I had a rather chauvanist father, and among other black pearls of wisdom, he offered me this: "At some point or another every woman becomes a whore. It can work for you sometimes, but in the long run it will not."
Now, with my wife as proof, I've found that this is not true about women.
However, with Apple and Google as proof, I'm becoming convinced it's true about corporations.
he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone
Well, if there's one thing Apple itself has proven, it's that there is a real market segment that will pay more for a better product and won't just go for the cheapest product in the niche. Therefore, I predict this strategy will fail.
And before someone uses the 'f' word, Apple's traditional customers have been loyal for a reason - they've delivered quality and real, practical utility in exchange for the price paid. If someone else can come along and do the same thing, then we'll find out how much all these boys really are fans of Apple. I'm one, and I don't care whose logo is on the damn thing, if it's a gem, I'll save up for it rather than pay less to have some rickety piece of crap now. Just like I've done for 20 years with my personal computers.
You know, I was going to make an informative, insightful post here, but since slashdot's text entry fields break basic functions like copy and paste, all i can do is say:
Click the link. Scroll down to the last page and read that. It's frequently more informative than reading the first page.
Start with a ridiculous premise to get people reading, then break out what's really happening
Welcome to corporate journalism. And corporate science.
If there's one useful thing that 30 years of recreational gaming has taught me, it's this: Players will find loopholes in any set of rules, and exploit them relentlessly for an advantage. Corrolaries include the tendency for games to degenerate into contests between different rulebreaking strategies and the observation that if you raise the stakes to include rewards of real value (like money) then the games with loopholes attract players who are not interested in the contest, but only in winning.
This lesson applies to all aspects of life from gaming, to sports, business, and even dating.
And so it's no surprise that when the publishers set up a set of rules to validate scientific results, that those engaged in the business of science will game those rules to publish their results. They're being paid to publish; if they don't publish, they've "lost" or "failed" because they will receive no further funding. So the stakes are real. And while the business of science still attracts a lot of true scientists -those interested in the process of inquiry- it now also attracts a lot of players who are only interested in the stakes. Not to mention the corporate and political interests who have predetermined results that they wish to promulgate.
What was really the point of implying that truth can change?
To game the system, of course. The aforementioned corporate and political interests will use this line of argument now, in order to discredit established scientific premises.
So let me get this right, money equals speech, according to various Supreme Court Rulings. But a major corporation whose credit and debit vehicles constitute one of the major means for tendering payment, i.e., speech, is permitted to filter your payments to whomever it likes.
In other words, a bank gets to decide when your speech is acceptable and when it isn't.
And, of course, if you're wealthy or powerful enough, this isn't a hindrance. But if you're a working stiff, living on a trickle of cash flow and using revolving credit to solve the logistical problems thereof, you're essentially subject to the bank's approval of your fiscal expression.
Yet another distinction between serfs and lords in the information age.
If you no longer wish to make the above change, or if you did not initiate this request, please disregard and/or delete this e-mail.
If you have any questions regarding your Battle.net account, click here for answers to frequently asked questions and contact information for the Blizzard Billing & Account Services team.
Sincerely, The Battle.net Account Team
The second was this friendly notice, confirming that they decided to do this on their own:
Greetings!
We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised. These websites include Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password. To complete the password reset, please log into Battle.net Account Management (https://us.battle.net/account/management) and follow the provided instructions.
If you are a registered commenter for any of these sites and used your Battle.net email address to sign up with Gawker Media, we also recommend that you update your Battle.net address as soon as possible via Account Management. If you are unable to complete this step or the password reset on your own and believe your account may be compromised, please contact our customer support staff by using the Account Recovery form (https://us.battle.net/account/support/account-recovery.html) and be sure to check out our Account Security Awareness guide (http://us.battle.net/en/security/) for additional security tips and suggestions.
For more information about this situation, please visit Gawker Media’s official announcement (http://gawker.com/5713056/gawker-security-breach-were-here-to-help) or Lifehacker’s comprehensive FAQ (http://lifehacker.com/5712785/faq-compromised-commenting-accounts-on-gawker-media).
Regards, Blizzard Entertainment
So I navigated to battle.net using a trusted means, and completed the password reset. This appeared to work; I received no error notices. But when I attempted to actually log in to my battle.net account, I got a LOGIN FAILED result every time.
