#6 Govt=Gestapo, Vista=SOS

Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista: "Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by waveclaw (43274) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 18, @11:35AM (#14750049)
(http://www.waveclaw.net/~jdpowell/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 14, @01:14PM)
DRM. Why would you pay for your own shackles?

Avereage Joe: But they were sooooo shiny! And look at all the pretty 'features.' And everyone's getting or got a pair! Besides, they go so well with my gamer clothes...I mean work suit.

The number one and number two reason people will buy Vista: it will come on their new PC and it will play all the video games sold for PC (that Average Joe cares about.) You can talk about 'compatibility' with work, but Windows 98 with Office 97 is all that takes for most cases. As soon as Duke Nukem comes out, you can be sure it will have a 'Made for Microsoft Windows Vista' sticker on it.
--

'You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know.'"

===================http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/18/149257

=

"Taking Security to the Next Level"

(Score:5, Funny)

by Nova Express (100383) <lperson1 AT austin DOT rr DOT com> on Saturday February 18, @11:42AM (#14750098)
(http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 16, @12:52PM)

1. Security, security, security: Windows XP Service Pack 2 patched a lot of holes, but Vista takes security to the next level.

So, instead of a wide open door with a 'PLEASE ROB ME!!!" sign taped to it, they've half closed the door and put up a sign that says "ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU NOT STEAL ALL MY BELONGINGS, IF THAT'S OK WITH YOU."

When your starting from the gutter, the "next level" is only the curb.

==========================="If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?"=====

Re:So...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by mrchaotica (681592) <mrchaotica.yahoo@com> on Saturday February 18, @11:50AM (#14750150)

The ability to run specific win32 apps.

Go, go, gadget Darwine! [opendarwin.org]

--
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'

===Mac tech blurb in GREY at bottom for hungry minds

Ten compelling reasons why not to upgrade!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Nirvelli (851945) on Saturday February 18, @04:31PM (#14751785)

1. Security, security, security: New holes, new holes, new holes.

2. Internet Explorer 7: GetFirefox [getfirefox.com].

3. Righteous eye candy: Ooohhh shiny...

4. Desktop search: Learn to organize.

5. Better updates: Why update? Because it was broken in the first place!

6. More media: More DRM!

7. Parental controls: Real parents don't need an OS to babysit their kids.

8. Better backups: Already have that.

9. Peer-to-peer collaboration: ???

10. Quick setup: Why am I running setup more than once anyways?

In short, 10 compelling reasons why you don't need to upgrade to Vista.

--
What is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow? [style.org]
==================

Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:

(Score:5, Funny)

by Mr. Bad Example (31092) on Saturday February 18, @12:43PM (#14750508)
(http://slashdot.org/)

> Why would you pay for your own shackles?

Because my wife complained that the garbage bag zip ties were irritating her wrists.
===================================

Re:One good reason NOT to buy Windows Vista:

(Score:5, Insightful)

by aj50 (789101) on Saturday February 18, @03:21PM (#14751379)
(http://www.deepandmeaningful.com/)

DRM shackles you whether your computer supports it or not.

If your computer doesn't support drm, then you can't see the content at all. Your system not supporting drm does not magically make all drm protected content play without restrictions. If drm is widespread, then you receive all the disadvantages of drm and none of the benefits (eg. more content being offered online).

The only good thing is if few people have drm then it is harder to distribute drm'd content but if by having a computer that doesn't support drm you are in the minority, there is no direct benefit to you.

====================

Re:Any Color You Like, As Long As It's Black

(Score:5, Funny)

by jcr (53032) <jcrNO@SPAMidiom.com> on Saturday February 18, @11:54AM (#14750183)
(Last Journal: Saturday November 05, @05:26AM)

Remember the Evil Empire's "where do you want to go today" ads? The real slogan is "who cares? You're coming with us."

