That's like saying that the CEO of McDonald's should be able to slaughter a cow.
Years ago, on Michael Moore's TV Nation program, there was a segment called the CEO Corporate Challenge, in which Moore attempted to get CEO's to perform some task with a product of their company, or component of a product of their company.
Picture Moore with a megaphone and a 1.44M floppy, outside IBM headquarters, shouting something like "Lou Gerstner, format this disk. You have one hour." Lou didn't show.
Surprisingly, Alexander Trotman, Ford CEO at the time, came out and changed the oil in a pickup in a time pretty close to a local quik-lube.
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you can expect the CEO to know about surprising stuff - they may have had a life before they became a CEO. In Trotman's case, he had been in the RAF, and I suspect he picked up skills and possibly a personality on the way through.
And yeah, I know it's TV *and* Michael Moore. But I have no trouble believing Trotman did it.
Normally, I would jump on the editor(s) more than the submitter. If a submitter's is *less* interested in getting stories of interest to the community posted and more interested in pulling traffic to their site, then it is the editor's job to recognise this over time and take it into account in their decision. IMHO, anyway.
But in this case, Carpenter has decided to preach about the submission system. She has a conflict on interest in this regard - she wants fewer people to have a say in whether her story is accepted yet doesn't declare her posting motivations. So fsck her - she's not being straight up in about her own motives when she questions those of others. She says:
All it takes to vote is a user account with a valid email. How many of the new account holders are part of viral marketing scams? There are probably people there now who are being paid for submissions or for votes.
Yeah, probably there are people being paid Joyce. Ya figure? How 'bout a statement on *your* motivations?
Her full comment is at the URL below. Be aware that you're generating ad revenue going there...
Canada for instance has a surcharge on blank CDs that goes to the media trade groups. From what I can tell very little of it goes to pay the artists, and pretty much none goes to the independent labels.
I think you're right on this one - the blank cassette/CD/media levy has been a schmozzle from an artist's perspective.
As I understand it, however, it has been the legal toe-hold that has made downloading of any material from a p2p network *not* illegal in Canada, so it has had an unintended side-effect that has helped avoid the RIAA lawsuit debacle up here. See the link below for background.
This one, I don't get - at all. I can conjure up no possible positive reason for the implanting of RFID tags in the human body. It is the ultimate intrusion, both figuratively and physically.
Nine senators opposed the measure, including Bob Margett (R-Arcadia), who said it is premature to legislate technology that has not yet proved to be a problem.
What a maroon. Why the hell is it a problem to preemptively act against activity that one doesn't like the look of? Have we got to the point that a technology has to become a *problem* before we can thoughtfully act to restrict or focus its use?
Entecho is now employing it's core skills in advanced composite materials, aerodynamics, flight control and computational fluid dynamics to create an entirely new family of compact VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) platforms, both manned (Hoverpod) and unmanned (Mupod), that hover and travel over any terrain.
I not a fan of spelling flames, but if a company can't proofread a fsck'ing web page why should I think that they are capable of building a reliable personal aircraft with all the due diligence such an undertaking requires?
Ms. Nason's career path: Law Student, Lawyer for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, counsel and communications director for Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss of Florida, counsel for the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois, Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Congressional Affairs w/ the U.S. Customs Service, Assistant Secretary for Governmental Affairs at the NHTSA, and finally Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Between serving as counsel for an insurance company as well as a couple of congressmen and their committees (one who was en route to the Directorship of the CIA), performing as an Assistant Commissioner and Assistant Secretary (Assistant is a *always* a worrisome prefix to a job title, right up there w/ 'vice-') and finally securing a political appointment as head honcho of the NHTSA, I'd say that we're talking about one helluva career bureaucrat who can cover an ass the size Montana before breakfast. She can chew up and spit out the lifetime set of FOI requests from/.'s readership before lunch. I don't even want to consider what she can get covered up by supper-time.
Those bridges are now doomed to drop from the sky like Cincinnati Turkeys the day before Thanksgiving, but she'll spin it so well she'll be getting the Medal of Honor for her anti-terrorism work.
