that if black, and if otherwise ambiguous (behavior/bodylanguage-wise), I may think of the perhaps valid stereotype of blacks likelier to be in the mid-low level drug dealing enterprise, than whites, whom I would chalk up more probability of just having rich parents. (and the drug association, unfortunately with prohibition, being often a gateway to broader disprespect for the more victimful laws as well as the victimless ones). Unfortunately this legitimate stereotype is a race-class hybrid issue. But my core point was- walking down a sketch neighborhood street, if you see 3 20 year olds, I think you may be paying more attention than you realize to how wealthy they appear, and how they behave/bodylanguage, and making possibly racially(racist?) based socioeconomic real-time threat guesstimates. Or maybe you just are that racist. Or just need to think it more through. I.e. 'gang-banger clothes'? Is that equivalent to 'rags', or you thinking more blatant synchronized bandanas. Ok, I guess I must concede minor point to you on the overt latter, in that, one can hedge their actions on the belief that an obvious race-homogenous clearly branded gang, will be on average over incidences, more of a threat if you are not of the same race as them. But even if I see a saw a group of blue eyed whites like myself in an overtly branded race-homogonous gang of 3+ members on the street... you know what... I'm not sure I can see feeling any less threatened there, but that might be an outlyer for obvious reasons...
I'm still waiting to see some sort of apology or april fools cover for this story, but maybe it is a continued significant downturn in advertising standards at slashdot, along the lines of my recent complaint/submission about the 'sugar daddy dating' advertising - http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=30347589 - that I got flooded with (~50%, cookieless, fresh profile front page view coverage). That seemed to only last a week or two, either because of a one-off ad-buy coincidence, or slashdot(or parent) exerting some better advertising discretion. Dunno. I'd love to bash this article, but I'm really too stunned to believe it wasn't an accident or late april fools thing. Although I did find this thread educational, if in fact the statements about digg having massive reduction in readership is true. Never having gotten on that bandwagon, I'm nonetheless surprised to hear it taking a serious kuro5hin like turn. Certainly if this video isn't just a freak one time thing, it is what could finally do slashdot in. I just can't believe they'd be so stupid as to just walk that obvious road. Maybe it's a secret ploy to run away all the cookieless viewers who aren't trackable and therefore worth as much as advertisees. I.e. if you browse logged in typically, you filter the editor, otherwise, you are driven away by advertisements. Culling the herd to focus on those valuable trackable advertisees. Bwa ha ha ha..... (sorry, just had to give into the advertising paranoia there for a bit...)
>>Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company. >> They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.
> Um, yes it does.
Actually, and I speak from a highly relevent perspective here, I'd like to point out that you are both wrong. RedHat is neither black nor white on this issue. They surf the grey area profitably. But I'll give them credit for surfing the gray, mostly on toward the better side. Yes, they do actually go a long way (in many ways) beyond what the GPL requires. And lots of people appreciate that. But both they and CentOS, will choose to take gray paths that inhibit the easy full harnessing of the source code in ideal form, without going through a path that requires one of those organizations to both have their logo all over the distro, and go through their compilation and distribution servers as part of your experience with the 'open source code distribution'. I've personally spent months of my own unemployed time trying to remedy this situation, such that anyone can easily leverage the nice srpms that RH provides, without having to deal with either CentOS or RedHat's logos and compilation servers (really, a $350 modern netbook can compile all of *EL-6.X in about a week, not something that demands dependence on an external corporation's servers).
Anyway, props to RH for getting their share of the $$ pie. And seemingly in less insidious ways than advertising companies have leveraged open source software to get their massive share of the $$ pie.
+1 "Or it just means that they've realised trying to track people who search for the censored terms is likely to be more effective if the searches give results - whereas previously people didn't bother searching because they knew the results were censored."
Probably using efficient technologies purchased or 'liberated' from U.S. companies, that knew _exactly_ what they were selling and how it was likely to be used by a government with the track history of the Tiananmen Square* Massacre (*OK China, let's call it the region of land 1 square mile with it's center at Tiananmen Square Massacre). Let alone the history of Orwellianly covering up that 'unhistory'.
I agree, this is a good step forward. But there are miles to go (and almost as much with the U.S. gubernment over here... One can hope that it literally is a problem of a generational technical divide, and that perhaps a more educated/high-tech-experienced generation will enact better social laws/structure around maturing technology, but... seeing how far we've strayed from using the older tech as a good 'analog' for applying laws and protections to new tech... and you'd best do more than hope)
"However, I think the idea that firefox will become irrelevant if they do not make their way onto mobile is dubious, because desktops will remain the primary means of computing, for many reasons."