It was NOT necessary, or polite, or even really their business to do this without asking first . Especially when they can easily determine that I am using an authenticator.
I've been dealing with Blizzard customer service for 12 years, now, and they've continuously grown worse and worse and worse. About the time Wrath came out, it was pretty clear that their 'A' team had left for greener pastures/advanced projects and the 'B' team remained behind for the customers to deal with.
My latest correspondence with them over this issue was the worst yet. If the interaction I had with this 'person' that I dealt with was any indication, then he couldn't even pass a Turing test. Even the words "PLEASE ELEVATE" just got me another canned response to perform a password reset.
I swear, i was dealing with a script, and a half-assed one at that.
At some point, sometime between 36 and 48 hours later, someone behind the scenes untangled the mess that had been created, and the login began working again.
I suspect it was a "nested reset" condition. Blizzard initiated a reset, and sent me a link to complete the reset. But being a good phish-proof customer, I ignored the link and used a trusted bookmark to navigate to battle.net, and initiated another reset, without completing the first one. They should have anticipated this, though, because they've been telling us for years "do not follow links in emails to pages that request your password."
Yea, well it happened to the "customers" of those jerks, too.
I had a registered account on Gizmodo, mostly to write posts telling an author how full of shit they were, or to correct silicon/silicone errors, etc., but that's immaterial.
What is material is that I've been getting emails from hosts of hosts upon which I've used that same email address to register, telling me I need to change my password, even though my password is not the same from site to site.
Worse, in a fit of idiocy, battle.net decided that, since my battle.net account is identified with an email address that they found on the leaked Gawker database, that they'd go ahead and reset my password. Yes, unsolicited. Despite the facts that a) my password does not hash to the string associated with the address in the database, b) I have an authenticator attached to the account, and c) it's not their fucking business to reset my password without asking first.
So what happened next? After getting the email from battle.net, I went to their account management page, and entered a new password -- and am then unable to login using those credentials. They broke my access for 36 hours. For no valid reason.
If I had actually held a desire to play during that time, I'd have been royally pissed. As it is, I'm just royally irritated at their stupidity, and at the subsequent neutronium density of their CS group to be completely unable to parse my simple request: "your password reset broke my login, please fix it," and instead treated me as if I had reported my account hacked. So now my WoW account is locked down while they review whatever they think they need to review.
Mass idiocy all around, yes, but precipitated by the arrogant idiocy of Gawker.
And of course, just for safety, I've had to go and change accounts everywhere to be registered with a new email address - or where not possible, rotate passwords... which I usually do, but not all at fucking once. I spent three hours last night going over my list of accounts and passwords and updating everything, including my home network, which caused things to break for other family members who are now calling me with "I can't use the web; I can't get to pokemon.com; why isn't Miro working?" etc.
So, long screed made short: The pain, there's more than enough to go around, even for the undeserving.
Or, in the the now immortal, um... expression, of an anonymous/b/tard: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...!!
All I want a search engine to do is accept my input of keywords, wait for me to press Enter, and then fetch the search results for what I typed.
You see those tiny little words next to the input field? "Instant is On?" Click that. Scroll down. Select the appropriate radio button, and save your options.
Oh, sorry. I forgot for a moment that you'd have to allow those evil subversive cookies to perform that kind of black magic...
That makes sense. Only rich white people are sheltered enough from the squalor, injustice, and misery of human existence to be so militantly concerned with the rights of animals.
Ask an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, or a Chinese Factory Laborer, or a Serb whose lived through a decade of civil war, or a hungry Gazan --or even a typical American living paycheck to paycheck-- to be concerned about the rights of whales or goats or factory chickens, and you'll get a bewildered look, at best.
For those who haven't seen what the AC parent is talking about, there's a screenshot here, with a reasonably innocuous URL that shouldn't get you in too much trouble with your employer's IT department...
Provided you don't work for the US Government, Amazon, mastercard, Visa, or paypal... or any other place that has a way to decode sourceforge project IDs.AND. a proscription against tools like LOIC.
And, it's about what you'd expect from a bunch of/b/tards.
Netflix: Uh, well, that's your ISP's fault for not coordinating with our CDN.
Um. No. You'd say that only if you wanted to piss people off.
