Not very surprisingly, the news about European countries' secret agencies cooperating with GCHQ and NSA easily explain the reluctance of said countries' politicians to really go after the US and UK for spying on them and their citizens... after all, it's the local agencies that do the work... too bad that too few of the citizens care... ("I have nothing to hide")
Guess what they say is true: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being watched...
... how long, until the only ones able to correctly solve the captchas are computers... throughout the last couple modifications to the generated images, it already got to the point where I'd have to reload the images multiple times until I got one that I could get close to being able to read...but maybe my natural senses are just not up to par with AI...
... when all 80 Million Germans were under surveillance, everything seemed to be OK... political leaders said everything was fine, all questions had been answered, go back to your everyday life... (mainly because German BND most likely was completely involved, also) But now all of a sudden they are p*ssed because they may have been a target... sorry, but _I_ am also concerned about _MY_ privacy... why do you believe you are better than anybody else of the 80 million citizens? After all, _YOU_ are also a citizen, and _WE_ have put you where you are now... so, next time your citizens are under attack (so to speak), remember what it feels like and do your God damn job right!
What's the deal with "easily damaged" USB connectors? In all my life, out of probably 3 dozens, I've not had a single cable - or device - break. I've had one cable (cheapest kind, ~1$ or so) that had gotten worn out, losing contact when wiggled, but for that price I won't be complaining. WTF are you people doing with your devices and cables? Or is everything you buy from the $1 shop?
Micro-USB may be better than many alternatives, but it's still a poor choice. It's tiny and polarized, so it's hard to see which way it needs to be oriented, particularly in poor lighting. That's a rather common problem. Why couldn't they get it right?
In contrast, Apple's Lightning connector works the same in either orientation.
Right. Humanity has gotten so d@mn lazy that - in case of not being able to see the correct orientation - rotating the plug by 180 is too f'ing hard to do... Sorry, but many of proprietary "advances" are just ways of securing companies' income, with minimal advantages for the customer... e.g., as you mentioned it - micro USB cable: ~1-2$. Lightning cable: ~20$
I don't have a gun, but I respect the Second Amendment and those that have guns. There are something like 100 accidental gun deaths a year, which I consider negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For one, you should get your numbers straight... I seriously doubt the number on "accidental", but that may depend on the definition of "accidental"... anyway, defining 100 accidental gun deaths as "negligible" does really say a lot of how much you value a person's life... Also, what about the thousands of other gun deaths in the US every year? Are they also negligible in your eyes, after all they aren't "accidental"?
The increased usage increases the problem of bad throughput... haven't used it in a while, but when I played around with it a bit, latency (which would be expected) but more importantly throughput was bad to unbearable... more users require more performance at the exit nodes, which means more exit nodes are needed... Having run an exit node for a short while myself, I know of the results: within less than 4 weeks, we received an inquiry into the owner/operator of the machine with the node's IP address, due to reported child porn access. Luckily, the police seemed to be halfway knowledgeable, and with the provided infos on the operation of the node (stats about the node throughput, etc.) they stopped investigating the issue. Needless to say node operation was terminated the day we received the initial inquiry. Without decent "provider status protection" for exit nodes, the risk for operators may be a bit too high unless extensive (and expensive) measures are taken to block illegal material... which, in turn, makes the whole network subject to other manipulation, and goes against the reason for the network...
P.S. - apart from the above, there have been laws put in place, forcing communities to use a certain percentage of their land for renewable energy production. Neat idea as such, but depending of the area, this causes some problems... e.g., the area I live in has large woods, moderate farming and cities in the range of 30-60k people (core cities). According the scientific research, there aren't many places for wind energy production, and the only ones that come even close to a break-even point for production are naturally on hills/higher plains. Which - not very surprisingly - aren't where the cities or farming is, but the dense woods. In order to fulfill the required ratio of renewable energy areas, the generators need to be placed in the middle of the woods, destroying not only the rather large space of woodland around the generators, but also requiring infrastructure (wider asphalt roads), power lines, and causing additional damage to the fauna by constant noise and infrasound... also we're talking not about some small windmill, but 600+ft high ones, with 400ft diameter rotors... to add to that, our local government decided to sign a contract with a company for them to build the generators even before any results of the surveys were done, or before involving (or even telling) the community about it... therefore, if the local people should successfully stop the project either through political pressure or legal channels, the community is probably liable for damages claims from that company... And then politicians wonder why people are fed up with politics...
Due to the over-production of renewable energy (which of course is a good thing), prices for electricity at the markets are constantly dropping, with some electricity actually being paid to the recipients (!) at times... at the same time, guaranteed prices for its production (in an attempt to stimulate building of renewable energy sources, with fixed rates for 20 or 25 years!) at rates of 3-4 times the wholesale market prices are causing EEG-rates (sort of a tax to pay for the guaranteed prices for the producers) to rise further and further, leading to constantly rising prices for consumers... to add to that, energy-hungry production processes are exempt from that "tax", which again is added onto the tax for regular consumers... so instead of profiting from the dropping prices on the market, consumers are forced to pay more and more... great job, politicians!