I can't claim to have read the entire comment, but this is close enough to the comment I was going to make. Basically, I see mobile phones, and their presently non-desktop OSs as a temporary thing. I mean, can't we all agree, that 20 years from now, we'll probably be wearing some device on our body, smaller than current mobile phones, but more powerful than our current desktops? While mozilla's strategy here may be the right one, I don't think it's ridiculous to believe that they could just sit the whole android/iOS era out, and wait for the day when mobile phone computing devices effectively re-integrate with the traditional desktop devices. Eh... just a kind of zen thought that occasionally just sitting and doing nothing is a more effective strategy to conserve energy and sanity, than chasing some new fad and wasting your energy in the process.
"Believe it or not, the way to fix the problem is to create more sweat shops in China."
You have been infected with an evil meme. You propose fixing something evil, by expanding it. There is another answer- Buy less shit you don't need. And when your gut reaction is that you really need that new smartphone. Think again. If you still think you need it, THINK AGAIN. But that is only part of the solution. The other part, is to use any and every means necessary to secure all the citizen's of the world, those rights enshrined in the first ammendment to the constitution of the United States of America. When all citizen's have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to become journalists exposing harsh working conditions, then THAT will be the foundation that solves this problems. More sweatshops is NOT the answer. More freedom of speech, and freedom to redress grievences with your government and employers, is the answer.
"The majority of Apple consumers don't care. They don't even want the product to last a long time as there will be a new product to buy years before the battery starts to go bad. They would much rather throw the product into landfill than be seen without the latest gadget (or they let Apple throw it into the landfill for them so they can remain obvlivious while still wearing their Think Green tee shirts)."
While there are many good criticisms of TFA in this thread, this is what makes the essence of the article good to consider. The majority of Apple consumers probably don't care about the devices possible longevity, i.e. being very useful to people for decades rather than years. And I'm guessing that Apple cares even less, as the quicker it gets recycled, the quicker thye are likely to sell another of their next gen devices. But what this ends up doing, is burning through our environmental resources in several ways. Rare earth elements, that I'd WAG 25-90% of are lost even when the devices are properly recycled. And then the electronic devices that people otherwise buy, that they could have just as easily used a 10 year old ipad for. And this is also related to the software walled garden issue. I.e. I happen to strongly believe, that if Nintendo weren't such jerks about homebrew software stifling and their walled garden, that every, even those ugly first generation, nintendo-DSs could be used for awesome things, like house intercom systems.
Now, I didn't cover all the angles and touch on all the nuance. I.e. I'm sure at some point there is a balance between newer generations of devices being more energy efficient, and probably half a dozen other subtle tracts. But I, like TFA's author, strongly believe that the world would be a much better place if _somehow_ we could slow down or reverse the march towards planned-obsolecent, artificially short-lived, homebrew hostile, hardware platforms.
Another perfect example is my cheap ($10 or $20 virgin mobile prepaid) clamshell phone. There are half a dozen features I would love to add to the thing if I had access to the needed compilers and interface to upload code to it. I.e. a (disc)golf scorekeeping app. Adjusting the vibrate ringer which wouldn't be half as annoying if I could just cut its duration by a factor of 4 as well as tweaking the algorithm it uses to 'remind' me that I have an unchecked missed call or voicemail. And I'm sure an open source community could come up with dozens of other 'apps' that the thing's hardware platform is trivially capable of that would make me enjoy the device much more. Anyway, it will be sad knowing how many rare earth materials, whose mining practices are literally fueling lord of the flies lifestyles in Africa and elsewhere, will be wasted because we, as mentioned, let companies like Apple get away with due to their homebrew hostile, planned obsolecent hardware platforms.
Again, I'm just saying, lots of insightful criticism of TFA above, but there IS a valid point here worth considering and not dismissing. We've only begun to see superpowers start to get in hissy fits over rare earth elements, the way they have been over oil for decades. Why not stop dismissing this authors valid points, so we can avoid more negative consequences in the future?
"So what I'm trying to say is that this is completely subjective, just do what feels natural.
The most important thing is to be passionate about the projects you pick up, if you are then never mind staying focused, you'll go into overtime without even realising it."
+1 (though I'm an absolute failure employment wise, but not ashamed of the path I've taken and where I am).
