It's no science, but we need to learn about possible threats from books. It probably won't happen, but perhaps it won't happen because we now know to avoid it. And because of it, we can think about potential dangers, and avoid them. In any case, we're warned.
And about people not suggesting no government: continuous reduction in government powers would eventually remove the government from playing field. If you've read SC, you'll remember that government exists there, too; it's, however, reduced to a bureaucracy without real power to control the companies that rule the landscape.
Because people too often accuse government and regulation as the sole cause of economic problems. While Snow Crash also portrays the society where government failed, it also shows that we wouldn't necessarily be better off without a government.
And your description of the society in SC as anarchy, it isn't; it's actually some sort of corporatocracy with various companies running various city districts. Again you have rule, again you have rulers... but you have people who are just as miserable.
Government interventions could be said to have saved US though now by reading Wikipedia I see that it's disputed. However, you can't say that letting xxAA, Microsoft and friends rule without control is a good thing. I'm not sure how it's in the US, but here in Croatia, the state takes care of children's playgrounds, of schools, etc.
Of course that state shouldn't involve itself too much in control of the society. But eliminating the state completely would be detrimental, because it's in human nature to deceive, to cheat and to work for own benefit at expense of others. Even if it isn't, too many people behave like it is.
For another example of corporatocracy, remember Total Recall.
Big government is bad. See Croatia, especially slow process for obtaining construction permits. But - no government is even worse. Uncontrolled market fighting based on Darwinistic principles would destroy common people and ultimately any freedoms we may have.
Didn't your mom teach you not to forcefully shut down any operating system with any file system? Just because it has measures to reduce the damage doesn't mean you can abuse it. So in this case, it is your fault.
And here I was going around all this time, feeling sorry for ext4 users who actually experienced system crashes due to bad graphics chip drivers or some other similar and silly problems. But no, it turns out that people who complain most are those who rely on operating system being able to resuscitate itself.
There's a reason why the filesystem syncs itself at the end of shutdown process, and why it is expected that you follow the process to the end. There's a reason why shutdown process exists in the first place. Throwing poor insults like "ext4 ranks with Windows 95" (perhaps you mean Win95's implementation of FAT?) doesn't help. Sure, it shouldn't lose stuff when the unexpected happens... but you shouldn't rely and expect it will. Unexpected is just that -- unexpected -- and you'd better be prepared for it the next time your desktop falls over while it's turned off and your drive dies a horrible death. Because God, Buddha, Allah, Shiva or someone else will make sure that happens to you, if you've raised yourself to expect that FS will survive being constantly forcefully turned off.
Allowing APPLICATION-X access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.
So, where do I disable access to my profile for APPLICATION-X, but not for all other apps? How do I anonymously give it a test drive? How deeply do I have to dig to disallow all apps the access to my data? When I find it, again, how do I disallow access for APPLICATION-X?
This is how it should be done:
Allowing APPLICATIONX access will let it pull your:
[x] profile information,
[ ] photos,
[ ] your friends' info,
[ ] and other content
that it requires to work.
Was it that hard, Facebook?
Also, I just noticed. "Your friends' info". Since my friends can see my entire profile... does that mean an app can see my entire profile just because one of my friend launched it? Note, I didn't launch it. My friend did. How deeply does the access for an application go?
Perhaps I should once again deactivate my Facebook account. These things are definitely unclear for the end user and until access to private data can be more easily controlled for Facebook Platform applications, it'll stay that way. And rummaging through settings, finding privacy settings, and having them set globally is not my idea of fun. I do want OTHERAPP-Y to access my data. I just don't want APPLICATION-X to access my data...
Whoosh. Entering your data into Facebook profile is one thing. Having all those tons of innocent quizzes automatically getting access to your private information is a problem. Easy solution would be that Facebook adds option to make it optional to provide a specific detail and to still be able to use the app. In case the developer of the app blocks you access because you didn't provide your email address to his app, many people would realize what assholes the developers of those "apps" are (emphasizing quotation marks).
This is all really Facebook's fault, not the app developers'.
On a side note: If you send Attribute Exchange request for email address to Google's OpenID, you won't get the data and the user won't even know you made the request unless you specified it is REQUIRED. It's so horribly hard to add a checkbox, which is off by default; and in case reg info is required, just remove the checkbox... *sigh*
That's a sad fact. USA people should really invoke antitrust laws more often. Microsoft's anticompetitive practices are making less damage than a single combination of media with content makers with distributors with ISPs. And USA has more than one such giant, where it would actually make sense to break up a company. And they wanted to break up Microsoft. That'd just allow it to focus on different fields, keeping the monoculture, spreading it further. Hah. Talk about not knowing where and when to react, eh?:)
Simple. Botnets don't generate all that great loads of upload traffic like BitTorrent does. Sure, the outgoing mails is irritating, but it's not exactly completely continuous and it's not exactly of such concentrated volume.
