Under your logic sniper rifles would be great toys for kids. Just make sure that there's nobody down range, and don't do anything stupid with them (like shoot them at your head) and no one gets hurt. : )
The Battlestar Galactica one seems a little silly. It was recalled because some kid put it in his mouth and shot a missle down his throat? Well no shit pieces of plastic are dengerous if you swallow them. Chess pieces are dangerous under that definition. What makes them any different from the 100000 other toys that shoot plastic missles of some kind? A little unfair to add them to that list imho.
In Universities professors are under a lot of pressure to get their names onto papers. This often leads to papers that dont really do much to advance human knowledge being published. I have a few friends that have gone on to work for big research labs rather than stay in academia and I hear prettymuch they same thing from them. You have to produce something tangible to justify your existance and for most researchers in big companies this means you must apply for patents. Same problem as academia, just replace the word "Paper" with "Patent" and "Publish" with "Apply for". Microsoft is hardy unique in this although they seem to get the most negative publicity for it. Look as some of the stuff IBM has patents for. Not every researcher at IBM made a groundbreaking invention.
Yeah, but slashdot is in the business of shilling for Google not Yahoo. Mostly Yahoo just gets ignored here whenever they do something. Then when Google puts out a beta for a very similar service later it makes slashdot headlines. 90% of articles on this website have a strong pro-google and anti-ms slant. Yahoo, which has probably innovated at least as much if not moreso than any other web services company gets very little press here. I guess they should just be glad that they arent getting ripped on constantly like Googles other big competitor. (Microsoft)
Maybe its just me, but the thing that got me into Baldurs Gate (1 and 2) was the story. It really drew me in like no other game ever has. The side quests were interesting and well thought out, they all seemed to fit together. By the end of the game I felt like I really identified with the hero. All of the areas were custom made (I loved that), you didnt go through similar looking areas over and over again. (especially in BG2) There was lots of action with very little repitition. With these games that have toolsets and let people make their own stuff you still always seem to get the feeling that youve played it before as you go through a dungeon or town.
People talk about these other games with side quests like the non linearity is this great and wonderful thing. But most of these side quests seemed like "go kill creature X until he drops 15 fangs" or whatever. Didnt really have much of a story.
I know that there are a lot of mods out there with good stories. I just want to buy a game and enjoy it without having to troll around on a bunch of websites.
In my mind Baldurs Gate will always be the best RPG.
The draft caused an uproar in colleges primarily because college students didnt want to go to vietnam. With things like this they dont see an immediate threat to their lifestyle.
That was simply a post mentioning that a congressman called for his arrest. This is article tells us that he has just had a search warrant served on him for suspicion of those crimes. Same topic, different events.
For anyone still reading this thread he was given a written order to take down the website which he complied with.
He is trying to get a legal defense fund together which you can contribute to via paypal now. Its difficult to tell if hes actually in real trouble or if it ended with the order to take down the boarding pass generater.
He hasnt provided any superfancy technology for haxoring your way past a checkpoint. What he did is amazingly simple to a degree that I am surprised noone else has done it before. Printing out a piece of paper formatted to look like an boarding pass is not really some clever idea noone else has had before.
We have all sorts of things on the internet that could be used for nefarious purposes in the wrong hands. This one is a hell of a lot simpler than a proof of concept for the latest IE exploit. At least people who are against posting proof of concept exploit code can back it up with the justification that many people who use it couldnt have figured it out themselves. He hasnt given the terrorists a damn thing. Anyone with moderate computer skills could print themselves a fake boarding pass.
Now that the FBI has come calling on him he should really hire a decent lawyer as fast as he can. Dont forget that we have all these laws which allow the government to ignore traditional rights when dealing with a possible terrorist. Im normally not one to jump around fearmongering about innocent people being dragged away in the name of fighting the war on terror, but this guy might not have the traditional rights such as seeing a lawyer and so forth. (Disclaimer: IANAL but I know that accused terrorists dont have many rights in this country)
Ive always thought the "check boarding pass" scheme was a false sense of security. Ive explained it to friends of mine several times and I have usually been met with eyes being rolled. Everyone knows that boarding an airplane fraudulently isnt that hard, they just put thing like this there as a nuisance deterrent/false sense of security.