A real corporation would avoid jargon, and point fingers at someone else... Hell, they do that even when they *are* at fault.
In reality, you'd get something more like:
Netflix: We're sorry, sir. Who is your internet provider? Comcast? Unfortunately, that appears to be a problem that all Comcast customers are experiencing. Please contact your Comcast customer service. In the meantime, can we offer you an free upgrade to your DVD by mail service for three months?
If you're gonna use that sort of logic, then let's extend it to the root cause.
If the US Government hadn't behaved like a bunch of ugly American assholes and corrupt Kleptocrats for the past 60 or 70 years, then perhaps they wouldn't have to worry about some telegrams pissing off the entire world, and therefore wouldn't need to consider revoking half of the Bill of Rights in order to make it even conceivably possible -but not likely- to cover it up.
I'm so fucking ashamed of being part of a population that has allowed criminals and sociopaths to rule it for so long and who is now apathetic about the whole thing. And when the consequences of this bring the entire economy down so that my neighbors are starving and homeless, the people who are going to be scapegoated sure as hell aren't going to be the ones responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a rather chauvanist father, and among other black pearls of wisdom, he offered me this: "At some point or another every woman becomes a whore. It can work for you sometimes, but in the long run it will not."
Now, with my wife as proof, I've found that this is not true about women.
However, with Apple and Google as proof, I'm becoming convinced it's true about corporations.
he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone
Well, if there's one thing Apple itself has proven, it's that there is a real market segment that will pay more for a better product and won't just go for the cheapest product in the niche. Therefore, I predict this strategy will fail.
And before someone uses the 'f' word, Apple's traditional customers have been loyal for a reason - they've delivered quality and real, practical utility in exchange for the price paid. If someone else can come along and do the same thing, then we'll find out how much all these boys really are fans of Apple. I'm one, and I don't care whose logo is on the damn thing, if it's a gem, I'll save up for it rather than pay less to have some rickety piece of crap now. Just like I've done for 20 years with my personal computers.
You know, I was going to make an informative, insightful post here, but since slashdot's text entry fields break basic functions like copy and paste, all i can do is say:
Click the link. Scroll down to the last page and read that. It's frequently more informative than reading the first page.
Start with a ridiculous premise to get people reading, then break out what's really happening
Welcome to corporate journalism. And corporate science.
If there's one useful thing that 30 years of recreational gaming has taught me, it's this: Players will find loopholes in any set of rules, and exploit them relentlessly for an advantage. Corrolaries include the tendency for games to degenerate into contests between different rulebreaking strategies and the observation that if you raise the stakes to include rewards of real value (like money) then the games with loopholes attract players who are not interested in the contest, but only in winning.
This lesson applies to all aspects of life from gaming, to sports, business, and even dating.
And so it's no surprise that when the publishers set up a set of rules to validate scientific results, that those engaged in the business of science will game those rules to publish their results. They're being paid to publish; if they don't publish, they've "lost" or "failed" because they will receive no further funding. So the stakes are real. And while the business of science still attracts a lot of true scientists -those interested in the process of inquiry- it now also attracts a lot of players who are only interested in the stakes. Not to mention the corporate and political interests who have predetermined results that they wish to promulgate.
What was really the point of implying that truth can change?
To game the system, of course. The aforementioned corporate and political interests will use this line of argument now, in order to discredit established scientific premises.
So let me get this right, money equals speech, according to various Supreme Court Rulings. But a major corporation whose credit and debit vehicles constitute one of the major means for tendering payment, i.e., speech, is permitted to filter your payments to whomever it likes.
In other words, a bank gets to decide when your speech is acceptable and when it isn't.
And, of course, if you're wealthy or powerful enough, this isn't a hindrance. But if you're a working stiff, living on a trickle of cash flow and using revolving credit to solve the logistical problems thereof, you're essentially subject to the bank's approval of your fiscal expression.
Yet another distinction between serfs and lords in the information age.
Well, you know, Swiss bankers are also known as the Gnomes of Zürich.
Perhaps they are concerned about the Underwear Gnomes of Zürich.
I was forced to change it. They reset it. I didn't.
