Fuck you, sonny. Back then (when I had a Gravis Ultrasound) the newly minted high school grads were already calling me grandpa. Not justified since my daughter was just being born, but whatever. 15 years later, most of the hair on my head is still brown (the salt is slowly starting to creep in, with good reason as any man with a teenage daughter can attest to), so "Old man" still grates slightly. What I've lost in twitch reflexes I've gained in wisdom, so bring it on, young boys. You might be able to kill more zombies than me, but I'm on a first-name basis with the Mayor and our State Representative. Whose mojo has more power in the real world? Hmm? When you're done with your childish little games, come talk to me...
... securing the content. Now slashdot crowd probably says this is a good thing, but theres not much to do if TV networks require it.
Nonsense. I can read a book, ride a bike, take a walk, go kayaking, write some code, work in the yard, play with the dog, play with the kids. The list is endless. The TV networks can require DRM all they want, but people can always ignore them and do something else to entertain themselves. On the offhand chance someone is interested in the odd bit of content, there are always other avenues besides online streaming (borrow the DVD set from the library, or a friend, or buy it on sale etc.)
What horseshit. A plumber (or other tradesperson) might not need what a person can learn in college to do the plumbing itself, but there are plenty of other things that a proper college education could be useful for. Socially, being able to interact with other members of the community with a college level education always comes in handy. How about being able to appreciate the local Shakespeare In The Park offerings, not to mention any other arts and culture offerings in the community? Being able to negotiate the byzantine details of a typical financial document? Read and understand legal documents? Make and balance a budget? What if the plumber is motivated to enter local politics to improve things in the community? Help the kids with the homework. Etc, etc.
An educated populace can only be a good thing, and education is not just about career preparation. That's what vocational schools are for. Higher education is about something else that transcends mere training for a particular career.
No knee-jerk anti-corporate trash here, my friend. I've been watching this kind of nonsense building up for the last 20 years with nary a whimper. If that's knee-jerk, my reflexes must be reaaaaaaaly slow.
On a more serious note, do you really think a checkbox in a settings dialog equates to a fully informed request for permission to sit and watch over someone's shoulder recording every private note and highlight? Really?
Being an intelligent individual, you of course realize that what today is "Opt In" can become "Opt out" tomorrow, followed by no option at all, probably by burying a clause in the "terms of service" somewhere. At some point the innocent "opt in" choice becomes obligatory in order to use the product despite the fact that having access to private notes is in no way required for the product to function.
Isn't it interesting that the very companies that protest constantly about piracy of their "intellectual property" and want to DRM lock everything to prevent it seem to have no respect for the property rights of individuals? Take note, you apologists who constantly point out that piracy is "theft" because it "steals" something that belongs to the creator whose 'right' to compensation and control of their works must be protected. Why silent now? The personal notes a person creates on their reading device are no different from other creative works and should be protected accordingly. Amazon should not be accessing or using this information without express permission or fairly compensating the rights holders and providing royalties for the lives of the authors plus 70 years. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Now that's a game I wouldn't mind playing. To hell with all the "we have the most realistic blood spatter" or "the most awesome beat-down" or "we have teh h00k3rz" games. This is what I want. (And I don't mean 'Ned Flanders' world either - I'm atheist. But more and better graphic violence doesn't do it for me. )
Both.
(Marketecture and not grokking with fullness, that is.)
Marketecture part: The delusional fantasy that because one is able to talk about things in a new way, old problems affecting scalability no longer apply. Very true. The marketers believe it. The foolish customers believe it. Anyone who has a clue runs for the hills.
Not grokking with fullness part: You've accurately grokked the "every (idiot) thinks that if..." part. What you haven't grokked is the details. In place of your speculation, just substitute that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The fantasy I see over and over again whenever a "new" paradigm changing technology comes along is that problems which were hard using the 'old' approach are suddenly eliminated merely by virtue of doing things in a "new" way. The fantasy is that having the 'insight' to recognize the awesome potential of the magical new approach is somehow superior to having the discipline to *fully* understand the problem and solving it decisively and intelligently. The latter is often viewed as not worth the effort or offering a "poor return on investment". The delusion is that effort is better spent on looking for a loophole that doesn't require any understanding because the new approach will magically make the hard problem go away so nobody has to expend any real effort. Doing things 'in the cloud' is one of those magic new approaches that substitutes for actually engineering a solution in an informed way.
