I think you missed the point of that third option, which was basically "play dirty by releasing a 'bugfix' for Windows that breaks firefox for the majority of users so they're forced to use IE for a while and retain bad feelings against firefox"; which is in no way related to "microsoft releases an amazing, innovative new product that completely revolutionises the web", which is how you seemed to have read it.
Option #2, Provide substantial IE improvements to regain marketshare was the "Microsoft becomes a great competitor in the browser market" option.
It's referred to as an example that MitM attacks against SSL sites do actually occur in real life, and it's not just a theoretical vulnerability that nobody actually tries to exploit.
This probably isn't news to many people, but it might be, and so is probably worth pointing out.
The fact that it does actually happen combined with the fact that Comodo apparently issue certificates without any validation checking whatsoever is what prompts the "Perfect MITM attacks" headline. i.e. it's trying to make it clear that this is actually a real threat. At least, for bums using other people's APs.;)
I think this is a really good point, and not just from the side of techies. If you consider how widespread digital copyright infringement is, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are dissatisfied with either the current copyright laws and/or distribution methods. Yet any proposal that is radically different from the current system is rejected purely because it is radically different.
It may just be that we, as a society, aren't yet smart enough to be able to predict with any degree of accuracy or certainty what the outcome of significant changes will be. That combined with our natural fear of the unknown and of change itself means anyone with a stake in an industry will cling to it and fight tooth and nail until the end before they embrace something that's not yet been proven to work.
Understandable, and I don't have a solution. However I think a lot of our problems stem from being limited to making very small changes to the current status quo, rather than looking in to the far distant utopian society and working out how we need to adapt and change to bring that into existence.
The other facet of course is that very few people will agree on that future vision of "utopia". While I believe that people should be free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't harm others and therefore agree that it's ridiculous that it's illegal to smoke marijuana (despite having no interest in doing so myself), others believe that it's harmful and people should be actively discouraged from doing themselves harm. I think both points of view are equally valid, but how can they coexist in one set of laws?
There isn't really any reason to assume that the rate of human learning is applicable to any non-human species. Short-lived species may spend a larger proportion of their time in a higher awareness state than humans. They may also need considerably less sleep. In addition, newborn octopuses may be far more intelligent/capable than a newborn human, further reducing the amount of time spent learning the basics of living before starting to learn "important" stuff. If the parents routinely die before the babies hatch, then the babies must emerge with the ability to feed themselves and probably communicate as well (because nobody's around to teach them) - which would put them far ahead of a human baby.
Not sure I'd call kernel security updates "rare" at this point, certainly not for the 2.6.18 Debian stable uses. I rarely seem to get more than a couple of weeks out of systems these days before I have to reboot for Yet Another Kernel Update. Grumble grumble.
I think there's something magical about a pint of beer. Here in Australia we're exclusively metric (although some Imperial units are common especially amongst older people, particularly feet and inches) but people will order a pint of <whatever> at the pub. Almost nothing that's sold here actually has anything other than metric measurements on it to indicate the quantity, with a few rare exceptions for some items imported from overseas and sold in the same packaging that's used in e.g. the US.
If RAM is so crucially important, why are all the RAM makers having such a hard time? I can't see there'd be no demand for RAM for any significant (or even insignificant) period of time, since as you say it's an integral component of crucial infrastructure all over the world.
Perhaps there actually is too much competition (i.e. more suppliers than the market can really sustain) and they're having to sell their product at prices which are unrealistic in the long term? One of the necessary side-effects of a highly competitive market is that there's lots of failures, after all. Especially if you consider the high price of setting up a factory, having a business plan that requires you to sell loads of RAM with tiny profit margins for the next few decades in order to break even is probably not a sound strategy.
Possibly it is a double-standard, but they haven't done any significant development on 2.x for quite a while, only security updates. Updating the Safe Browsing protocol may be considered "significant development" (I have no idea how much work would actually be involved) and therefore isn't really an option.