I received two emails, the first was a notice that a reset request occured:
We've received a request to reset the password for this Battle.net account. Please click this link to reset your password:
https://us.battle.net/account/support/password-reset-confirm.xml?ticket=OBFUSCATED
If you no longer wish to make the above change, or if you did not initiate this request, please disregard and/or delete this e-mail.
If you have any questions regarding your Battle.net account, click here for answers to frequently asked questions and contact information for the Blizzard Billing & Account Services team.
Sincerely,
The Battle.net Account Team
The second was this friendly notice, confirming that they decided to do this on their own:
Greetings!
We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised. These websites include Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password. To complete the password reset, please log into Battle.net Account Management (https://us.battle.net/account/management) and follow the provided instructions.
If you are a registered commenter for any of these sites and used your Battle.net email address to sign up with Gawker Media, we also recommend that you update your Battle.net address as soon as possible via Account Management. If you are unable to complete this step or the password reset on your own and believe your account may be compromised, please contact our customer support staff by using the Account Recovery form (https://us.battle.net/account/support/account-recovery.html) and be sure to check out our Account Security Awareness guide (http://us.battle.net/en/security/) for additional security tips and suggestions.
For more information about this situation, please visit Gawker Media’s official announcement (http://gawker.com/5713056/gawker-security-breach-were-here-to-help) or Lifehacker’s comprehensive FAQ (http://lifehacker.com/5712785/faq-compromised-commenting-accounts-on-gawker-media).
Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment
So I navigated to battle.net using a trusted means, and completed the password reset. This appeared to work; I received no error notices. But when I attempted to actually log in to my battle.net account, I got a LOGIN FAILED result every time.
It was NOT necessary, or polite, or even really their business to do this without asking first . Especially when they can easily determine that I am using an authenticator.
I've been dealing with Blizzard customer service for 12 years, now, and they've continuously grown worse and worse and worse. About the time Wrath came out, it was pretty clear that their 'A' team had left for greener pastures/advanced projects and the 'B' team remained behind for the customers to deal with.
My latest correspondence with them over this issue was the worst yet. If the interaction I had with this 'person' that I dealt with was any indication, then he couldn't even pass a Turing test. Even the words "PLEASE ELEVATE" just got me another canned response to perform a password reset.
I swear, i was dealing with a script, and a half-assed one at that.
At some point, sometime between 36 and 48 hours later, someone behind the scenes untangled the mess that had been created, and the login began working again.
I suspect it was a "nested reset" condition. Blizzard initiated a reset, and sent me a link to complete the reset. But being a good phish-proof customer, I ignored the link and used a trusted bookmark to navigate to battle.net, and initiated another reset, without completing the first one. They should have anticipated this, though, because they've been telling us for years "do not follow links in emails to pages that request your password."
Yea, well it happened to the "customers" of those jerks, too.
I had a registered account on Gizmodo, mostly to write posts telling an author how full of shit they were, or to correct silicon/silicone errors, etc., but that's immaterial.
What is material is that I've been getting emails from hosts of hosts upon which I've used that same email address to register, telling me I need to change my password, even though my password is not the same from site to site.
Worse, in a fit of idiocy, battle.net decided that, since my battle.net account is identified with an email address that they found on the leaked Gawker database, that they'd go ahead and reset my password. Yes, unsolicited. Despite the facts that a) my password does not hash to the string associated with the address in the database, b) I have an authenticator attached to the account, and c) it's not their fucking business to reset my password without asking first.
So what happened next? After getting the email from battle.net, I went to their account management page, and entered a new password -- and am then unable to login using those credentials. They broke my access for 36 hours. For no valid reason.
If I had actually held a desire to play during that time, I'd have been royally pissed. As it is, I'm just royally irritated at their stupidity, and at the subsequent neutronium density of their CS group to be completely unable to parse my simple request: "your password reset broke my login, please fix it," and instead treated me as if I had reported my account hacked. So now my WoW account is locked down while they review whatever they think they need to review.
Mass idiocy all around, yes, but precipitated by the arrogant idiocy of Gawker.
And of course, just for safety, I've had to go and change accounts everywhere to be registered with a new email address - or where not possible, rotate passwords... which I usually do, but not all at fucking once. I spent three hours last night going over my list of accounts and passwords and updating everything, including my home network, which caused things to break for other family members who are now calling me with "I can't use the web; I can't get to pokemon.com; why isn't Miro working?" etc.
