Yeah, the greyness has already begun in full force. I agree with you, this wouldn't protect my kids or especially my neighbor's kids, at least not at first. It would give me a relatively easy way to block the porn sites that are trying to comply though, and the rest I could continue to filter.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is no quick and easy fix for this problem, but the idea of.xxx is a start down that path, and it might take decades, but that's the way our society is supposed to work anyway.
Here's an analogy: If you want good clothes, personalized service, or a wide selection of any particular type of item you don't go to.Walmart. You go to the mall and you find the.clothing store, the.service store or the.bookstore. So.com has porn, and so does.net &.everything else, but.xxx has the biggest selection and the best quality stuff. I really think that the industry would self-regulate.
I know I'm going to get murdered for this on here, but what about my right to protect my child from pornography online? I'm not asking that it be eliminated from the net, or that my kids never see pornography, but I want to make sure that at least while they are young they don't get exposed to it. Yeah, I'm a geek and I have filters up with a transparent proxy and all that on a separate Linux box, so I feel pretty safe about it right now, but the average person doesn't have the knowledge to do that.
A.XXX extension would make it as easy for me to block content for my kids as it would for you to find the content you are really after on the net. I think the real problem here is that most people here don't trust the government to not take the next step. I'm not sure I blame anyone for that - our government, both Democrats and Republicans, have given us little reason to trust them. Having said that, the.XXX extension in and of itself is not at all bad, and I think a happy medium would be to add the extension and encourage it from within the industry to make both sides of the playing field happier. The US Government is not going to be able to regulate foreign companies providing this stuff on domains other than.XXX, and I think it would be a huge waste of time and money to spend the effort attempting to regulate it within the US. Any attempt to do so would end in utter failure. I believe that the industry would self-regulation. I think it would benefit the average addict enough knowing that http://anything.xxx/ would get him porn, that he, and thus the industry, would stop wasting as much time on other tlds.
We have many different physical locations and exchange servers, but at my location I am the Exchange admin among many other things. At my site we have about 650 user email boxes (plus many resource boxes). We delete all mail on the server older than 60 days (legal reasons) and attempt to impose a 100MB/user limit (performance reasons). Before trying to implement some restrictions on mailbox size there were multiple email boxes over 1GB even with the 60 day retention policy, which means these people averaged over 500MB of email a month. I certainly see how someone could arrive at a 13GB email box at this rate.
Users are allowed to archive email to PST files at our location, but this is not consistent across the corporation. Some sites do not allow archiving at all. All sites have server enforced 60 day retention policies, so I do not agree with the policy that people lose their email so quickly and can't save it anywhere. PST (archived email) files, however, must be stored on PC hard drives that are not backed up by IT. Again, this is for legal reasons.
Our Exchange server is not officially backed up, and our official policy is that should it die we start from scratch and everyone loses everything on it. In reality I do rotating backups that are retained for 1 day so that I can cover myself if the server should die. Somehow I don't think that even though the order came down to me from above that I would be off scott free should the server die and I not be able to restore it.
In spite of people knowing their email is not backed up and is deleted after 60 days, some people still refuse to cooperate with the quota by archiving their email quickly and cite many different reasons, but most commonly that they just receive too many attachments. I realize this is an educational problem, but we are full of highly technical and highly educated people who we cater to, and we should since they are the ones that pay the bills, not the IT staff.
In the article's case, there should be some sort of compromise. Those mailbox sizes are too big, but depending on your users, you will probably have to compromise and provide them with some alternative means of storing information in email form. Some people apparently just organize better in an email box than they do on a filesystem.
I still do this as well. I occasionally do purchase through them, so am a decent customer and still receive approximately 60 emails a month from them. I filter them and save them for the weekend so I can click through them all at one time. I've returned $200 in Circuit City gift certificates over the years and am close to getting another $50. I've slowed down because I started using fatwallet.com because of the direct return, but if MyPoints has a ProFlowers deal or the like and I was going to buy flowers for my wife anyway, I'll go through them so I get some return.
There is a screenshot showing that GnuCash can browse Slashdot. Or at least there was before the site was Slashdotted. It seemed to me that it was being boasted as a feature, otherwise why advertise it?
My point wasn't that it shouldn't be okay to render HTML within your app, but that it shouldn't be possible to browse the Internet. HTML is fine for generating reports, and I would be glad that for something standards based.
Why I would want a web browser that is able to browse the Internet inside an application that holds all my financial information? Sounds Microsoft Money-ish to me. I'd prefer to keep applications separate so there is less possibility that a malicious website could pull financial information off my computer.