For all of you who believe the universe and/or the planet would be better of without our race than stop being a hypocrite and off yourself for the good of the universe.
I knew this would show up sooner or later - "Earth, Love it or Leave it!".
People engage in a conversation, you don't like what they say, so ya tell them to kill themselves, and it gets modded to +5: Insightful. Jesus, there's a good reason to despair for humanity right there.
How on earth can you not see what they have done and how harmful that has been to the whole industry? The opportunities for strong competition in the OS market are essentially non-existent due to Microsoft's criminal behavior.
Bingo! As good an example of any is the DR-DOS debacle, the court filings of which may be found at http://www.courttv.com/archive/legaldocs/cyberlaw/ microsoft/msnsued.html. The point is that Microsoft lied to their customers, over-sold their own 'coming soon' versions of DOS, and built checks into Win 3.1 startup code to refuse to start over DR-DOS, even though their was no technical impediment to running Win 3.1 over DR-DOS.
And per-processor pricing was the real kicker - if you didn't sign into the multi-year per-processor license agreement, you couldn't get product and even if you could the dollars would kill you. It was brutal.
I've no doubt their are very competent, bright people doing good work at Microsoft; look at Mark Russinovich, who is a freakin' genius, and whose work has brought me much joy at critical moments when his tools saved my day.
But collectively, Microsoft is a predatory marketing machine that will kick the fsck'ing shit out of you without slowing down. I have, honestly, met members of the [insert internationally known motorcycle enthusiast/club here] who are interesting and intelligent, but get in a conflict with one of them and the whole club will stomp you, without a moment's hesitation before, nor any remorse after the fact.
And that's Microsoft business character. So if/. is a little corner of the world where Bill et al takes it on the chin, fairly and even unfairly, then that's okay with me.
Actually since "Cannuck" isn't a real word you can spell it however you damn well please...
From the OED online:
Canuck
colloq.
A. n.
1. A Canadian; spec. a French Canadian.
2. A Canadian horse or pony.
3. The French-Canadian patois.
B. adj. Of or pertaining to Canada or its inhabitants.
No entry for 'Cannuck'. The OED and I have never seen your spelling.
Annette Parker, a supervisor at Eagle's Truck Stop, said she unplugged the machine after overhearing conversations about the excess payments.
"The next morning when we had come back in, someone had plugged it back up," she said.
Annette should be charged with Gross Stupidity. Are you telling me that an ATM in an unattended installation was incorrectly dispensing $$ in favour of the customer, and she *unplugged* a machine that could be plugged back in? Jesus Jupiter, what did she think would happen?
Round these parts, unattended ATM's (those not in a 24 hour store, with no staff in the vicinity, etc.) are locked down in terms of access to the power source, network connection, etc. In the case in the article, anyone, can uplug/replug the device, and perform diagnostics, etc. This was well covered last September: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/21/181 9242. Why does the installing company's dereliction of duty combined with bonehead attendants turn into a criminal charge for the customer who came up on the good side of bank service charges for once in her life?
Okay, this is a little silly - but seriously, at what point has the vendor done such a crappy job that it is their problem, not the customer's?
This is not a new concept. I recall hearing about this class of device twenty years ago when I worked the door at a couple of bars - always wished I had one (it's a hard way to make cash to fund your education, letting people beat on your head so you can learn to make a living with self-same head). Never saw one though.
I was listening to a show on CBC radio (gov't-funded NPR-like radio in Canada) a month or so back and they had a marketing guy talking about the value of brands. The speaker asserted that even bad brands have tremendous value, because they need to be focused, not established. Establishing a brand takes years and a shit-pile of money, with no guarantees, said he. From this guy's perspective, there is nothing more difficult in marketing and sales than establishing a brand, where a brand is a gut feeling about products+prior experience+what you've heard+service+etc. It's all that stuff that is evoked when you hear the company name, see the logo, think about buying a product.
This is completely off my cuff, but I think Linksys is a very established brand in residential markets, where 'Cisco' isn't. My girlfriend's son (first marriage stuff) even called his wireless router 'the linksys' last week... and his wireless router is labeled by Dlink.
