The first scene, in the first movie, is a slo-mo shot of Jar-Jar Binks getting his head sliced off with a lightsaber.
That scene alone might make the movie ticket worth it. Especially if done in 3D with a full range of special effects (i.e. seeing the blood spurt out and so).
And then 4,700 students missed out of that 10% of the top (at least that's how I read it).
Makes me wonder: how many "K-3rd" students are there in NYC? And how many did get in? Obviously most students must have gotten in or there would have been more of an outcry, and the errors listed seem to be very marginal (e.g. age recorded in months, not days). So this 4,700 can't be more than 5% of that top 10%. Which means there should be about a million students in that age group in NYC, if not more. Is that reasonable, on an 8 mln total population?
As you apparently don't run any anti-virus or other anti-malware software, I'm not very surprised you don't see any of the possibly dozens of viruses that have infected your computer.
Reminds me of the UMTS auctions around 1999/2000. Huge amounts of money were spent in various countries - so much that several of the buyers of UMTS licenses almost went bankrupt, just on the license cost. Especially as the high license cost required high fees for subscribers in a time that there was no such thing as a smartphone.
Auctions got huge results in various countries, but after five, six such auctions in other countries in EU the prices offered fell drastically. Phone companies obviously smartened up, realising that the amount paid in the first auctions was so much that they'd never be able to get that back from subscribers. A few years later, mobile internet was being offered cheap as there was little demand and a huge bandwidth available, so the more subscribers the more money they could get back. Hence the lower prices.
Nowadays I'm sure mobile phone companies have smartened up a lot. They know the demand, they know what they can reasonably pay to make a reasonable profit, and of course a major competitor to the new 4G network is the existing 3G network - which for many people is good enough already.
I have a copy of Google Maps off-line, as well as recent vector maps of OSM. Mapping covered that way.
Restaurants: well they're all over the place, just go to the nearest shopping mall (unless you're deep in the countryside that's no more than five minutes walk).
Transport: I have all bus routes and ferry schedules off-line in the phone.
Facebook: don't care enough.
E-mail and web: if I really want that I can just sit down at McDonald's or most parks for WiFi. It's really rare. If people must reach me so urgently, they just have to call.
Games: they're off-line anyway. I'm not going to share my game progress on Facebook or so. Great for killing some time, but that's it.
Major application for me: geocaching. Got all data off-line; again Hong Kong is small.
Now if living in a country where I'd be on the road a lot, out of town, unknown areas - yes then mobile data gets interesting. For now, meh. I used to have a data account a few years ago, basically didn't use it.
Most of the things you mention are true but the problem lies with the response from the Android system. If there is no GPS permission, an error is returned - which the programmer has to catch and handle. This is a different situation than "no fix available". And as a user is not supposed to cherry pick permissions, that situation is usually not handled properly, if at all.
For the rest I'm not that worried. If an app wants permissions I don't like it to need, I don't install it. I used to have the Facebook app installed (came with the phone; before I installed Cyanogenmod), never set it up. I don't have mobile data anyway other than wifi, so it's useless. Many more such apps.
And the best ad blocker is of course to simply not have network access at all. So I don't even have one of those:-)
I do have a facebook account. I do not post every detail of my life, on the contrary. I'm posting maybe one status update a year, if that many. They're going to have a hard time profiling me anyway, as I don't click "like" all the time either. I even still haven't bothered to add a profile picture, and my timeline is filled with photos other people posted. At least it was last time I visited that page, half year or longer ago.
If you can root your phone, it's a vulnerability that should be fixed, it's as simple as that. The OS is designed in a rather secure way, not being able to get root access is one of those design features. Vulnerabilities that you try to exploit to get root access can just as well be exploited by malware in apps, and then you never know what's happening.
If you don't like that, by all means install an aftermarket ROM like Cyanogenmod. And even those should have no vulnerabilities, allowing apps root access without you giving explicit permission.
Many permissions will of course cause an app to crash when not present. And you can't blame the developer for that. After all, to make things work you set the required permissions and then assume it's there. Missing permissions may indeed very well block some expected functionality.
One of the few exceptions may be internet access - that can not be guaranteed ever. Phones can be out of network range, and even with the permission present you can not connect. However I'm actually not sure if my network availability check would work without the permission present...
Making permissions optional, which I'd like to see from a user pov, is pretty hard from a developer pov especially as currently it is all or nothing, so when installed a developer assumes the permissions they ask are actually there, and no tests are done.
