IBM has already done the school district a favor by not selling their debt to a vulture credit company that would be way more heinous in how it dealt with the district. Normally when loans like this start taking longer than usual to get their money, companies like IBM write off the debt and sell it to vulture funds for pennies on the dollar, and then these vulture funds turn around and gauge the debtors for as much as they can get.
So the fact that IBM did NOT do this means they have a heart. Don't be stupid and keep on asking for more. IBM is a business, and if they let this customer go, they would simply have more problems in the future.
People use e-mail because they want to communicate with other people. Once an ISP makes it harder to communicate, people will stop using that ISP. End of story.
ISPs and email addresses are throw-away. I don't think it is in the best interest for ISPs to make it harder for users to have their emails reliably get to their friends. It is in their best interest to get companies to pay to make sure people see their promotions.
Think about how unusable email would be if there were no spam filters? People naturally migrate to email providers whose spam filters are at least "good enough". If their ability to send emails were not "good enough" then people would move away from it.
This whole article is a complete waste of time. Apple specifically does not want to create a line of cheap computers. Why? Because they have to maintain high profit margins, meaning they make more money per computer sold than the other competitors.
Why is this important? Because Apple invests in itself. Apple uses the profits it makes so that it can fund it's own software development, something that Dell and HP do NOT need to do. Apple cannot rely on 3rd party software developers to develop great software because their market is too small... most software developers go to where the money is, which is Microsoft.
So, that's why products like Safari, i-whatever, are all APPLE developed. If Apple had to rely on Microsoft for a web browser like IE they would be SOL. By having complete control over their hardware, OS, and software, that's how they create a completely great user experience.
So would Apple fanatics PLEASE stop trying to manufacture disingenuous and fraudulent arguments of how Macs and somehow cheaper than PCs? That is patently false. BUT APPLE DOESN'T CARE. They will never compete based on price. If they wanted to, they would be dead by now. They specifically differentiate themselves based on quality, cool factor, etc. And it works. Look at their stock price.
If Apple doesn't care, why do the Apple fanboys care? Just drop it. The whole point of Apple is that they are the Mercedes Benz of computers. If they started trying to compete in the low-end computer segment they would be dead.
This is what you do: buy 2 drives exactly the same size and mirror them. End of story. If you're worried about a blown raid controller, then buy another hard drive and stick that on another computer and run a weekly cron job to copy everything. Right now you can get 500 GB hard drive for about $150. Get two of them and mirror them. (If you need more than 500 GB I would highly suggest encoding your porn into a different format than MPEG2) By the time you run out of space, you will be able to get 1 TB drives for about $150. Migrate over to the 2 1 TB hard drives. Repeat every few years.
With computers, the stupidest thing you can do is spend extra money to prepare for your needs for tomorrow. Buy for what you need now, and by the time you outgrow it, things will be cheaper, faster and larger.
By the way RAID 5 is a pain in the ass unless you have physical hotswap capability, which I highly doubt.
I haven't used my name for posting on the Internet since 1997 when I realized that dejanews.com would keep my newsgroup postings forever (even that was with a somewhat random e-mail address). I literally don't have any internet presence with my real name unless it's inadvertent (ie. a news release from my employer) but the good thing is that my name is so common I would be hard to find anyway.
So in it's place, I created a whole shitload of false identities that I post under, one of them about 10 years old now. Mainly on forums and newsgroups for work purposes, etc. If you searched for this particular identity, you would probably fine hundreds of posts (including many on slashdot) some of them truthful, some of them fake, with various opinions of topics.
Every few years I will discard an identity or create a new one, for various reasons. I even have a fake lj blog that I've created just for the purpose of having that sense of "credibility", just in case I need it. I usually update that every few weeks, with something that I read on someone else's blog, but changing the words around just enough so that I can't be googled and exposed as a fake. I make sure each identity has a different way of typing, different levels of typos or capitalization, etc. I don't think you would be able to properly gauge the "credibility" of this person at all.