He sure as shit didn't call it 'my cisco'.
I call this move a mistake. Here's a Slideshare doc I cam across a few months back; the writer can't spell 'Porsche' correctly, but nonetheless I think it's a good intro blurb: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap
Second. WTF are we supposed to do with this - it tell you shinola? What slays me is how many comments there are on it, with me being another sheep in the herd.
I generally pick CowboyNeal in polls... but I think you should get a roll of tinfoil and a hat pattern, dude, - assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/ 26/1224255, your editor's pumpkin is on the slow cooker tonight my friend.
You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space
I am not trolling, but my karma's probably going to get hosed here because there's no faster way to get people whipped up crooked-ass bent out of shape, making vi vs emacs look like a kiddie-time quarrel, than to tell people their email environment is going to change, should be used differently, is not as good as another environment, etc. Discussions about e-mail clients == religious war.
For me, e-mail clients are dead. Post gmail, webmail is good enough for me, particularly with the keyboard interface enabled on gmail. I use the native client vs webmail at work about 30-70 (in favour of webmail) and I handle a lot of mail daily. Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure why I even use the native client that much; all my business apps sit in the enterprise portal anyway, so I'm already there. Old habits die hard, I guess.
For me, it's a question of why would I install Thunderbird (or any other client)? I already have Firefox installed, and it gets me to all the mail I need. Nothing against Thunderbird - I'm sure it's quite nice.
Torrent mUI has all the basic features you could want in order to remotely control your Torrent application.
From the summary:
bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.
Yeah, I know I'm selectively quoting from the summary (i.e. another line says "allows the end user to control torrent downloads remotely".I also understand that I'm splitting some hairs here, but there is nothing new on the cell phone. So do we consider it to be bringing capabilities to a phone every time a new web application is built or an old host app has a new web front end built for it? Nothing has changed on the phone. That's the *point* of building web-based apps - dodge the client.
And (also from the summary a "giant leap forward"? I don't think so. The utorrent web interface allows me to remote control my torrent downloads from any browser which can render the page, and has done so in public availability since sometime last year. I haven't tried to use it from my phone, but there's got to be a phone-based browser out there capable of doing so. Anyone?
I think it is neat that someone is doing this. Can we just take some of the hyperbole out of summaries? (I can hear the 'you must be new here' comments already).
My lame stab at extending rope-skip singsong (apologies to Tackhead):
Lizzie Borden did teh h4x,
Got drunk and unplugged 40 racks.
When she saw what she had done,
She unplugged number 41. Get Axe... Break In.... *Ques*tion Mark... *Pro*fit!
Appreciate the info. I've never played a slot, and I somehow just assumed that the average payback would be much lower. On a 98% payback, say on quarters, the house is making fifty cents on 100 pulls of the arm. So I suppose the important things about slots are making them fast and easy to pull, and to keep the player there as long as possible. This would be the advantage of video slots from a house perspective, I suppose; you can change the pull of an arm to the push of a button, which is presumably easier and faster, and you don't have to honour the physics of a mechanical set of reels. For the latter, the house must look to speed up the overall process, without losing the historical charm of the spin.
In any case, it's a higher payback than I presumed. A quick read on wikipedia and elsewhere suggests that average paybacks are codified in some jurisdictions, but these seem to be low - in the neighbourhood of 75%. So user expectations of payback must be higher than that - I expect that the house would love to set the average payback as low as it could without losing players.
The approach taken by the University of Kansas is pretty dough-brained. Ironically, I have little tolerance for zero-tolerance approaches to anything.
I'm located at a post-secondary institution in Canada, and as of this writing the takedown/threatening notices sent by MailSentry et al on behalf of the MPAA, RIAA and misc publishers of electronic texts have no teeth (although this may change if pending legislation is passed).
If we were located south of the 49th parallel, this would be a different story, I suppose. The University has an obligation to manage the risk posed to the institution by such notices. I'm not suggesting that they should stop, drop and roll-over for the industry upon receipt - I believe that the University has an obligation to find the ground which best protects their interests *and* those of its students.