Life is too short not to follow the above advise, if you can find a way to. To hell with trading in your hours for a handful of dimes from banking and other establishment jerks that gamed the system to get their bailouts when all of their 'proper business practices' turned into more epic global economy damaging failures than we passionate slackers could have ever conjured up with our playing by our own rules work ethics.
The establishment got rich selling TV entertainment to our parents to use as substitute automated child rearing devices, so if our brains work better pausing and unpausing some rerun of some show we liked as a kid amidst our work day- so be it.
I'm probably as guilty at too often thinking the Average Joe may be as informed/cynical as I am. I.e, my non-RTFA response is "Credibility Matters".
These days I don't find the idea credible that any service could actually succeed in maintaining a business model, and in the technical challenge, of securing my privacy and providing a service even remotely comparable to the privacy 'invading' alternatives like Google and Facebook. At least not for $1, or even $100/yr. Even if you could somehow neutralize the unethical advertising gangs, neutralizing the unethical state sponsored intelligence agencies, as well as the unethical organized criminal gangs, seems in my estimation to be entirely out of the reach of any corporation. Yes, I am one of THOSE open source software zealots...
The hack consists of asking the Hypervisor to return without waiting for a blit to end. After the Hypervisor returns there is a small length of time during which the FIFO or FIFO registers can be modified before the GPU has finished reading the command. This will occur when a large blit is decomposed into many smaller 1024×1024 blits by the Hypervisor. The last operation pushed to the FIFO by the Hypervisor is a wait for the GPU engine to go idle. By skipping this operation, it is possible to enqueue more commands to the FIFO for the GPU to execute. So the hack consists in either patching the last operation with a NOP, or changing the FIFO write pointer to stop earlier. "
"The system rewards bastards, so we tend to become bastards."
Actually, I doubt this is true (whether your parents were married at the time of your birth increasing your rewards from the system).
But I do suspect it is true that the system rewards people who don't think about the words they use. Because I hear so many people like you who talk like that, and clearly think they are making intelligent conversation.
"Could it just *possibly* be that both men, of at least reasonable intellect, when faced with the full disclosure of what the US intelligence community knows, decided on the SAME course for reasons that are mutually sound? Reasons we don't know, and probably won't know for 50 years if ever?"
Sure, that's possible and even likely. But it matters a lot what that knowledge is. The first bit that comes to my mind is "If presidents threaten the wealth of the established players, their children, or the children of some of their close, but less nationally known friends, are likely to be tortured."
Obvious troll, but I'll bite: the bits that you receive through my connection detract from the bits that I can receive through my connection for bandwidth is a physical world entity.
OTOH, the bits that you copy from me don't disappear from my hard disk by your copying, for information is being a virtual world entity.
I'm not trolling, nor the author of the grandparent post, nor interested enough to RTFA. But I kindof agree with your line of reasoning, BUT... You sound like the kind of logical ethicist who might be interested in this followup thought-
Suppose the hacker in question was _so good_, that they managed to write their tools and enabling hacks, such that the only bandwidth 'stolen', was known, with scientific and engineering accuracy, to have gone completely unused. Now that's a very, very big IF. But from skimming these comments, it does sound like this guy may have known the technical nature of the network even better than those who owned and operated it. In that hypothetical, his infraction seems about as ethically dubious as the seemingly less (by your expression) malicious copyright violation of getting a free copy of that tv episode you paid itunes for.
Lots of shades of gray, and very very big pictures to consider... I consider it best to reserve judgement, given I'm positive I don't know all the relevant facts, and it does seem incredibly unlikely to have seriously harmed anyone. (but who knows, its just as easy to construct a hypothetical where the interference interrupted 911 emergency services, but if so, the details of such things are for a jury of ones peers to decide).
A true darknet would not depend on traditiona DNS (root servers). I can't immediately tell from their FAQ if their methods are entirely independent of DNS.
parent post is BullShit as well, again, coming from a christian, who when he was an atheist cub-scout, having fulfilled all the requirements to become a boy scout (bridge/arrow of light ceremony), kept his honor by refusing to become a boy scout which required the following pledge-
" On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country "
I call BullShit of the first order on the parent post's reply to this grandparent post:
""Moreover they completely bar atheists and agnostics from membership of any kind."
false. not sure where you heard this.... even if you take umbrage to that, and decide to forego that part of advancement, you can be a member of the group"
*as a former cub-scout atheist, now a Christian at age 36*, who refused to become a boy scout because of the required pledge to God during the bridge/arrow of light ceremony.