I doubt I'm unique and there are probably scores of people doing the same thing. As internet users get more and more sophisticated, how will internet credibility really be gauged unless you actually meet someone face-to-face? I was even contemplating getting a pay-as-you-go cellphone with no traceability (paid with cash at a store in a different city than where I live) just in case I needed to talk with someone offline. I'm doubtful you can really establish credibility to the point where it's better to just assume that everyone is lying and be on the guard all the time.
The problem it seems is that all these people gave everyone the same email address. That's dumb. I have one email address for all my personal emails to friends and family. I never use it for anything else, and get really pissy when people use this email for mass e-mails, etc, just to cut down on it leaking. Despite my efforts I get about 10 spams a day but gmail gets all of them, so it's not an issue.
i have 2 separate email accounts for all financial and business-related stuff, and one for accounts that I buy stuff from, like amazon, etc. 1 email for myspace, etc. The beauty of gmail is that I can forward all the emails into my main email address automatically so I don't need to check them.
I have a separate email for full-disclosure and bugtraq, etc.
If I were these guys like Lessig or the VC dude, all outside correspondence I would funnel to an alternate email address, with an auto-responder saying "Thanks for e-mailing me, I will try my best to answer you when I get a chance!" Then check it every once in a while, and feel free to delete whatever you want because you have no reason to respond if you don't want to.
Sorry you're right.. I actually meant that ethanol wasn't used to decrease greenhouse gases emissions, but I didn't write that properly. It is used like MTBE to help gas burn completely so that there isn't any leftover gas leftover. It is used to decrease emissions, but like I said I meant to say greenhouse gas emissions, which from what I remember, it actually increased that.
If corn prices doubled, then more farmers will plant corn, and it will cause the price of corn to drop. I'm sure at some point there will be a crisis where too much corn is produced, which will cause a plummet of corn prices and another "corn crisis", and less farmers will plant corn, cycle repeats, etc. It will all work itself out.
BTW, ethanol is not added to make emissions cleaner, it was added to replace MTBE. It's a widely held misnomer that it was added to decrease emissions or whatnot.
Wrong. How often do you actually check for https being used? When you go to gmail.com or yahoo.com, yes, it uses https to exchange login information, but the URL in the top bar is always http://./
Thus, they don't even need to use an SSL cert they can just use regular http, and no one will ever tell the difference.
He didn't address that point. You can poison DNS servers so that it will set the.bank addresses to other DNS servers.
Even worse, hackers can start poisoning the hosts on individual machines, which makes it even worse. It's already at a known address: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc. Once they start adding their own entries into the hosts file for Windows users, they are fucked. It will be so easy to point them whereever the hackers want.
His suggestion solves NOTHING. In fact, it is extremely shortsighted and amateurish for a so-called CTO of a security company, and makes me question how good his company is if the CTO can't even get this right.
Yes, I know they have to make the transformers look realistic and can't look like the cartoon. But frankly they just look like a jumble of metal, and there's nothing to help me figure out who is who. I mean even Optimus Prime barely look any different from the other robots, the only distinguishing factor is he is slightly red and blue. I guess I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
In the article, the judge makes references to a thought experiment called harrassthem.com. Doesn't harrassthem.com sounds pretty close to dontdatehimgirl.com? Yet dontdatehimgirl.com was protected under section 230.
I just don't see how asking for gender or orientation invalidates anything and somehow makes them responsible for whatever gets posted by the members of the forum. It seems like a wrong decision to me and should be pursued further.
Software patents, if I remember correctly, came about in the 90s. All the stuff about operating system fundamentals, etc were NEVER patented because you couldn't patent them before. You couldn't patent an algorithm or business method, but the changes in the 90s cause the entire problem we have now.
So the argument that Linus makes that MS infringes on fundamental patents or what-not is bogus because those patents never existed. I'm pretty sure FAT itself isn't patented, but some aspect of FAT was patented.
As to something mentioned about Samba, you can reverse-engineer a protocol, which is what Samba did with the MS-Lan manager stuff. Again, I don't think any of that internal stuff was patented because that was done in the 80s, however, they could be sued for copyright infringement if they stole code, which is why I believe samba was developed in a clean-room type environment.