But I'm not the board of the University of Kansas. They may not give a tin shit about the student's interests, or may consider the unauthorised file sharing of copyrighted material as unlawful as the MPAA does (it is illegal under some circumstances, after all, whether you like it or not). And if you leave it to the University's lawyers, they will likely advocate a position much like the University is currently occupying.
So, if I was the IT honcho at the U or K, what's a reasonable position for me, given that as a senior officer of the University I have an obligation to look out for threats to the organisation and manage the associated risk, but also knowing that file sharing is not so clearcut an issue as the industry advocates would have us believe?
Your mistake is an issue of scale [...snip...] Add too all that... NO paper trail...
You got it - nicely summarised: Electronic Cheating Scales, while Manual Cheating is Hard Work. Paper voting systems provide a backup counting option which removes the element(s) which make cheating in this environment possible, while electronic voting recounts are just as susceptible to cheating as the original count - the elements which make cheating possible in this environment, in the first place, are still there.
I cannot articulate the degree to which electronic voting scares the ker-snarf outta me. Electoral fraud in a paper-based system takes a *lot* of effort - you practically need a totalitarian state in place to do it large scale. Electoral fraud in an electronic system requires, in the best case, s single clever coder who provides the mechanisms, and some henchmen to do some dirty work - maybe.
All that being said, electronic voting systems are probably an inevitable change. So how do we mitigate the danger? Off the top of my head: 1) The source code must be visible to anyone who wants to see it 2) Incentives for finding issues/vulnerabilities must be made available (c.f 'Bill Gates Should Buy Your Buffer Overruns' from earlier today - maybe instead of MS the gov't should pay?) 3) The change-management process must be rigorous, to say the least 4) the creation of the binary and its distribution must be a public and incredibly tightly specified process (checksums, hashes, etc. out the wazoo ).
This is like radar detection, only with a lot more at stake. Leap-frogging occurs with radar detection, and the Bad Guys come out on top for a while. This cannot happen.
The road to stopping this from happening is paved by the GPL. Code must be freely available (as in beer and freedom - the code can go anywhere anyhow, and there can be no charge for retrieval). Millions of prying eyes must turn the stones of electronic voting source and brush them up and make sure they are indeed rocks and not something else.
Hell, electronic voting systems should be the wheel on which the flesh and skeleton of closed-source code is finally broken in the court of public opinion.
This is a perfect example of how the government creates a system that COULD be abused but has a legitimate purpose initially. The people allow it, so long as it is not used for evil. Then, once the government has it in place, the rules are changed.
Hear, Hear. One of the hallmarks of a free society is that a citizen has a reasonable expectation of not being surveilled in the course of normal daily activities. On the flip side, a distinguishing characteristic of a police state is that one may be under observation at any time for any (including no) reason(s).
It is unlikely that people will give up markers of freedom in a one fell swoop. Freedom is more likely to disappear via a series of changes, each well-rationalised in a particular context. Each successive change will be easily and equally digestible, and by the time the long term effect is noticeable it is far too late.
Consider such initiatives in relation to *principles*, not in terms of a situational rationalisation. There is *always* a reasonable situational argument for such change, and it will always make sense if viewed in that context. No matter what your principles are, e.g. 'A citizen has a right to expect to not be under surveillance in the course of day to day activities' or conversely, 'The safety of the collective takes precedence over the rights of the individual' that a decision which impacts on the fundamental precepts of a culture should be made; situational or relative decision-making will undermine the foundation of a culture over time. This has nothing to do with what side of the issue I stand on; rather, it is about stopping creeping, incremental change from changing the fundamentals underpinning your culture's values.
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago, on Michael Moore's TV Nation program, there was a segment called the CEO Corporate Challenge, in which Moore attempted to get CEO's to perform some task with a product of their company, or component of a product of their company.
Picture Moore with a megaphone and a 1.44M floppy, outside IBM headquarters, shouting something like "Lou Gerstner, format this disk. You have one hour." Lou didn't show.