Every cell in spreadsheets deserves its own thread, this way the Excel does not crash by one mistake in one cell.
I was just pointing out there's no real corellation between splitting process into threads and "not crashing". Perhaps he meant to speak about delays, but crash is to me the "Illegal operation", the "Send or don't send report", the "Segmentation fault", etc., and not plain old hanging...
You mean process. We've all seen so many crashes of entire process caused by a single thread. Threads are not mutually isolated, that's their point. Processes are.
YouTube can detect signature even in distorted audio. It did on one of my videos and removed the content, offering me to replace it with their selection.
Which means md5 hash comparison is not really the way they'll do it. They'll instead use method that Google uses with Youtube, whatever it is.
You know, you can string together several messages and all modern phones support that - they split and merge the messages. You, of course, get charged separately for each segment of the message...
And don't you dare use non-7bit characters! No sir. Just dare using your national letters (e.g. Croatian) and bang! Only one character from your language (e.g. Ä) and number of chars that fits in the message shrinks in a horrible and twisted way.
Which means, an oversight (typing à instead of o) means message starts spanning e.g. 3 messages instead of 1. And the price grows appropriately.
So... SMS is a two-sided sword. But you can't count on anyone in my country to read their mail on the run. Simply expensive.
I actually IMed two times for half an hour. Messages flied non stop. Why? Waiting for night public transportation for cca 45min can be sortof... boring. I was desperate, even at expense of my fingers.
Apple Corps is owned by Beatles, but it's not equal to Beatles... And even if it were, the brand "Apple Corps" is not nearly as worthy and well-known as "Apple Computers". Brand "Beatles" is just a bit more well-known than "Apple Computers". Otherwise, I must say I don't make much of the remaining of your posting. Can you send me some of that pot you were smoking while writing that?:):):)
Actually, in 1991 they settled with Apple Computer agreeing not to ship physical media with music. See this section and this section.
The whole thing with Apple Corps is simply silly. It's nothing more than "Let's prove something!" Who has ever heard about Apple Corps, a 'company' that'll remain a footnote in history as "the company that wrestled with Apple, Inc. to use the Apple trademark". Nothing more. I never heard of them until they renewed their suit in 2003.
Even in early 1980s Apple Computer was more famous than Apple Corps. Trademark law simply needs a reform; preventing a company from entering another business is silly. What should Apple Computer do, change the name so they can sell music? MacCorp would sound neat, but Apple is Apple. I think we can agree who is less famous and who should change the name. Trademarks serve well with companies of equal size and with directly overlapping businesses, and obviously not so well with tiny companies fighting large companies...
I'm not in touch with any big corporations here in Croatia, but I rarely run into places that DON'T have an alternative browser installed.
Zagreb Computer Association: check
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing: check
XV gymnasium*: check
my game company: check
Besides, you CAN (or in the past you could) install Firefox without admin privileges.
And, Firefox stores addons in your user profile (usually C:\Documents and Settings\ivucica\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\...) so I don't see how that's possible. I had problems on Faculty**, those looked like admin-caused-problems, but I googled and I found out that I just needed to delete some files in the profile. And addon installation then went perfectly. Besides, I remember that in highschool I was installing Firefox without admin privileges (just told it to install into...\My Documents\) so I don't really see why everyne is making a fuss out of "not being able to install Firefox".
Only reasonable explanation I can think of is policy of not being able to run anything outside of C:\Program Files (I saw such setups). But in programmer's environment, you can get Firefox. And admin would have to closely monitor you to stop you from using it.
Of course, running from USB drive is an alternative if you carry your USB drive around all the time -- I don't:)
* type of school
** here it's a subunit of university, not a name for staff
Real problem is they're forcing their browser to be default system browser, in place of Opera, Firefox, Chrome - whichever is your default. Y'know how aforementioned browsers (and older IE) ask you if you want them to be the default? The/. summary makes point of forcing IE8 as the default.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no science, but we need to learn about possible threats from books. It probably won't happen, but perhaps it won't happen because we now know to avoid it. And because of it, we can think about potential dangers, and avoid them. In any case, we're warned.