=======

In case of /.ing, the 10 reasons are

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Yahweh Doesn't Exist (906833) on Saturday February 18, @11:41AM (#14750091)

1. new firewall almost as good as ZoneAlarm
2. new IE almost as good as Firefox
3. new eye-candy almost as good as OS X
4. new desktop search almost as good as Google Desktop
5. new update program almost as good as Mac Software Update
6. new media programs almost as good as iLife
7. new parental controls almost as good as proper parenting
8. new backups almost as good as things not breaking in the first place
9. new P2P almost as good as turning off your firewall
10. new quick install almost as good as all the other planned features that don't actually exist yet
========================



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http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

By John Siracusa

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Quartz 2D Extreme

What Quartz Extreme did for the Quartz Compositor, Quartz 2D Extreme does for the Quartz 2D drawing API. Here's what the Quartz implementation looks like in Tiger.

Quartz in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

If you look at the three Quartz implementation diagrams in sequence, you can see how the video card portion of the diagram has slowly expanded over the course of four years to encompass more and more of the display layer. The reason is clear when you look at the bandwidth numbers: 30GB/s between the GPU and VRAM, and that number is climbing rapidly—much more rapidly than the bandwidth between the CPU and RAM.

This leads us to the most painful reality of the brave new world of GPU-powered drawing: VRAM is finite. The simple block diagrams shown earlier sweep this reality under the carpet. What happens when there's simply not enough room in VRAM to cache all of the backing stores and bitmaps and rasterized glyphs and who knows what else? Does performance fall off a cliff?

As it turns out, VRAM has been "virtualized" by Mac OS X since Quartz Extreme debuted in Jaguar. Although the Jaguar Quartz diagram shows the backing store in RAM, the Quartz Compositor is smart enough to cache those backing stores in VRAM as well. The biggest limitation of Jaguar's Quartz implementation is that the actual drawing is still done into the backing store in RAM, so the diagram accurately reflects the sequence of events during an actual drawing operation. But as long as a window's contents don't change, the Quartz Compositor can continue to use its VRAM cache of the backing store instead of reading it from RAM every single time. .../...

.../... Unfortunately, this has not been a common practice in Mac OS X applications. Prior to Quartz 2D Extreme, keeping references to large pieces of data around long after the things they refer to have been used was usually considered a waste of memory for no significant performance gain. Remember, in Panther and earlier, drawing with a large number of pixels was likely to be limited by the upload bandwidth from RAM to VRAM more than any other factor. If a bitmap was used for repeated drawing, Mac OS X's excellent disk caching system made it less critical to retain the bitmap in the application's memory. It made just as much sense to discard the reference and then get the bitmap from memory anyway (the disk cache) the next time it was needed. ...It's an easy problem for a developer to fix, however, and they should be used to it by now. Every time a major new version of Mac OS X is released, it behooves developers to profile their applications again. As Apple has warned on many occasions, "What was once cheap may now be expensive and vice versa. Don't assume; measure!" The price of performance is eternal vigilance.

//// a few pages later:

Like Kaleidoscope, the popular user interface theme engine for classic Mac OS which was also coauthored by Arlo Rose, Konfabulator is meant to be an environment for hosting user-created content. There is a large and growing collection of user-contributed Konfabulator widgets.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes a technology called Dashboard which is very similar to Konfabulator. It too is an engine for running small programs called "widgets." Dashboard widgets are also bundles containing a description file, images and other resources, and JavaScript code to make the widgets actually work. The implementation details start to diverge from there, however.

Instead of purpose-build XML files and a custom JavaScript API, Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, DOM, and all the other technologies used in a modern web browser. Dashboard actually uses Web Kit, the engine that powers the Safari web browser, to run its widgets. The widget description files are actually HTML pages, and the JavaScript code behaves just as it would if it was running inside a web browser. In fact, the Tiger version of Safari (2.0) can also be used to display and run widgets.

.../...

The product

Dashboard has visual frills and thrills galore. In addition to the Exposé-style activation, there's an extremely cool water ripple effect when a new widget is activated. Closing a widget causes it to be sucked back into the tiny "x" button like a piece of transparent taffy. The "widget drawer" on the bottom of the screen, activated by the slightly larger "x" button in the lower-left corner of the screen, pushes the entire screen background upwards as it appears. The widgets it contains slide in from the left. Dragging a widget icon out of the drawer causes it to do a cross-fade "morph" into its full-sized form.

