Saw this quote from Kitten on Kuro5hin the other day:
Zero tolerance, then, isn't really a preventative measure. It's a knee-jerk reaction to an outraged public that schools aren't doing enough to "protect" our children. It's a highly visible - if ineffective - policy that schools can point to and say "Look, we're doing our best!" Everyone knows it's idiotic and doesn't do anything positive or productive, but it makes them feel better to be able to see something.
That really gets to the heart of this issue. Legislation against video games, television, movies, magazines, music, etc., etc., only serves one purpose: To make people *feel* secure.
But they aren't any more secure. Little boys have always played war, or cowboys and indians, or knights in shining armor. Quake III doesn't encourage hooliganism anymore than cap guns or toy swords.
Until society stops looking for the quick fix and instead tries to hunt down its inherent problems and reform them, things will continue as they are.
How dare anyone challenge the monopoly? Don't they realize that by bothering ICANN, they're only suppressing innovation?
From the ICANN "one root" doc:
This document reaffirms ICANN's commitment to a single, authoritative public root for the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) and to the management of that unique root in the public interest according to policies developed through community processes.
I bet they'd change their story if it were decided that the "single, authoritative public root" out to be someone other than them.
Although the Internet allows a high degree of decentralized activities, coordination of the assignment function by a single authority is necessary where unique parameter values are technically required.
The phrase "single authority" is never good.
Over the past several years, some private organizations have established DNS roots as alternatives to the authoritative root. Frequently, these "alternative" roots have been established to support for-profit top-level domain registries that have been unable to gain entry into the authoritative root as managed in the public interest by the IANA or ICANN.
'Don't listen to the "other" guys. We're looking out for you.' Yeah, right.
Because these alternative roots substitute insular motives for the community-based processes that govern the management of the authoritative root, their decisions to include particular top-level domains have not been subjected to the same tests of community support and conformance with the public trust.
Sound anything like Microsoft's "Open Source is unsafe" theory?
I don't care if this keyboard really is great or not, I'm just sick of people pointing out why something won't ever take off. At this rate, nothing will ever get better, because people are too fucking lazy to change.
Better to criticize weak ideas than to put time and money into them that might better be spent on producing something that *won't* make the company go bankrupt in a year, and might actually be useful to society.
If people were a bit more cynical, and a bit less "rah rah progress rah rah innovation", I wouldn't have had to sit back and watch the dot coms drop like flies.
Pros: Great for typing up documents; Extremely compact; Plug 'N Play/Easy Installation; No incompatibilites
Cons: Rather steep learning curve; Terrible for gaming; Hefty price for keyboard
Note two of the cons -- "Terrible for gaming" and "Hefty price". I'm sorry folks, but this keyboard will not change the world. It's a neat toy, and might have some applications for wearable computers, but that's about it.
The question is, will this pass the grandmother test? Any grandmother could have figured out a normal QWERTY (or Dvorak or whatever) keyboard, but I doubt that this will "change the way people type" for the simple reason that nobody's grandmother could use it.
This is exactly the same thing that people have been talking about for the past century or two. During the modern era and into the post-modern, pundits lamented the loss of simple pleasures such as killing one's own cow to make a hamburger.
The truth is, though, a "Fast Food Society" is the path of least resistance, and is inevitably the path that every society will eventually take. We talk about innovation, invention, and utility, but then when we receive it we long for the Good Old Days when we hand to start our computers with hand-cranks.
The article raises some very good points, which lead to some other ones. I'm being serious here, not trolling, so don't just mod this down because you disagree.
The fact that company X happens to know that customer ID 939392-2349493-1343 likes to play ping-pong on Tuesday nights and prefers green pullovers to blue is not equivalent to being spied upon. The information is used in an abstract fashion: crunching statistics, determining customer needs, etc. Not one person at DoubleClick or any other "Big Brother" company gives a flying flip at a rolling donut *what* you do in your spare time.
How does a computer thousands of miles away knowing that you're interested in travel, politics, and fine art *really* affect your life, except that the spam you receive is tailored for your interests, instead of being completely random?
People are naturally observant by nature. When you go out in public, you notice what people are doing, wearing, saying, etc. After a while, you come to conclusions based on those observations. Have you invaded those people's privacy? A library keeps track of what books people are reading so that they can keep their library stocked with books that will be useful or interesting to the local population. Have they invaded those people's privacy? The notion that what someone is doing is EVIL because they are company is absurd, yet that seems to be the party line here on Slashdot.
Privacy issues like this come up because people are still reeling from paranoid fantasies of adolescence: They're parents are going to find their porn, see them making out with the boy/girl from next door, find out about their secret "anarchist" identity, walk in on them pleasuring themselves, etc., etc. They carry over into their adult technological lives as rants about "privacy", "big brother", etc.