Since Google is going to be disabling their service which makes the phishing detector thing work at all, stopping the browser from trying to access it is a reasonable measure. It perhaps depends on the manner in which they disable it; if someone wants to make and use their own SBP 1.0 server with Firefox 2 they should be able to, so removing the code altogether would be bad, but disabling the option and hiding the UI option to enable it would be okay.
Your analogy should have compared the idea of Microsoft disabling a soon-to-be-unusable feature of IE6 to get people to move to IE7. A lot of people (especially here) would argue that's a good thing, as IE7 is more standards compliant and more secure than IE6.
If you're the one doing the refactoring, then you'll know how far the indentation is wrong, and you can apply the correction. This should be a simple matter if you're using a reasonable editor. I think most IDEs have buttons you can press to increase or decrease the indentation of the selected block of text; with vim you can use < and > in visual select mode and then use . to repeat the action as needed. So no, I wouldn't think anyone should be even slightly inconvenienced by this when refactoring their own project's code.
Code copied from websites would also be properly indented, however it may not be the right indentation level for your project. The markers will all be there though so the editor should be able to get it right, and if not the programmer should.
At most, having to re-indent the code is a minor inconvenience; arguably a small price to pay for the visual clarity it enforces on all Python codebases. I don't particularly understand the hostility towards braces or other syntax to mark code blocks, but in practice it doesn't seem like a big enough issue to avoid using the language.
What did they say they weren't going to discuss and then did discuss anyway? The only thing I can see sumdumass said to that effect was "Now I don't care to argue the merits of an abortion" and they in fact didn't do that.
Personally, I get the impression that you've decided to start screaming "slimy rhetoric technique!!!" because you're unable to form a rational response to the stated fact: the only difference between you and that conservative is the timing of the termination of life. That's understandable, because it's a very accurate and well-made point, and I certainly can't think of anything to refute it. However you could have just said "wow, I'd never thought of it like that before. That puts it in a whole new perspective. Thank you for enlightening me." rather than carrying on with baseless attacks trying to discredit a perfectly logical and rational post by comparing the poster to "faux news".
Did Portugal used to have much more readily available access to these kinds of weapons?
I think the main difference between the US and other countries with stricter gun control laws like the UK and Australia is that the US is already awash in all sorts of guns. Enacting laws now to control them will have little effect.
In contrast, Australia and especially the UK have always had pretty strict controls and there are fewer guns available to the criminal element as a result. Gun control seems to work reasonably well when applied from a clean slate, but it's very unlikely to work if the criminals already have guns.
So when you represent a one-sided view of the argument in your original post it was okay, but when someone presented the other side in a follow-up in a conversation-style thread it's somehow biased?
You're really making us pro-choicers look like a bunch of idiots incapable of having a rational discussion.
Please re-read the reply in a non-combative tone and maybe you'll realise how insane you sound in your responses.
I'd really like to know why the idea of running CPU-intensive computations on your mobile phone would excite you in the first place. Devices with relatively slow CPUs running from relatively limited power sources doesn't seem to be ideal platform for distributed computing applications...
I generally order a boxed copy online of anything I like enough to make me want to encourage the developers/publishers to produce more. I don't actually do anything with the boxed copy though; my copies of Oblivion, Defcon, Medieval 2, Silent Hunter 4 and Hitman: Blood Money are all still in their shrink-wrap. Some of these (like Oblivion) I bought after I'd pretty much stopped playing it, and others (like Hitman) I pre-ordered before it was released but still installed a pirated version. In fact, I'd completed the game using a pirated copy before the game was even released in my country.
The main thing though is that buying a game sends a clear signal to the developers and publishers that making that kind of game will make them some money. It's not about wanting to be "legit" - I have absolutely no fear of being caught with pirated games; there certainly are pirated games on my system and in my archive which I didn't think were worth the money. I'm also more likely to buy from smaller/independent studios than I am to buy the latest big-budget release. I bought World of Goo way before it was released (in March, according to my email archives) largely because they were an independent doing something I thought was cool, for example.
I think that's a message publishers need to try to get out there a bit better: buying a game isn't about avoiding jail time, it's about saying "yes please, more of this!".