It was pretty dumb for this guy to post the php script online, but I feel badly for him. Its obvious he isnt a terrorist or anything.
Enforcement of drug laws in the United States at least outweighs the effort put into enforcement put into copyright laws by a *vast* margin. The effort law enforcement puts into chasing down drug dealers, cartels, or whatever is so massive its mind blowing to me you would suggest that media piracy is pursued more aggresively.
The publicity the "War on Drugs" has gotten is huge too. Were you joking when you said that you hear more about media piracy than illegal drugs?
Oh come on now. The writeup has the phrase: "dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers". Copyright law has been around for a -LOT- longer than the.mp3 format. The MPAA has not dragooned entire governments. The governments are simply enforcing copyright laws. If a convenience store is robbed will we see a headline on slashdot about 7-11 dragooning entire city governments to go after the customers of 7-11? Are we suddenly opposed to all enforcement of laws on slashdot now or just copyright laws?
I remember when napster was the hot topic on slashdot and people ripped on the mpaa for going after napster when it was just a tool to search. "They should go after the individual violaters, napster isnt breaking the law!" was modded +5 again and again. Now a decade later the MPAA is doing just that, they are suing people who are violating copyright law. The old arguments were at least based off the idea that people shouldnt be allowed to break the law without fear of reprisal.
The MPAA has a right to expect that copyright laws be enforced as they are written.
So how is this any different from a traditional low tech ballot box? If you allow someone unrestricted and unsupervized access to a box full of ballots its security breaks pretty fast too. While it may be possible that computerized voting could have made elections more secure than they were previously, the idea that we have taken a step backwards in terms of security seems like a stretch to me.
If a virus can get to the point where its torpedoing your keys or doing something similar to cause WGA to think you dont have a legitimate copy you are hosed anyway. It could just as easily delete all the autoupdate code that would be used to download security fixes if it has the ability to muck with WGA. This isnt some secret gotcha button attackers can use that no one thought about until Dvorak came along.
This sounds like a journalist speculating about things he doesnt understand.
As always you are making stuff up or accusing them of doing things you think they might do. In reality 2 minutes of research shows that what you are saying is not the case.
You claim that Microsoft will break compatibility with older versions on purpose by putting out a new file format. Microsoft has addressed the issue of older versions of office being able to open the new formats with a free update. People who are using it now will not be forced to upgrade to read/write the new formats. Here is a source:
You say MS is only claiming "Open" and is going to produce a "uncrackable obfuscated wrench"? Here is the entire schema as submitted to a standards body:
Stop making up wild accusations in an attempt to defend your poorly chosen position. Your accusations are only based on things that Microsoft could do when a quick stop at google will show that they have not done these things and cannot do them at this point. In the future I recommend that you at least look at the wikipedia entry for the topic you are going to flame someone on.
Mistakes happen in commercial software, everyone knows that. I think what galls people on here isnt the mistake so much as it is their attempt to blame it on Microsoft.
You know that guy who screws something up on his computer and then starts swearing about Microsoft when it was clearly his own fault? Apple is being that guy right now.
Wow, hes taking a shot at windows security? Microsoft may have released some pretty insecure code in the past, but it looks like Apple is the first to actually ship a product with a virus preinstalled.
The article referred to it as a rooftop solar power generation system. I dont see anything in TFA to indicate that there would be only one panel. I suspect that the use of the word "Panel" rather than "Panels" was a mistake in the submission to slashdot.
It wasnt my intention to make excuses for anyone. I was just asking a question hoping to learn more. He mentioned a debacle and I wanted to know what he was referring to. I made the assumption that his dissatisfaction was related to the new XML formats because a lot of developers I know are writing code for that format these days. It wasnt an attempt to "excuse problems with the old version by bringing up that there is a new version" as you accused me of.
You imply that I am ignorant or "beyond hope", yet you arent even aware of the new open XML based formats.
What is it you say you feel so strongly about? You feel strongly against a new file format you didnt even know existed?
> No, the EU used legal requirements to force MS to accommodate these competitors at a late date after legal complaints. What kind of idiocy turns that into "losing a bet"?