Even if a new approach reduces the effort previously required for certain tasks, it invariably brings with it new problems that have to be understood in order to avoid being bogged down.
History shows that folks who solve the hard problem wipe the floor with those who are looking for shortcuts. FedEx (solved the logistics problems associated with rapid delivery to anywhere), Southwest Airlines (solved the logistics problems associated with low cost regional air travel), Walmart (developed a satellite network to track inventory and sales chain-wide). Google (a better algorithm for search). Etc.
After WW II , the country was split up in two , with Western Germany leading a relatively acceptable life , but for Eastern Germany , it was centuries of suffer.
I assume you meant *decades* of suffering, not centuries, considering that the GDR only existed for 41 years. It may have felt like centuries to those suffering, I'll grant you that.
You're forgetting ACTA which is the attempt to transform 'misinformed garbage' into reality without anyone realizing it until it is too late. Do not underestimate those who wish to control you. Sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "la la la la" will not be enough to ward them off. Take this seriously and make sure this does not spread to where you live. The first step is not to smugly point out that it doesn't apply to you where you live, but to help those trying to fight it before it spreads to you.
People like you are the reason corporations continue to gain control over our lives. People 'want' without being willing to accept the consequences. Or worse, they accept the consequences willingly (if they even understand the consequences of their actions, which is rare), condemning those few left with free will to either give up their freedom or participation in the Faustian bargain that is the mass market. If mass market acceptance is the measuring stick for the success of the "linux desktop", I hope it never succeeds.
This doesn't exactly map onto "vote with your wallet". So how are we supposed to 'vote' in a meaningful way.
This is a serious question. Not buying a product and advising anyone who will listen to do the same is one thing, but how exactly does one provide negative feedback to an Free Software project?
Critical posts on blogs and forums may have a cathartic effect for those who need to vent, but these days they tend to be either ignored or played down as 'the blathering of the disgruntled'. In many communities, stepping too far away from the groupthink results in being banned from further participation. Banning wears the guise of maintaining order and keeping things on topic, but is quite an effective tool at suppressing dissent. Once the ban hammer falls, it's as if you never existed. Noone else can even come along and read your opinions and decide they agree with you. Chilling.
How exactly does a person communicate in a serious way that an open source project has jumped the shark?
What stick does one wield if monetary punishment is not a viable option? And "fork the code" is not the right answer. This is more about how communities communicate to the 'executive' team to produce a product that folks can be happy with.
There's some kind of thing that goes on in marketing, entertainment, and politics that almost always seems to go for the left side of the Gaussian, as if collecting the not-so-clever is easier than collecting the clever.
I'm probably just a cynic, but maybe you failed to correctly identify your own place on the Gaussian, so just assumed that you were in the center where most of the people were, rather than far out on the highly clever end. Most programming designed to appeal to the majority would thus appear to you to be pandering to the not-so-clever, when it's actually just trying for the middle. Amusingly, it *is* easier to collect the not-so-clever, so you were right and wrong simultaneously.
This move is as self-serving as ever, so be careful what you wish for as the Flash hate clouds your mind.
1. Microsoft doesn't control Adobe and I'm sure that bothers them. It sure as hell bothers Steve Jobs. So why not take them out while they are vulnerable?
2. Microsoft is part of the H.264 patent pool, so they will make money when the licensing bombs go off. Killing off a competitor (flash) so users and content providers have few alternatives and must pay up puts them right where Microsoft wants them.
3. Once flash is gone (or has greatly diminished influence/relevance), Microsoft is free to tweak things in a way that suits them better. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
4. HTML5 video has no established standard DRM solution which content owners crave. Flash does, so it's hard to get content owners on board with Microsoft's agenda at present. I suspect that Microsoft has something in the works to offer them, which will conveniently be exclusive to Microsoft controlled platforms, or licensable to those who play nice (Apple). Sorry Android (and Linux).
Yes, but that's not always the case, even with nominally "Open Source" software that ends up on proprietary closed devices. Tivo comes to mind, as does Android. I can't recall ever reading about building bit-identical executables as a way of verifying that what is running on the hardware is actually the same as the audited source code. Mostly I read the opposite - what actually runs is always different from what the 'open' source can produce, if for no other reason than signing them with a private key. That's enough to slip in some clever assembler routine that can be used as a backdoor, I'm guessing.