When was the last time you saw a real Virus? I saw one the other day pop up in an alert log and I laughed. The message was "A boot or partition virus has been found on drive A:." I've got hundreds of Windows XP machines that I'm responsible for, but these things don't bother me because XP won't allow them to run.
The things I'm worried about take advantage of insecure applications such as Outlook, or insecure Windows components such as Internet Explorer. They don't require hardware level access to the system to run, which means that if you are able to lock down these applications so that they have limited access to the system, you've also locked down any potential exploit to that particular application.
Depending on your philosophy about life, the universe, and everything, you may call these types of exploits worms instead of viruses. It certainly would grant Microsoft the benefit of the doubt in having mostly reduced viruses to a thing of the past. I still agree with you that this is mostly just more self promoting nonsense from Microsoft.
1. XCP or Media Max? Why not? They should have learned from this mistake and are unlikely to do it again. It won't change my position on never purchasing a music CD again (I am a Rhapsody user), but it certainly makes sense that they should use someone who has learned from mistakes rather than another 3rd party without a clue.
2. There needs to be a more streamlined way for this to happen. Joe Average isn't going to bring back music just because it pops up in typical legalese or even plain English warning him that he isn't supposed to copy the music. Regardless of what it says about DRM, his interpretation in the 5 seconds he thinks before pressing "Accept" will be that this is just another warning about not copying the CD that he has to agree to before he can listen. It needs to say something like: "Installing this DRM will break your computer, prevent you from accessing the Internet, and allow everyone in the world to view all the files on your computer." just to get the user's attention.
3. Why would someone willingly uninstall this software when it means they can't listen to their music collection anymore. That's way worse than renting music online. It needs to be available so that Joe Average can take his CD back to the store within the return period and for the rare occasions when Sony makes a similar "mistake."
4. A pop-up message appears 6 months down the road and says Joe Average has to accept an update to his DRM or his music will stop playing. At this point he's a hostage to Sony. It is too late to bring the CD back to where it was purchased. It doesn't matter what the update says or warns him about, he's going to install it. This is pointless.
5. Plain English? If it is more than a couple sentences, any English looks like legal mumbo-jumbo to the average teenager who is likely the target market anyway.
6. In other words, a lawyer who is going to make them add more than a couple sentences to fully protect Sony's interests. Or a lawyer who is going to make them add more than a couple sentences to fully protect the consumer's interests. Either way it will defeat number 6.
7. Who is this going to be? Microsoft? Sony, or Sony's 3rd party DRM maker will never agree to hand out the code to, say, the open source community to take it through some decent testing.
8. Fine. I'd rather they just were happy with the high profit margin on the CD sale though. Anyone dumb enough to purchase a CD at this point deserves all the spying/targeted advertising they get.
9. This depends how they describe full-disclosure. I can't believe they expected that the current software would cause any problems. "This CD contains copy protection that has been tested by Microsoft to ensure compatibility with Windows XP." That may constitute full disclosure for them.
10. This depends what the fix is. They haven't fixed the problem they got themselves into this time. The AV companies and even Microsoft have had to do this for them. They aren't technically competent enough to do this, unless they mean to outsource this process to Microsoft, etc.
Every one of these points is lip service to the problem, and even all together they won't completely ensure that this doesn't happen again. You are right, this punishes the meek. I happen to be tech savvy yet honest at the same time, which is why I subscribe to Rhapsody (and Yahoo, but that stuff is so buggy it is almost unusable) which now works on my Linux boxes and makes me very happy. I am punished to the tune of $15/month to feed my MP3 player all the music I want, so I'm not too upset. My parents, on the other hand, who are also honest people but not technically savvy could fall victim should they decide to play a CD in the computer, as unlikely as that would be.
I'm going to post something on my blog about DRM, warning my half dozen readers of the problem. If everyone here with a blog, a soapbox, or any other platform would post or say something, maybe we could educate people. Until this becomes something that Joe Average's technically savvy buddy talks about, Joe Average won't know or care about the problem.
Good idea, but say I live in one state but spend most of my time driving in other states. The state I'm living in would like it, but other states would not.
I think this would be a great idea if it in turn reduced state and/or federal taxes and eliminated the tax on gasoline. At least you could see all your taxes in one place for once. If Bush is serious about simplifying tax law, this would be a simple thing to simplify.
The fact of the matter is though that this has less to do with taxing and more to do with tracking. The federal and state governments already charge us tax on our gas. This tax has the same effect as a tax on our odometers as you propose, and the current method even gives discounts to users who chose good gas mileage cars. If they just wanted more revenue, they would raise the tax on gas.