If the Dock was the "ooh, ahh" demo in Mac OS X 10.0, Dashboard is it in Tiger. Here's a screenshot.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/17

-------------...-For over four years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release—not just "faster in the experience of most end users," but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.

...But that's really reaching. At a certain point, you simply have to accept that Apple is doing a heck of a lot more than patching up grossly inefficient code rushed out to make the 10.0 release. It's time to give credit where credit is due. Apple keeps making Mac OS X faster, and it rules.

------------------...

Performance summary

There's not much more to say. Tiger is faster than Panther, and you'll notice. The GPU-powered graphics technologies play less of a role in day-to-day performance increases than you might expect. Think of them instead as enablers of entirely new things (e.g., Core Video effects) rather the bringers of "the snappy."

Has the interface responsiveness everyone has been clamoring for finally arrived in Tiger? Let me put it this way: I fully expect to see our friend "the snappy" appearing in Mac web forums during the run up to the Mac OS X 10.5 release in late 2006 or so. (Resizing an application like iCal is still way, way too slow.) But Tiger pushes things much closer to the tipping point.

============ .../...

Safari

My Panther review contained a paean to the glory of Safari. The new version (2.0) continues those winning ways. Tiger's Safari comes with the expected (but still appreciated) collection of page rendering performance improvements and better conformance with web standards. The performance of the JavaScript in particular has improved. This makes script-heavy web application like GMail feel a lot snappier. (As a bonus, Panther users get most of these improvements in Safari 1.3 which is part of Mac OS X 10.3.9.)

Safari 2.0 supports RSS in an interesting way. Articles from one or more news feeds are displayed in a single web page. A slider control adjusts the length of the article summaries. An example is shown below. You can see it in motion at Apple's web site.

------------------ http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/20 ====

The new options for PDF-related printing activities are nice, but why in the world are they sprouting from a button? Why not use, oh, I don't know, a pop-up menu widget instead? Yes, then the dialog would need a pop-up menu and a button, but somehow we'd all survive.

The inaugural winner of this award, the Panther Finder's crazy context menu for labels, is still the overall champion, I think. But Tiger's PDF button-menu gives it a run for its money. (The Mail toolbar gets an honorable mention this year as well.)

----------------

To quote a forum post by Thaen, "Someone got paid to change that. Think about it." Actually, it doesn't surprise me. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is what drives all progress. If any technology company is going to indulge its employees' pursuit of perfection, it's Apple.

Yes, the spacing still looks like ass

I am once again sad to report that my pet Apple Type Services bug remains unfixed in Tiger. For all you folks out there who, like me, want to use 9-point Monaco as your Terminal font, the work-around is still the same: manually edit your ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist file and set the value of the FontWidthSpacing set to 1.003, a value that is impossible to get via the GUI.

FontWidthSpacing
1.003

Then never, ever touch the font panel in the Terminal application, and patiently wait another year. (Well, probably 18 months this time.)

==================

If you're still running Jaguar or earlier, you really owe it to yourself to upgrade to Tiger. It'll be the best $129 you've ever spent on an operating system. If you're happy with Panther, I strongly recommend going to an Apple store and checking out Tiger in person. Chances are good that there'll be at least one or two features that you'll decide you need, if not right way, then soon. As with any new release, it won't hurt to wait for version 10.4.1 or later.

Overall, Tiger is impressive. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years—let alone the length of time it took for Mac OS X 10.0 to first ship. The productivity of Apple's Mac OS X development team has increased tremendously since 10.0; they're now firing on all cylinders. While I dearly wish someone would steer them in the direction of the eternally neglected Finder, I can't help but be proud of the little OS team that could.