Add to that the almost "fraudulent" way of making consumers responsible for delays e.g. in the building of ocean wind farms... if some wind farm can't be put up and in production in time, again the consumers have to pay the fines... WTF???
While the original article doesn't clearly point to a German article on this, I assume this is about the while DE-Mail/e-Post crap that Telekom/United Internet and German Post has set up... the problem here is, that neither of their services provide a clean end-to-end encryption. While the communication between the providers (like German Telekom) and the end user at both ends of the email communication may be encrypted, mails are decrypted at the provider in order to "scan for viruses and malware", of course only to protect the user... yeah, right. So, the whole system is broken by design... Law enforcement, BND (German NSA), or whoever have nice central points where they can access information unencrypted. The only improvement over using US or other international servers is that access supposedly is under German control and therefore German laws. How much that is worth has been seen (and most likely will become more clear over the next few months) in the wake of the NSA affair... too bad that too few people are willing and able to use things like PGP/GPG to encrypt their mails...
Isn't that the company that, 5 years ago, expected they'd still be a leader in commercially used mobile phones, instead of being pretty near extinction?
probably M$ asked him to step down not because of what he said, but because he let people know ahead of time instead of them not knowing until after they bought the new XBox...
... I read in a German article was that Apple was quoted saying that that patent wasn't important for them... yeah, right, which is why you patented it and used it to sue Android makers...
Take a look at the devices from Fortinet... decent AV/Malware as well as webfilter with "the usual" load of different categories (and the ability to filter based on groups defined e.g. by SSO info from an ADS). Add to that many additional security firewall features, IPS, security scanner,... to top it off, it's a lot more affordable with better throughput than many (all well-known?) competitors...
I wonder how long before the big players in the software market come out with a 500+MB installation that is nothing more than an RDP or VNC etc. client... at least _then_ they won't be lying anymore when they say the game needs a network connection...
I for one boycott any of these programs that the companies believe they need to mess up so much by DRM... but I guess there's still too many people that would rather be harassed and play the newest games, than just pass them bye and go with decently programmed software...
i'm glad they're fixing it, and i'm glad they took the time to do it right.
... and it took so long because before Apple, nobody had thought up a way to encrypt data on transmission between a server and a client. So they had to research, and write something that would work. Maybe they might even come up with a patent application... let's think, what may they call it - maybe something like "secure http"?
Really, if you have a 27" main monitor, the 13" of the notebook (albeit full HD) is nothing more than additional tool space... Also, as for the keyboard - while it may be nice to be able to use the Notebook keyboard (I do that right now), I would hate using it 8-9 hours per day for coding... how much "getting used to" do you really need to be able to use it in an emergency situation? From a ergonomical POV, I've not yet seen a single notebook keyboard that can keep up with even lower priced regular keyboards... I would not want to swap my MS Natural Keyboard (at least something M$ got right) for ANY notebook KBD...
Looking at the regular wholesale price in Germany (which is most likely higher than in the US), a price of $20k per piece would require e.g. a voice bundle. Plus, with a purchase of that many devices, Cisco would allow for a project price that would save at least another 20-30% on the purchase... As for the oversized, unless they were setting up every site with full 1G or more, they are oversized by at least one or two models... 29xx series will in most cases handle any "regular" speed used in WAN environments, even with partial 1G speeds...
... devices like the iJunk aren't unrepairable enough (given the repair documents found in the Internet), so M$ had to show they are still better than Apple...
Many products cost the US$-price in Euro here... or even more in Euro than in US$... e.g., one of our customers complained about our price for a Fortinet device. They looked up the device on the Internet and found it on some supplier's page... after converting the prices, it turned out that the street price in the US (including VAT but without state sales tax) was about more than 40% under our wholesale price (without VAT) according to the official price list (and we already get a pretty good rebate on the official prices). Try to explain that to your customers...
But then, I reckon with all the lobbying, why would the government bother... it's just the citizens losing money to an out-of-country company...:(
Slashdot Mirror
Not very surprisingly, the news about European countries' secret agencies cooperating with GCHQ and NSA easily explain the reluctance of said countries' politicians to really go after the US and UK for spying on them and their citizens ... after all, it's the local agencies that do the work ... too bad that too few of the citizens care ... ("I have nothing to hide")
Guess what they say is true: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being watched ...
... how long, until the only ones able to correctly solve the captchas are computers ... throughout the last couple modifications to the generated images, it already got to the point where I'd have to reload the images multiple times until I got one that I could get close to being able to read ...but maybe my natural senses are just not up to par with AI ...