" On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country "
All I've really wanted for christmas for the last 10 years is a phone easily disassemblable, with a transparent case, and user facing dip switches for the mic, the antennas, the battery, and these days, the power line going to the camera. Or alternately for the camera, a physical piece of plastic that slides to expose/cover the camera. Also the dip switches should be placed in such a way that it is reasonably convincing to technical users that they are in fact breaking the relevant physical traces/wires.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I've been 'religiously' reading slashdot for over a decade now, incalculably more regularly than I've gone to church, shall I assume that slashdot is likely delivering me malware right now?
Seriously, since CmdrTaco left, and to be honest, many years prior to that and the recent SlashBI goodness, things have been going way downhill. This past year I've still skimmed each 600+ post global warming article, because it seems important enough, and the slashdot flamefests, despite the signal to noise ratio, sadly seem more intelligent than any other conversation on the topic. But threads like this, where every last highly moderated comment seems like nothing more than a troll-response bounty for the pageview-centric new management... Ehh. If there is one comment that breaks me of my slashdot religion, it was probably the first Score:5 comment on this thread- "Obama ate a a dog!". I guess the planet will just have to burn...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/28/2214228/google-releases-fcc-report-on-street-view-probe
"There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get."
Yes. URPMI is why I used and loved Mandrake... about a million years ago. Funny how in that sentence you fail to mention yum, which is exactly the thing that caused the rest of the RPM based distros to finally erase Mandrake's core advantage. It's been a long time since then. Mandrake is dead, let it R.I.P.
Disclaimer: While I did work at Keyhole(what became GoogleEarth) for 1.75 years back in 2k3, and while my older brother is Google's VP-Engineering, Geo division, I have had no significant insider knowledge or discussions about this, or anything related to it, since I left that job. I also would probably be written off as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic by many, but I'll refrain from shilling half a dozen interesting tidbits about myself here. Anyway, my comment is this:
"This would be evil if Google:
1) Collaborated with the government to alert the government about potential "illegal" activities being conducted"
Now, I will mention that it is public knowledge that the CIA through it's venture capital investment arm 'In-Q-Tel' did more or less save Keyhole from going under during the hard times of 2003ish, a year or two before they were acquired by google.
I honestly can't see how people, even the author of the parent comment, can ignore that angle of the parent comment. Do you really, in any universe after the last decade, think the CIA wouldn't start scratching their heads regarding the possibilities of a dragnet of roving signals intelligence vehicles canvasing the nation, neigh, the world?? I mean, Really??. Do you really think that if they had done something illegal, or debatably unconstitutional on that scale, that they couldn't succeed in getting it brushed under the rug, under the cover that it was just a couple silly engineers stretching some bounds? Really? If so, enjoy your lack of paranoia. Ignorance is bliss.
-dmc
Pessimistic Sci-Fi IMHO is an attempt, through social communication of complex ideas, to effect changes within society, that would have the result of turning the pessimistic author into a more optimistic person.
"Monotheism is evil itself."
You could be a troll, but I'll guess you're not, and respond to some of your anti-christianity, that, was expressed much as I probably would have expressed it 10 or 20 years ago when I was still a lifelong atheist.
As to the bible referring to people allegorically as 'sheep', yes. The bible speaks of people allegorically and parable-ly(parabolicly can't be right :)), in many ways. A whole lot of 'flocks' and 'sheeps', and perhaps more than that, as fields of crops and other such collections to be harvested by God. What you might interestingly trip out on, is how it is perhaps your belief, that in all the life in the universe, or perhaps an isolated pond of it here on earth, you believe that you are of the one single unique species that is not, effectively going to be harvested or otherwise feeding and providing needs of a larger ecosystem, so complex you're limited grey-matter faculties cannot even begin to fully comprehend.
As for your point about translations- translations are all we have, and if you think about it, the best we could have, so I'd advize you come to grips with that, and begin to appreciate translations, if imperfect and/or varying, rather than arrogantly cast them asside as unworthy of respect and educational value.
As to "the whole Christian promotion of ignorance with regards to Abortion/Global Warming etc"... Stereotype much? One of the key first things I learned as a christian when I became a christian, was how non-homogoneous (not a sexuality thing, read slowly) christians are as a whole. Once you, Phrogman, get to the point of spending more effort looking at how others might actually be people roughly as smart and decent as you despite their strange beliefs you clearly despise, you will see that Christians as a whole have incredibly varied personal positions with regards to Abortion/Global Warming, etc. Perhaps as much variance as non-christians. I mean, there was this whole roman catholic, protestant, martin luther, thing in history you might want to look up. Don't get me wrong, I had a similarly vile view of christianity 15 years ago. You might have a pretty different view 15 years from now. Even today, I'll certainly grant a kernel of truth within your second to last sentence. Maybe by the time you are willing to spend more time granting a kernel of truth in the teachings of various mainstream religions, you will agree that blindly hating christians is about as useless as blindly hating anti-christians.