Surprisingly, Alexander Trotman, Ford CEO at the time, came out and changed the oil in a pickup in a time pretty close to a local quik-lube.
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you can expect the CEO to know about surprising stuff - they may have had a life before they became a CEO. In Trotman's case, he had been in the RAF, and I suspect he picked up skills and possibly a personality on the way through.
And yeah, I know it's TV *and* Michael Moore. But I have no trouble believing Trotman did it.
The Canadian Equivalent is 'This Hour Has 22 Minutes'. Check out the overlap between:
The Chasers - Selling Tourism:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vpHGLXZ-j-Q
22 Minutes - Talking to Americans:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=seYUbVa7L7w
Must have been colonies for too long.
Normally, I would jump on the editor(s) more than the submitter. If a submitter's is *less* interested in getting stories of interest to the community posted and more interested in pulling traffic to their site, then it is the editor's job to recognise this over time and take it into account in their decision. IMHO, anyway.
But in this case, Carpenter has decided to preach about the submission system. She has a conflict on interest in this regard - she wants fewer people to have a say in whether her story is accepted yet doesn't declare her posting motivations. So fsck her - she's not being straight up in about her own motives when she questions those of others. She says:
All it takes to vote is a user account with a valid email. How many of the new account holders are part of viral marketing scams? There are probably people there now who are being paid for submissions or for votes.Yeah, probably there are people being paid Joyce. Ya figure? How 'bout a statement on *your* motivations?
Her full comment is at the URL below. Be aware that you're generating ad revenue going there ...
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/5550I think you're right on this one - the blank cassette/CD/media levy has been a schmozzle from an artist's perspective.
As I understand it, however, it has been the legal toe-hold that has made downloading of any material from a p2p network *not* illegal in Canada, so it has had an unintended side-effect that has helped avoid the RIAA lawsuit debacle up here. See the link below for background.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.htmlThis one, I don't get - at all. I can conjure up no possible positive reason for the implanting of RFID tags in the human body. It is the ultimate intrusion, both figuratively and physically.
Nine senators opposed the measure, including Bob Margett (R-Arcadia), who said it is premature to legislate technology that has not yet proved to be a problem.What a maroon. Why the hell is it a problem to preemptively act against activity that one doesn't like the look of? Have we got to the point that a technology has to become a *problem* before we can thoughtfully act to restrict or focus its use?
From the Entecho web page:
Entecho is now employing it's core skills in advanced composite materials, aerodynamics, flight control and computational fluid dynamics to create an entirely new family of compact VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) platforms, both manned (Hoverpod) and unmanned (Mupod), that hover and travel over any terrain.I not a fan of spelling flames, but if a company can't proofread a fsck'ing web page why should I think that they are capable of building a reliable personal aircraft with all the due diligence such an undertaking requires?
I found this entry http://www.zimbio.com/Nicole+Nason+-+Department+of +Transportation.
Ms. Nason's career path: Law Student, Lawyer for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, counsel and communications director for Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss of Florida, counsel for the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois, Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Congressional Affairs w/ the U.S. Customs Service, Assistant Secretary for Governmental Affairs at the NHTSA, and finally Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Between serving as counsel for an insurance company as well as a couple of congressmen and their committees (one who was en route to the Directorship of the CIA), performing as an Assistant Commissioner and Assistant Secretary (Assistant is a *always* a worrisome prefix to a job title, right up there w/ 'vice-') and finally securing a political appointment as head honcho of the NHTSA, I'd say that we're talking about one helluva career bureaucrat who can cover an ass the size Montana before breakfast. She can chew up and spit out the lifetime set of FOI requests from /.'s readership before lunch. I don't even want to consider what she can get covered up by supper-time.
Those bridges are now doomed to drop from the sky like Cincinnati Turkeys the day before Thanksgiving, but she'll spin it so well she'll be getting the Medal of Honor for her anti-terrorism work.
I knew this would show up sooner or later - "Earth, Love it or Leave it!".
People engage in a conversation, you don't like what they say, so ya tell them to kill themselves, and it gets modded to +5: Insightful. Jesus, there's a good reason to despair for humanity right there.