This service seems to be limited to the music of certain big labels. If you're not with that big label, your music will not be on iRadio. That's a serious limitation that traditional over-the-air radio stations do not have - they pay a flat fee, or a fee per song played, regardless of the publisher of the song. That alone makes it so much less interesting. It's not radio, it's more of a "universal music promotion channel".
And probably a total lack of dj's, that do announcements, some silly talk sometimes, give some news facts, whatever. Some may be experts in a certain music genre, and will introduce their listeners to interesting new stuff. Major part of what makes radio, radio.
I'm afraid the Internet will beat them in the end.
Take web browsers. We had this piece of shit called Netscape, that was innovating the hell out of everybody else, and taking over the whole Internet. MS saw that happening, realised it was just wrong, and came with the excellent solution called Internet Explorer. It took them a while to get it right, but by the time they reached version 6 they did it. They had created the one all, end all of browsers, the ultimate web browsing solution, and Netscape was nowhere to be found again. And then as a final measure to save the Internet they all but shut down the Internet Explorer department, and they saw it was good.
However they missed the Internet vigilantes, the insurgents, who won't take no for an answer. Secretly in a dark, evil corner of the Internet, hidden from the almighty eye of Microsoft, they resurrected the stinking corpse of Netscape and created Mozilla, a beast that had Internet Explorer for lunch.
The same will happen to malware. MS may temporarily dominate the internet with their ultimate malware, like they did with their ultimate browser (IE6), it won't last. Someone will come up with another piece of malware, and take back what was lost, returning innovation to the world in the process.
I think it's quite safe to assume that the dinos this study is dedicated to are less than one year old, as this is about dinos that were still in their eggs.
OTOH I'd guess it's normal for a dino to multiply it's size while still in the egg. Just look at human babies, they grow like a hundred times in length and something like a thousand times in weight from the moment they're recognisable as human (arms, legs, head) until they're born. After birth they grow only about four times in length and some 20 times in weight to reach adulthood.
If it really slows down growth, it'd be an evolutionary disadvantage over those who do not carry all that junk DNA around for they'd grow up faster, and spend less time being small and vulnerable. Dinos are point in case: they're believed to grow so big as protection against predators, be so big that they can't kill you any more. So also they had to grow very fast, as being any smaller would mean they're vulnerable.
Also, why would we have picked up so much junk DNA if it really has no function at all? That just doesn't make sense to me.
The article doesn't mention much about how fast they really grew.
How long did it take them to reach adult size, for example?
And related: what was the approx. lifespan of such animals?
How could they manage the food intake for that growth? This are plant eaters, and plants are not the most efficient sources of energy - leaves are pretty hard to digest, especially compared to meat. So they must eat a lot of it (probably pretty much constantly), and have a rather efficient digestive system that can handle the huge quantities of food.
Whether TPB is legal depends on the local law. That you think it's not doing anything wrong, doesn't mean the rest of the world or their laws agree with that.
To keep it from becoming a mess, we NEED an authoritative entity that keeps track of all the names and numbers. Otherwise, sooner or later, two names will start pointing to the same address. Or, depending on where in the world you are, a name points to different addresses.
Already this has been split into multiple authoritative entities, one for each TLD, and a pool of addresses for each those authorities, and numerous registrars that manage the individual registrations on behalf of those authorities. This allows such domain-shopping like TPB is doing. I doubt you can split it up much further or it's really going to become a mess, it's enough of a mess as it is already.
If, as you suggest, you start questioning multiple DNS servers and get different answers, you have a big problem. Which one is the legitimate site, which one is a scammer?
While it's always argued here that IP doesn't identify a person, which I think is true, it does identify a connection - that's after all the whole purpose of an IP address.
Maybe. You're presuming that ISPs keep accurate information regarding DHCP leases. From the article it said that her ISP "distributes IP addresses among customers as they log on and that it can't track exactly who had what number when."
If so, that sounds to me like a pretty strong "it wasn't me" kind of defence. Defendant also said not to know about bittorrent - haven't her computers been seized? Any bittorrent software and evidence of its use found? No? She didn't do it, case closed.
Definitely makes this sound like one of the weaker cases.
My WiFi router, now about 10 years old, does have a default password and a reset button to reset the device to that password.
However the only way to access that router's inernals is to be on the LAN side (either WiFi or cable), then point a browser to 192.168.123.254, and enter the password. To get the router to connect via WiFi, you must first connect by cable, to even enable WiFi.