Unless the source can be compiled from scratch and used in place of the pre-compiled versions, including flashing of firmware, creation of installable ROM images or OS installs, having source code guaranteed by analysis to be exploit-free gains the user nothing. There could still be spyware in the final product. Short of self-installing, I guess creation of bit-equivalent or checksum-equivalent binaries would be good enough as a verification mechanism.
This seems like a natural progression down the line of diminishing trust between countries. It's not very surprising, especially since the Chinese government *may* have been 'supportive' of some of the China/Google hacking. It appears the downside of possibly endorsing or supporting security breaches is other people/countries/etc will suspect you of it from that point on.
You might also consider that if they are spying on their own citizens via spyware installed by the manufacturer (at government insistence), they realize fully well that it can be done to them via software or equipment from sources not under their control. No need to invoke the Google hacking - that was just a sloppy fiasco. The government hacking "bay of pigs", if you will.
Indeed. Jobs are not an end to themselves; the whole point of a competitive economy is to create more wealth from less work, making everything more affordable, which will ultimately result in more free time; at the end of scarcity, quite a lot of free time.
Not to detract from your insightful comment by going off on a tangent, but...
The increase in free time that needs to be filled with stimulus is exactly what gives the RIAA and MPAA their power.
People need to fill that free time with something, which is where the power to implement and enforce draconian DRM measures for entertainment comes from. People should find something else to do, like walk around in the Big Blue Room, to deprive these parasites of their power.
Detecting the SSID and MAC address is more like reading the name and house number from the curbside mailbox. Both are 'visible' to the casual passerby, so are not private. Since it's broadcasting a signal that extends far beyond the boundaries of the property, the fact that the AP itself is inside the premises is irrelevant.
People should install shielding if they want their AP visibility to be limited only to the abode (or the property if they want to get a signal while outside).
And if you leave your WIFI device plus Wireless Location provider on, Google will use your phone as a war driving device whereby they periodically scan and return the results back to Google.
Really? This is technically possible, of course, but your wording implies something deliberate on the part of Google. That's a pretty strong statement and needs substantiation, since there's little evidence this takes place unless the user is running a particular app. You're implying that the base android environment does this somehow. Citation needed.
Here's to all the folks over the last several years that gleefully announced they were ditching their services (cable, satellite, whatever) and just getting it for free online. My usual response was that once they get you on board, they will start charging for it at some point. No more free tv and flipping a bird to the 'man'. I guess I was right.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck you, sonny. Back then (when I had a Gravis Ultrasound) the newly minted high school grads were already calling me grandpa. Not justified since my daughter was just being born, but whatever. 15 years later, most of the hair on my head is still brown (the salt is slowly starting to creep in, with good reason as any man with a teenage daughter can attest to), so "Old man" still grates slightly. What I've lost in twitch reflexes I've gained in wisdom, so bring it on, young boys. You might be able to kill more zombies than me, but I'm on a first-name basis with the Mayor and our State Representative. Whose mojo has more power in the real world? Hmm? When you're done with your childish little games, come talk to me ...
Nonsense. I can read a book, ride a bike, take a walk, go kayaking, write some code, work in the yard, play with the dog, play with the kids. The list is endless. The TV networks can require DRM all they want, but people can always ignore them and do something else to entertain themselves. On the offhand chance someone is interested in the odd bit of content, there are always other avenues besides online streaming (borrow the DVD set from the library, or a friend, or buy it on sale etc.)
An educated populace can only be a good thing, and education is not just about career preparation. That's what vocational schools are for. Higher education is about something else that transcends mere training for a particular career.
On a more serious note, do you really think a checkbox in a settings dialog equates to a fully informed request for permission to sit and watch over someone's shoulder recording every private note and highlight? Really?
Being an intelligent individual, you of course realize that what today is "Opt In" can become "Opt out" tomorrow, followed by no option at all, probably by burying a clause in the "terms of service" somewhere. At some point the innocent "opt in" choice becomes obligatory in order to use the product despite the fact that having access to private notes is in no way required for the product to function.