Bingo! As good an example of any is the DR-DOS debacle, the court filings of which may be found at http://www.courttv.com/archive/legaldocs/cyberlaw/ microsoft/msnsued.html. The point is that Microsoft lied to their customers, over-sold their own 'coming soon' versions of DOS, and built checks into Win 3.1 startup code to refuse to start over DR-DOS, even though their was no technical impediment to running Win 3.1 over DR-DOS.
And per-processor pricing was the real kicker - if you didn't sign into the multi-year per-processor license agreement, you couldn't get product and even if you could the dollars would kill you. It was brutal.
I've no doubt their are very competent, bright people doing good work at Microsoft; look at Mark Russinovich, who is a freakin' genius, and whose work has brought me much joy at critical moments when his tools saved my day.
But collectively, Microsoft is a predatory marketing machine that will kick the fsck'ing shit out of you without slowing down. I have, honestly, met members of the [insert internationally known motorcycle enthusiast/club here] who are interesting and intelligent, but get in a conflict with one of them and the whole club will stomp you, without a moment's hesitation before, nor any remorse after the fact.
And that's Microsoft business character. So if /. is a little corner of the world where Bill et al takes it on the chin, fairly and even unfairly, then that's okay with me.
From the OED online:
Canuck
colloq.
A. n.
1. A Canadian; spec. a French Canadian.
2. A Canadian horse or pony.
3. The French-Canadian patois.
B. adj. Of or pertaining to Canada or its inhabitants.
No entry for 'Cannuck'. The OED and I have never seen your spelling.
So, what the hell is a 'real word' anyway?
From TFA:
Annette Parker, a supervisor at Eagle's Truck Stop, said she unplugged the machine after overhearing conversations about the excess payments."The next morning when we had come back in, someone had plugged it back up," she said.
Annette should be charged with Gross Stupidity. Are you telling me that an ATM in an unattended installation was incorrectly dispensing $$ in favour of the customer, and she *unplugged* a machine that could be plugged back in? Jesus Jupiter, what did she think would happen?
Round these parts, unattended ATM's (those not in a 24 hour store, with no staff in the vicinity, etc.) are locked down in terms of access to the power source, network connection, etc. In the case in the article, anyone, can uplug/replug the device, and perform diagnostics, etc. This was well covered last September: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/21/181 9242. Why does the installing company's dereliction of duty combined with bonehead attendants turn into a criminal charge for the customer who came up on the good side of bank service charges for once in her life?
Okay, this is a little silly - but seriously, at what point has the vendor done such a crappy job that it is their problem, not the customer's?
This is not a new concept. I recall hearing about this class of device twenty years ago when I worked the door at a couple of bars - always wished I had one (it's a hard way to make cash to fund your education, letting people beat on your head so you can learn to make a living with self-same head). Never saw one though.
Here's a reference from 2005 to such a device, with a different name. I don't know if it is the same company, or a different development: http://www.defense-update.com/products/s/sabershot .htm
I was listening to a show on CBC radio (gov't-funded NPR-like radio in Canada) a month or so back and they had a marketing guy talking about the value of brands. The speaker asserted that even bad brands have tremendous value, because they need to be focused, not established. Establishing a brand takes years and a shit-pile of money, with no guarantees, said he. From this guy's perspective, there is nothing more difficult in marketing and sales than establishing a brand, where a brand is a gut feeling about products+prior experience+what you've heard+service+etc. It's all that stuff that is evoked when you hear the company name, see the logo, think about buying a product.
This is completely off my cuff, but I think Linksys is a very established brand in residential markets, where 'Cisco' isn't. My girlfriend's son (first marriage stuff) even called his wireless router 'the linksys' last week ... and his wireless router is labeled by Dlink.
He sure as shit didn't call it 'my cisco'.
I call this move a mistake. Here's a Slideshare doc I cam across a few months back; the writer can't spell 'Porsche' correctly, but nonetheless I think it's a good intro blurb:
http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap
Second. WTF are we supposed to do with this - it tell you shinola? What slays me is how many comments there are on it, with me being another sheep in the herd.