The whole point of Certificate Authorities isn't just to distribute certificates... it's to make sure that the certificates are valid and that they are giving them to the right people. Being able to make whatever certificates I want makes the entire thing meaningless. If there is an open source CA, I could create a certificate that says I'm Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates... who would make sure that I'm really who I say I am? If you can't guarantee that the cert is correct, then it makes the CA useless.
The only way you can make it meaningful is by having some type of investigation. Granted, most low-level certs are pretty much rubber-stamped however, there is the concept of higher-level certs that require more and more verification. For example, code-signing certs probably require a higher level of verification.
This costs money and there has to be some sort of financial interest to generate this.
The issue isn't the source code for CAs, Openssl has the code to generate certs, which makes it a valid CA, it's about making sure the certs are valid.
One of his suitemates was interviewed by Chris Matthews of MSNBC. Matthews was blatantly trying to get at the video game angle, asking the suitemate if he ever saw Cho playing video games, but the suitemate said emphatically "No". He never saw Cho do anything on his computer except type stuff on MS Word documents.
MAYBE WE SHOULD BAN MS WORD INSTEAD.
What I found striking was that the suitemate said there was never anything aggressive about Cho ever. He never got excited or angry, and even when they tried talking to him, Cho never reacted with disdain or disgust... he was simply emotionless. He said he never saw him do anything violent ever, and he only saw him either in his room or watching tv (wrestling and SpikeTV).
Just like IPv6 is going to be implemented... someday. It will never happen. I guess someone needs to bring it up that, boy, it sure would be a great idea, but frankly it will never happen. The Internet is so much more than just the US, there's no way you can have it scrapped. As is with most things in this world, it will continue along on this current path, and maybe something will be built along side it (eg Internet2 or whatever that University network is called) and eventually switched over, but you can't just scrap it.
Sorry, but it's people like you that allow totalitarian states to get to the point where it becomes impossible to get rid of them.
You think, CCTV is a great idea, it's going to stop petty crime. But in your head you're really thinking, it's going to stop there, obviously, because that's where you draw the line as to the potential benefits.
What you don't realize, is that there are far more people in positions of higher power that will say, why stop there? Once we get facial recognition, we can spot criminals as they walk down the street. That will make our society safer! But then, all the data needs to be stored somewhere, and this data is permanent. So, even though they only want to find criminals, it ends up tracking everyone's movements. But it's okay, because it's a public place, right?
And then, sooner or later, your cars get tracked, and like I said, you entire movement everywhere gets tracked. Maybe not actively, but the data can be retrieved. They can go back through the data from the cameras and figure out where you have been.
Is this really what you want? Take a look back, it's not a very large leap from going from CCTVs in public places, to CCTVs in public places with facial recognition, to CCTVs with facial recognition in ALL public places.
Then, who knows, there might even be a movement to get these CCTVs put into homes, for security purposes. Why not? How different is this from a security system where the security people call your house in the event an alarm is triggered? It could piggyback over the infrastructure already built by the government to handle the volume of traffic from all the millions of CCTV cameras installed already. But of course, they will promise to guarantee your privacy, right? Just like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and your ISP. Unless they get a supoena, of course.
Now, how dissimilar are we from 1984? You scoff at the "slippery slope" argument, but it is very, very real.
There was a stupid article on slashdot where the author said "Vista is dangerous". What a load of horseshit. Vista isn't dangerous... THIS is dangerous. And I can't believe that there are people in this day-and-age that don't realize it. It's just pure naivety.
So explain then... when reading 1984, instead of feeling shock and disgust at the complete lack of privacy, do you think, "My, what a great idea. They must have a very safe society."
