The US government is stupid, but this is just a case of a specific person being stupid (both the official and the poster you replied to).
Fingerprinting everyone who enters your country is only valid when you've already deteriorated civil liberties beyond the point of no return. I don't think turning your country into a police state for the sake of being "safe" is a reasonable scenario. The bottom line is that US foreign policy put the US in its current position, so maybe changing this might ensure safety.
Wars on "terrorism" and clandestine activities involving your secret services aren't exactly on the road to positive foreign policy.
The more the US moves toward this police state (and police the world attitude), the more people will be wrongly detained at airports, boarders, hell, even in other countries. This does not reflect well at all for the US or US citizens.
The issue, however, is that SAP made claims based on little to no information, nor people who had any idea on what the outcomes should be. Now, I'm no project management expert, but this seems like a monumentally stupid thing to do.
Whether the demo was rigged or not, SAP went into an agreement without full details and without real confidence that the product they are delivering would actually do what the client wants.
Looking at your site, I can see you develop sites for people who don't know any better (than to either get some real professionals or do it themselves). This kind of falls into line with 22.5% of your visitors being Vista users.
I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.
Anecdotal evidence is never an apt reply to sarcasm or trolling, you'll just end up looking the fool.
I can understand for a specific artistic effect, but Polaroids were notoriously unreliable, they degraded quickly, and the colours were never 100% correct. The reason why the standard died, as was mentioned by the GGGP was for the instant "view and reshoot if needed".
I doubt many artists would even use polaroids due to the rapid degradation of the photo when exposed to light for great periods of time. Not having any negatives also ensures that the photo cannot be reprinted if it does deteriorate.
For law enforcement, that would be just stupid. Monumentally stupid. The quality and the life of the photo ensure that the evidence is not permissible in a court. If it was 35mm film, I'd understand, but not Polaroids.
This is the same thing I was thinking of. Is it really any use as the receiver needs to have at least a camera and laptop, or some specialised decoder device to even make this usable.
While the technology seems neat, it also seems a bit more like a weekend project of someone with an inkjet printer and some chemicals. Did it really require funding from DARPA? I'd hazard a guess and say "no".
They already do. That's how they stop people from installing OS X on non-Apple hardware.
I honestly don't see why anyone would buy a Mac clone myself - flaky support at best, design that's nowhere near as visually pleasing as the real thing, and a company that's already untrustworthy behind it.
Yes, I own a Mac, but I also own a Windows machine, a Linux machine, and a Linux server.
Actually, no, using any food crop for fuel is a bad idea. This ensures that the 3rd world are always starving by removing food crops for consumption and replacing them with crops that go into rich 1st world nations' cars.
Case in point, I recently visited south western Thailand, while flying into the area and driving around you notice that there are NO rice fields, vegetable patches, or even grazing land for animals. It has all been converted into palm plantations for bio fuels. The palms are unable to be used for food due to being bred purely for the oils - no fruit, nothing.
On top of this, the amount of workers drops to almost 0 when running a palm oil farm - you only need workers at harvest and planting time which can be up to 5 years between. You do not need anyone to tend to the plantation at all during the growing cycle. So you end up with one person/family owning and profiting from the land while the rest of the village/region starve and/or live in poverty.
I am an environmentalist myself, but I will never agree with ANY bio fuels being used. This doesn't solve the issue at hand, which isn't the supply of fossil fuels, but the effect of any combustion fuels. Driving the price of food up in under developed nations to satisfy your own desire to feel warm and gooey inside is inexcusable.
Indeed, the deed/trait system in LOTRO is probably the best "achievement" system I've seen.
Generally they come in 2 levels (I think 3 or 4 for the quest related ones), level 1 is a title you can display, level 2 is a stat boost that can stack up by finishing deeds in different areas.
Some give insane boosts to your character, enough give you a big advantage in PvP, or make your life so much easier in PvE.
Unfortunately it's not the gathering of the passwords that hurts the business with things like Confiker.