As to the further ancestors of this thread, and Jesus wielding a whip in the temple. First, I imagine one could wield a whip and drive people and/or animals from an area, without actually inflicting violent contact with humans (I'm inexperienced with cattle to know if warning shots are sufficient there). Next, the beginning of christian humility for some might be to reflect on, in context, the story of Jesus getting angry in the temple on that occasion. It's pretty remarkable, as there really aren't that many stories in the bible of Jesus getting angry. One could take that as a cue to meditate on the story in particular. Clearly it is an interesting example of the kind of vitriol animosity towards the established mainstream religion of the day, and how it was practiced, that you Phrogman, could perhaps appreciate in a 'through the looking glass' sort of way.
"
It would offend them for me to say that Religion was invented
"
My christian (36yo, atheist for the first 27 or so) response to this would be don't go (pre-)judging them too quickly. Maybe you aren't, maybe you know them well enough, but if I were you, or had been you when I was younger, my advice now is, say it. They sound like overall/more-or-less decent folk if you've bothered to continue hanging out with them despire your disbelief. As a christian, I'm advocating that more christians do what they can to expose themselves to others real beliefs, in a core non-judgemental ('judge not...') way, rather than what has historically, and is still the case in greater and lesser degrees in many christians, i.e. anything that looks even the slightest bit remotely to be in the same vein as the midevil catholic church's use of torture[1] devices to terroristicly coerce and compel false 'confessions of belief' (either directly, or indirectly). Most of us older folks remember the sodomy laws(any homosexual sex, at points in the past, even oral sex amongst married heterosexual couples) that were until relatively historicly recently, on the books and enforced in texas, kansas(my home state), etc. All due to the worst sort of impulses in people to control minorities and those different from them, due to their selective interpretation of one particular translation, of a particular collection of books, that despite those qualifiers, present a groundwork for anyone on the planet beginning to understand the 'mainstream'(or rather, one healthy and unarguably significant fraction of it) human cultural history of the last couple thousand years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture#Roman_Catholic_Church
"The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them."
This is the thing. It'll happen. It took royalty getting caught up in the Murdoch phone hacking thing, but now that cat is starting to come out of the bag. I think it's safe to say that the U.K. has a more evolved, through experience, and more enlightened view of the dangers of digital network communications security these days than they did in the ugly post-9/11 big brother (cities blanketed with 24/7 video surveillance, etc...) phase. Before the Murdoch thing, the govt could hammer away the company line (that you quote above, i.e. the threats will never hit those you know or care about, any more than lightning and car crashes do). But now after seeing the top eschelon of the paragons of terrorist-fighting elite professional police, succumb to simple bribery for tabloid exploitation purposes to further enrich the owner of FOX news??
Things evolve, technology, perceptions. People learn. They aren't as stupid, both now and in the future, as the above sentiment suggests you believe.
"
Me? Sure, if I'm walking a street alone (especially in New Orleans) and I see some black teen males walking behind me or coming near me...I keep a very wary eye out on them, and often will cross to the other side of the road and keep an eye out for my options to get to safety in case of a mugging.
"
This is where you _really_ lost me. As the current end of page +5 comment suggests, the real deciding factor for my near-instinctual threat-level meters is based fairly colorblindedly on subtler things than race, mostly towards wealth. Though if the others appear wealthy and young, say 20-25ish, I'll admit that if black, and if otherwise ambiguous (behavior/bodylanguage-wise), I may think of the perhaps valid stereotype of blacks likelier to be in the mid-low level drug dealing enterprise, than whites, whom I would chalk up more probability of just having rich parents. (and the drug association, unfortunately with prohibition, being often a gateway to broader disprespect for the more victimful laws as well as the victimless ones). Unfortunately this legitimate stereotype is a race-class hybrid issue. But my core point was- walking down a sketch neighborhood street, if you see 3 20 year olds, I think you may be paying more attention than you realize to how wealthy they appear, and how they behave/bodylanguage, and making possibly racially(racist?) based socioeconomic real-time threat guesstimates. Or maybe you just are that racist. Or just need to think it more through. I.e. 'gang-banger clothes'? Is that equivalent to 'rags', or you thinking more blatant synchronized bandanas. Ok, I guess I must concede minor point to you on the overt latter, in that, one can hedge their actions on the belief that an obvious race-homogenous clearly branded gang, will be on average over incidences, more of a threat if you are not of the same race as them. But even if I see a saw a group of blue eyed whites like myself in an overtly branded race-homogonous gang of 3+ members on the street... you know what... I'm not sure I can see feeling any less threatened there, but that might be an outlyer for obvious reasons...