Uh, no. You can't compare a commercial business with academia. Microsoft, Adobe, and countless other software companies make special deals with academic institutions to gain the hearts and minds of students, not because they have large budgets. My company is spending millions to finally upgrade from Office 2000 to Office 2003 around the middle of next year. We've negotiated, but honestly with Microsoft there is little room to negotiate, even at these figures. At 65k this business is a fly on our wall, and we're a fly on the wall of hundreds if not thousands of companies. I'd be surprised if Microsoft didn't raise the price just because they attempted to waste Microsoft's time by negotiating.
Seriously though you can't compare academics with corporations. The software industry sees academics as an investment and corporations as the cash cow.
I am currently attending the University of Phoenix in the MBA/TM program (Technical Management). Nothing technical seems to happen until the end, so I can't comment on that part, but I can say that my experience has been as varied as the instructors I had. Some are good, some are downright awful. I'm currently in a class that is awful. Not one instructor that I have had has fully updated their syllabus to reflect the change in schedule which happened several months ago when they changed the "week" from Thursday-Wednesday to Tuesday-Monday. My current instructor is disorganized and slow to answer questions about the confusing syllabus.
I've seen plagiarism and shoddy work from students, but then see the same students in the following class(es). All my teams but the one in my last class have had me doing the majority of the work since I seem to be the only one who cares. I've talked with others who have experienced this team problem as well and typically there are two answers I always get. Either that the University of Phoenix is hard and challenging or that it is way too easy.
From these reports and my own experience, here is what I infer about the University of Phoenix: You get out of it what you put in. If you work hard and try hard you will actually learn something and get decent grades. If you don't put much into it, you'll still probably get decent grades, but you won't get any educational benefit out of it. The disadvantage of this inconsistency is that management will see one student who is a product of UoP who is lazy and worthless as an employee and then make a judgment call against the rest. I wouldn't rely on a degree from UoP to get you a job, but rather to supplement your job. I do technical work with a more technical bachelor's degree and eventually will probably want to move up into management. I think the degree I have, the work I do, and the history I have with my company will give them a good impression of my UoP degree when I get it. However, if I were a hiring manager evaluating a potential new employee, I would not put much weight behind a UoP degree in my decision process.
So why am I attending? I live out in the middle of nowhere, and really have no other education options that fit into my schedule. The biggest reason though is that my job is paying for the majority of it so that my out of pocket expense is relatively small.
Maybe the technology to produce a certain size drive is doubling every 6 months (don't know, never checked), but drives aren't doubling in size every 6 months. Let's see, we have 500GB drives out now, which means that three years ago the best we could do would have been no more than an 8 GB drive. Nah, I don't think it is quite that good, but it would be nice.
I got about 3% each year for the last two years, however my take home pay has actually decreased due to increased costs of benefits, in particular healthcare. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well have kept their pay increase and just kept the cost of benefits the same too. Now it sounds like they'll be hiking things up again in another year and a half so anything I get this year around will get eaten up by that.
It is just a token to try to make people feel better. I'm sure if my base salary was high enough I'd be getting more than the increase in my benefits counters, but there are some people who do much worse than I do too. I could get a 10% raise, but if it doesn't increase my take home salary, then I don't care.
stlhawkeye: I agree with your assessment, however I think there is something more intellectual and less "Slashbot" about the parent poster's comment. Personally I think it is great that people can make a (really good) living making games on two levels. First, I get to play good games. Second, they get to keep producing and improving them. It's no question that revenue drives gaming, not open source.
I think it is reasonable to expect that Mr. Meiers would say something about his opinion in his response. I read the first question and answer and immediately thought this was going to be another lousy interview where the interviewee never answers the questions. Here's some political and economically sound answers he could have inserted: There are a few open source games that have done some innovative things. We've actually hired an open sourcer or two. You hopefully get the idea. Even an answer confessing he hasn't even noticed would at least acknowledge that he understood the question and attempted to answer.
I just started taking classes at the University of Phoenix in the MBA program (Technology Management). I am surprised and disgusted with how awful people spell. It is a struggle to understand many students because of the awful grammar and spelling. From what I've seen so far, these are people with a BS or BA already who will just as easily earn an MBA. If schools are not going to require accurate grammar and spelling, they need to at least require readable sentences. These are tomorrow's managers and executives, and they can't even write a comprehensible email.