I generally pick CowboyNeal in polls ... but I think you should get a roll of tinfoil and a hat pattern, dude, - assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/ 26/1224255, your editor's pumpkin is on the slow cooker tonight my friend.
I am not trolling, but my karma's probably going to get hosed here because there's no faster way to get people whipped up crooked-ass bent out of shape, making vi vs emacs look like a kiddie-time quarrel, than to tell people their email environment is going to change, should be used differently, is not as good as another environment, etc. Discussions about e-mail clients == religious war.
For me, e-mail clients are dead. Post gmail, webmail is good enough for me, particularly with the keyboard interface enabled on gmail. I use the native client vs webmail at work about 30-70 (in favour of webmail) and I handle a lot of mail daily. Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure why I even use the native client that much; all my business apps sit in the enterprise portal anyway, so I'm already there. Old habits die hard, I guess.
For me, it's a question of why would I install Thunderbird (or any other client)? I already have Firefox installed, and it gets me to all the mail I need. Nothing against Thunderbird - I'm sure it's quite nice.
From the article:
Torrent mUI has all the basic features you could want in order to remotely control your Torrent application.From the summary:
bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.Yeah, I know I'm selectively quoting from the summary (i.e. another line says "allows the end user to control torrent downloads remotely".I also understand that I'm splitting some hairs here, but there is nothing new on the cell phone. So do we consider it to be bringing capabilities to a phone every time a new web application is built or an old host app has a new web front end built for it? Nothing has changed on the phone. That's the *point* of building web-based apps - dodge the client.
And (also from the summary a "giant leap forward"? I don't think so. The utorrent web interface allows me to remote control my torrent downloads from any browser which can render the page, and has done so in public availability since sometime last year. I haven't tried to use it from my phone, but there's got to be a phone-based browser out there capable of doing so. Anyone?
I think it is neat that someone is doing this. Can we just take some of the hyperbole out of summaries? (I can hear the 'you must be new here' comments already).
From Sept 2006 the announcement on utorrent's web interface and remote control:
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=14565
And a BitTorrent client for mobile devices, article dated mar 13th 2007:y our-mobile/
http://torrentfreak.com/symtorrent-bittorrent-on-
Nothing to see here ... nothing new, anyway.
There's a great on-line book on the rise and fall of Wordperfect by Pete Peterson: http://www.fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect/
Almost Perfect is a rollicking good read, with something for everyone in it.
That is god-damned fscking funny.
My lame stab at extending rope-skip singsong (apologies to Tackhead):
Lizzie Borden did teh h4x,Got drunk and unplugged 40 racks.
When she saw what she had done,
She unplugged number 41. Get Axe
Appreciate the info. I've never played a slot, and I somehow just assumed that the average payback would be much lower. On a 98% payback, say on quarters, the house is making fifty cents on 100 pulls of the arm. So I suppose the important things about slots are making them fast and easy to pull, and to keep the player there as long as possible. This would be the advantage of video slots from a house perspective, I suppose; you can change the pull of an arm to the push of a button, which is presumably easier and faster, and you don't have to honour the physics of a mechanical set of reels. For the latter, the house must look to speed up the overall process, without losing the historical charm of the spin.
In any case, it's a higher payback than I presumed. A quick read on wikipedia and elsewhere suggests that average paybacks are codified in some jurisdictions, but these seem to be low - in the neighbourhood of 75%. So user expectations of payback must be higher than that - I expect that the house would love to set the average payback as low as it could without losing players.
Thanks ...
I don't understand ... what's a 95-98% payback? You mean the amount you got when you finally won was shorted? Or something else?
Are you fucking INSANE!?
Abo-so-fucking-lutely Beautiful.
You the man.
[ ... returns to cleaning the beer spray from his keyboard ...]
The approach taken by the University of Kansas is pretty dough-brained. Ironically, I have little tolerance for zero-tolerance approaches to anything.