Can't do much better than that. It's secure out of hte box: physical local connection needed to do anything to the device, after that it's up to the user to set up their WiFi network properly.
It being the ISP, I'd expect them to have a log of which IP was assigned to which physical connection. They know which cable runs where, and which equipment is assigned to each subscriber. And if that database has errors misidentifying a connection, that'd be easy to find out, and then to amend the court case as needed.
While it's always argued here that IP doesn't identify a person, which I think is true, it does identify a connection - that's after all the whole purpose of an IP address. And for a typical connection the pool of potential users tends to be pretty small, in many cases just one.
No matter where you live, you can always ignore Apple. And pretty much any corporation for that matter. They are not governing you; they try to sell you something. You don't like them? Don't buy anything from them.
However you can not normally ignore your government. If you don't pay your taxes, they'll come after you. If you don't follow their rules, they'll come after you.
that probably means gecko is just as much spaghetti code as the netscape code base they discarded back in the days for being too complicated to work on.
It's really hard to tell where the popup comes from, as it's easy enough for a web site to make it look like it's from a legit application. And it doesn't have to be perfect, as you don't see that update request so often so it's not familiar.
I'm a pretty savvy user I have to say myself, but often enough I've been tricked. Particularly by web sites showing popups that look exactly like a standard Windows error message, so automatically click to dismiss it, only to have that button not be a button but a hyperlink to some dodgy site. Easy enough to imagine a web sites provides a link to a pdf, but instead of serving a pdf file it shows a "new version of Adobe Reader available, install now?" kind of dialog - where of course the software-to-be-installed is something different.
I wouldn't be surprised if those "old" P4's don't have that much memory, after all it's really not needed for Win XP, web browsing, reading e-mail, word processing, etc. Back in the day I was doing just that on a system where the hard disk space was a fraction of that 2 GB!
So to get them to run Win7 they'd have to buy memory, install it in every single computer (lots of work), and hope it all still works (no hd cable accidentally pulled loose or so). Sounds like a lot of money and effort for - well, what exactly? To replace something that works with something that works, with the risk of breaking stuff in the process? Doesn't sound like an improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
The first scene, in the first movie, is a slo-mo shot of Jar-Jar Binks getting his head sliced off with a lightsaber.
That scene alone might make the movie ticket worth it. Especially if done in 3D with a full range of special effects (i.e. seeing the blood spurt out and so).
And then 4,700 students missed out of that 10% of the top (at least that's how I read it).
Makes me wonder: how many "K-3rd" students are there in NYC? And how many did get in? Obviously most students must have gotten in or there would have been more of an outcry, and the errors listed seem to be very marginal (e.g. age recorded in months, not days). So this 4,700 can't be more than 5% of that top 10%. Which means there should be about a million students in that age group in NYC, if not more. Is that reasonable, on an 8 mln total population?
As you apparently don't run any anti-virus or other anti-malware software, I'm not very surprised you don't see any of the possibly dozens of viruses that have infected your computer.
Reminds me of the UMTS auctions around 1999/2000. Huge amounts of money were spent in various countries - so much that several of the buyers of UMTS licenses almost went bankrupt, just on the license cost. Especially as the high license cost required high fees for subscribers in a time that there was no such thing as a smartphone.
Auctions got huge results in various countries, but after five, six such auctions in other countries in EU the prices offered fell drastically. Phone companies obviously smartened up, realising that the amount paid in the first auctions was so much that they'd never be able to get that back from subscribers. A few years later, mobile internet was being offered cheap as there was little demand and a huge bandwidth available, so the more subscribers the more money they could get back. Hence the lower prices.
Nowadays I'm sure mobile phone companies have smartened up a lot. They know the demand, they know what they can reasonably pay to make a reasonable profit, and of course a major competitor to the new 4G network is the existing 3G network - which for many people is good enough already.
Well I live in Hong Kong, small place.
I have a copy of Google Maps off-line, as well as recent vector maps of OSM. Mapping covered that way.
Restaurants: well they're all over the place, just go to the nearest shopping mall (unless you're deep in the countryside that's no more than five minutes walk).
Transport: I have all bus routes and ferry schedules off-line in the phone.
Facebook: don't care enough.
E-mail and web: if I really want that I can just sit down at McDonald's or most parks for WiFi. It's really rare. If people must reach me so urgently, they just have to call.
Games: they're off-line anyway. I'm not going to share my game progress on Facebook or so. Great for killing some time, but that's it.