Mac OS X started its life as the most ambitious consumer operating system ever produced. Apple abandoned its existing, 16-year-old code base for something entirely new. Out of the gate, Mac OS X was a technical curiosity with few applications, and a performance dog. A scant four years later, Tiger is a powerhouse that combines the best Unix has to offer with a feature-rich, user-friendly interface. The increasingly capable bundled applications are just icing on the cake. We've come a long way, baby./////////////////

boring but maybe similar: (from /. i'm just being nice) http://cyborch.dk/pages/tiger ////////

http://darwine.opendarwin.org/ [if you can't guess, don't bother, it is WAAY over your element] /////////

Re:So...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by ScrewMaster (602015) on Saturday February 18, @12:22PM (#14750365)

Innovation has nothing to do with it. This is merely a response to market pressure. That's the only pressure to which Microsoft ever responds. They don't need to be a technological leader ... they only have to be the market leader, which means they can just satisfy the current top "n" complaints about Windows to keep selling millions of copies. Windows users look at features and capabilities this way: if it wasn't in Windows before, and it is now, then it's an innovative, new feature. Doesn't matter if every other major OS has had said feature for years ... it's still innovative.

--
"... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.

/

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Houston Police Chief Wants Cameras in Homes

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Houston Police Chief Wants Cameras in Homes: "No, you know what this is? I'll tell you...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 18, @04:04AM (#14748490)
... If you expect opposition to your proposal, you propose something even more draconian than your original goal to see how it goes over. This achieves two things, first, it tests the water, just in case people are ready to give in. Second, if the people aren't ready to give in, you scale it back to less draconian, and all of a sudden the scaled back solutions don't seem nearly as bad, and the 'controversial' ideas go forward masquerading as 'reasonable', due to the now common comparison with the 'unreasonable'.

They're hacking us people. They are hacking our minds. They know exactly what they're doing. This isn't tinfoil hat stuff, they have highly paid strategists that study how to pull shit like this off. We're in deep doo doo if we, as a people, don't begin to recognize the nature of this social 'matrix'."
========
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Remember the Politician-garbage guy..from a few years back?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by wideBlueSkies (618979) * on Saturday February 18, @10:41AM (#14749741)
(Last Journal: Sunday July 10, @08:00AM)

Parent's comment reminded me of a case from a few years back.

There was a congressman...or was it a police chief...who favored the position that once garbage was placed at the curb, it was considered abandoned by the owner, and was not subject to search by warrant. The police could just pick up any given bag of trash and search for evidence...no privacy concerns.

All was well until a local paper picked through his trash and publised the contents...unread magazines and solicitation letters... food boxes...that's what I remember.

Man, was he pissed...and suddenly his view didn't apply to him.

So, hell yes, let's put publicly accessable GPS devices in police cars, let's have webcams in police stations...in every room. Let's watch the watchers.

Also reminds me of that sherrif in Arizona who had webcams in his jail...the man was ahead of his time.

--
The important thing is not to stop questioning. --Albert Einstein
================

Re:reality

(Score:5, Insightful)

by IcePop456 (575711) on Saturday February 18, @03:09AM (#14748391)

If you really look at traffic laws, saftey is not the top priority. Money is. Most people don't weave in and out of lanes for the fun of it. They do it because cops don't enforce the keep to the right policy. Try that on the Autobahn in German. In fact, the unrestricted speed parts of the Autobahn are one of, if not the, safest stretches of highways. Why? 1) Good design 2) strict enforcement of driving habits that actually yield accidents. Speed doesn't kill - the accident does. Speed just makes it more likely you'll be sorry after that accident. Road rage is one thing, but has anyone spent some time investigating why people are getting this rage? Are we all nuts or just sick of other inconsiderate drivers?

How about those seat belt check points? If I don't wear my seat belt, who am I going to hurt? Ok fine, parents can be more responsible for their children. I guess there's a finite chance you could become a missle in an accident and hurt someone else with your flying body. In reality, this is just another cash cow. A few years ago a State trooper was killed in NJ when he was hit at a toll booth checking for seat belts (fell into on coming traffic). Try explaining that one to his family.

...and don't get me started about GEICO (or auto insurance in general).

==========

Re:Cops removed from reality

(Score:5, Insightful)

by dfghjk (711126) on Saturday February 18, @09:36AM (#14749430)

Selective enforcement is an abuse of power whether YOU suffer from it or not. Perhaps you are more attractive than the other poster. Perhaps you are a girl with big tits or a mother/grandmother that looks sweet and innocent. Perhaps you are frequently the officer's type. Doesn't matter. Fact is that society treats people unequally based on appearance. That goes for men as well as women.