I'm located at a post-secondary institution in Canada, and as of this writing the takedown/threatening notices sent by MailSentry et al on behalf of the MPAA, RIAA and misc publishers of electronic texts have no teeth (although this may change if pending legislation is passed).
If we were located south of the 49th parallel, this would be a different story, I suppose. The University has an obligation to manage the risk posed to the institution by such notices. I'm not suggesting that they should stop, drop and roll-over for the industry upon receipt - I believe that the University has an obligation to find the ground which best protects their interests *and* those of its students.
But I'm not the board of the University of Kansas. They may not give a tin shit about the student's interests, or may consider the unauthorised file sharing of copyrighted material as unlawful as the MPAA does (it is illegal under some circumstances, after all, whether you like it or not). And if you leave it to the University's lawyers, they will likely advocate a position much like the University is currently occupying.
So, if I was the IT honcho at the U or K, what's a reasonable position for me, given that as a senior officer of the University I have an obligation to look out for threats to the organisation and manage the associated risk, but also knowing that file sharing is not so clearcut an issue as the industry advocates would have us believe?
Well, ya gotta admit that QSECOFR sounds tougher than SYSTEM.
And while we're at it, let's get the HAL/IBM ROT1 play for VMS/WNT plus Davey Cutler conspiracy/easter egg thang going again!
You got it - nicely summarised: Electronic Cheating Scales, while Manual Cheating is Hard Work. Paper voting systems provide a backup counting option which removes the element(s) which make cheating in this environment possible, while electronic voting recounts are just as susceptible to cheating as the original count - the elements which make cheating possible in this environment, in the first place, are still there.
I cannot articulate the degree to which electronic voting scares the ker-snarf outta me. Electoral fraud in a paper-based system takes a *lot* of effort - you practically need a totalitarian state in place to do it large scale. Electoral fraud in an electronic system requires, in the best case, s single clever coder who provides the mechanisms, and some henchmen to do some dirty work - maybe.
All that being said, electronic voting systems are probably an inevitable change. So how do we mitigate the danger? Off the top of my head: 1) The source code must be visible to anyone who wants to see it 2) Incentives for finding issues/vulnerabilities must be made available (c.f 'Bill Gates Should Buy Your Buffer Overruns' from earlier today - maybe instead of MS the gov't should pay?) 3) The change-management process must be rigorous, to say the least 4) the creation of the binary and its distribution must be a public and incredibly tightly specified process (checksums, hashes, etc. out the wazoo ).
This is like radar detection, only with a lot more at stake. Leap-frogging occurs with radar detection, and the Bad Guys come out on top for a while. This cannot happen.
The road to stopping this from happening is paved by the GPL. Code must be freely available (as in beer and freedom - the code can go anywhere anyhow, and there can be no charge for retrieval). Millions of prying eyes must turn the stones of electronic voting source and brush them up and make sure they are indeed rocks and not something else.
Hell, electronic voting systems should be the wheel on which the flesh and skeleton of closed-source code is finally broken in the court of public opinion.
Hear, Hear. One of the hallmarks of a free society is that a citizen has a reasonable expectation of not being surveilled in the course of normal daily activities. On the flip side, a distinguishing characteristic of a police state is that one may be under observation at any time for any (including no) reason(s).
It is unlikely that people will give up markers of freedom in a one fell swoop. Freedom is more likely to disappear via a series of changes, each well-rationalised in a particular context. Each successive change will be easily and equally digestible, and by the time the long term effect is noticeable it is far too late.
Consider such initiatives in relation to *principles*, not in terms of a situational rationalisation. There is *always* a reasonable situational argument for such change, and it will always make sense if viewed in that context. No matter what your principles are, e.g. 'A citizen has a right to expect to not be under surveillance in the course of day to day activities' or conversely, 'The safety of the collective takes precedence over the rights of the individual' that a decision which impacts on the fundamental precepts of a culture should be made; situational or relative decision-making will undermine the foundation of a culture over time. This has nothing to do with what side of the issue I stand on; rather, it is about stopping creeping, incremental change from changing the fundamentals underpinning your culture's values.
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