Using a cell phone and driving is very distracting to some people, much more than talking to passengers. The benefit of passengers is that they can see what is happening around them. If the car in front of you starts acting irregularly, they'll suspend their conversation with you without having to say a word to them. If you are in rush traffic and make a wrong turn, they'll help you get back on track. If you are talking to someone on the cell phone, they're going to continue talking as if nothing is going on in your world.
I talk on the cell phone in the car sometimes, but I always start the conversation by telling the person on the other end that I'm driving. People who talk to me on the phone know that if something happens I'm dropping the phone, with or without hanging up. I do drop it frequently because I drive a manual transmission and need both hands if I need to accelerate hard while turning, etc. When I know I'm going to be on the phone I use the handsfree, but even then people know that they are second place to my driving.
When all else fails -- like the time I got a return call on a resume while driving -- I pull off the road to talk.
I agree with your point about cellphones being bad only because they are visible. There are countless other distractions that any driver must face. Would they pass a law banning CB radios from truckers?
To stay on topic though, I think this is a good compromise and wonder when I can start carrying my own blocker. I'm currently down to just the company cell phone, which might as well not exist since it has such awful service (Cellular One), so I wouldn't be hurting myself since it almost always rings to voicemail anyway. I am annoyed by an annoying cell phone user at least once a week. Those commercials at the start of movies annoy me too -- so repetitive -- about turning off your phone.
I can think of one great reason to use this over Knoppix. If I use my Linux box I can't get to my online bank because they don't trust anything but IE. Sure I can modify my user agent string but that sometimes breaks other things. If this works as it looks, I don't need to have a VM of Windows on my PC anymore just to do banking or browsing.
Maybe they are just toys, but a small or foldup keyboard adapted to bluetooth and priced at under $50 would be an instant hit with me and several people I know who carry Palm Tungsten T's around and would like to have a decent way to input data without cables or awkward docking stations.
Zone-H mostly posts defacements, and the reason this is easy is because of all the wannabe linux people out there. It isn't all that hard to download a RedHat ISO, slap an exploitable phpnuke on it (or some other php based web tool with a hole) and bam they go down. Maybe it takes a month or two for an exploit in their version of to surface, but when it does, they aren't paying attention as much as the people doing the exploitation.
Keeping a box up to date is important no matter what the OS. Windows makes it easy with WindowsUpdate. RedHat and many other Linux distros make it more difficult with pay-to-update or oops we-broke-your-config updates.
Linux can be more secure, but only when you know what you are doing.
I'm late to posting, so this is probably redundant by now.
Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Simple, those notification messages aren't in any way related to that phone. A user is unlikely to cancel his/her yahoo account just because they cancelled their phone service.
It's obviously a problem, but definitely not an intentional one on Yahoo's part. An article like this on Slashdot is probably enough to get them to put up a page explaining how to get your number off someone else's account.
It is kinda funny to think about this that Bill Gates/Microsoft could be part of the Mark of the Beast. Even the casual reader of Revelation 13 will notice that there is already some supernatural stuff going on before anyone receives the Mark. The author of the last link there you referenced takes the whole thing way out of context, and obviously hasn't done much study of anything, let alone the Bible.
First of all, the beast will already be in existance. He will already have suffered the fatal wound yet recovered. Many of mankind are already worshiping the beast. The beast speaks, blasphemies God, etc. Taking the mark is something not just like a computer chip, but like subscribing to a new religion. This will be very clear to everyone receiving it that it isn't just going to allow them to buy or sell, but it will also mark them as a follower of the beast.
Microsoft may be immoral, but so far I haven't seen anything that they've done collectively to put themselves ahead of God or to start a new religion or kill people who don't worship them. Until that happens, only the naieve will reject technology that makes them more productive members of society based simply on the fear of the Mark.
Of course I'm not saying that there aren't other reasons to reject this technology -- other comments have covered this well -- I'm just stating that it shouldn't be rejected based only on fear of the Mark.
You have to take into account just who is patenting it. I'd rather see this patented by a University than a business. If the university doesn't patent this, someone else will claim the research and patent it first. If the university is smart, and they probably are, they won't sell this exclusively to a single company for money, they'll license it at a reasonable cost or free to people genuinely interested in developing it further.
Patents are not by definition evil, and neither is the governmental system. It is just the abuses (e.g. Amazon.com's one-click patent) that make it seem that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the greyness has already begun in full force. I agree with you, this wouldn't protect my kids or especially my neighbor's kids, at least not at first. It would give me a relatively easy way to block the porn sites that are trying to comply though, and the rest I could continue to filter.
.xxx is a start down that path, and it might take decades, but that's the way our society is supposed to work anyway.