In 25+ years of driving I've been let off exactly one time because I'm not the kind of driver that gets let off with a warning. Just because you've can recall more times than I've ever experienced doesn't make you a better driver or mean that police don't abuse their power. In fact, it's evidence of it.
================
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Re:Now they're moving into the open...

(Score:5, Informative)

by Archtech (159117) on Saturday February 18, @09:37AM (#14749434)

re: "...that corny old poem about first they came for the Jews, then the homosexuals and I never spoke up".

Is this what you meant? Please note the first three lines (usually omitted in the USA), and that there is no mention of homosexuals. Political correctness is one thing; rewriting history and literature is another.

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
- Martin Niemöller, Der Weg ins Freie, (F.M. Hellbach, Stuttgart, 1946)

When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat.
When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist.
When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew.
When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest.

=================http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/18/064208=

Bin Laden would approve.

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Fantastic Lad (198284) on Saturday February 18, @08:53AM (#14749269)

Porn, porn, porn. . .

Defending American values? Well, sheesh. Isn't more than half of the world's porn made in America? Playboy, anybody?

Sounds to me like Bush's stiffs are more interested in re-defining American values rather than in defending the existing ones. Not like "American Values," which seem to include destroying budding democracies and economies around the world by funding evil men like Saddam, and maintaining one of the lowest standards of living in the world's industrialized nations, the shortest number of holidays, largest number of work hours, largest percentage of starving, homeless and illiterate. . . Golly! Let's defend that!

But with some spiffy re-defining and defending of New American Values, why in 50 years, (if there's still a U.S. around in 50 years when the radioactive dust settles and Bush's babies crawl from their luxurious underground retreats), Americans may well be making the best automobiles, watches and repressed sexuality fetish porn in the world, and be putting all their verbs at the end of the sentence where they damned well belong!

Anyway, what exactly does stamping out porn have to do with stopping 'terrorists' blowing up buildings? Heck, Islamic Extremist groups don't like porn either. They say it's a moral corruption. So wouldn't they approve of this latest move by Bush's stiffs?

It's all nuts. None of it makes sense except when viewed through the spyglass of fascism.

I'm sure people laughed at the brownshirts too. Don't give them an inch.-FL

================================

Re:Neat!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Cpt_Kirks (37296) on Saturday February 18, @07:54AM (#14749040)

I am a registered Republican (lesser of two evils, etc.).

So now we have our own versions of the Muslim world's "Morality Police"?

The main problem I have with the GOP is this damn puritanism. This is the 21st century, dammit! If we force our views (actually their views, not mine. I have TB's of pr0n) on others, how are we better than the damn Islamist's?

The GOP is liable to take it up the ass big time in November. Hopefully this will clear out some of the ancient old farts so we can later elect younger pols with more of a Libertarian bent.

But I'm not holding my breath...
=================
The (Christian) "religious nuts" to which the GP refers don't recognise separation of church and state, either.
============

Re:Neat!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by smokin_juan (469699) on Saturday February 18, @08:15AM (#14749111)
(Last Journal: Sunday December 08, @02:43PM)

lesser of two evils, etc.

These situations will not improve until people learn to count higher than two.
===========================

Re:Neat!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by roystgnr (4015) <(ude.saxetu.macit) (ta) (rngtsyor)> on Saturday February 18, @09:26AM (#14749395)
(http://slashdot.org/)

These situations will not improve until people learn to count higher than two.

Unfortunately, the problems with plurality voting are described by game theory, not arithmetic. Everybody knows how to count higher than two; not so many people know the differences between instant runoff, Condorcet, and approval voting.

What's worse: the biggest problem with democracy in America today is apathy, not ignorance. People get furious at anyone who voted for "the other guy"; yet for some reason they take it easy on the more numerous group who couldn't be bothered to vote at all.==
====================

Re:Neat!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by thatguywhoiam (524290) on Saturday February 18, @09:15AM (#14749358)

There ..Michael Copps, a Democrat member of the FCC, has almost single handedly driven the Janet Jackson thing to the extreme on TV and radio, and Jonathan Adelstein (also a Democrat) has been pushing for revoking the licenses of radio stations because of his interpretation of obscenity laws then yes, the Democrats have some responsibility for this. That's all in the last five years. more of this too....you know those quaint little stickers on CDs? Tipper Gore's (Al's squeeze), was leading the charge on that back in the day. This isn't a "one side is doing it and not the other" thing.

