Back when the Soviet Union still existed, the US had to keep up the facade of a liberal, free country where you may be what and how you want to be, where your privacy and your rights are protected by the government and not trampled on
To be fair, though, this was also the era of Hoover's FBI and the Red Scare. We had no business claiming to be any better than the Soviets as long as we had institutions with names like the "House Unamerican Activities Committee."
There's plenty of stupid fascist bullshit going on today in America and I'm never reluctant to bitch about it on Slashdot... but honestly, I suspect things were even worse for most of the country's modern history. Don't let a misplaced sense of nostalgia obscure the progress that has been made over the last several decades.
If you don't like your government you and other like-minded people can elect a new one.
Yeah, right, I and the 5% of the population who's "like-minded." Democracy is 95 wolves and 5 sheep making dinner plans.
In this reality, the vast majority of my fellow Americans believe that Jesus rode dinosaurs to work. The less power and influence these people have over my life, the better.
What do you do if all corporations supplying product X are bad?
Same as you. Either refrain from buying product X, or tweak my moral compass to make it seem OK.
How about another example - There's solid evidence that Giant Mining Corp (tm) is destroying the environment. You sell your shares and stop buying from them directly. That has no effect because hardly any of their other customers join in the boycott. Also the companies you buy products from are all customers of Giant Mining Corp, so you can't avoid indirectly sending them money.
I'd have no problem with your example, except that power-crazed governments (including ostensibly democratic ones like our own, here in the US) always seem to targeting everybody and everything except Giant Mining Corp (tm). It's almost as if Giant Mining Corp (tm) has figured out ways to influence the various regulatory agencies to its own ends, and used its considerable resources to make it happen.
My position is that far from being a small set of exceptions that can be addressed on a case-by-case basis, this sort of corruption and regulatory capture is a natural and inseparable part of any large bureaucracy. I don't have any good suggestions on where to go from here... but giving even more power to the government officials we have now, or to the morons on the street who keep electing them, cannot possibly be the answer.
If you're a US citizen, one estimate I've seen is that you're subject to 40,000+ pages of Federal, state, and local laws. You may absolutely rest assured that you have broken more than one of them today, probably before you even got out of bed this morning. As have I.
Now, who has "something to hide," and who doesn't?
Even with how little control we have over government, it's still more than we have over businesses.
How do you figure that? I can always refuse to do business with a given corporation. Try that with the government, and they will send men with guns after you.
The relativism on here is just dumbfounding, sometimes.
So what's his angle? Why is someone with that kind of reputation stooping to patent trolling? Do you think that's what Allen wants to be remembered for?
I don't disagree with you about his many positive contributions (and I believe I made that very clear), but this is like Bill Gates waking up one morning and deciding to go club seals with a video crew tagging along. Is it profitable? Not likely. Is it a good PR move? Of course not. Is it a masterstroke of respectable villainy, worthy of history's all-time great evil overlords? No. It just doesn't make any sense.
For one thing, if I were that wealthy and didn't care about my legacy or public image, I'd get more serious about my evil-doing. I wouldn't fart around with a bunch of chickenshit patent suits. I'd build a vast island fortress in the desert and staff it with robotic underage hookers or something.
Anything but engage in this sort of penny-ante legal lameness, which does nothing but tarnish my reputation among informed, technologically-literate people.
The Cinerama restoration and KEXP's migration beyond college radio come to mind. Other people would cite EMP, although I'm not a fan of that one. He has also funded some interesting (if abortive) scientific projects like the Allen Telescope Array.
I don't live there so I don't know anything about his various South Lake Union ventures and schemes, but I will say that my impression of Allen was generally positive prior to what he's doing now. Not that he gives much of a hoot what some random people on Slashdot think about him.
Paul Allen has done a lot of great stuff (and some not so great stuff) for the Seattle area, but on the whole he's definitely made a positive contribution. Now, at a time in his life when he might have looked to the Gates Foundation or other global interests to occupy his time, he decided instead to buy up a bunch of bullshit software patents and go trolling.
So fuck off, Paul. You could've made a difference, but you decided to enrich a gang of lawyers instead.