You claimed it was "losing a bet" in your own post that I was responding to!
The rest of your post is just a rant about how Microsoft is a monopoly (which I will grant you) and is unrelated to the present issue.
You are claiming that Microsoft is doing something wrong, but within the context of this issue they are clearly in the right. The EU is forcing them to do something that is fundamentally bad. They changed the security model to something which is clearly better. Other AV companies have adapted. Symantec and McAfee just dont want to rewrite their crappy software to work with an operating system that wont let them mess around with the kernel the way older versions of windows did. The EU never should have listened to Symantec and McAfee. It is mindboggling to me that people are believing and repeating the FUD that they are spreading. This is a triumph of lawyers and politics over technical merit.
Oh please, this would not have illegally excluded them in any way. Microsoft did not lose a bet that they could exclude competitors. You are just spreading FUD.
Also allowing these apps to hook into the kernel is fundamentally bad for security regardless of how they had designed it earlier. The fact that it was allowed in previous releases of windows was a huge problem. On the one hand people malign them for this, but when they fix it to what it should be guys like you accuse them of being monopolists!
Dont forget that McAfee and Symantic have a vested interest in not only destroying windows security just so they can do what they want in their apps, but also in keeping these fundamental flaws in windows.
Also this argument should be evaluated based on the circumstances at hand, not past unrelated events. Instead of the issue at hand you talk about Microsoft's past monopoly history which has nothing to do with this. It sounds like you just have a preexisting prejudice against microsoft and are not capable of looking at this objectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Under your logic sniper rifles would be great toys for kids. Just make sure that there's nobody down range, and don't do anything stupid with them (like shoot them at your head) and no one gets hurt. : )
The Battlestar Galactica one seems a little silly. It was recalled because some kid put it in his mouth and shot a missle down his throat? Well no shit pieces of plastic are dengerous if you swallow them. Chess pieces are dangerous under that definition. What makes them any different from the 100000 other toys that shoot plastic missles of some kind? A little unfair to add them to that list imho.
In Universities professors are under a lot of pressure to get their names onto papers. This often leads to papers that dont really do much to advance human knowledge being published. I have a few friends that have gone on to work for big research labs rather than stay in academia and I hear prettymuch they same thing from them. You have to produce something tangible to justify your existance and for most researchers in big companies this means you must apply for patents. Same problem as academia, just replace the word "Paper" with "Patent" and "Publish" with "Apply for". Microsoft is hardy unique in this although they seem to get the most negative publicity for it. Look as some of the stuff IBM has patents for. Not every researcher at IBM made a groundbreaking invention.
Yeah, but slashdot is in the business of shilling for Google not Yahoo. Mostly Yahoo just gets ignored here whenever they do something. Then when Google puts out a beta for a very similar service later it makes slashdot headlines. 90% of articles on this website have a strong pro-google and anti-ms slant. Yahoo, which has probably innovated at least as much if not moreso than any other web services company gets very little press here. I guess they should just be glad that they arent getting ripped on constantly like Googles other big competitor. (Microsoft)
Actually I am pretty sure that this is -exactly- the sort of thing they intended. Third party websites pushing both their website and IE7.
All this will do is get people who likely would have been using Google anyway to upgrade to IE7 as well. Both companies stand to gain from this.
This submission might not have been accepted without the snarky comment about how Google was using MS's own features against them though.
Maybe its just me, but the thing that got me into Baldurs Gate (1 and 2) was the story. It really drew me in like no other game ever has. The side quests were interesting and well thought out, they all seemed to fit together. By the end of the game I felt like I really identified with the hero. All of the areas were custom made (I loved that), you didnt go through similar looking areas over and over again. (especially in BG2) There was lots of action with very little repitition. With these games that have toolsets and let people make their own stuff you still always seem to get the feeling that youve played it before as you go through a dungeon or town.
People talk about these other games with side quests like the non linearity is this great and wonderful thing. But most of these side quests seemed like "go kill creature X until he drops 15 fangs" or whatever. Didnt really have much of a story.