I'm still waiting to see some sort of apology or april fools cover for this story, but maybe it is a continued significant downturn in advertising standards at slashdot, along the lines of my recent complaint/submission about the 'sugar daddy dating' advertising - http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=30347589 - that I got flooded with (~50%, cookieless, fresh profile front page view coverage). That seemed to only last a week or two, either because of a one-off ad-buy coincidence, or slashdot(or parent) exerting some better advertising discretion. Dunno. I'd love to bash this article, but I'm really too stunned to believe it wasn't an accident or late april fools thing. Although I did find this thread educational, if in fact the statements about digg having massive reduction in readership is true. Never having gotten on that bandwagon, I'm nonetheless surprised to hear it taking a serious kuro5hin like turn. Certainly if this video isn't just a freak one time thing, it is what could finally do slashdot in. I just can't believe they'd be so stupid as to just walk that obvious road. Maybe it's a secret ploy to run away all the cookieless viewers who aren't trackable and therefore worth as much as advertisees. I.e. if you browse logged in typically, you filter the editor, otherwise, you are driven away by advertisements. Culling the herd to focus on those valuable trackable advertisees. Bwa ha ha ha..... (sorry, just had to give into the advertising paranoia there for a bit...)
>>Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company.
>> They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.
> Um, yes it does.
Actually, and I speak from a highly relevent perspective here, I'd like to point out that you are both wrong. RedHat is neither black nor white on this issue. They surf the grey area profitably. But I'll give them credit for surfing the gray, mostly on toward the better side. Yes, they do actually go a long way (in many ways) beyond what the GPL requires. And lots of people appreciate that. But both they and CentOS, will choose to take gray paths that inhibit the easy full harnessing of the source code in ideal form, without going through a path that requires one of those organizations to both have their logo all over the distro, and go through their compilation and distribution servers as part of your experience with the 'open source code distribution'. I've personally spent months of my own unemployed time trying to remedy this situation, such that anyone can easily leverage the nice srpms that RH provides, without having to deal with either CentOS or RedHat's logos and compilation servers (really, a $350 modern netbook can compile all of *EL-6.X in about a week, not something that demands dependence on an external corporation's servers).
Anyway, props to RH for getting their share of the $$ pie. And seemingly in less insidious ways than advertising companies have leveraged open source software to get their massive share of the $$ pie.
+1 "Or it just means that they've realised trying to track people who search for the censored terms is likely to be more effective if the searches give results - whereas previously people didn't bother searching because they knew the results were censored."
Probably using efficient technologies purchased or 'liberated' from U.S. companies, that knew _exactly_ what they were selling and how it was likely to be used by a government with the track history of the Tiananmen Square* Massacre (*OK China, let's call it the region of land 1 square mile with it's center at Tiananmen Square Massacre). Let alone the history of Orwellianly covering up that 'unhistory'.
I agree, this is a good step forward. But there are miles to go (and almost as much with the U.S. gubernment over here... One can hope that it literally is a problem of a generational technical divide, and that perhaps a more educated/high-tech-experienced generation will enact better social laws/structure around maturing technology, but... seeing how far we've strayed from using the older tech as a good 'analog' for applying laws and protections to new tech... and you'd best do more than hope)
"However, I think the idea that firefox will become irrelevant if they do not make their way onto mobile is dubious, because desktops will remain the primary means of computing, for many reasons."
I can't claim to have read the entire comment, but this is close enough to the comment I was going to make. Basically, I see mobile phones, and their presently non-desktop OSs as a temporary thing. I mean, can't we all agree, that 20 years from now, we'll probably be wearing some device on our body, smaller than current mobile phones, but more powerful than our current desktops? While mozilla's strategy here may be the right one, I don't think it's ridiculous to believe that they could just sit the whole android/iOS era out, and wait for the day when mobile phone computing devices effectively re-integrate with the traditional desktop devices. Eh... just a kind of zen thought that occasionally just sitting and doing nothing is a more effective strategy to conserve energy and sanity, than chasing some new fad and wasting your energy in the process.
"Believe it or not, the way to fix the problem is to create more sweat shops in China."