Even if you like buying from STEAM, there's no particular reason you have to actually download and install the game. I played a pirated copy of Portal and didn't think it was anything particularly special until I'd completed it, at which point I decided it was an awesome experience that deserved reward. So I bought the Orange Box on STEAM, but never actually installed Portal from it. That's not the point of buying it.
As a customer, your only way to send a message to the producers is to pay for things you enjoy and want more of.
10% of all workers losing their jobs would be huge. 10% of software developers losing their jobs, not so much. Would be significant if it happened all at once, but it won't.
Your off-topic mod sucks, and I hope someone fixes it. It's definitely an interest subject, but I doubt we'll ever really know for sure -- there's only so much you can deduce from fossils. That said, I imagine it would be very different to how we behave today.
Consider that even in our very recent past, most marriages were arranged by the parents or even other members of the society -- anyone who tried to "follow their heart" would've been punished, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if such punishments were pretty extreme like being stoned to death. (Fair warning: that article is pretty unpleasant.)
I also wonder how long we humans have had the kind of intelligence we have today. 4,000 years isn't a very long time by evolutionary standards, but perhaps intelligence evolves faster? Are the incredible achievements we now take for granted the result of some kind of improvement in our ability to harness the power of the brain, or just a result of slow incremental improvements to our societal organisation? Perhaps it's all down to improved teaching methods and a realisation of its importance?
I think the BBC's headline is a lot more accurate -- certainly it's easier to arrive at "cause of death of ancient remains found to be murder" from reading the Beeb's headline than it is by reading slashdot's interpretation, which pretty clearly says they found a family murdered in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
for all intensive purposes
I believe you mean, for all intents and purposes
I think you missed the point of that third option, which was basically "play dirty by releasing a 'bugfix' for Windows that breaks firefox for the majority of users so they're forced to use IE for a while and retain bad feelings against firefox"; which is in no way related to "microsoft releases an amazing, innovative new product that completely revolutionises the web", which is how you seemed to have read it.
Option #2, Provide substantial IE improvements to regain marketshare was the "Microsoft becomes a great competitor in the browser market" option.
Essentially a made up word that somehow made it into the dictionary
How else would we have words, much less dictionaries, if they weren't "made up" at some point?
It's referred to as an example that MitM attacks against SSL sites do actually occur in real life, and it's not just a theoretical vulnerability that nobody actually tries to exploit.
This probably isn't news to many people, but it might be, and so is probably worth pointing out.
The fact that it does actually happen combined with the fact that Comodo apparently issue certificates without any validation checking whatsoever is what prompts the "Perfect MITM attacks" headline. i.e. it's trying to make it clear that this is actually a real threat. At least, for bums using other people's APs. ;)
I think this is a really good point, and not just from the side of techies. If you consider how widespread digital copyright infringement is, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are dissatisfied with either the current copyright laws and/or distribution methods. Yet any proposal that is radically different from the current system is rejected purely because it is radically different.
It may just be that we, as a society, aren't yet smart enough to be able to predict with any degree of accuracy or certainty what the outcome of significant changes will be. That combined with our natural fear of the unknown and of change itself means anyone with a stake in an industry will cling to it and fight tooth and nail until the end before they embrace something that's not yet been proven to work.
Understandable, and I don't have a solution. However I think a lot of our problems stem from being limited to making very small changes to the current status quo, rather than looking in to the far distant utopian society and working out how we need to adapt and change to bring that into existence.
The other facet of course is that very few people will agree on that future vision of "utopia". While I believe that people should be free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't harm others and therefore agree that it's ridiculous that it's illegal to smoke marijuana (despite having no interest in doing so myself), others believe that it's harmful and people should be actively discouraged from doing themselves harm. I think both points of view are equally valid, but how can they coexist in one set of laws?
Deprecated.
Not that "depreciated" is entirely wrong.