I know that there are a lot of mods out there with good stories. I just want to buy a game and enjoy it without having to troll around on a bunch of websites.
In my mind Baldurs Gate will always be the best RPG.
The draft caused an uproar in colleges primarily because college students didnt want to go to vietnam. With things like this they dont see an immediate threat to their lifestyle.
That was simply a post mentioning that a congressman called for his arrest. This is article tells us that he has just had a search warrant served on him for suspicion of those crimes. Same topic, different events.
For anyone still reading this thread he was given a written order to take down the website which he complied with.
He is trying to get a legal defense fund together which you can contribute to via paypal now. Its difficult to tell if hes actually in real trouble or if it ended with the order to take down the boarding pass generater.
He hasnt provided any superfancy technology for haxoring your way past a checkpoint. What he did is amazingly simple to a degree that I am surprised noone else has done it before. Printing out a piece of paper formatted to look like an boarding pass is not really some clever idea noone else has had before.
We have all sorts of things on the internet that could be used for nefarious purposes in the wrong hands. This one is a hell of a lot simpler than a proof of concept for the latest IE exploit. At least people who are against posting proof of concept exploit code can back it up with the justification that many people who use it couldnt have figured it out themselves. He hasnt given the terrorists a damn thing. Anyone with moderate computer skills could print themselves a fake boarding pass.
Now that the FBI has come calling on him he should really hire a decent lawyer as fast as he can. Dont forget that we have all these laws which allow the government to ignore traditional rights when dealing with a possible terrorist. Im normally not one to jump around fearmongering about innocent people being dragged away in the name of fighting the war on terror, but this guy might not have the traditional rights such as seeing a lawyer and so forth. (Disclaimer: IANAL but I know that accused terrorists dont have many rights in this country)
Ive always thought the "check boarding pass" scheme was a false sense of security. Ive explained it to friends of mine several times and I have usually been met with eyes being rolled. Everyone knows that boarding an airplane fraudulently isnt that hard, they just put thing like this there as a nuisance deterrent/false sense of security.
It was pretty dumb for this guy to post the php script online, but I feel badly for him. Its obvious he isnt a terrorist or anything.
Are you kidding?
Enforcement of drug laws in the United States at least outweighs the effort put into enforcement put into copyright laws by a *vast* margin. The effort law enforcement puts into chasing down drug dealers, cartels, or whatever is so massive its mind blowing to me you would suggest that media piracy is pursued more aggresively.
The publicity the "War on Drugs" has gotten is huge too. Were you joking when you said that you hear more about media piracy than illegal drugs?
Oh come on now. The writeup has the phrase: "dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers". Copyright law has been around for a -LOT- longer than the .mp3 format. The MPAA has not dragooned entire governments. The governments are simply enforcing copyright laws. If a convenience store is robbed will we see a headline on slashdot about 7-11 dragooning entire city governments to go after the customers of 7-11? Are we suddenly opposed to all enforcement of laws on slashdot now or just copyright laws?
I remember when napster was the hot topic on slashdot and people ripped on the mpaa for going after napster when it was just a tool to search. "They should go after the individual violaters, napster isnt breaking the law!" was modded +5 again and again. Now a decade later the MPAA is doing just that, they are suing people who are violating copyright law. The old arguments were at least based off the idea that people shouldnt be allowed to break the law without fear of reprisal.
The MPAA has a right to expect that copyright laws be enforced as they are written.
So how is this any different from a traditional low tech ballot box? If you allow someone unrestricted and unsupervized access to a box full of ballots its security breaks pretty fast too. While it may be possible that computerized voting could have made elections more secure than they were previously, the idea that we have taken a step backwards in terms of security seems like a stretch to me.
If a virus can get to the point where its torpedoing your keys or doing something similar to cause WGA to think you dont have a legitimate copy you are hosed anyway. It could just as easily delete all the autoupdate code that would be used to download security fixes if it has the ability to muck with WGA. This isnt some secret gotcha button attackers can use that no one thought about until Dvorak came along.
This sounds like a journalist speculating about things he doesnt understand.
Oh, I didnt know that. Do you have a source for that information?