I was recently on contract for a large bank doing what they called "lvl 1 support" (tough times and no work calls for tough measures). I bailed after 2 days due to the fact they'd let Confiker take a massive hold on the network. 1500+ servers, every workstation of about 20 000 was infected. The biggest issue was that users were being locked out of their accounts, productivity was at almost 0, and the highest level of support had no idea what they were doing. Supposedly they were fixing the issues, however the servers they "fixed" were ending up reinfected due to them not patching against Confiker straight away.
Pretty much a lack of decent IT staff (they are currently offshoring all their support staff, with infrastructure staff to be moved later) was to blame for the massive infection. Policies weren't enforced, lower level support staff had close to full administrative access on the servers, and there were no proactive patching cycles. I've seen this before and raised the red flag at previous jobs, unfortunately the calls for greater security and greater responsibility for high level admins has gone unheeded.
The people controlling IT departments prefer to follow their little management processes rather than actually do anything productive for the company. Taking months if not a year to deploy a critical patch on a server, or ignoring calls for tightened security policies (both digital and social) are the real reason companies fail. What IT managers need to remember is, a decent password policy is a vital portion of a wider solution.
Unfortunately, as we can see now, the UK have some serious issues with their politicians flagrantly abusing the system. It really doesn't surprise me that they'd be stupid enough to openly admit they are biased toward Microsoft even though the policy states otherwise.
This really isn't a good example given the current situation in the UK.
I would suspect that over some nice luncheons and dinners that the US Army would have been "persuaded" to upgrade to Vista and not 7. This kind of crap happens all the time in government agencies that don't have to balance their funding sheets.
In large corporations things are vetted and validated mostly*, but for things like the Army it's all about "chain-o-command". This seems to breed corruption from the highest levels down, unfortunately the soldiers are the ones who bare the brunt of the issues - just look at the joke that the "Land Warrior" project is.
No doubt the person who made the decisions has been bought by MS or has a vested interest in MS.
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Yes, No, No.
Arsenic, yes, for sure, 100% natural.
Tobacco, no, it's been modified by humans through selective breeding, exactly the same as other crops.
Multivitamins are no different to having a diet that consists of fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. While not the best substitute for a decent diet, to say that vitamins aren't natural is just stupid.
Uhh, the security is the issue. Why was such a sensitive device allowed to be removed from a secure area into an "area where 1000 badge holders had access"? As with all "secure" systems, the biggest security issue is people. If you're not going to enforce security then there's no point having it.
I think that's a bit overboard, I've used both a Netgear and Linksys wireless router for my ADSL2+ and I've not had any issues using BT. Hell, I even use my NAS as the BT client now and it works great.
I'd say that the issues with the GGPs BT is more that he/she has a craptacular ADSL router or that its QoS is turned on but isn't configured correctly. Either way, there are solutions to the issues and they don't require building an expensive network.
Take this as another example. Australia recently banned guns, and had their firearm homocide rate TRIPLE!!!
[Citation Needed]
The only "evidence", if it can be called this, of an increase in violence are opinion pieces such as blogs and editorials. There are no statistics or research to back this up. As an Australian I am proud of our gun control laws and laugh every time I see some gun-nut claiming they've done harm.
This is just one site that shows how murders have NOT CHANGED and that gun related accidents have changed. They even state that assaults & other crime cannot be seen as a direct result of gun control laws.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks you can get better results from using a decent search engine and your own wits. To me this seems like a gimmick more than anything, thus why there is so much hype.
Products that deliver quality generally stand on their own merits, not on a pile of hype.
I'd say it's more to do with fear. Keep people afraid and they'll adhere to some text's words. It's not that people are born believing in god and wanting to do good in "his" name, it's that they are brainwashed into fearing an invisible man who watches everything you do.
It's essentially the same as normal society, except in the society at large you can fall on two sides of the fence: those that fear the law enough not to commit a crime, and those that don't. Replace law with god and you've got a religious commune.
So no, they don't govern via "meta governance", it's merely fear of doing the "wrong" thing according to their texts. Which really means people don't want to go against a central figure who interprets their text for them.