.Walmart. You go to the mall and you find the .clothing store, the .service store or the .bookstore. So .com has porn, and so does .net & .everything else, but .xxx has the biggest selection and the best quality stuff. I really think that the industry would self-regulate.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is no quick and easy fix for this problem, but the idea of
Here's an analogy: If you want good clothes, personalized service, or a wide selection of any particular type of item you don't go to
I know I'm going to get murdered for this on here, but what about my right to protect my child from pornography online? I'm not asking that it be eliminated from the net, or that my kids never see pornography, but I want to make sure that at least while they are young they don't get exposed to it. Yeah, I'm a geek and I have filters up with a transparent proxy and all that on a separate Linux box, so I feel pretty safe about it right now, but the average person doesn't have the knowledge to do that.
.XXX extension would make it as easy for me to block content for my kids as it would for you to find the content you are really after on the net. I think the real problem here is that most people here don't trust the government to not take the next step. I'm not sure I blame anyone for that - our government, both Democrats and Republicans, have given us little reason to trust them. Having said that, the .XXX extension in and of itself is not at all bad, and I think a happy medium would be to add the extension and encourage it from within the industry to make both sides of the playing field happier. The US Government is not going to be able to regulate foreign companies providing this stuff on domains other than .XXX, and I think it would be a huge waste of time and money to spend the effort attempting to regulate it within the US. Any attempt to do so would end in utter failure. I believe that the industry would self-regulation. I think it would benefit the average addict enough knowing that http://anything.xxx/ would get him porn, that he, and thus the industry, would stop wasting as much time on other tlds.
A
Ok, go ahead and mod me into oblivion.
We have many different physical locations and exchange servers, but at my location I am the Exchange admin among many other things. At my site we have about 650 user email boxes (plus many resource boxes). We delete all mail on the server older than 60 days (legal reasons) and attempt to impose a 100MB/user limit (performance reasons). Before trying to implement some restrictions on mailbox size there were multiple email boxes over 1GB even with the 60 day retention policy, which means these people averaged over 500MB of email a month. I certainly see how someone could arrive at a 13GB email box at this rate.
Users are allowed to archive email to PST files at our location, but this is not consistent across the corporation. Some sites do not allow archiving at all. All sites have server enforced 60 day retention policies, so I do not agree with the policy that people lose their email so quickly and can't save it anywhere. PST (archived email) files, however, must be stored on PC hard drives that are not backed up by IT. Again, this is for legal reasons.
Our Exchange server is not officially backed up, and our official policy is that should it die we start from scratch and everyone loses everything on it. In reality I do rotating backups that are retained for 1 day so that I can cover myself if the server should die. Somehow I don't think that even though the order came down to me from above that I would be off scott free should the server die and I not be able to restore it.
In spite of people knowing their email is not backed up and is deleted after 60 days, some people still refuse to cooperate with the quota by archiving their email quickly and cite many different reasons, but most commonly that they just receive too many attachments. I realize this is an educational problem, but we are full of highly technical and highly educated people who we cater to, and we should since they are the ones that pay the bills, not the IT staff.
In the article's case, there should be some sort of compromise. Those mailbox sizes are too big, but depending on your users, you will probably have to compromise and provide them with some alternative means of storing information in email form. Some people apparently just organize better in an email box than they do on a filesystem.
I still do this as well. I occasionally do purchase through them, so am a decent customer and still receive approximately 60 emails a month from them. I filter them and save them for the weekend so I can click through them all at one time. I've returned $200 in Circuit City gift certificates over the years and am close to getting another $50. I've slowed down because I started using fatwallet.com because of the direct return, but if MyPoints has a ProFlowers deal or the like and I was going to buy flowers for my wife anyway, I'll go through them so I get some return.
There is a screenshot showing that GnuCash can browse Slashdot. Or at least there was before the site was Slashdotted. It seemed to me that it was being boasted as a feature, otherwise why advertise it?
. gif
My point wasn't that it shouldn't be okay to render HTML within your app, but that it shouldn't be possible to browse the Internet. HTML is fine for generating reports, and I would be glad that for something standards based.
Looks like the site is back enough to bring the link: http://gnucash.org/images/gnome-1.6/help-slashdot
Why I would want a web browser that is able to browse the Internet inside an application that holds all my financial information? Sounds Microsoft Money-ish to me. I'd prefer to keep applications separate so there is less possibility that a malicious website could pull financial information off my computer.