This is the first attempt to peer beneath the surface of a comet to its freshly exposed material for clues to the early formation of the solar system. The public can share in this exciting experiment by observing the impact and its effect from earth. Dramatic images from cameras on both the impactor and the spacecraft will be sent back to earth in near real-time and the event will be broadcast on television.
This is about research, not about blowing up comets to save the earth.
This is, once again, old news. Sniffing electrical signals to determine what a user is doing isn't new at all. I found this out myself about six or seven years ago, when I had a mouse wire running under some speakers. As I moved the mouse, the speakers twitched and hummed according to how I moved.
Since then, I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of articles about this or that surveillance technology that does basically the same thing, only it decodes the signals and puts them into something more intelligent than pops and hisses.
Anyone who uses a wireless keyboard and thinks that nobody could ever find out that he's writing mash notes to his favorite porn star is naive, and plain stupid.
The important thing is that now we have a number. In the past, insults were reserved for AOLers and the like, who were obviously HPBs. Those on slow cable, like the collision-heavy @home network, or those with fast downstream only, were still marked among the ranks of the elite.
Now we can properly categorize people regardless of their ISP or method of connecting to the Internet. We have a number. If you are less than 150, you're an LPB. Otherwise, you're just a p1ngk1dd13.
It's kinda like penis length, really. It doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to have a number to compare yourself to.
If a culture believes that pornography is bad and the government of that culture enacts laws to curb it, is it really oppression? We have laws against kiddie porn, etc., but we don't think that's oppressive because it makes sense to us. It's a different culture. Different things make sense to them. How is requiring an ID card to use internet cafes any different from having to have a library card to check out books, a license to drive a car, etc.?
CmdrTaco's first shower of the year peaks early tomorrow morning. His shower started April 16th but peaks Sunday morning between 2 AM and 5 AM. MSN has a good overview of the shower, but if you intend on watching, kuro5hin.org has a map showing you exactly where to look. My experience with CmdrTaco's showers in the past has been hit or miss; most are a bust, but occasionally, there are some pretty spectacular showers."
Using a booster rocket, the prototype will be accelerated to mach 5, at which point the pilot's face will be torn from his skull. Hopefully, the plane will fly at speeds up to almost mach 7 for 10-15 seconds before getting hit by a Chinese hotdog pilot.
While I'm all for archiving data for future historical analysis, I think it's fairly certain that IM logs, "how's it goin?" e-mails, and detailed transcripts of #40yearoldsinglebaldguys will not be very useful to historians in three hundred years. Yes, they tell about our culture and practices, and yes they might be interesting, but we don't need all of it to extrapolate those conclusions. There is simply no room to store the vast quantity of information generated on the Internet on a daily basis, and considering the fact that 99.998% of it is of little value, I think that we can safely do without it.
Things are still floating around from the old days. We have Usenet archives from the 80s, and text files from even earlier. We can learn a lot about the culture based on those. Things that grab the public consciousness tend to around. They get mirrored, printed out, saved on disk, etc.
Does there need to be a giant warehouse that contains vacuum-sealed printouts of every wise thing said on the internet?
Slashdot Mirror
But they aren't any more secure. Little boys have always played war, or cowboys and indians, or knights in shining armor. Quake III doesn't encourage hooliganism anymore than cap guns or toy swords.
Until society stops looking for the quick fix and instead tries to hunt down its inherent problems and reform them, things will continue as they are.
(Oh, wait...it will...)
A little reformatting of the "Geeko" should make it look sufficiently like Godzilla.
Here are some more informative RFCs regarding TLDs and related servers: RFC2795, RFC3092, RFC2551, RFC2100.
From the ICANN "one root" doc:
This document reaffirms ICANN's commitment to a single, authoritative public root for the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) and to the management of that unique root in the public interest according to policies developed through community processes.
I bet they'd change their story if it were decided that the "single, authoritative public root" out to be someone other than them.
Although the Internet allows a high degree of decentralized activities, coordination of the assignment function by a single authority is necessary where unique parameter values are technically required.
The phrase "single authority" is never good.
Over the past several years, some private organizations have established DNS roots as alternatives to the authoritative root. Frequently, these "alternative" roots have been established to support for-profit top-level domain registries that have been unable to gain entry into the authoritative root as managed in the public interest by the IANA or ICANN.
'Don't listen to the "other" guys. We're looking out for you.' Yeah, right.
Because these alternative roots substitute insular motives for the community-based processes that govern the management of the authoritative root, their decisions to include particular top-level domains have not been subjected to the same tests of community support and conformance with the public trust.
Sound anything like Microsoft's "Open Source is unsafe" theory?
In that case, it's no contest. This keyboard will rule the world.
Better to criticize weak ideas than to put time and money into them that might better be spent on producing something that *won't* make the company go bankrupt in a year, and might actually be useful to society.
If people were a bit more cynical, and a bit less "rah rah progress rah rah innovation", I wouldn't have had to sit back and watch the dot coms drop like flies.