Negative emotion stress is, of course, not good. The adrenaline, edge of your seat, put you in the zone stress is great.
It's one reason I find some games totally miss the mark be it via controls, atmosphere, achievements, or even gameplay. They can pull out either of these stresses depending on if they do it right. You need that feeling of urgency and distress to get your mind into the game, for that suspension of disbelief. Negative emotion stress is quite different, rage quits, anger, smacktalk, etc.
They certainly can try, but ultimately there is no way a webmaster can "detect" if his advert was displayed properly, short of looking over the end-user's shoulder.
In the USA it's perfectly legal under copyright law for browsers to alter the display to remove ads. If webmaster wants to replace his homepage with a TOS contract, that's another story.
(Also it is hilarious that you "think" something is a "fact" based on one site who detected one ad-block method, and decided to be an asshat about it. Typical nerd spazoid reaction, I guess.)
Point being, most webmasters know adblocking is just a fact of life and they've learned to live with it. If Taco tried to stop adblockers from accessing Slashdot, most people would end up having a nice laugh at his expense.
I can see you're wanting to troll there, to be honest, you're still wrong. No matter how much you call me an "asshat" or a "nerd spazoid", it doesn't mean you're correct. Your UID shows you've been here for a while, yet you have learnt nothing of how web sites can be constructed.
It's quite simple to create a script that would detect if an ad is presented or not. If the script is blocked, well, you'd be going against the T&C of the site. If the ad is blocked, you'd know.
It's hilarious that you "think" that resorting to name calling and bullshit to support your previously flawed argument is a valid tactic. I'd suggest that you stay away from posting crap like this, but I know it would do no good...
Slashdot Mirror
The US government is stupid, but this is just a case of a specific person being stupid (both the official and the poster you replied to).
Fingerprinting everyone who enters your country is only valid when you've already deteriorated civil liberties beyond the point of no return. I don't think turning your country into a police state for the sake of being "safe" is a reasonable scenario. The bottom line is that US foreign policy put the US in its current position, so maybe changing this might ensure safety.
Wars on "terrorism" and clandestine activities involving your secret services aren't exactly on the road to positive foreign policy.
The more the US moves toward this police state (and police the world attitude), the more people will be wrongly detained at airports, boarders, hell, even in other countries. This does not reflect well at all for the US or US citizens.
Sounds like most projects I've worked on.
The issue, however, is that SAP made claims based on little to no information, nor people who had any idea on what the outcomes should be. Now, I'm no project management expert, but this seems like a monumentally stupid thing to do.
Whether the demo was rigged or not, SAP went into an agreement without full details and without real confidence that the product they are delivering would actually do what the client wants.
It'll be ok, I'll call a doctor!
Looking at your site, I can see you develop sites for people who don't know any better (than to either get some real professionals or do it themselves). This kind of falls into line with 22.5% of your visitors being Vista users.
I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.
Anecdotal evidence is never an apt reply to sarcasm or trolling, you'll just end up looking the fool.
I can understand for a specific artistic effect, but Polaroids were notoriously unreliable, they degraded quickly, and the colours were never 100% correct. The reason why the standard died, as was mentioned by the GGGP was for the instant "view and reshoot if needed".
I doubt many artists would even use polaroids due to the rapid degradation of the photo when exposed to light for great periods of time. Not having any negatives also ensures that the photo cannot be reprinted if it does deteriorate.
For law enforcement, that would be just stupid. Monumentally stupid. The quality and the life of the photo ensure that the evidence is not permissible in a court. If it was 35mm film, I'd understand, but not Polaroids.
This is the same thing I was thinking of. Is it really any use as the receiver needs to have at least a camera and laptop, or some specialised decoder device to even make this usable.
While the technology seems neat, it also seems a bit more like a weekend project of someone with an inkjet printer and some chemicals. Did it really require funding from DARPA? I'd hazard a guess and say "no".
They already do. That's how they stop people from installing OS X on non-Apple hardware.