When was the last time you saw a real Virus? I saw one the other day pop up in an alert log and I laughed. The message was "A boot or partition virus has been found on drive A:." I've got hundreds of Windows XP machines that I'm responsible for, but these things don't bother me because XP won't allow them to run.
The things I'm worried about take advantage of insecure applications such as Outlook, or insecure Windows components such as Internet Explorer. They don't require hardware level access to the system to run, which means that if you are able to lock down these applications so that they have limited access to the system, you've also locked down any potential exploit to that particular application.
Depending on your philosophy about life, the universe, and everything, you may call these types of exploits worms instead of viruses. It certainly would grant Microsoft the benefit of the doubt in having mostly reduced viruses to a thing of the past. I still agree with you that this is mostly just more self promoting nonsense from Microsoft.
There are multiple problems with this list.
1. XCP or Media Max? Why not? They should have learned from this mistake and are unlikely to do it again. It won't change my position on never purchasing a music CD again (I am a Rhapsody user), but it certainly makes sense that they should use someone who has learned from mistakes rather than another 3rd party without a clue.
2. There needs to be a more streamlined way for this to happen. Joe Average isn't going to bring back music just because it pops up in typical legalese or even plain English warning him that he isn't supposed to copy the music. Regardless of what it says about DRM, his interpretation in the 5 seconds he thinks before pressing "Accept" will be that this is just another warning about not copying the CD that he has to agree to before he can listen. It needs to say something like: "Installing this DRM will break your computer, prevent you from accessing the Internet, and allow everyone in the world to view all the files on your computer." just to get the user's attention.
3. Why would someone willingly uninstall this software when it means they can't listen to their music collection anymore. That's way worse than renting music online. It needs to be available so that Joe Average can take his CD back to the store within the return period and for the rare occasions when Sony makes a similar "mistake."
4. A pop-up message appears 6 months down the road and says Joe Average has to accept an update to his DRM or his music will stop playing. At this point he's a hostage to Sony. It is too late to bring the CD back to where it was purchased. It doesn't matter what the update says or warns him about, he's going to install it. This is pointless.
5. Plain English? If it is more than a couple sentences, any English looks like legal mumbo-jumbo to the average teenager who is likely the target market anyway.
6. In other words, a lawyer who is going to make them add more than a couple sentences to fully protect Sony's interests. Or a lawyer who is going to make them add more than a couple sentences to fully protect the consumer's interests. Either way it will defeat number 6.
7. Who is this going to be? Microsoft? Sony, or Sony's 3rd party DRM maker will never agree to hand out the code to, say, the open source community to take it through some decent testing.
8. Fine. I'd rather they just were happy with the high profit margin on the CD sale though. Anyone dumb enough to purchase a CD at this point deserves all the spying/targeted advertising they get.
9. This depends how they describe full-disclosure. I can't believe they expected that the current software would cause any problems. "This CD contains copy protection that has been tested by Microsoft to ensure compatibility with Windows XP." That may constitute full disclosure for them.
10. This depends what the fix is. They haven't fixed the problem they got themselves into this time. The AV companies and even Microsoft have had to do this for them. They aren't technically competent enough to do this, unless they mean to outsource this process to Microsoft, etc.
Every one of these points is lip service to the problem, and even all together they won't completely ensure that this doesn't happen again. You are right, this punishes the meek. I happen to be tech savvy yet honest at the same time, which is why I subscribe to Rhapsody (and Yahoo, but that stuff is so buggy it is almost unusable) which now works on my Linux boxes and makes me very happy. I am punished to the tune of $15/month to feed my MP3 player all the music I want, so I'm not too upset. My parents, on the other hand, who are also honest people but not technically savvy could fall victim should they decide to play a CD in the computer, as unlikely as that would be.
I'm going to post something on my blog about DRM, warning my half dozen readers of the problem. If everyone here with a blog, a soapbox, or any other platform would post or say something, maybe we could educate people. Until this becomes something that Joe Average's technically savvy buddy talks about, Joe Average won't know or care about the problem.
Good idea, but say I live in one state but spend most of my time driving in other states. The state I'm living in would like it, but other states would not.
I think this would be a great idea if it in turn reduced state and/or federal taxes and eliminated the tax on gasoline. At least you could see all your taxes in one place for once. If Bush is serious about simplifying tax law, this would be a simple thing to simplify.
The fact of the matter is though that this has less to do with taxing and more to do with tracking. The federal and state governments already charge us tax on our gas. This tax has the same effect as a tax on our odometers as you propose, and the current method even gives discounts to users who chose good gas mileage cars. If they just wanted more revenue, they would raise the tax on gas.