There isn't really any reason to assume that the rate of human learning is applicable to any non-human species. Short-lived species may spend a larger proportion of their time in a higher awareness state than humans. They may also need considerably less sleep. In addition, newborn octopuses may be far more intelligent/capable than a newborn human, further reducing the amount of time spent learning the basics of living before starting to learn "important" stuff. If the parents routinely die before the babies hatch, then the babies must emerge with the ability to feed themselves and probably communicate as well (because nobody's around to teach them) - which would put them far ahead of a human baby.
Not sure I'd call kernel security updates "rare" at this point, certainly not for the 2.6.18 Debian stable uses. I rarely seem to get more than a couple of weeks out of systems these days before I have to reboot for Yet Another Kernel Update. Grumble grumble.
I think there's something magical about a pint of beer. Here in Australia we're exclusively metric (although some Imperial units are common especially amongst older people, particularly feet and inches) but people will order a pint of <whatever> at the pub. Almost nothing that's sold here actually has anything other than metric measurements on it to indicate the quantity, with a few rare exceptions for some items imported from overseas and sold in the same packaging that's used in e.g. the US.
But it's always a pint.
If RAM is so crucially important, why are all the RAM makers having such a hard time? I can't see there'd be no demand for RAM for any significant (or even insignificant) period of time, since as you say it's an integral component of crucial infrastructure all over the world.
Perhaps there actually is too much competition (i.e. more suppliers than the market can really sustain) and they're having to sell their product at prices which are unrealistic in the long term? One of the necessary side-effects of a highly competitive market is that there's lots of failures, after all. Especially if you consider the high price of setting up a factory, having a business plan that requires you to sell loads of RAM with tiny profit margins for the next few decades in order to break even is probably not a sound strategy.
Weird, complaining 320 kbits is too much then asking for a lossless download..?
Regardless, right there in the fucking summary it says they're offering FLAC as well as MP3 and Apple Lossless.
Possibly it is a double-standard, but they haven't done any significant development on 2.x for quite a while, only security updates. Updating the Safe Browsing protocol may be considered "significant development" (I have no idea how much work would actually be involved) and therefore isn't really an option.
Since Google is going to be disabling their service which makes the phishing detector thing work at all, stopping the browser from trying to access it is a reasonable measure. It perhaps depends on the manner in which they disable it; if someone wants to make and use their own SBP 1.0 server with Firefox 2 they should be able to, so removing the code altogether would be bad, but disabling the option and hiding the UI option to enable it would be okay.
Your analogy should have compared the idea of Microsoft disabling a soon-to-be-unusable feature of IE6 to get people to move to IE7. A lot of people (especially here) would argue that's a good thing, as IE7 is more standards compliant and more secure than IE6.
If you're the one doing the refactoring, then you'll know how far the indentation is wrong, and you can apply the correction. This should be a simple matter if you're using a reasonable editor. I think most IDEs have buttons you can press to increase or decrease the indentation of the selected block of text; with vim you can use < and > in visual select mode and then use . to repeat the action as needed. So no, I wouldn't think anyone should be even slightly inconvenienced by this when refactoring their own project's code.
Code copied from websites would also be properly indented, however it may not be the right indentation level for your project. The markers will all be there though so the editor should be able to get it right, and if not the programmer should.
At most, having to re-indent the code is a minor inconvenience; arguably a small price to pay for the visual clarity it enforces on all Python codebases. I don't particularly understand the hostility towards braces or other syntax to mark code blocks, but in practice it doesn't seem like a big enough issue to avoid using the language.
What did they say they weren't going to discuss and then did discuss anyway? The only thing I can see sumdumass said to that effect was "Now I don't care to argue the merits of an abortion" and they in fact didn't do that.
Personally, I get the impression that you've decided to start screaming "slimy rhetoric technique!!!" because you're unable to form a rational response to the stated fact: the only difference between you and that conservative is the timing of the termination of life. That's understandable, because it's a very accurate and well-made point, and I certainly can't think of anything to refute it. However you could have just said "wow, I'd never thought of it like that before. That puts it in a whole new perspective. Thank you for enlightening me." rather than carrying on with baseless attacks trying to discredit a perfectly logical and rational post by comparing the poster to "faux news".