I honestly don't see why anyone would buy a Mac clone myself - flaky support at best, design that's nowhere near as visually pleasing as the real thing, and a company that's already untrustworthy behind it.
Yes, I own a Mac, but I also own a Windows machine, a Linux machine, and a Linux server.
Actually, no, using any food crop for fuel is a bad idea. This ensures that the 3rd world are always starving by removing food crops for consumption and replacing them with crops that go into rich 1st world nations' cars.
Case in point, I recently visited south western Thailand, while flying into the area and driving around you notice that there are NO rice fields, vegetable patches, or even grazing land for animals. It has all been converted into palm plantations for bio fuels. The palms are unable to be used for food due to being bred purely for the oils - no fruit, nothing.
On top of this, the amount of workers drops to almost 0 when running a palm oil farm - you only need workers at harvest and planting time which can be up to 5 years between. You do not need anyone to tend to the plantation at all during the growing cycle. So you end up with one person/family owning and profiting from the land while the rest of the village/region starve and/or live in poverty.
I am an environmentalist myself, but I will never agree with ANY bio fuels being used. This doesn't solve the issue at hand, which isn't the supply of fossil fuels, but the effect of any combustion fuels. Driving the price of food up in under developed nations to satisfy your own desire to feel warm and gooey inside is inexcusable.
Indeed, the deed/trait system in LOTRO is probably the best "achievement" system I've seen.
Generally they come in 2 levels (I think 3 or 4 for the quest related ones), level 1 is a title you can display, level 2 is a stat boost that can stack up by finishing deeds in different areas.
Some give insane boosts to your character, enough give you a big advantage in PvP, or make your life so much easier in PvE.
Unfortunately it's not the gathering of the passwords that hurts the business with things like Confiker.
I was recently on contract for a large bank doing what they called "lvl 1 support" (tough times and no work calls for tough measures). I bailed after 2 days due to the fact they'd let Confiker take a massive hold on the network. 1500+ servers, every workstation of about 20 000 was infected. The biggest issue was that users were being locked out of their accounts, productivity was at almost 0, and the highest level of support had no idea what they were doing. Supposedly they were fixing the issues, however the servers they "fixed" were ending up reinfected due to them not patching against Confiker straight away.
Pretty much a lack of decent IT staff (they are currently offshoring all their support staff, with infrastructure staff to be moved later) was to blame for the massive infection. Policies weren't enforced, lower level support staff had close to full administrative access on the servers, and there were no proactive patching cycles. I've seen this before and raised the red flag at previous jobs, unfortunately the calls for greater security and greater responsibility for high level admins has gone unheeded.
The people controlling IT departments prefer to follow their little management processes rather than actually do anything productive for the company. Taking months if not a year to deploy a critical patch on a server, or ignoring calls for tightened security policies (both digital and social) are the real reason companies fail. What IT managers need to remember is, a decent password policy is a vital portion of a wider solution.
Unfortunately, as we can see now, the UK have some serious issues with their politicians flagrantly abusing the system. It really doesn't surprise me that they'd be stupid enough to openly admit they are biased toward Microsoft even though the policy states otherwise.
This really isn't a good example given the current situation in the UK.
... get marked -1.
I would suspect that over some nice luncheons and dinners that the US Army would have been "persuaded" to upgrade to Vista and not 7. This kind of crap happens all the time in government agencies that don't have to balance their funding sheets.
In large corporations things are vetted and validated mostly*, but for things like the Army it's all about "chain-o-command". This seems to breed corruption from the highest levels down, unfortunately the soldiers are the ones who bare the brunt of the issues - just look at the joke that the "Land Warrior" project is.
No doubt the person who made the decisions has been bought by MS or has a vested interest in MS.
You're machine was born Pwnd. Nuf said.
Your ability to utilise the english language was born pwnd. Nuf Said.
Continue wanking off in your mom's basement?
I don't think you understand the concept of the word you have used.
Unlike "jerking" it does not need "off" after it. This leads me to believe you are not an Aussie, but an American trying to appropriate Aussie slang.
The actual phrase should be:
Continue wanking in your mom's basement?