... when all 80 Million Germans were under surveillance, everything seemed to be OK ... political leaders said everything was fine, all questions had been answered, go back to your everyday life ... (mainly because German BND most likely was completely involved, also) But now all of a sudden they are p*ssed because they may have been a target ... sorry, but _I_ am also concerned about _MY_ privacy ... why do you believe you are better than anybody else of the 80 million citizens? After all, _YOU_ are also a citizen, and _WE_ have put you where you are now ... so, next time your citizens are under attack (so to speak), remember what it feels like and do your God damn job right!
Did I mention most politicians suck?
... even in that area, China generates more jobs than the US ... I wonder how many of those jobs have been outsourced by the NSA ... ;)
http://cdn.iofferphoto.com/img/item/985/572/87/o_2DeyRlFrMivDa12.jpg (mine is still somewhere in the attic I believe ... or the basement ... after 40+ years ...)
Anything else means you're not fit to be a parent, IMNSHO ...
What's the deal with "easily damaged" USB connectors? In all my life, out of probably 3 dozens, I've not had a single cable - or device - break. I've had one cable (cheapest kind, ~1$ or so) that had gotten worn out, losing contact when wiggled, but for that price I won't be complaining. WTF are you people doing with your devices and cables? Or is everything you buy from the $1 shop?
Micro-USB may be better than many alternatives, but it's still a poor choice. It's tiny and polarized, so it's hard to see which way it needs to be oriented, particularly in poor lighting. That's a rather common problem. Why couldn't they get it right?
In contrast, Apple's Lightning connector works the same in either orientation.
Right. Humanity has gotten so d@mn lazy that - in case of not being able to see the correct orientation - rotating the plug by 180 is too f'ing hard to do ... ... e.g., as you mentioned it - micro USB cable: ~1-2$. Lightning cable: ~20$
Sorry, but many of proprietary "advances" are just ways of securing companies' income, with minimal advantages for the customer
I don't have a gun, but I respect the Second Amendment and those that have guns. There are something like 100 accidental gun deaths a year, which I consider negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For one, you should get your numbers straight ... I seriously doubt the number on "accidental", but that may depend on the definition of "accidental" ... anyway, defining 100 accidental gun deaths as "negligible" does really say a lot of how much you value a person's life ...
Also, what about the thousands of other gun deaths in the US every year? Are they also negligible in your eyes, after all they aren't "accidental"?
The increased usage increases the problem of bad throughput ... haven't used it in a while, but when I played around with it a bit, latency (which would be expected) but more importantly throughput was bad to unbearable ... more users require more performance at the exit nodes, which means more exit nodes are needed ... ... which, in turn, makes the whole network subject to other manipulation, and goes against the reason for the network ...
Having run an exit node for a short while myself, I know of the results: within less than 4 weeks, we received an inquiry into the owner/operator of the machine with the node's IP address, due to reported child porn access. Luckily, the police seemed to be halfway knowledgeable, and with the provided infos on the operation of the node (stats about the node throughput, etc.) they stopped investigating the issue. Needless to say node operation was terminated the day we received the initial inquiry. Without decent "provider status protection" for exit nodes, the risk for operators may be a bit too high unless extensive (and expensive) measures are taken to block illegal material
Are there any stats on how much the global traffic of spam as well as malware access dropped during the DDoS attack?
P.S. - apart from the above, there have been laws put in place, forcing communities to use a certain percentage of their land for renewable energy production. Neat idea as such, but depending of the area, this causes some problems ... e.g., the area I live in has large woods, moderate farming and cities in the range of 30-60k people (core cities). According the scientific research, there aren't many places for wind energy production, and the only ones that come even close to a break-even point for production are naturally on hills/higher plains. Which - not very surprisingly - aren't where the cities or farming is, but the dense woods. In order to fulfill the required ratio of renewable energy areas, the generators need to be placed in the middle of the woods, destroying not only the rather large space of woodland around the generators, but also requiring infrastructure (wider asphalt roads), power lines, and causing additional damage to the fauna by constant noise and infrasound ... also we're talking not about some small windmill, but 600+ft high ones, with 400ft diameter rotors ... to add to that, our local government decided to sign a contract with a company for them to build the generators even before any results of the surveys were done, or before involving (or even telling) the community about it ... therefore, if the local people should successfully stop the project either through political pressure or legal channels, the community is probably liable for damages claims from that company ... ...