The whole point is that you are sacrificing privacy bit-by-bit to the point where there is no privacy anymore. You can't pick your nose or fart because there are CCTVs everywhere, a luxury that used to be afforded to use if no person was around, but now, we have to look for cameras as well. If you use your credit or debit card to buy things or if you use a supermarket savings card, your purchases get tracked. You can't make offensive jokes amongst friends in emails because emails can get leaked or read from tape backups, or your TV habits will be sent to Tivo, or your searches done on Google will be tracked. Where does it end? Can you do anything these days without leaving an inadvertent trail? Or am I wrong to ask that because only guilty people care about leaving a trail?
And even worse, you will be judged for one single incident in these records, if you just so happen to be the unlucky one to raise the ire of these new Thought Police. Imagine you googled "how to commit murder" just for curiosity and someone you know is killed. Or if you bought antifreeze with your credit card because you really needed antifreeze, but the neighborhood cat killer going around spilling antifreeze on driveways bought his antifreeze using cash? If you get your name in the newspaper, you will can expect to be googled for the rest of your life, and judged by it, even though you may have been found innocent.
1984 is/was taught in school so that kids would learn that things like that are bad, ie. a totalitarian system, government lies, etc. A big part of 1984 was how monitored people were, and one of the scariest moments for me was when the main character Smith had his own little secret corner of the room where none of the cameras could watch him, and he had his privacy albeit momentarily. The whole point was that this system was horrible!!!
Yet, somehow, this has morphed into a seemingly-large group of people believe that this is a GOOD thing. A doubleplus good thing. WTF went wrong??? Don't they realize they have become the EXACT thing that George Orwell was warning about??? What happened to the 60 years of knowledge that this book brought us about what life would be like living in a society like this?
I have Vista Home on my new Dell desktop. I don't like it one bit. No additional functionality, and all they did was move things around for no apparent reason. It takes me about 3x longer to find the stuff that I used to be able to do on XP in a jiffy. It's really stupid and indulgent changes on their part.
But dangerous? Fucking ridiculous. This is a computer program, not a gun. There is no perceived threat from Vista. I have had problems with some software, but they are shitty, shitty software (Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, don't buy it, it sucks even though it says it was made for Vista). But for the most part, it has been very stable.
Of course, I bought 2 GB of RAM which really is the sweet spot, especially for games like Supreme Commander. I had 1 G before, but it just wasn't enough. With 2 GB of RAM it ran well, and I haven't had any problems with Vista.
I can understand why I do not want price-floors, but can someone explain what the counter argument is? Why has this made it all the way to the Supreme Court if it is so obviously flawed?
Funny, when the programmers at EA got switched to hourly, were made eligible for OT, etc, it was hailed as a victory. Somehow at Google, the same action makes them a second class citizen.
FWIW, my company does the same thing (I work in Silicon Valley as well). I am non-exempt, work from 10 to 7 or 8 every day, and I don't get any of the Google perks, and get no OT. I just don't see how this means that Google is turning the corner into evil territory.
I understand why Sony won't talk about price drops, since it is bad for business since people will put off buying the PS3 while waiting for the price drop, and it will piss off the loyalists who paid extra money for it at the beginning.
But saying that there is no consideration for price drops is fooling no one. End users are far too saavy now, and the blanket statements that were made 10 years ago won't fly in this day-and-age. It is clear as daylight that the price point of the PS3 is too high, and the fact that there isn't a critical mass of users will drastically affect how game developers will release games for PS3, make exclusives for PS3, etc. This becomes a self-feeding disaster.
So, being realistic and knowing that you are talking about to an informed audience, when will we see a price drop such that a higher adoption rate can be achieved?
Isn't not giving the password to unencrypt your hard drive considered obstruction of justice? Depending on what you're trying to hide from the police, the penalities for obstruction of justice may be more severe...
I think it may be a bit different than just genetic hardwiring... The simple fact that we have thoughts and feelings that can't really be explained by science to me makes us think that there is something definitely non-physical about our nature. I can have thoughts that no one can hear, I can plan things in my head, come up with ideas, etc. I have a personality, feelings, and none of this is explainable through science... not yet anyway.