Major application for me: geocaching. Got all data off-line; again Hong Kong is small.
Now if living in a country where I'd be on the road a lot, out of town, unknown areas - yes then mobile data gets interesting. For now, meh. I used to have a data account a few years ago, basically didn't use it.
Most of the things you mention are true but the problem lies with the response from the Android system. If there is no GPS permission, an error is returned - which the programmer has to catch and handle. This is a different situation than "no fix available". And as a user is not supposed to cherry pick permissions, that situation is usually not handled properly, if at all.
For the rest I'm not that worried. If an app wants permissions I don't like it to need, I don't install it. I used to have the Facebook app installed (came with the phone; before I installed Cyanogenmod), never set it up. I don't have mobile data anyway other than wifi, so it's useless. Many more such apps.
And the best ad blocker is of course to simply not have network access at all. So I don't even have one of those :-)
I do have a facebook account. I do not post every detail of my life, on the contrary. I'm posting maybe one status update a year, if that many. They're going to have a hard time profiling me anyway, as I don't click "like" all the time either. I even still haven't bothered to add a profile picture, and my timeline is filled with photos other people posted. At least it was last time I visited that page, half year or longer ago.
If you can root your phone, it's a vulnerability that should be fixed, it's as simple as that. The OS is designed in a rather secure way, not being able to get root access is one of those design features. Vulnerabilities that you try to exploit to get root access can just as well be exploited by malware in apps, and then you never know what's happening.
If you don't like that, by all means install an aftermarket ROM like Cyanogenmod. And even those should have no vulnerabilities, allowing apps root access without you giving explicit permission.
Many permissions will of course cause an app to crash when not present. And you can't blame the developer for that. After all, to make things work you set the required permissions and then assume it's there. Missing permissions may indeed very well block some expected functionality.
One of the few exceptions may be internet access - that can not be guaranteed ever. Phones can be out of network range, and even with the permission present you can not connect. However I'm actually not sure if my network availability check would work without the permission present...
Making permissions optional, which I'd like to see from a user pov, is pretty hard from a developer pov especially as currently it is all or nothing, so when installed a developer assumes the permissions they ask are actually there, and no tests are done.
This service seems to be limited to the music of certain big labels. If you're not with that big label, your music will not be on iRadio. That's a serious limitation that traditional over-the-air radio stations do not have - they pay a flat fee, or a fee per song played, regardless of the publisher of the song. That alone makes it so much less interesting. It's not radio, it's more of a "universal music promotion channel".
And probably a total lack of dj's, that do announcements, some silly talk sometimes, give some news facts, whatever. Some may be experts in a certain music genre, and will introduce their listeners to interesting new stuff. Major part of what makes radio, radio.
Main reason for me to listen to the radio is to hear music I didn't know yet. And that way to have a better idea on what's available to choose from.
I'm afraid the Internet will beat them in the end.
Take web browsers. We had this piece of shit called Netscape, that was innovating the hell out of everybody else, and taking over the whole Internet. MS saw that happening, realised it was just wrong, and came with the excellent solution called Internet Explorer. It took them a while to get it right, but by the time they reached version 6 they did it. They had created the one all, end all of browsers, the ultimate web browsing solution, and Netscape was nowhere to be found again. And then as a final measure to save the Internet they all but shut down the Internet Explorer department, and they saw it was good.
However they missed the Internet vigilantes, the insurgents, who won't take no for an answer. Secretly in a dark, evil corner of the Internet, hidden from the almighty eye of Microsoft, they resurrected the stinking corpse of Netscape and created Mozilla, a beast that had Internet Explorer for lunch.
The same will happen to malware. MS may temporarily dominate the internet with their ultimate malware, like they did with their ultimate browser (IE6), it won't last. Someone will come up with another piece of malware, and take back what was lost, returning innovation to the world in the process.
I think it's quite safe to assume that the dinos this study is dedicated to are less than one year old, as this is about dinos that were still in their eggs.
OTOH I'd guess it's normal for a dino to multiply it's size while still in the egg. Just look at human babies, they grow like a hundred times in length and something like a thousand times in weight from the moment they're recognisable as human (arms, legs, head) until they're born. After birth they grow only about four times in length and some 20 times in weight to reach adulthood.
I'm sure all that "junk" DNA has a function.