And then politicians wonder why people are fed up with politics
Due to the over-production of renewable energy (which of course is a good thing), prices for electricity at the markets are constantly dropping, with some electricity actually being paid to the recipients (!) at times ... at the same time, guaranteed prices for its production (in an attempt to stimulate building of renewable energy sources, with fixed rates for 20 or 25 years!) at rates of 3-4 times the wholesale market prices are causing EEG-rates (sort of a tax to pay for the guaranteed prices for the producers) to rise further and further, leading to constantly rising prices for consumers ... to add to that, energy-hungry production processes are exempt from that "tax", which again is added onto the tax for regular consumers ... so instead of profiting from the dropping prices on the market, consumers are forced to pay more and more ... great job, politicians!
Add to that the almost "fraudulent" way of making consumers responsible for delays e.g. in the building of ocean wind farms ... if some wind farm can't be put up and in production in time, again the consumers have to pay the fines ... WTF???
While the original article doesn't clearly point to a German article on this, I assume this is about the while DE-Mail/e-Post crap that Telekom/United Internet and German Post has set up ... the problem here is, that neither of their services provide a clean end-to-end encryption. While the communication between the providers (like German Telekom) and the end user at both ends of the email communication may be encrypted, mails are decrypted at the provider in order to "scan for viruses and malware", of course only to protect the user ... yeah, right. So, the whole system is broken by design ... Law enforcement, BND (German NSA), or whoever have nice central points where they can access information unencrypted. The only improvement over using US or other international servers is that access supposedly is under German control and therefore German laws. ... too bad that too few people are willing and able to use things like PGP/GPG to encrypt their mails ...
How much that is worth has been seen (and most likely will become more clear over the next few months) in the wake of the NSA affair
Isn't that the company that, 5 years ago, expected they'd still be a leader in commercially used mobile phones, instead of being pretty near extinction?
probably M$ asked him to step down not because of what he said, but because he let people know ahead of time instead of them not knowing until after they bought the new XBox ...
... I read in a German article was that Apple was quoted saying that that patent wasn't important for them ... yeah, right, which is why you patented it and used it to sue Android makers ...
Two young men in steubenville rape a young women and get 1 - 2 years in jail.
A man writes a script to get email address from a website and gets 3.5 years in jail.
Something's not right.
Of course ... once you mess with a big company, your deed is so much worse than anything you could do to another person ...
Take a look at the devices from Fortinet ... decent AV/Malware as well as webfilter with "the usual" load of different categories (and the ability to filter based on groups defined e.g. by SSO info from an ADS). Add to that many additional security firewall features, IPS, security scanner, ... to top it off, it's a lot more affordable with better throughput than many (all well-known?) competitors ...
I wonder how long before the big players in the software market come out with a 500+MB installation that is nothing more than an RDP or VNC etc. client ... at least _then_ they won't be lying anymore when they say the game needs a network connection ...
I for one boycott any of these programs that the companies believe they need to mess up so much by DRM ... but I guess there's still too many people that would rather be harassed and play the newest games, than just pass them bye and go with decently programmed software...
i'm glad they're fixing it, and i'm glad they took the time to do it right.
... and it took so long because before Apple, nobody had thought up a way to encrypt data on transmission between a server and a client. So they had to research, and write something that would work. Maybe they might even come up with a patent application ... let's think, what may they call it - maybe something like "secure http"?
Really, if you have a 27" main monitor, the 13" of the notebook (albeit full HD) is nothing more than additional tool space ... ... how much "getting used to" do you really need to be able to use it in an emergency situation? From a ergonomical POV, I've not yet seen a single notebook keyboard that can keep up with even lower priced regular keyboards ... I would not want to swap my MS Natural Keyboard (at least something M$ got right) for ANY notebook KBD ...
Also, as for the keyboard - while it may be nice to be able to use the Notebook keyboard (I do that right now), I would hate using it 8-9 hours per day for coding
Looking at the regular wholesale price in Germany (which is most likely higher than in the US), a price of $20k per piece would require e.g. a voice bundle. Plus, with a purchase of that many devices, Cisco would allow for a project price that would save at least another 20-30% on the purchase ... ... 29xx series will in most cases handle any "regular" speed used in WAN environments, even with partial 1G speeds ...
As for the oversized, unless they were setting up every site with full 1G or more, they are oversized by at least one or two models
Nature is more intelligent than US Republicans, it doesn't ignore Darwin's findings ;)
... devices like the iJunk aren't unrepairable enough (given the repair documents found in the Internet), so M$ had to show they are still better than Apple ...
Many products cost the US$-price in Euro here ... or even more in Euro than in US$ ... e.g., one of our customers complained about our price for a Fortinet device. They looked up the device on the Internet and found it on some supplier's page ... after converting the prices, it turned out that the street price in the US (including VAT but without state sales tax) was about more than 40% under our wholesale price (without VAT) according to the official price list (and we already get a pretty good rebate on the official prices). Try to explain that to your customers ...
But then, I reckon with all the lobbying, why would the government bother ... it's just the citizens losing money to an out-of-country company ... :(