So because all humans have these characteristics of thoughts,feelings, etc, I think that lends itself to the fact that there is something else mysterious at work here. The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has already done the school district a favor by not selling their debt to a vulture credit company that would be way more heinous in how it dealt with the district. Normally when loans like this start taking longer than usual to get their money, companies like IBM write off the debt and sell it to vulture funds for pennies on the dollar, and then these vulture funds turn around and gauge the debtors for as much as they can get.
So the fact that IBM did NOT do this means they have a heart. Don't be stupid and keep on asking for more. IBM is a business, and if they let this customer go, they would simply have more problems in the future.
People use e-mail because they want to communicate with other people. Once an ISP makes it harder to communicate, people will stop using that ISP. End of story.
ISPs and email addresses are throw-away. I don't think it is in the best interest for ISPs to make it harder for users to have their emails reliably get to their friends. It is in their best interest to get companies to pay to make sure people see their promotions.
Think about how unusable email would be if there were no spam filters? People naturally migrate to email providers whose spam filters are at least "good enough". If their ability to send emails were not "good enough" then people would move away from it.
This whole article is a complete waste of time. Apple specifically does not want to create a line of cheap computers. Why? Because they have to maintain high profit margins, meaning they make more money per computer sold than the other competitors.
Why is this important? Because Apple invests in itself. Apple uses the profits it makes so that it can fund it's own software development, something that Dell and HP do NOT need to do. Apple cannot rely on 3rd party software developers to develop great software because their market is too small... most software developers go to where the money is, which is Microsoft.
So, that's why products like Safari, i-whatever, are all APPLE developed. If Apple had to rely on Microsoft for a web browser like IE they would be SOL. By having complete control over their hardware, OS, and software, that's how they create a completely great user experience.
So would Apple fanatics PLEASE stop trying to manufacture disingenuous and fraudulent arguments of how Macs and somehow cheaper than PCs? That is patently false. BUT APPLE DOESN'T CARE. They will never compete based on price. If they wanted to, they would be dead by now. They specifically differentiate themselves based on quality, cool factor, etc. And it works. Look at their stock price.
If Apple doesn't care, why do the Apple fanboys care? Just drop it. The whole point of Apple is that they are the Mercedes Benz of computers. If they started trying to compete in the low-end computer segment they would be dead.
This is what you do: buy 2 drives exactly the same size and mirror them. End of story. If you're worried about a blown raid controller, then buy another hard drive and stick that on another computer and run a weekly cron job to copy everything. Right now you can get 500 GB hard drive for about $150. Get two of them and mirror them. (If you need more than 500 GB I would highly suggest encoding your porn into a different format than MPEG2) By the time you run out of space, you will be able to get 1 TB drives for about $150. Migrate over to the 2 1 TB hard drives. Repeat every few years.
With computers, the stupidest thing you can do is spend extra money to prepare for your needs for tomorrow. Buy for what you need now, and by the time you outgrow it, things will be cheaper, faster and larger.
By the way RAID 5 is a pain in the ass unless you have physical hotswap capability, which I highly doubt.
I haven't used my name for posting on the Internet since 1997 when I realized that dejanews.com would keep my newsgroup postings forever (even that was with a somewhat random e-mail address). I literally don't have any internet presence with my real name unless it's inadvertent (ie. a news release from my employer) but the good thing is that my name is so common I would be hard to find anyway.
So in it's place, I created a whole shitload of false identities that I post under, one of them about 10 years old now. Mainly on forums and newsgroups for work purposes, etc. If you searched for this particular identity, you would probably fine hundreds of posts (including many on slashdot) some of them truthful, some of them fake, with various opinions of topics.
Every few years I will discard an identity or create a new one, for various reasons. I even have a fake lj blog that I've created just for the purpose of having that sense of "credibility", just in case I need it. I usually update that every few weeks, with something that I read on someone else's blog, but changing the words around just enough so that I can't be googled and exposed as a fake. I make sure each identity has a different way of typing, different levels of typos or capitalization, etc. I don't think you would be able to properly gauge the "credibility" of this person at all.