From the review:
Pros: Great for typing up documents; Extremely compact; Plug 'N Play/Easy Installation; No incompatibilites
Cons: Rather steep learning curve; Terrible for gaming; Hefty price for keyboard
Note two of the cons -- "Terrible for gaming" and "Hefty price". I'm sorry folks, but this keyboard will not change the world. It's a neat toy, and might have some applications for wearable computers, but that's about it.
The question is, will this pass the grandmother test? Any grandmother could have figured out a normal QWERTY (or Dvorak or whatever) keyboard, but I doubt that this will "change the way people type" for the simple reason that nobody's grandmother could use it.
Someone told me that www.verizonsucks.com might have some answers.
The truth is, though, a "Fast Food Society" is the path of least resistance, and is inevitably the path that every society will eventually take. We talk about innovation, invention, and utility, but then when we receive it we long for the Good Old Days when we hand to start our computers with hand-cranks.
Rubbish.
- The fact that company X happens to know that customer ID 939392-2349493-1343 likes to play ping-pong on Tuesday nights and prefers green pullovers to blue is not equivalent to being spied upon. The information is used in an abstract fashion: crunching statistics, determining customer needs, etc. Not one person at DoubleClick or any other "Big Brother" company gives a flying flip at a rolling donut *what* you do in your spare time.
- How does a computer thousands of miles away knowing that you're interested in travel, politics, and fine art *really* affect your life, except that the spam you receive is tailored for your interests, instead of being completely random?
- People are naturally observant by nature. When you go out in public, you notice what people are doing, wearing, saying, etc. After a while, you come to conclusions based on those observations. Have you invaded those people's privacy? A library keeps track of what books people are reading so that they can keep their library stocked with books that will be useful or interesting to the local population. Have they invaded those people's privacy? The notion that what someone is doing is EVIL because they are company is absurd, yet that seems to be the party line here on Slashdot.
Privacy issues like this come up because people are still reeling from paranoid fantasies of adolescence: They're parents are going to find their porn, see them making out with the boy/girl from next door, find out about their secret "anarchist" identity, walk in on them pleasuring themselves, etc., etc. They carry over into their adult technological lives as rants about "privacy", "big brother", etc.(read it a few times before modding it down).
...someone comes out with a patch for XP Lite, a la 98lite?
This is about research, not about blowing up comets to save the earth.
From jamesarcher.net:, a link to the old Microsoft website.
actually, i got all of it back when that happened to me.
Since then, I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of articles about this or that surveillance technology that does basically the same thing, only it decodes the signals and puts them into something more intelligent than pops and hisses.
Anyone who uses a wireless keyboard and thinks that nobody could ever find out that he's writing mash notes to his favorite porn star is naive, and plain stupid.
Now we can properly categorize people regardless of their ISP or method of connecting to the Internet. We have a number. If you are less than 150, you're an LPB. Otherwise, you're just a p1ngk1dd13.
It's kinda like penis length, really. It doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to have a number to compare yourself to.
This is exactly the same thing as any robot made within the past few decades, except that it hops and looks like a dinosaur. Big whoop.
If a culture believes that pornography is bad and the government of that culture enacts laws to curb it, is it really oppression? We have laws against kiddie porn, etc., but we don't think that's oppressive because it makes sense to us. It's a different culture. Different things make sense to them. How is requiring an ID card to use internet cafes any different from having to have a library card to check out books, a license to drive a car, etc.?
CmdrTaco's first shower of the year peaks early tomorrow morning. His shower started April 16th but peaks Sunday morning between 2 AM and 5 AM. MSN has a good overview of the shower, but if you intend on watching, kuro5hin.org has a map showing you exactly where to look. My experience with CmdrTaco's showers in the past has been hit or miss; most are a bust, but occasionally, there are some pretty spectacular showers."
My two-year college had an .edu TLD, as do many others.
Using a booster rocket, the prototype will be accelerated to mach 5, at which point the pilot's face will be torn from his skull. Hopefully, the plane will fly at speeds up to almost mach 7 for 10-15 seconds before getting hit by a Chinese hotdog pilot.
While I'm all for archiving data for future historical analysis, I think it's fairly certain that IM logs, "how's it goin?" e-mails, and detailed transcripts of #40yearoldsinglebaldguys will not be very useful to historians in three hundred years. Yes, they tell about our culture and practices, and yes they might be interesting, but we don't need all of it to extrapolate those conclusions. There is simply no room to store the vast quantity of information generated on the Internet on a daily basis, and considering the fact that 99.998% of it is of little value, I think that we can safely do without it.
Things are still floating around from the old days. We have Usenet archives from the 80s, and text files from even earlier. We can learn a lot about the culture based on those. Things that grab the public consciousness tend to around. They get mirrored, printed out, saved on disk, etc.
Does there need to be a giant warehouse that contains vacuum-sealed printouts of every wise thing said on the internet?
No. No, there doesn't.