And about people not suggesting no government: continuous reduction in government powers would eventually remove the government from playing field. If you've read SC, you'll remember that government exists there, too; it's, however, reduced to a bureaucracy without real power to control the companies that rule the landscape.
Do you have an alternative scenario?
Because people too often accuse government and regulation as the sole cause of economic problems. While Snow Crash also portrays the society where government failed, it also shows that we wouldn't necessarily be better off without a government.
And your description of the society in SC as anarchy, it isn't; it's actually some sort of corporatocracy with various companies running various city districts. Again you have rule, again you have rulers... but you have people who are just as miserable.
Government interventions could be said to have saved US though now by reading Wikipedia I see that it's disputed. However, you can't say that letting xxAA, Microsoft and friends rule without control is a good thing. I'm not sure how it's in the US, but here in Croatia, the state takes care of children's playgrounds, of schools, etc.
Of course that state shouldn't involve itself too much in control of the society. But eliminating the state completely would be detrimental, because it's in human nature to deceive, to cheat and to work for own benefit at expense of others. Even if it isn't, too many people behave like it is.
For another example of corporatocracy, remember Total Recall.
Big government is bad. See Croatia, especially slow process for obtaining construction permits. But - no government is even worse. Uncontrolled market fighting based on Darwinistic principles would destroy common people and ultimately any freedoms we may have.
Did you ever read Snow Crash?
Didn't your mom teach you not to forcefully shut down any operating system with any file system? Just because it has measures to reduce the damage doesn't mean you can abuse it. So in this case, it is your fault.
And here I was going around all this time, feeling sorry for ext4 users who actually experienced system crashes due to bad graphics chip drivers or some other similar and silly problems. But no, it turns out that people who complain most are those who rely on operating system being able to resuscitate itself.
There's a reason why the filesystem syncs itself at the end of shutdown process, and why it is expected that you follow the process to the end. There's a reason why shutdown process exists in the first place. Throwing poor insults like "ext4 ranks with Windows 95" (perhaps you mean Win95's implementation of FAT?) doesn't help. Sure, it shouldn't lose stuff when the unexpected happens ... but you shouldn't rely and expect it will. Unexpected is just that -- unexpected -- and you'd better be prepared for it the next time your desktop falls over while it's turned off and your drive dies a horrible death. Because God, Buddha, Allah, Shiva or someone else will make sure that happens to you, if you've raised yourself to expect that FS will survive being constantly forcefully turned off.
kthxbye.
In other news, the summary of yet another /. article is wrong. The blog didn't begin in 1995, it began when she was 95 years old. Look here
In that case, it's a case of horrible UI design.
So, where do I disable access to my profile for APPLICATION-X, but not for all other apps? How do I anonymously give it a test drive? How deeply do I have to dig to disallow all apps the access to my data? When I find it, again, how do I disallow access for APPLICATION-X?
This is how it should be done:
Was it that hard, Facebook?
Also, I just noticed. "Your friends' info". Since my friends can see my entire profile ... does that mean an app can see my entire profile just because one of my friend launched it? Note, I didn't launch it. My friend did. How deeply does the access for an application go?
Perhaps I should once again deactivate my Facebook account. These things are definitely unclear for the end user and until access to private data can be more easily controlled for Facebook Platform applications, it'll stay that way. And rummaging through settings, finding privacy settings, and having them set globally is not my idea of fun. I do want OTHERAPP-Y to access my data. I just don't want APPLICATION-X to access my data...
Whoosh. Entering your data into Facebook profile is one thing. Having all those tons of innocent quizzes automatically getting access to your private information is a problem. Easy solution would be that Facebook adds option to make it optional to provide a specific detail and to still be able to use the app. In case the developer of the app blocks you access because you didn't provide your email address to his app, many people would realize what assholes the developers of those "apps" are (emphasizing quotation marks).
This is all really Facebook's fault, not the app developers'.
On a side note: If you send Attribute Exchange request for email address to Google's OpenID, you won't get the data and the user won't even know you made the request unless you specified it is REQUIRED. It's so horribly hard to add a checkbox, which is off by default; and in case reg info is required, just remove the checkbox... *sigh*
That's a sad fact. USA people should really invoke antitrust laws more often. Microsoft's anticompetitive practices are making less damage than a single combination of media with content makers with distributors with ISPs. And USA has more than one such giant, where it would actually make sense to break up a company. And they wanted to break up Microsoft. That'd just allow it to focus on different fields, keeping the monoculture, spreading it further. Hah. Talk about not knowing where and when to react, eh? :)
Simple. Botnets don't generate all that great loads of upload traffic like BitTorrent does. Sure, the outgoing mails is irritating, but it's not exactly completely continuous and it's not exactly of such concentrated volume.