You have been infected with an evil meme. You propose fixing something evil, by expanding it. There is another answer- Buy less shit you don't need. And when your gut reaction is that you really need that new smartphone. Think again. If you still think you need it, THINK AGAIN. But that is only part of the solution. The other part, is to use any and every means necessary to secure all the citizen's of the world, those rights enshrined in the first ammendment to the constitution of the United States of America. When all citizen's have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to become journalists exposing harsh working conditions, then THAT will be the foundation that solves this problems. More sweatshops is NOT the answer. More freedom of speech, and freedom to redress grievences with your government and employers, is the answer.
This.
"The majority of Apple consumers don't care. They don't even want the product to last a long time as there will be a new product to buy years before the battery starts to go bad. They would much rather throw the product into landfill than be seen without the latest gadget (or they let Apple throw it into the landfill for them so they can remain obvlivious while still wearing their Think Green tee shirts)."
While there are many good criticisms of TFA in this thread, this is what makes the essence of the article good to consider. The majority of Apple consumers probably don't care about the devices possible longevity, i.e. being very useful to people for decades rather than years. And I'm guessing that Apple cares even less, as the quicker it gets recycled, the quicker thye are likely to sell another of their next gen devices. But what this ends up doing, is burning through our environmental resources in several ways. Rare earth elements, that I'd WAG 25-90% of are lost even when the devices are properly recycled. And then the electronic devices that people otherwise buy, that they could have just as easily used a 10 year old ipad for. And this is also related to the software walled garden issue. I.e. I happen to strongly believe, that if Nintendo weren't such jerks about homebrew software stifling and their walled garden, that every, even those ugly first generation, nintendo-DSs could be used for awesome things, like house intercom systems.
Now, I didn't cover all the angles and touch on all the nuance. I.e. I'm sure at some point there is a balance between newer generations of devices being more energy efficient, and probably half a dozen other subtle tracts. But I, like TFA's author, strongly believe that the world would be a much better place if _somehow_ we could slow down or reverse the march towards planned-obsolecent, artificially short-lived, homebrew hostile, hardware platforms.
Another perfect example is my cheap ($10 or $20 virgin mobile prepaid) clamshell phone. There are half a dozen features I would love to add to the thing if I had access to the needed compilers and interface to upload code to it. I.e. a (disc)golf scorekeeping app. Adjusting the vibrate ringer which wouldn't be half as annoying if I could just cut its duration by a factor of 4 as well as tweaking the algorithm it uses to 'remind' me that I have an unchecked missed call or voicemail. And I'm sure an open source community could come up with dozens of other 'apps' that the thing's hardware platform is trivially capable of that would make me enjoy the device much more. Anyway, it will be sad knowing how many rare earth materials, whose mining practices are literally fueling lord of the flies lifestyles in Africa and elsewhere, will be wasted because we, as mentioned, let companies like Apple get away with due to their homebrew hostile, planned obsolecent hardware platforms.
Again, I'm just saying, lots of insightful criticism of TFA above, but there IS a valid point here worth considering and not dismissing. We've only begun to see superpowers start to get in hissy fits over rare earth elements, the way they have been over oil for decades. Why not stop dismissing this authors valid points, so we can avoid more negative consequences in the future?
"So what I'm trying to say is that this is completely subjective, just do what feels natural.
The most important thing is to be passionate about the projects you pick up, if you are then never mind staying focused, you'll go into overtime without even realising it."
+1 (though I'm an absolute failure employment wise, but not ashamed of the path I've taken and where I am).
Life is too short not to follow the above advise, if you can find a way to. To hell with trading in your hours for a handful of dimes from banking and other establishment jerks that gamed the system to get their bailouts when all of their 'proper business practices' turned into more epic global economy damaging failures than we passionate slackers could have ever conjured up with our playing by our own rules work ethics.
The establishment got rich selling TV entertainment to our parents to use as substitute automated child rearing devices, so if our brains work better pausing and unpausing some rerun of some show we liked as a kid amidst our work day- so be it.
"Average Joe is an idiot. Film at 11."
I'm probably as guilty at too often thinking the Average Joe may be as informed/cynical as I am. I.e, my non-RTFA response is "Credibility Matters".
These days I don't find the idea credible that any service could actually succeed in maintaining a business model, and in the technical challenge, of securing my privacy and providing a service even remotely comparable to the privacy 'invading' alternatives like Google and Facebook. At least not for $1, or even $100/yr. Even if you could somehow neutralize the unethical advertising gangs, neutralizing the unethical state sponsored intelligence agencies, as well as the unethical organized criminal gangs, seems in my estimation to be entirely out of the reach of any corporation. Yes, I am one of THOSE open source software zealots...