I doubt I'm unique and there are probably scores of people doing the same thing. As internet users get more and more sophisticated, how will internet credibility really be gauged unless you actually meet someone face-to-face? I was even contemplating getting a pay-as-you-go cellphone with no traceability (paid with cash at a store in a different city than where I live) just in case I needed to talk with someone offline. I'm doubtful you can really establish credibility to the point where it's better to just assume that everyone is lying and be on the guard all the time.
The problem it seems is that all these people gave everyone the same email address. That's dumb. I have one email address for all my personal emails to friends and family. I never use it for anything else, and get really pissy when people use this email for mass e-mails, etc, just to cut down on it leaking. Despite my efforts I get about 10 spams a day but gmail gets all of them, so it's not an issue.
i have 2 separate email accounts for all financial and business-related stuff, and one for accounts that I buy stuff from, like amazon, etc. 1 email for myspace, etc. The beauty of gmail is that I can forward all the emails into my main email address automatically so I don't need to check them.
I have a separate email for full-disclosure and bugtraq, etc.
If I were these guys like Lessig or the VC dude, all outside correspondence I would funnel to an alternate email address, with an auto-responder saying "Thanks for e-mailing me, I will try my best to answer you when I get a chance!" Then check it every once in a while, and feel free to delete whatever you want because you have no reason to respond if you don't want to.
End of story. What's so hard about that?
Sorry you're right.. I actually meant that ethanol wasn't used to decrease greenhouse gases emissions, but I didn't write that properly. It is used like MTBE to help gas burn completely so that there isn't any leftover gas leftover. It is used to decrease emissions, but like I said I meant to say greenhouse gas emissions, which from what I remember, it actually increased that.
If corn prices doubled, then more farmers will plant corn, and it will cause the price of corn to drop. I'm sure at some point there will be a crisis where too much corn is produced, which will cause a plummet of corn prices and another "corn crisis", and less farmers will plant corn, cycle repeats, etc. It will all work itself out.
BTW, ethanol is not added to make emissions cleaner, it was added to replace MTBE. It's a widely held misnomer that it was added to decrease emissions or whatnot.
Wrong. How often do you actually check for https being used? When you go to gmail.com or yahoo.com, yes, it uses https to exchange login information, but the URL in the top bar is always http://./
Thus, they don't even need to use an SSL cert they can just use regular http, and no one will ever tell the difference.
He didn't address that point. You can poison DNS servers so that it will set the .bank addresses to other DNS servers.
Even worse, hackers can start poisoning the hosts on individual machines, which makes it even worse. It's already at a known address: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc. Once they start adding their own entries into the hosts file for Windows users, they are fucked. It will be so easy to point them whereever the hackers want.
His suggestion solves NOTHING. In fact, it is extremely shortsighted and amateurish for a so-called CTO of a security company, and makes me question how good his company is if the CTO can't even get this right.
Yes, I know they have to make the transformers look realistic and can't look like the cartoon. But frankly they just look like a jumble of metal, and there's nothing to help me figure out who is who. I mean even Optimus Prime barely look any different from the other robots, the only distinguishing factor is he is slightly red and blue. I guess I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
I hope they have the Dinobots...
I just don't see how asking for gender or orientation invalidates anything and somehow makes them responsible for whatever gets posted by the members of the forum. It seems like a wrong decision to me and should be pursued further.
Software patents, if I remember correctly, came about in the 90s. All the stuff about operating system fundamentals, etc were NEVER patented because you couldn't patent them before. You couldn't patent an algorithm or business method, but the changes in the 90s cause the entire problem we have now.
So the argument that Linus makes that MS infringes on fundamental patents or what-not is bogus because those patents never existed. I'm pretty sure FAT itself isn't patented, but some aspect of FAT was patented.
As to something mentioned about Samba, you can reverse-engineer a protocol, which is what Samba did with the MS-Lan manager stuff. Again, I don't think any of that internal stuff was patented because that was done in the 80s, however, they could be sued for copyright infringement if they stole code, which is why I believe samba was developed in a clean-room type environment.