Isn't it interesting that the very companies that protest constantly about piracy of their "intellectual property" and want to DRM lock everything to prevent it seem to have no respect for the property rights of individuals? Take note, you apologists who constantly point out that piracy is "theft" because it "steals" something that belongs to the creator whose 'right' to compensation and control of their works must be protected. Why silent now? The personal notes a person creates on their reading device are no different from other creative works and should be protected accordingly. Amazon should not be accessing or using this information without express permission or fairly compensating the rights holders and providing royalties for the lives of the authors plus 70 years. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
World of Good
Now that's a game I wouldn't mind playing. To hell with all the "we have the most realistic blood spatter" or "the most awesome beat-down" or "we have teh h00k3rz" games. This is what I want. (And I don't mean 'Ned Flanders' world either - I'm atheist. But more and better graphic violence doesn't do it for me. )
Marketecture part: The delusional fantasy that because one is able to talk about things in a new way, old problems affecting scalability no longer apply. Very true. The marketers believe it. The foolish customers believe it. Anyone who has a clue runs for the hills.
Not grokking with fullness part: You've accurately grokked the "every (idiot) thinks that if ..." part. What you haven't grokked is the details. In place of your speculation, just substitute that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The fantasy I see over and over again whenever a "new" paradigm changing technology comes along is that problems which were hard using the 'old' approach are suddenly eliminated merely by virtue of doing things in a "new" way. The fantasy is that having the 'insight' to recognize the awesome potential of the magical new approach is somehow superior to having the discipline to *fully* understand the problem and solving it decisively and intelligently. The latter is often viewed as not worth the effort or offering a "poor return on investment". The delusion is that effort is better spent on looking for a loophole that doesn't require any understanding because the new approach will magically make the hard problem go away so nobody has to expend any real effort. Doing things 'in the cloud' is one of those magic new approaches that substitutes for actually engineering a solution in an informed way.
Even if a new approach reduces the effort previously required for certain tasks, it invariably brings with it new problems that have to be understood in order to avoid being bogged down.
History shows that folks who solve the hard problem wipe the floor with those who are looking for shortcuts. FedEx (solved the logistics problems associated with rapid delivery to anywhere), Southwest Airlines (solved the logistics problems associated with low cost regional air travel), Walmart (developed a satellite network to track inventory and sales chain-wide). Google (a better algorithm for search). Etc.
You must be out of good ideas to add to the discussion.
After WW II , the country was split up in two , with Western Germany leading a relatively acceptable life , but for Eastern Germany , it was centuries of suffer .
I assume you meant *decades* of suffering, not centuries, considering that the GDR only existed for 41 years. It may have felt like centuries to those suffering, I'll grant you that.
You're forgetting ACTA which is the attempt to transform 'misinformed garbage' into reality without anyone realizing it until it is too late. Do not underestimate those who wish to control you. Sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "la la la la" will not be enough to ward them off. Take this seriously and make sure this does not spread to where you live. The first step is not to smugly point out that it doesn't apply to you where you live, but to help those trying to fight it before it spreads to you.
People like you are the reason corporations continue to gain control over our lives. People 'want' without being willing to accept the consequences. Or worse, they accept the consequences willingly (if they even understand the consequences of their actions, which is rare), condemning those few left with free will to either give up their freedom or participation in the Faustian bargain that is the mass market. If mass market acceptance is the measuring stick for the success of the "linux desktop", I hope it never succeeds.
This doesn't exactly map onto "vote with your wallet". So how are we supposed to 'vote' in a meaningful way.
This is a serious question. Not buying a product and advising anyone who will listen to do the same is one thing, but how exactly does one provide negative feedback to an Free Software project?
Critical posts on blogs and forums may have a cathartic effect for those who need to vent, but these days they tend to be either ignored or played down as 'the blathering of the disgruntled'. In many communities, stepping too far away from the groupthink results in being banned from further participation. Banning wears the guise of maintaining order and keeping things on topic, but is quite an effective tool at suppressing dissent. Once the ban hammer falls, it's as if you never existed. Noone else can even come along and read your opinions and decide they agree with you. Chilling.
How exactly does a person communicate in a serious way that an open source project has jumped the shark?
What stick does one wield if monetary punishment is not a viable option? And "fork the code" is not the right answer. This is more about how communities communicate to the 'executive' team to produce a product that folks can be happy with.
The ability to consider multiple contradictory viewpoints at once is a sign of intelligence, so yeah, the latter. Or not. :-)
There's some kind of thing that goes on in marketing, entertainment, and politics that almost always seems to go for the left side of the Gaussian, as if collecting the not-so-clever is easier than collecting the clever.