If it really slows down growth, it'd be an evolutionary disadvantage over those who do not carry all that junk DNA around for they'd grow up faster, and spend less time being small and vulnerable. Dinos are point in case: they're believed to grow so big as protection against predators, be so big that they can't kill you any more. So also they had to grow very fast, as being any smaller would mean they're vulnerable.
Also, why would we have picked up so much junk DNA if it really has no function at all? That just doesn't make sense to me.
The article doesn't mention much about how fast they really grew.
How long did it take them to reach adult size, for example?
And related: what was the approx. lifespan of such animals?
How could they manage the food intake for that growth? This are plant eaters, and plants are not the most efficient sources of energy - leaves are pretty hard to digest, especially compared to meat. So they must eat a lot of it (probably pretty much constantly), and have a rather efficient digestive system that can handle the huge quantities of food.
The big trick remains to get your hands on that infohash. It's not like it's easy to guess or so.
Whether TPB is legal depends on the local law. That you think it's not doing anything wrong, doesn't mean the rest of the world or their laws agree with that.
To keep it from becoming a mess, we NEED an authoritative entity that keeps track of all the names and numbers. Otherwise, sooner or later, two names will start pointing to the same address. Or, depending on where in the world you are, a name points to different addresses.
Already this has been split into multiple authoritative entities, one for each TLD, and a pool of addresses for each those authorities, and numerous registrars that manage the individual registrations on behalf of those authorities. This allows such domain-shopping like TPB is doing. I doubt you can split it up much further or it's really going to become a mess, it's enough of a mess as it is already.
If, as you suggest, you start questioning multiple DNS servers and get different answers, you have a big problem. Which one is the legitimate site, which one is a scammer?
Maybe. You're presuming that ISPs keep accurate information regarding DHCP leases. From the article it said that her ISP "distributes IP addresses among customers as they log on and that it can't track exactly who had what number when."
If so, that sounds to me like a pretty strong "it wasn't me" kind of defence. Defendant also said not to know about bittorrent - haven't her computers been seized? Any bittorrent software and evidence of its use found? No? She didn't do it, case closed.
Definitely makes this sound like one of the weaker cases.
My WiFi router, now about 10 years old, does have a default password and a reset button to reset the device to that password.
However the only way to access that router's inernals is to be on the LAN side (either WiFi or cable), then point a browser to 192.168.123.254, and enter the password. To get the router to connect via WiFi, you must first connect by cable, to even enable WiFi.
Can't do much better than that. It's secure out of hte box: physical local connection needed to do anything to the device, after that it's up to the user to set up their WiFi network properly.
It being the ISP, I'd expect them to have a log of which IP was assigned to which physical connection. They know which cable runs where, and which equipment is assigned to each subscriber. And if that database has errors misidentifying a connection, that'd be easy to find out, and then to amend the court case as needed.
While it's always argued here that IP doesn't identify a person, which I think is true, it does identify a connection - that's after all the whole purpose of an IP address. And for a typical connection the pool of potential users tends to be pretty small, in many cases just one.
No matter where you live, you can always ignore Apple. And pretty much any corporation for that matter. They are not governing you; they try to sell you something. You don't like them? Don't buy anything from them.
However you can not normally ignore your government. If you don't pay your taxes, they'll come after you. If you don't follow their rules, they'll come after you.
that probably means gecko is just as much spaghetti code as the netscape code base they discarded back in the days for being too complicated to work on.
There you have another issue, indeed.
It's really hard to tell where the popup comes from, as it's easy enough for a web site to make it look like it's from a legit application. And it doesn't have to be perfect, as you don't see that update request so often so it's not familiar.
I'm a pretty savvy user I have to say myself, but often enough I've been tricked. Particularly by web sites showing popups that look exactly like a standard Windows error message, so automatically click to dismiss it, only to have that button not be a button but a hyperlink to some dodgy site. Easy enough to imagine a web sites provides a link to a pdf, but instead of serving a pdf file it shows a "new version of Adobe Reader available, install now?" kind of dialog - where of course the software-to-be-installed is something different.
I wouldn't be surprised if those "old" P4's don't have that much memory, after all it's really not needed for Win XP, web browsing, reading e-mail, word processing, etc. Back in the day I was doing just that on a system where the hard disk space was a fraction of that 2 GB!
So to get them to run Win7 they'd have to buy memory, install it in every single computer (lots of work), and hope it all still works (no hd cable accidentally pulled loose or so). Sounds like a lot of money and effort for - well, what exactly? To replace something that works with something that works, with the risk of breaking stuff in the process? Doesn't sound like an improvement.