As always you are making stuff up or accusing them of doing things you think they might do. In reality 2 minutes of research shows that what you are saying is not the case.
e overview.mspx
n t_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm
n _XML
You claim that Microsoft will break compatibility with older versions on purpose by putting out a new file format. Microsoft has addressed the issue of older versions of office being able to open the new formats with a free update. People who are using it now will not be forced to upgrade to read/write the new formats. Here is a source:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/itpro/fil
You say MS is only claiming "Open" and is going to produce a "uncrackable obfuscated wrench"? Here is the entire schema as submitted to a standards body:
http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curre
If you want a good unbiased source of information on this topic I suggest wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_Ope
Stop making up wild accusations in an attempt to defend your poorly chosen position. Your accusations are only based on things that Microsoft could do when a quick stop at google will show that they have not done these things and cannot do them at this point. In the future I recommend that you at least look at the wikipedia entry for the topic you are going to flame someone on.
Mistakes happen in commercial software, everyone knows that. I think what galls people on here isnt the mistake so much as it is their attempt to blame it on Microsoft.
You know that guy who screws something up on his computer and then starts swearing about Microsoft when it was clearly his own fault? Apple is being that guy right now.
Wow, hes taking a shot at windows security? Microsoft may have released some pretty insecure code in the past, but it looks like Apple is the first to actually ship a product with a virus preinstalled.
The article referred to it as a rooftop solar power generation system. I dont see anything in TFA to indicate that there would be only one panel. I suspect that the use of the word "Panel" rather than "Panels" was a mistake in the submission to slashdot.
The article didnt say anything about its physical size. I wonder how much space they would have to consume to supply that much power.
The google campus doesnt have that many buildings, I have this weird image in my mind of all their buildings completely covered by solar panels.
Wow. Why on earth are you flaming me?
It wasnt my intention to make excuses for anyone. I was just asking a question hoping to learn more. He mentioned a debacle and I wanted to know what he was referring to. I made the assumption that his dissatisfaction was related to the new XML formats because a lot of developers I know are writing code for that format these days. It wasnt an attempt to "excuse problems with the old version by bringing up that there is a new version" as you accused me of.
You imply that I am ignorant or "beyond hope", yet you arent even aware of the new open XML based formats.
What is it you say you feel so strongly about? You feel strongly against a new file format you didnt even know existed?
Pardon my ignorance, but what is it that you dont like about MS Office XML? (we are talking about the new format supported by office 2007 right?)
I'm not trolling or trying to call you out or anything, I am just unfamiliar with complaints against their new office XML formats.
> No, the EU used legal requirements to force MS to accommodate these competitors at a late date after legal complaints. What kind of idiocy turns that into "losing a bet"?
You claimed it was "losing a bet" in your own post that I was responding to!
The rest of your post is just a rant about how Microsoft is a monopoly (which I will grant you) and is unrelated to the present issue.
You are claiming that Microsoft is doing something wrong, but within the context of this issue they are clearly in the right. The EU is forcing them to do something that is fundamentally bad. They changed the security model to something which is clearly better. Other AV companies have adapted. Symantec and McAfee just dont want to rewrite their crappy software to work with an operating system that wont let them mess around with the kernel the way older versions of windows did. The EU never should have listened to Symantec and McAfee. It is mindboggling to me that people are believing and repeating the FUD that they are spreading. This is a triumph of lawyers and politics over technical merit.
Oh please, this would not have illegally excluded them in any way. Microsoft did not lose a bet that they could exclude competitors. You are just spreading FUD.
Also allowing these apps to hook into the kernel is fundamentally bad for security regardless of how they had designed it earlier. The fact that it was allowed in previous releases of windows was a huge problem. On the one hand people malign them for this, but when they fix it to what it should be guys like you accuse them of being monopolists!
Dont forget that McAfee and Symantic have a vested interest in not only destroying windows security just so they can do what they want in their apps, but also in keeping these fundamental flaws in windows.
Also this argument should be evaluated based on the circumstances at hand, not past unrelated events. Instead of the issue at hand you talk about Microsoft's past monopoly history which has nothing to do with this. It sounds like you just have a preexisting prejudice against microsoft and are not capable of looking at this objectively.