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Yes, No, No.
Arsenic, yes, for sure, 100% natural.
Tobacco, no, it's been modified by humans through selective breeding, exactly the same as other crops.
Multivitamins are no different to having a diet that consists of fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. While not the best substitute for a decent diet, to say that vitamins aren't natural is just stupid.
Uhh, the security is the issue. Why was such a sensitive device allowed to be removed from a secure area into an "area where 1000 badge holders had access"? As with all "secure" systems, the biggest security issue is people. If you're not going to enforce security then there's no point having it.
I think that's a bit overboard, I've used both a Netgear and Linksys wireless router for my ADSL2+ and I've not had any issues using BT. Hell, I even use my NAS as the BT client now and it works great.
I'd say that the issues with the GGPs BT is more that he/she has a craptacular ADSL router or that its QoS is turned on but isn't configured correctly. Either way, there are solutions to the issues and they don't require building an expensive network.
>
Take this as another example. Australia recently banned guns, and had their firearm homocide rate TRIPLE!!!
[Citation Needed]
The only "evidence", if it can be called this, of an increase in violence are opinion pieces such as blogs and editorials. There are no statistics or research to back this up. As an Australian I am proud of our gun control laws and laugh every time I see some gun-nut claiming they've done harm.
This is just one site that shows how murders have NOT CHANGED and that gun related accidents have changed. They even state that assaults & other crime cannot be seen as a direct result of gun control laws.
http://www.gunsandcrime.org/auresult.html
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks you can get better results from using a decent search engine and your own wits. To me this seems like a gimmick more than anything, thus why there is so much hype.
Products that deliver quality generally stand on their own merits, not on a pile of hype.
because that's not the 2nd thing you'd guess?
I'd say it's more to do with fear. Keep people afraid and they'll adhere to some text's words. It's not that people are born believing in god and wanting to do good in "his" name, it's that they are brainwashed into fearing an invisible man who watches everything you do.
It's essentially the same as normal society, except in the society at large you can fall on two sides of the fence: those that fear the law enough not to commit a crime, and those that don't. Replace law with god and you've got a religious commune.
So no, they don't govern via "meta governance", it's merely fear of doing the "wrong" thing according to their texts. Which really means people don't want to go against a central figure who interprets their text for them.
I agree, but you should really clarify "stress".
Negative emotion stress is, of course, not good. The adrenaline, edge of your seat, put you in the zone stress is great.
It's one reason I find some games totally miss the mark be it via controls, atmosphere, achievements, or even gameplay. They can pull out either of these stresses depending on if they do it right. You need that feeling of urgency and distress to get your mind into the game, for that suspension of disbelief. Negative emotion stress is quite different, rage quits, anger, smacktalk, etc.
Agreed... As we say here in Australia:
Harden the fuck up!
They certainly can try, but ultimately there is no way a webmaster can "detect" if his advert was displayed properly, short of looking over the end-user's shoulder.
In the USA it's perfectly legal under copyright law for browsers to alter the display to remove ads. If webmaster wants to replace his homepage with a TOS contract, that's another story.
(Also it is hilarious that you "think" something is a "fact" based on one site who detected one ad-block method, and decided to be an asshat about it. Typical nerd spazoid reaction, I guess.)
Point being, most webmasters know adblocking is just a fact of life and they've learned to live with it. If Taco tried to stop adblockers from accessing Slashdot, most people would end up having a nice laugh at his expense.
I can see you're wanting to troll there, to be honest, you're still wrong. No matter how much you call me an "asshat" or a "nerd spazoid", it doesn't mean you're correct. Your UID shows you've been here for a while, yet you have learnt nothing of how web sites can be constructed.
It's quite simple to create a script that would detect if an ad is presented or not. If the script is blocked, well, you'd be going against the T&C of the site. If the ad is blocked, you'd know.
It's hilarious that you "think" that resorting to name calling and bullshit to support your previously flawed argument is a valid tactic. I'd suggest that you stay away from posting crap like this, but I know it would do no good...