Parent of my post says
I was just pointing out there's no real corellation between splitting process into threads and "not crashing". Perhaps he meant to speak about delays, but crash is to me the "Illegal operation", the "Send or don't send report", the "Segmentation fault", etc., and not plain old hanging...
You mean process. We've all seen so many crashes of entire process caused by a single thread. Threads are not mutually isolated, that's their point. Processes are.
Long live the fork().
YouTube can detect signature even in distorted audio. It did on one of my videos and removed the content, offering me to replace it with their selection.
Which means md5 hash comparison is not really the way they'll do it. They'll instead use method that Google uses with Youtube, whatever it is.
But ... parallel compiling on quadcore is so fast :(
WHOOSH.
Flied like birds. You see, I write a message, open my cell phone and let the message fly out like a dove on a parade ...
So I see no problem with my statement.
PS Slashdot isn't encoding-friendly either. I typed c with a v above and I got Ä. I typed o with a ' above and I got Ã.
You know, you can string together several messages and all modern phones support that - they split and merge the messages. You, of course, get charged separately for each segment of the message...
And don't you dare use non-7bit characters! No sir. Just dare using your national letters (e.g. Croatian) and bang! Only one character from your language (e.g. Ä) and number of chars that fits in the message shrinks in a horrible and twisted way.
Which means, an oversight (typing à instead of o) means message starts spanning e.g. 3 messages instead of 1. And the price grows appropriately.
So ... SMS is a two-sided sword. But you can't count on anyone in my country to read their mail on the run. Simply expensive.
<joke type="bad">Noob</joke>
I actually IMed two times for half an hour. Messages flied non stop. Why? Waiting for night public transportation for cca 45min can be sortof ... boring. I was desperate, even at expense of my fingers.
I assert no such things :)
Apple Corps is owned by Beatles, but it's not equal to Beatles... And even if it were, the brand "Apple Corps" is not nearly as worthy and well-known as "Apple Computers". Brand "Beatles" is just a bit more well-known than "Apple Computers". Otherwise, I must say I don't make much of the remaining of your posting. Can you send me some of that pot you were smoking while writing that? :) :) :)
Actually, in 1991 they settled with Apple Computer agreeing not to ship physical media with music. See this section and this section.
The whole thing with Apple Corps is simply silly. It's nothing more than "Let's prove something!" Who has ever heard about Apple Corps, a 'company' that'll remain a footnote in history as "the company that wrestled with Apple, Inc. to use the Apple trademark". Nothing more. I never heard of them until they renewed their suit in 2003.
Even in early 1980s Apple Computer was more famous than Apple Corps. Trademark law simply needs a reform; preventing a company from entering another business is silly. What should Apple Computer do, change the name so they can sell music? MacCorp would sound neat, but Apple is Apple. I think we can agree who is less famous and who should change the name. Trademarks serve well with companies of equal size and with directly overlapping businesses, and obviously not so well with tiny companies fighting large companies...
*sigh*
Apple Corps v. Apple Computer
I'm not in touch with any big corporations here in Croatia, but I rarely run into places that DON'T have an alternative browser installed.
Besides, you CAN (or in the past you could) install Firefox without admin privileges.
And, Firefox stores addons in your user profile (usually C:\Documents and Settings\ivucica\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ ...) so I don't see how that's possible. I had problems on Faculty**, those looked like admin-caused-problems, but I googled and I found out that I just needed to delete some files in the profile. And addon installation then went perfectly. Besides, I remember that in highschool I was installing Firefox without admin privileges (just told it to install into ...\My Documents\) so I don't really see why everyne is making a fuss out of "not being able to install Firefox".
Only reasonable explanation I can think of is policy of not being able to run anything outside of C:\Program Files (I saw such setups). But in programmer's environment, you can get Firefox. And admin would have to closely monitor you to stop you from using it.
Of course, running from USB drive is an alternative if you carry your USB drive around all the time -- I don't :)
* type of school
** here it's a subunit of university, not a name for staff
Level of hype it generated on Slashdot?
Looks sufficiently high to me ;)
Real problem is they're forcing their browser to be default system browser, in place of Opera, Firefox, Chrome - whichever is your default. Y'know how aforementioned browsers (and older IE) ask you if you want them to be the default? The /. summary makes point of forcing IE8 as the default.
They can, until 2038.