I was going to say something about how easy and pointless it is to cherry-pick transgressions from any party, but you know what? It doesn't matter.

I don't focking care who's encouraging the brownshirt activity; it just has to stop.

========================

Re:These were county officials, not US Gov't

(Score:5, Insightful)

by William Baric (256345) on Saturday February 18, @09:52AM (#14749516)

If the two guys are fired then I agree. If not, then it probably means they have at least the implicit approbation of their superiors.

As for the Bush administritation, they just have to create the climate . They certainly won't give every orders. Do you really think Hitler did everything all by himself ? There was a lot of local initiative like this one in Germany in the 1930.

And guess what... The Bush administration did create the climate for such things to happen. So yes it's related to Bush, Ashcroft and all the others.
=======================

Re:Now they're moving into the open...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by GoofyBoy (44399) on Saturday February 18, @08:12AM (#14749097)
(Last Journal: Monday October 11, @08:43PM)

>you'd see that the officers involved had overstepped their bounds, they arrested no one and they've been reassigned.

1. They thought they were doing the correct thing. This is after their training. After getting approved for acting as a government official. After talking to another trained person (each other). (And MAYBE after talking to other trained persons, including their supervisor.)
2. The librarian, who knows what legal knowlege he had, had to talk to them in private. How did it even get to this point? Even then, they had to call in a police officer.
3. If we hadn't heard of this, would they have been reassigned? Why aren't they let go? Its clear they didn't get their training. Will they ever be in the field again in the future? Are they in a position to use their judgement again, even behind the desk (where they could potentially do even greater damage)?

I don't TRUST the police/law enforment, just because they have a badge and a nice uniform because in the end they are just human, like anyone without a badge and nice uniform. I give them a certain amount of respect, but I give everyone the same amount of respect.

(Police/law enforement don't trust their own either, ask them if they have locks on their lockers in the police station.)

--
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
==================

Not only porn

(Score:5, Interesting)

by recoiledsnake (879048) on Saturday February 18, @07:49AM (#14749025)

From the article here [boiseweekly.com]

A federal employee gets hassled by Homeland Security for antiwar stickers on his car. Is it a mistake, a new rule, or the part of a trend of the First Amendment being bullied out of existence? Read the transcript, read the rules and decide for yourself

================

I have an idea that will save $3.6M/year...

(Score:5, Funny)

by xxxJonBoyxxx (565205) on Saturday February 18, @07:54AM (#14749038)

"In the post-9/11 era, even suburban counties have homeland security departments. Montgomery County will not specify how many officers are in the department's security division, citing security reasons. Its annual budget, including salaries, is $3.6 million.
================

Re:Hypocrisy

(Score:5, Funny)

by Council (514577) <rmunroe@gDEBIANmail.com minus distro> on Saturday February 18, @08:18AM (#14749118)
(http://www.xkcd.com/)

If you've got your dick in your hand while you look at it it's porn.

Great. Well, as of last night, Better Homes and Gardens and the American Machinist's Handbook are both porn.

And stop looking at me like that.

--
xkcd [xkcd.com] - a webcomic of romance and Fourier transforms

===============================

Re:Porn @ the Library

(Score:5, Insightful)

by 47F0 (523453) on Saturday February 18, @08:44AM (#14749224)

"Hoever, I get so damn tired of being told what rights others have, when it comes out of my pocket."

But it's OK when the rights you enjoy come out of others pockets? You, sir, or madam, frighten me.

Virtually all of the rights we enjoy are, in one way or another, out of the public's pockets. We pay for a military, and (supposedly) law enforcement to, among other things, defend those rights.

Democracy and Freedom are not easy, nor for the faint of heart. These concepts demand that you value those concepts to the extent that the guy next door, whose opinions and tastes and religion you absolutely despise, is worth your defending his rights. This may include his right to condemn your favorite candidate, his right to burn the flag we love in protest, and his right to have access to materials in a public media forum that you don't agree with.