The whole point of Certificate Authorities isn't just to distribute certificates... it's to make sure that the certificates are valid and that they are giving them to the right people. Being able to make whatever certificates I want makes the entire thing meaningless. If there is an open source CA, I could create a certificate that says I'm Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates... who would make sure that I'm really who I say I am? If you can't guarantee that the cert is correct, then it makes the CA useless.
The only way you can make it meaningful is by having some type of investigation. Granted, most low-level certs are pretty much rubber-stamped however, there is the concept of higher-level certs that require more and more verification. For example, code-signing certs probably require a higher level of verification.
This costs money and there has to be some sort of financial interest to generate this.
The issue isn't the source code for CAs, Openssl has the code to generate certs, which makes it a valid CA, it's about making sure the certs are valid.
One of his suitemates was interviewed by Chris Matthews of MSNBC. Matthews was blatantly trying to get at the video game angle, asking the suitemate if he ever saw Cho playing video games, but the suitemate said emphatically "No". He never saw Cho do anything on his computer except type stuff on MS Word documents.
MAYBE WE SHOULD BAN MS WORD INSTEAD.
What I found striking was that the suitemate said there was never anything aggressive about Cho ever. He never got excited or angry, and even when they tried talking to him, Cho never reacted with disdain or disgust... he was simply emotionless. He said he never saw him do anything violent ever, and he only saw him either in his room or watching tv (wrestling and SpikeTV).
MAYBE WE SHOULD BAN WRESTLING AND SPIKE TV.
Just like IPv6 is going to be implemented... someday. It will never happen. I guess someone needs to bring it up that, boy, it sure would be a great idea, but frankly it will never happen. The Internet is so much more than just the US, there's no way you can have it scrapped. As is with most things in this world, it will continue along on this current path, and maybe something will be built along side it (eg Internet2 or whatever that University network is called) and eventually switched over, but you can't just scrap it.
Sorry, but it's people like you that allow totalitarian states to get to the point where it becomes impossible to get rid of them.
You think, CCTV is a great idea, it's going to stop petty crime. But in your head you're really thinking, it's going to stop there, obviously, because that's where you draw the line as to the potential benefits.
What you don't realize, is that there are far more people in positions of higher power that will say, why stop there? Once we get facial recognition, we can spot criminals as they walk down the street. That will make our society safer! But then, all the data needs to be stored somewhere, and this data is permanent. So, even though they only want to find criminals, it ends up tracking everyone's movements. But it's okay, because it's a public place, right?
And then, sooner or later, your cars get tracked, and like I said, you entire movement everywhere gets tracked. Maybe not actively, but the data can be retrieved. They can go back through the data from the cameras and figure out where you have been.
Is this really what you want? Take a look back, it's not a very large leap from going from CCTVs in public places, to CCTVs in public places with facial recognition, to CCTVs with facial recognition in ALL public places.
Then, who knows, there might even be a movement to get these CCTVs put into homes, for security purposes. Why not? How different is this from a security system where the security people call your house in the event an alarm is triggered? It could piggyback over the infrastructure already built by the government to handle the volume of traffic from all the millions of CCTV cameras installed already. But of course, they will promise to guarantee your privacy, right? Just like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and your ISP. Unless they get a supoena, of course.
Now, how dissimilar are we from 1984? You scoff at the "slippery slope" argument, but it is very, very real.
There was a stupid article on slashdot where the author said "Vista is dangerous". What a load of horseshit. Vista isn't dangerous... THIS is dangerous. And I can't believe that there are people in this day-and-age that don't realize it. It's just pure naivety.
So explain then... when reading 1984, instead of feeling shock and disgust at the complete lack of privacy, do you think, "My, what a great idea. They must have a very safe society."