I'm probably just a cynic, but maybe you failed to correctly identify your own place on the Gaussian, so just assumed that you were in the center where most of the people were, rather than far out on the highly clever end. Most programming designed to appeal to the majority would thus appear to you to be pandering to the not-so-clever, when it's actually just trying for the middle. Amusingly, it *is* easier to collect the not-so-clever, so you were right and wrong simultaneously.
Yes. Quit.
1. Microsoft doesn't control Adobe and I'm sure that bothers them. It sure as hell bothers Steve Jobs. So why not take them out while they are vulnerable?
2. Microsoft is part of the H.264 patent pool, so they will make money when the licensing bombs go off. Killing off a competitor (flash) so users and content providers have few alternatives and must pay up puts them right where Microsoft wants them.
3. Once flash is gone (or has greatly diminished influence/relevance), Microsoft is free to tweak things in a way that suits them better. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
4. HTML5 video has no established standard DRM solution which content owners crave. Flash does, so it's hard to get content owners on board with Microsoft's agenda at present. I suspect that Microsoft has something in the works to offer them, which will conveniently be exclusive to Microsoft controlled platforms, or licensable to those who play nice (Apple). Sorry Android (and Linux).
This makes me very nervous.
He must cramp up after awhile and need to change position. Surely someone could hear him shifting around inside after that.
Yes, but that's not always the case, even with nominally "Open Source" software that ends up on proprietary closed devices. Tivo comes to mind, as does Android. I can't recall ever reading about building bit-identical executables as a way of verifying that what is running on the hardware is actually the same as the audited source code. Mostly I read the opposite - what actually runs is always different from what the 'open' source can produce, if for no other reason than signing them with a private key. That's enough to slip in some clever assembler routine that can be used as a backdoor, I'm guessing.
Unless the source can be compiled from scratch and used in place of the pre-compiled versions, including flashing of firmware, creation of installable ROM images or OS installs, having source code guaranteed by analysis to be exploit-free gains the user nothing. There could still be spyware in the final product. Short of self-installing, I guess creation of bit-equivalent or checksum-equivalent binaries would be good enough as a verification mechanism.
This seems like a natural progression down the line of diminishing trust between countries. It's not very surprising, especially since the Chinese government *may* have been 'supportive' of some of the China/Google hacking. It appears the downside of possibly endorsing or supporting security breaches is other people/countries/etc will suspect you of it from that point on.
You might also consider that if they are spying on their own citizens via spyware installed by the manufacturer (at government insistence), they realize fully well that it can be done to them via software or equipment from sources not under their control. No need to invoke the Google hacking - that was just a sloppy fiasco. The government hacking "bay of pigs", if you will.
Indeed. Jobs are not an end to themselves; the whole point of a competitive economy is to create more wealth from less work, making everything more affordable, which will ultimately result in more free time; at the end of scarcity, quite a lot of free time.
Not to detract from your insightful comment by going off on a tangent, but ...
The increase in free time that needs to be filled with stimulus is exactly what gives the RIAA and MPAA their power.
People need to fill that free time with something, which is where the power to implement and enforce draconian DRM measures for entertainment comes from. People should find something else to do, like walk around in the Big Blue Room, to deprive these parasites of their power.
Just sayin'
Detecting the SSID and MAC address is more like reading the name and house number from the curbside mailbox. Both are 'visible' to the casual passerby, so are not private. Since it's broadcasting a signal that extends far beyond the boundaries of the property, the fact that the AP itself is inside the premises is irrelevant. People should install shielding if they want their AP visibility to be limited only to the abode (or the property if they want to get a signal while outside).
And if you leave your WIFI device plus Wireless Location provider on, Google will use your phone as a war driving device whereby they periodically scan and return the results back to Google.
Really? This is technically possible, of course, but your wording implies something deliberate on the part of Google. That's a pretty strong statement and needs substantiation, since there's little evidence this takes place unless the user is running a particular app. You're implying that the base android environment does this somehow. Citation needed.
Here's to all the folks over the last several years that gleefully announced they were ditching their services (cable, satellite, whatever) and just getting it for free online. My usual response was that once they get you on board, they will start charging for it at some point. No more free tv and flipping a bird to the 'man'. I guess I was right.