I promise you, there are church ladies out there who are angry that they have to pay for your right to look at 14th-century Italian painters at your library - because there might be pictures of naked chubby girls in there. They resent having to pay for your right to view this trash. Ridiculous? How, exactly, are you any different?
Because, believe me - Your neighbor that you despise may not agree with what you have to say, believe, or have access to in your library either. The very essence of the core of our government, that we all pay lip service to, but let slip away when it gets tough, is the concept of inalienable rights. I can't take your rights - and you can't take mine. And we each have to pay a little for that priviledge.
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Re:Terrorist have won

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Archtech (159117) on Saturday February 18, @09:54AM (#14749525)

It's tempting to say that - of course 9/11 and other events smoothed the way - but it's not terrorists who want to take away Americans' liberties. It's other Americans. The terrorist scare just gives them a huge gaping window of opportunity, just as the Communist scare set Joe McCarthy up in business.
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PR Stunt ...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 18, @08:57AM (#14749285)

I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt. From a legal standpoint, Google does not have much ground to stand on. Yahoo and Microsoft realized this and that is why they complied. However, from a public relations point of view, it costs Google a small handful of hours of legal time and in return, Google gets featured on Slashdot and the countries newspapers, television and radio outlets, in addition to all over the internet numerous times. In the vast majority of cases, Google will be featured as the do-gooder ("do no evil") standing up to the U.S. Government on the public's behalf meanwhile making its competitors (Yahoo and Microsoft) look bad in the public eye.

In the end, expect Google to comply with the DOJ's request but only after getting all the (almost) free publicity it can from this. I hope that there are some writers of marketing and public relations books paying attention to this stunt because this has got to be one of the best (and least expensive) public relations coups in recent history.

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Re:PR Stunt ...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by rainman_bc (735332) on Saturday February 18, @09:44AM (#14749458)
(http://costas.dyndns.ws/)

If the information the government wanted was a matter of national security ...
Then yeah, google should hand it over immediately, no questions asked ...

Yeah, according to the DHS, everything is a matter of national security. They use it as an excuse for just about everything they want to do, without being subject to scrutiny.
========================

Warning! PDF behind article link!

(Score:5, Informative)

by Da w00t (1789) on Saturday February 18, @08:59AM (#14749293)
(http://www.richardharman.com/)

[this is bad] (yes, I am a member)

Link to the blogger post [blogspot.com], that's the article, and THEN the pdf [blogspot.com]! Thank you!

(karmawhoring)

Here's a portion of the introduction:

• I. INTRODUCTION
  Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box, not only will they receive back the most relevant results, but that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason. The Government's demand for disclosure of untold millions of search queries submitted by Google users and for production of a million Web page addresses or "URLs" randomly selected from Google's proprietary index would undermine that trust, unnecessarily burden Google, and do nothing to further the Government's case in the underlying action.
  
  Fortunately, the Court has multiple, independent bases to reject the Government's Motion. First, the Government's presentation falls woefully short of demonstrating that the requested information will lead to admissible evidence. This burden is unquestionably the Government's. Rather than meet it, the Government concedes that Google's search queries and URLs are not evidence to be used at trial at all. Instead, the Government says, the data will be "useful"

Read the rest of this comment...

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Laughable

(Score:5, Insightful)

by fafaforza (248976) on Saturday February 18, @09:12AM (#14749346)

Or am I just cynikal?

From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.

Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?

The way I see it is that Google is simply grandstanding. There have been some voices recently that Google has been getting too powerfull and encompassing. They have your email, they know what you search for, and they search your entire hard drive and call back home with their toolbar.

From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis. Is this Google's chance to get back to the good graces of the Internet's geeks, stick to their missions to "do no evil" and retain their image of the anti-corporation, the underdog, and the rebel, while trying to get back to their $150 billion market cap?
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Re:Laughable

(Score:5, Insightful)

by amishdisco (705368) on Saturday February 18, @10:11AM (#14749617)
(http://www.faithspanker.com/)

How much disconnect is there between the DoJ finding search strings interpreted by them as criminal activity, and their demanding the IP addresses that made them? And why do so many people still trust the intentions of our government?