The whole point is that you are sacrificing privacy bit-by-bit to the point where there is no privacy anymore. You can't pick your nose or fart because there are CCTVs everywhere, a luxury that used to be afforded to use if no person was around, but now, we have to look for cameras as well. If you use your credit or debit card to buy things or if you use a supermarket savings card, your purchases get tracked. You can't make offensive jokes amongst friends in emails because emails can get leaked or read from tape backups, or your TV habits will be sent to Tivo, or your searches done on Google will be tracked. Where does it end? Can you do anything these days without leaving an inadvertent trail? Or am I wrong to ask that because only guilty people care about leaving a trail?
And even worse, you will be judged for one single incident in these records, if you just so happen to be the unlucky one to raise the ire of these new Thought Police. Imagine you googled "how to commit murder" just for curiosity and someone you know is killed. Or if you bought antifreeze with your credit card because you really needed antifreeze, but the neighborhood cat killer going around spilling antifreeze on driveways bought his antifreeze using cash? If you get your name in the newspaper, you will can expect to be googled for the rest of your life, and judged by it, even though you may have been found innocent.
1984 is/was taught in school so that kids would learn that things like that are bad, ie. a totalitarian system, government lies, etc. A big part of 1984 was how monitored people were, and one of the scariest moments for me was when the main character Smith had his own little secret corner of the room where none of the cameras could watch him, and he had his privacy albeit momentarily. The whole point was that this system was horrible!!!
Yet, somehow, this has morphed into a seemingly-large group of people believe that this is a GOOD thing. A doubleplus good thing. WTF went wrong??? Don't they realize they have become the EXACT thing that George Orwell was warning about??? What happened to the 60 years of knowledge that this book brought us about what life would be like living in a society like this?
I have Vista Home on my new Dell desktop. I don't like it one bit. No additional functionality, and all they did was move things around for no apparent reason. It takes me about 3x longer to find the stuff that I used to be able to do on XP in a jiffy. It's really stupid and indulgent changes on their part.
But dangerous? Fucking ridiculous. This is a computer program, not a gun. There is no perceived threat from Vista. I have had problems with some software, but they are shitty, shitty software (Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, don't buy it, it sucks even though it says it was made for Vista). But for the most part, it has been very stable.
Of course, I bought 2 GB of RAM which really is the sweet spot, especially for games like Supreme Commander. I had 1 G before, but it just wasn't enough. With 2 GB of RAM it ran well, and I haven't had any problems with Vista.
I can understand why I do not want price-floors, but can someone explain what the counter argument is? Why has this made it all the way to the Supreme Court if it is so obviously flawed?
Funny, when the programmers at EA got switched to hourly, were made eligible for OT, etc, it was hailed as a victory. Somehow at Google, the same action makes them a second class citizen.
FWIW, my company does the same thing (I work in Silicon Valley as well). I am non-exempt, work from 10 to 7 or 8 every day, and I don't get any of the Google perks, and get no OT. I just don't see how this means that Google is turning the corner into evil territory.
I understand why Sony won't talk about price drops, since it is bad for business since people will put off buying the PS3 while waiting for the price drop, and it will piss off the loyalists who paid extra money for it at the beginning.
But saying that there is no consideration for price drops is fooling no one. End users are far too saavy now, and the blanket statements that were made 10 years ago won't fly in this day-and-age. It is clear as daylight that the price point of the PS3 is too high, and the fact that there isn't a critical mass of users will drastically affect how game developers will release games for PS3, make exclusives for PS3, etc. This becomes a self-feeding disaster.
So, being realistic and knowing that you are talking about to an informed audience, when will we see a price drop such that a higher adoption rate can be achieved?
Isn't not giving the password to unencrypt your hard drive considered obstruction of justice? Depending on what you're trying to hide from the police, the penalities for obstruction of justice may be more severe...
I think it may be a bit different than just genetic hardwiring... The simple fact that we have thoughts and feelings that can't really be explained by science to me makes us think that there is something definitely non-physical about our nature. I can have thoughts that no one can hear, I can plan things in my head, come up with ideas, etc. I have a personality, feelings, and none of this is explainable through science... not yet anyway.
So because all humans have these characteristics of thoughts,feelings, etc, I think that lends itself to the fact that there is something else mysterious at work here. The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.