Uh, no. You can't compare a commercial business with academia. Microsoft, Adobe, and countless other software companies make special deals with academic institutions to gain the hearts and minds of students, not because they have large budgets. My company is spending millions to finally upgrade from Office 2000 to Office 2003 around the middle of next year. We've negotiated, but honestly with Microsoft there is little room to negotiate, even at these figures. At 65k this business is a fly on our wall, and we're a fly on the wall of hundreds if not thousands of companies. I'd be surprised if Microsoft didn't raise the price just because they attempted to waste Microsoft's time by negotiating.
Seriously though you can't compare academics with corporations. The software industry sees academics as an investment and corporations as the cash cow.
I am currently attending the University of Phoenix in the MBA/TM program (Technical Management). Nothing technical seems to happen until the end, so I can't comment on that part, but I can say that my experience has been as varied as the instructors I had. Some are good, some are downright awful. I'm currently in a class that is awful. Not one instructor that I have had has fully updated their syllabus to reflect the change in schedule which happened several months ago when they changed the "week" from Thursday-Wednesday to Tuesday-Monday. My current instructor is disorganized and slow to answer questions about the confusing syllabus.
I've seen plagiarism and shoddy work from students, but then see the same students in the following class(es). All my teams but the one in my last class have had me doing the majority of the work since I seem to be the only one who cares. I've talked with others who have experienced this team problem as well and typically there are two answers I always get. Either that the University of Phoenix is hard and challenging or that it is way too easy.
From these reports and my own experience, here is what I infer about the University of Phoenix: You get out of it what you put in. If you work hard and try hard you will actually learn something and get decent grades. If you don't put much into it, you'll still probably get decent grades, but you won't get any educational benefit out of it. The disadvantage of this inconsistency is that management will see one student who is a product of UoP who is lazy and worthless as an employee and then make a judgment call against the rest. I wouldn't rely on a degree from UoP to get you a job, but rather to supplement your job. I do technical work with a more technical bachelor's degree and eventually will probably want to move up into management. I think the degree I have, the work I do, and the history I have with my company will give them a good impression of my UoP degree when I get it. However, if I were a hiring manager evaluating a potential new employee, I would not put much weight behind a UoP degree in my decision process.
So why am I attending? I live out in the middle of nowhere, and really have no other education options that fit into my schedule. The biggest reason though is that my job is paying for the majority of it so that my out of pocket expense is relatively small.
Maybe the technology to produce a certain size drive is doubling every 6 months (don't know, never checked), but drives aren't doubling in size every 6 months. Let's see, we have 500GB drives out now, which means that three years ago the best we could do would have been no more than an 8 GB drive. Nah, I don't think it is quite that good, but it would be nice.
I got about 3% each year for the last two years, however my take home pay has actually decreased due to increased costs of benefits, in particular healthcare. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well have kept their pay increase and just kept the cost of benefits the same too. Now it sounds like they'll be hiking things up again in another year and a half so anything I get this year around will get eaten up by that.
It is just a token to try to make people feel better. I'm sure if my base salary was high enough I'd be getting more than the increase in my benefits counters, but there are some people who do much worse than I do too. I could get a 10% raise, but if it doesn't increase my take home salary, then I don't care.
stlhawkeye: I agree with your assessment, however I think there is something more intellectual and less "Slashbot" about the parent poster's comment. Personally I think it is great that people can make a (really good) living making games on two levels. First, I get to play good games. Second, they get to keep producing and improving them. It's no question that revenue drives gaming, not open source.
I think it is reasonable to expect that Mr. Meiers would say something about his opinion in his response. I read the first question and answer and immediately thought this was going to be another lousy interview where the interviewee never answers the questions. Here's some political and economically sound answers he could have inserted: There are a few open source games that have done some innovative things. We've actually hired an open sourcer or two. You hopefully get the idea. Even an answer confessing he hasn't even noticed would at least acknowledge that he understood the question and attempted to answer.
It did seem like a dodge.
You should probably try out Flickr then. They allow you to download the original size images.
http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/#89
I just started taking classes at the University of Phoenix in the MBA program (Technology Management). I am surprised and disgusted with how awful people spell. It is a struggle to understand many students because of the awful grammar and spelling. From what I've seen so far, these are people with a BS or BA already who will just as easily earn an MBA. If schools are not going to require accurate grammar and spelling, they need to at least require readable sentences. These are tomorrow's managers and executives, and they can't even write a comprehensible email.