Have you considered using a decent editor which can fix the indentation for you?
Just a thought.
I actually prefer Perl to Python, but I'll admit that I'm not actually sure why.
Did Portugal used to have much more readily available access to these kinds of weapons?
I think the main difference between the US and other countries with stricter gun control laws like the UK and Australia is that the US is already awash in all sorts of guns. Enacting laws now to control them will have little effect.
In contrast, Australia and especially the UK have always had pretty strict controls and there are fewer guns available to the criminal element as a result. Gun control seems to work reasonably well when applied from a clean slate, but it's very unlikely to work if the criminals already have guns.
So when you represent a one-sided view of the argument in your original post it was okay, but when someone presented the other side in a follow-up in a conversation-style thread it's somehow biased?
You're really making us pro-choicers look like a bunch of idiots incapable of having a rational discussion.
Please re-read the reply in a non-combative tone and maybe you'll realise how insane you sound in your responses.
Not really, because slashdot's terms and conditions don't require that you use your real name when creating an account or signing posts.
I'd really like to know why the idea of running CPU-intensive computations on your mobile phone would excite you in the first place. Devices with relatively slow CPUs running from relatively limited power sources doesn't seem to be ideal platform for distributed computing applications...
I generally order a boxed copy online of anything I like enough to make me want to encourage the developers/publishers to produce more. I don't actually do anything with the boxed copy though; my copies of Oblivion, Defcon, Medieval 2, Silent Hunter 4 and Hitman: Blood Money are all still in their shrink-wrap. Some of these (like Oblivion) I bought after I'd pretty much stopped playing it, and others (like Hitman) I pre-ordered before it was released but still installed a pirated version. In fact, I'd completed the game using a pirated copy before the game was even released in my country.
The main thing though is that buying a game sends a clear signal to the developers and publishers that making that kind of game will make them some money. It's not about wanting to be "legit" - I have absolutely no fear of being caught with pirated games; there certainly are pirated games on my system and in my archive which I didn't think were worth the money. I'm also more likely to buy from smaller/independent studios than I am to buy the latest big-budget release. I bought World of Goo way before it was released (in March, according to my email archives) largely because they were an independent doing something I thought was cool, for example.
I think that's a message publishers need to try to get out there a bit better: buying a game isn't about avoiding jail time, it's about saying "yes please, more of this!".
Even if you like buying from STEAM, there's no particular reason you have to actually download and install the game. I played a pirated copy of Portal and didn't think it was anything particularly special until I'd completed it, at which point I decided it was an awesome experience that deserved reward. So I bought the Orange Box on STEAM, but never actually installed Portal from it. That's not the point of buying it.
As a customer, your only way to send a message to the producers is to pay for things you enjoy and want more of.
How do you know they're real names?
10% of all workers losing their jobs would be huge. 10% of software developers losing their jobs, not so much. Would be significant if it happened all at once, but it won't.
There's a failblog for every occasion.
Your off-topic mod sucks, and I hope someone fixes it. It's definitely an interest subject, but I doubt we'll ever really know for sure -- there's only so much you can deduce from fossils. That said, I imagine it would be very different to how we behave today.
Consider that even in our very recent past, most marriages were arranged by the parents or even other members of the society -- anyone who tried to "follow their heart" would've been punished, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if such punishments were pretty extreme like being stoned to death. (Fair warning: that article is pretty unpleasant.)
I also wonder how long we humans have had the kind of intelligence we have today. 4,000 years isn't a very long time by evolutionary standards, but perhaps intelligence evolves faster? Are the incredible achievements we now take for granted the result of some kind of improvement in our ability to harness the power of the brain, or just a result of slow incremental improvements to our societal organisation? Perhaps it's all down to improved teaching methods and a realisation of its importance?
I think the BBC's headline is a lot more accurate -- certainly it's easier to arrive at "cause of death of ancient remains found to be murder" from reading the Beeb's headline than it is by reading slashdot's interpretation, which pretty clearly says they found a family murdered in Germany.