To further rain on the "VMs, even hardware ones, aren't exploitable" parade, the history of hacking the PS3 is always a fun read-
http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:rsx
"
FIFO workaround
The hack consists of asking the Hypervisor to return without waiting for a blit to end. After the Hypervisor returns there is a small length of time during which the FIFO or FIFO registers can be modified before the GPU has finished reading the command. This will occur when a large blit is decomposed into many smaller 1024×1024 blits by the Hypervisor. The last operation pushed to the FIFO by the Hypervisor is a wait for the GPU engine to go idle. By skipping this operation, it is possible to enqueue more commands to the FIFO for the GPU to execute. So the hack consists in either patching the last operation with a NOP, or changing the FIFO write pointer to stop earlier.
"
MOD PARENT UP, WAY UP!
""On the other hand, if you feel that 'big brother' is silently watching your every move, then you must have a huge ego.""
"More like the government could be watching your every move. Or someone else's moves. I don't only care about myself, you know."
THIS. F-N THIS YOU "you have a big ego" ASSHOLES
"The system rewards bastards, so we tend to become bastards."
Actually, I doubt this is true (whether your parents were married at the time of your birth increasing your rewards from the system).
But I do suspect it is true that the system rewards people who don't think about the words they use. Because I hear so many people like you who talk like that, and clearly think they are making intelligent conversation.
"Could it just *possibly* be that both men, of at least reasonable intellect, when faced with the full disclosure of what the US intelligence community knows, decided on the SAME course for reasons that are mutually sound? Reasons we don't know, and probably won't know for 50 years if ever?"
Sure, that's possible and even likely. But it matters a lot what that knowledge is. The first bit that comes to my mind is "If presidents threaten the wealth of the established players, their children, or the children of some of their close, but less nationally known friends, are likely to be tortured."
Obvious troll, but I'll bite: the bits that you receive through my connection detract from the bits that I can receive through my connection for bandwidth is a physical world entity.
OTOH, the bits that you copy from me don't disappear from my hard disk by your copying, for information is being a virtual world entity.
I'm not trolling, nor the author of the grandparent post, nor interested enough to RTFA. But I kindof agree with your line of reasoning, BUT... You sound like the kind of logical ethicist who might be interested in this followup thought-
Suppose the hacker in question was _so good_, that they managed to write their tools and enabling hacks, such that the only bandwidth 'stolen', was known, with scientific and engineering accuracy, to have gone completely unused. Now that's a very, very big IF. But from skimming these comments, it does sound like this guy may have known the technical nature of the network even better than those who owned and operated it. In that hypothetical, his infraction seems about as ethically dubious as the seemingly less (by your expression) malicious copyright violation of getting a free copy of that tv episode you paid itunes for.
Lots of shades of gray, and very very big pictures to consider... I consider it best to reserve judgement, given I'm positive I don't know all the relevant facts, and it does seem incredibly unlikely to have seriously harmed anyone. (but who knows, its just as easy to construct a hypothetical where the interference interrupted 911 emergency services, but if so, the details of such things are for a jury of ones peers to decide).
A true darknet would not depend on traditiona DNS (root servers). I can't immediately tell from their FAQ if their methods are entirely independent of DNS.
parent post is BullShit as well, again, coming from a christian, who when he was an atheist cub-scout, having fulfilled all the requirements to become a boy scout (bridge/arrow of light ceremony), kept his honor by refusing to become a boy scout which required the following pledge-
"
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_Promise#United_States_of_America
I call BullShit of the first order on the parent post's reply to this grandparent post:
""Moreover they completely bar atheists and agnostics from membership of any kind."
false. not sure where you heard this. ... even if you take umbrage to that, and decide to forego that part of advancement, you can be a member of the group"
*as a former cub-scout atheist, now a Christian at age 36*, who refused to become a boy scout because of the required pledge to God during the bridge/arrow of light ceremony.
"
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_Promise#United_States_of_America
All I've really wanted for christmas for the last 10 years is a phone easily disassemblable, with a transparent case, and user facing dip switches for the mic, the antennas, the battery, and these days, the power line going to the camera. Or alternately for the camera, a physical piece of plastic that slides to expose/cover the camera. Also the dip switches should be placed in such a way that it is reasonably convincing to technical users that they are in fact breaking the relevant physical traces/wires.
Maybe in 10 more years...