Using a cell phone and driving is very distracting to some people, much more than talking to passengers. The benefit of passengers is that they can see what is happening around them. If the car in front of you starts acting irregularly, they'll suspend their conversation with you without having to say a word to them. If you are in rush traffic and make a wrong turn, they'll help you get back on track. If you are talking to someone on the cell phone, they're going to continue talking as if nothing is going on in your world.
I talk on the cell phone in the car sometimes, but I always start the conversation by telling the person on the other end that I'm driving. People who talk to me on the phone know that if something happens I'm dropping the phone, with or without hanging up. I do drop it frequently because I drive a manual transmission and need both hands if I need to accelerate hard while turning, etc. When I know I'm going to be on the phone I use the handsfree, but even then people know that they are second place to my driving.
When all else fails -- like the time I got a return call on a resume while driving -- I pull off the road to talk.
I agree with your point about cellphones being bad only because they are visible. There are countless other distractions that any driver must face. Would they pass a law banning CB radios from truckers?
To stay on topic though, I think this is a good compromise and wonder when I can start carrying my own blocker. I'm currently down to just the company cell phone, which might as well not exist since it has such awful service (Cellular One), so I wouldn't be hurting myself since it almost always rings to voicemail anyway. I am annoyed by an annoying cell phone user at least once a week. Those commercials at the start of movies annoy me too -- so repetitive -- about turning off your phone.
Blame the user, not the phone.
I can think of one great reason to use this over Knoppix. If I use my Linux box I can't get to my online bank because they don't trust anything but IE. Sure I can modify my user agent string but that sometimes breaks other things. If this works as it looks, I don't need to have a VM of Windows on my PC anymore just to do banking or browsing.
Maybe they are just toys, but a small or foldup keyboard adapted to bluetooth and priced at under $50 would be an instant hit with me and several people I know who carry Palm Tungsten T's around and would like to have a decent way to input data without cables or awkward docking stations.
Zone-H mostly posts defacements, and the reason this is easy is because of all the wannabe linux people out there. It isn't all that hard to download a RedHat ISO, slap an exploitable phpnuke on it (or some other php based web tool with a hole) and bam they go down. Maybe it takes a month or two for an exploit in their version of to surface, but when it does, they aren't paying attention as much as the people doing the exploitation.
Keeping a box up to date is important no matter what the OS. Windows makes it easy with WindowsUpdate. RedHat and many other Linux distros make it more difficult with pay-to-update or oops we-broke-your-config updates.
Linux can be more secure, but only when you know what you are doing.
I'm late to posting, so this is probably redundant by now.
As long as we don't have to spell it "N-E-W-C-A-R-D" every time we say it! People mispeak PCMCIA more than any other acronym I can think of.
Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Simple, those notification messages aren't in any way related to that phone. A user is unlikely to cancel his/her yahoo account just because they cancelled their phone service.
It's obviously a problem, but definitely not an intentional one on Yahoo's part. An article like this on Slashdot is probably enough to get them to put up a page explaining how to get your number off someone else's account.
It is kinda funny to think about this that Bill Gates/Microsoft could be part of the Mark of the Beast. Even the casual reader of Revelation 13 will notice that there is already some supernatural stuff going on before anyone receives the Mark. The author of the last link there you referenced takes the whole thing way out of context, and obviously hasn't done much study of anything, let alone the Bible.
First of all, the beast will already be in existance. He will already have suffered the fatal wound yet recovered. Many of mankind are already worshiping the beast. The beast speaks, blasphemies God, etc. Taking the mark is something not just like a computer chip, but like subscribing to a new religion. This will be very clear to everyone receiving it that it isn't just going to allow them to buy or sell, but it will also mark them as a follower of the beast.
Microsoft may be immoral, but so far I haven't seen anything that they've done collectively to put themselves ahead of God or to start a new religion or kill people who don't worship them. Until that happens, only the naieve will reject technology that makes them more productive members of society based simply on the fear of the Mark.
Of course I'm not saying that there aren't other reasons to reject this technology -- other comments have covered this well -- I'm just stating that it shouldn't be rejected based only on fear of the Mark.
You have to take into account just who is patenting it. I'd rather see this patented by a University than a business. If the university doesn't patent this, someone else will claim the research and patent it first. If the university is smart, and they probably are, they won't sell this exclusively to a single company for money, they'll license it at a reasonable cost or free to people genuinely interested in developing it further.
Patents are not by definition evil, and neither is the governmental system. It is just the abuses (e.g. Amazon.com's one-click patent) that make it seem that way.
The same thing happened to me. I went back, turned cookies on and the shipping cost appeared. If your cookies are off that might be the problem.