So, long screed made short: The pain, there's more than enough to go around, even for the undeserving.
Or, in the the now immortal, um... expression, of an anonymous /b/tard: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...!!
Overheard at the scene:
"Robble, robble!"
Yet another data point proving that the EFF is one of the best nonprofit organizations in the US for a geek to bestow a gift upon.
If you're the kind of donor who's inclined to reward success rather than fund battles, now's a great time...
Oh, wait... See sig.
Right. You have to turn the cover over and look at the underside.
"Do not remove eraser."
Hell, it's pretty easy to guess the "relevant info" I'm going to search for next after reading that article:
Marissa Mayer Nude
All I want a search engine to do is accept my input of keywords, wait for me to press Enter, and then fetch the search results for what I typed.
You see those tiny little words next to the input field? "Instant is On?" Click that. Scroll down. Select the appropriate radio button, and save your options.
Oh, sorry. I forgot for a moment that you'd have to allow those evil subversive cookies to perform that kind of black magic...
Never mind.
That makes sense. Only rich white people are sheltered enough from the squalor, injustice, and misery of human existence to be so militantly concerned with the rights of animals.
Ask an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, or a Chinese Factory Laborer, or a Serb whose lived through a decade of civil war, or a hungry Gazan --or even a typical American living paycheck to paycheck-- to be concerned about the rights of whales or goats or factory chickens, and you'll get a bewildered look, at best.
For those who haven't seen what the AC parent is talking about, there's a screenshot here, with a reasonably innocuous URL that shouldn't get you in too much trouble with your employer's IT department...
Provided you don't work for the US Government, Amazon, mastercard, Visa, or paypal... or any other place that has a way to decode sourceforge project IDs .AND. a proscription against tools like LOIC.
And, it's about what you'd expect from a bunch of /b/tards.
Who is the house owner
From the article, it sounds like they found Crazy Harry's House.
and why this amount of explosives?
Comedy.
Similarly, have an egg or a pancake before replying, and you need not concern yourself with planing fried girls.
(I prefer to plane my girls baked, for the record...)
Well, the FBI doesn't say who the other two thirds comes from. 4Chan could /b/ doing just fine.
I looked at this summary over my first sip of coffee and read "A Third of World's Sperm From One Russian Man," and nearly spit it onto my macbook.
Titles like this should wait until after 10:00 am Eastern/7:00 am Pacific.
Yes, and it's followed by my post-ski-vacation sequel, "Nocash."
Yes, I'm slogging my way thru King of the Vagabonds right now, so please - no spoilers!
GP is right. But it's all about public relations.
Netflix: Uh, well, that's your ISP's fault for not coordinating with our CDN.
Um. No. You'd say that only if you wanted to piss people off.
A real corporation would avoid jargon, and point fingers at someone else... Hell, they do that even when they *are* at fault.
In reality, you'd get something more like:
Netflix: We're sorry, sir. Who is your internet provider? Comcast? Unfortunately, that appears to be a problem that all Comcast customers are experiencing. Please contact your Comcast customer service. In the meantime, can we offer you an free upgrade to your DVD by mail service for three months?
Emulsification of cell membrane lipids
Translation for the non bio-geeky: Detergents (including most hand soaps) shred cell membranes. It's like taking a weed-whacker to a water balloon.
Here, try this.
If you're gonna use that sort of logic, then let's extend it to the root cause.
If the US Government hadn't behaved like a bunch of ugly American assholes and corrupt Kleptocrats for the past 60 or 70 years, then perhaps they wouldn't have to worry about some telegrams pissing off the entire world, and therefore wouldn't need to consider revoking half of the Bill of Rights in order to make it even conceivably possible -but not likely- to cover it up.
I'm so fucking ashamed of being part of a population that has allowed criminals and sociopaths to rule it for so long and who is now apathetic about the whole thing. And when the consequences of this bring the entire economy down so that my neighbors are starving and homeless, the people who are going to be scapegoated sure as hell aren't going to be the ones responsible.
Cats can be trained. Quite easily. You just can't attempt to train them like they're dogs.
(You'd get the same result with dogs if you tried to train them like they were cats.)
It appears that in your case, the cats were smarter than you. And spell better.