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Completely different

(Score:5, Insightful)

by typical (886006) on Saturday February 18, @10:53AM (#14749808)
(Last Journal: Wednesday June 22, @07:54PM)

But there is a difference.

With the RIAA, a crime had been committed, and Yahoo was asking to not turn over information identifying the offenders (more or less, yes, this is simplified).

In this case, the government has *no* committed crime, and is not trying to track down any criminals. They are simply trying (or at least, this is their justification) to obtain Google's search data to support GOP initiatives to spread pornography filters based on the fact that N% of searches return pornography hits.

My take is that Google is completely in the right. The federal government has absolutely no right to that data, nor do I want them to be able to subpoena it.

As for not being identifiable, give me a break. You surf sites with ads served by people like Doubleclick and Google Ads. Google can match all past searches from your IP or from a machine with any cookies that they've set on your machine. This is not speculation -- they have specifically stated that they have this ability. It's a pretty good bet that a number of sites on the Web have your real name. Maybe it's not a drop-in "Google has a complete database", but it only takes Google + *one* other website you visit that has your personal name, and there's a damned comprehensive list of your thoughts, research, summary of what you're reading about and so forth available to the federal government.

I don't think that this is a very good thing.

--
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.

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Cheap Buzzes

(Score:5, Funny)

by karlfr (897006) on Saturday February 18, @10:08AM (#14749591)

From TFA: "And some say latching on to a controversial topic is a cheap way to get buzz. Of a 2002 project involving marijuana muffins..."

Hmm... using "marijuana muffins" to get a cheap buzz?

Now there's a novel idea...
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http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177840&threshold=5&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=14750235

Re:Political Correction

(Score:5, Insightful)

by de Selby (167520) on Saturday February 18, @12:02PM (#14750235)

"Since when is it a fact that the entire known universe started as an miniscule "cosmic egg" that exploded into everything?"

Since the evidence piled up became so overwhelming that it became perverse to believe otherwise. Without a series of incredible--and extremely unlikely--future discoveries bringing doubt upon the theory, belief otherwise must either be dishonest or purely a matter of blind faith taxed to its extreme.

And personally, I find it interesting how William Lane Craig uses the Big Bang in his version of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God.

"Intelligent design similarly interprets available facts (e.g., the notion of irreducible complexity) and attempts to coordinate them within a unified theory of origins."

Except Intelligent Design has more problems than any conventional scientific theory. To be honest, it has been thoroughly disproved several times over. That it hasn't been abandoned is proof that its proponents either aren't open to reason or aren't concerned with truth.

Basically, the challenge it presents is shallow and weak. If Irreducible Complexity were understood as most do (that there is no evolutionary path for something), it's clearly and provably incorrect. Investigation into the evolution of the bacterial flagella, the blood clotting system, the immune system, and Behe's other examples have all filled in the picture on how these things evolved. As Behe saw in the recent trial, much of this has already made it into textbooks.

If it's understood as Behe put it (that there no evolutionary path that always maintains the function we see now), it's true but also irrelevant and not a challenge to evolution. Evolution doesn't require that this happen.

And finally, Dembski's "Explanatory Filter" relies on Behe to throw out evolution as a likely natural cause. One must have already rejected Evolution for it to work. That is without even going into how its nothing more than a mathematic version of the fallacy of arguing from ignorance. At it's simplest it's this: Do you know how this thing could come about naturally by law or chance? No? Then it was designed.

"Neither camp can prove their theory to a scientific certainty (as much as either side wants to believe they can)"

Maybe I don't follow this right. Are you squaring Intelligent Design against the Big Bang? As far as I can tell, there is no position or argument in ID that requires anyone to reject the Big Bang.

"but each should be allowed to make their arguments. Let the arguments be tested and challenged in the public sphere, and learn from the debate."

As is happening. Conferences are held, books are written, talks are given, papers are published, websites serve up evidence and arguments... and nobody has ever tried to stop this.

Of course, some want Intelligent Design to be given a free pass to be included in public school classrooms, bypassing the long, hard process everything else is subject to. That's not debate in the public sphere -- that's giving into all demands but requesting negotiations continue. It's absurd!