Of course, the article you quote is written by a liberal arts major like yourself, and, like you, lacks basic understanding of statistics. You can't really compare the average Chinese (who still lives in extreme poverty, is lacking education and prospects for the future) to the person, who is allowed to live in Shenzhen (where Foxconn's main facility is located). Shenzhen's population is very far from a representative sample of the Chinese population. People there are much, much better educated (1/5 of China's PhDs work there), paid substantially more than elsewhere and, generally, have much better lives than the norm in China. But don't let your ignorance stop you from spewing the cliches that you hear on the conservative radio broadcasts while you drive to your cleaning job.
That's the longest-winded rendition of "Sorry, you're right -- my bad" I've ever seen. Are you sure you're not a liberal arts major?
Of course, Foxconn's employee suicide rate is less than that of the rest of the Chinese population taken as a whole, but don't let that derail your derp.
How about someone comes up with something scientifically significant without proving to be in bed with one side or the other?
Scientists have tried very hard to do just that, and they have failed. You can't prove that something is "safe," but repeated studies have consistently shown no harm.
It's outrageous that unqualified pseudo-governmental bodies like this committee have so much power over the rest of us.
As someone mentioned above, the IBM T221s have offered similar pixel density for years, but at a staggering cost.
Someone sold a used one on eBay a few weeks ago for around $2000. Several more used T221s appeared right after that, so now might actually be a good time to buy one. They are ordinarily very rare.
I'm a little unclear on how authorizing on a per-application basis, using a hashed ID as the other user mentioned above, would open up a significant attack surface. I agree that UAC works, and that it isn't easily circumvented... but still, I should have the ability to disable it on a per-application basis, and optionally for any processes spawned by that application.
Obviously that''s an insecure practice on my part and should be done only with care, but turning UAC off entirely really does expose a huge attack surface, and that's what I'm doing now, along with a few million other Windows users who might or might not understand the implications of what they're doing.
I guess it comes down to whether you believe that sustainability should be part of the definition of progress. I'm not a leftist or hardcore environmentalist in most respects but I would argue that it should be. In other words,if you're doing something that won't cultivate a healthy nation, society, and economy over the next 100 years, you're not being 'progressive.'
Dictators like Stalin and Mao no doubt thought of themselves as progressives, but IMHO only posterity can apply that label, and posterity says otherwise.
I am totally fed up with you anti-Sony people having a field day with this story. IT HAPPENED. It could have happened to your sacred Apple, Microsoft, or Nintendo
Says a lot when Sony's karma is in worse shape than Microsoft's.
As long as people are stupid enough to keep giving money to Sony, they have no real incentive to change.
A very large committee voted on your right to not be murdered. Continue cursing the voter and perhaps he'll vote that right away from you: let it be a need you decide for yourself and we'll see how well you do at defending it.
Ah, threats... how lovely. That must be part of this "social contract" thing I keep hearing so much about.
Going to have to call [citation needed] on that. Very few HP calculators, programmable or otherwise, had a conventional '=' key for use with infix expressions.
My comment was never intended to apply only to programmable calculators anyway; not sure where you got that.
That's absolutely incorrect. Only a few of the earlier models made after 1977 offered both modes. You may be thinking of the 'anniversary edition' HP-35S, which worked like the original HP-35 but added an optional algebraic mode.
Countless engineering students have stories about someone asking to borrow their HP calculators, only to return it with a puzzled expression a few minutes later.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when the Soviet Union still existed, the US had to keep up the facade of a liberal, free country where you may be what and how you want to be, where your privacy and your rights are protected by the government and not trampled on
To be fair, though, this was also the era of Hoover's FBI and the Red Scare. We had no business claiming to be any better than the Soviets as long as we had institutions with names like the "House Unamerican Activities Committee."
There's plenty of stupid fascist bullshit going on today in America and I'm never reluctant to bitch about it on Slashdot... but honestly, I suspect things were even worse for most of the country's modern history. Don't let a misplaced sense of nostalgia obscure the progress that has been made over the last several decades.
If you don't like your government you and other like-minded people can elect a new one.
Yeah, right, I and the 5% of the population who's "like-minded." Democracy is 95 wolves and 5 sheep making dinner plans.
In this reality, the vast majority of my fellow Americans believe that Jesus rode dinosaurs to work. The less power and influence these people have over my life, the better.
What do you do if all corporations supplying product X are bad?
Same as you. Either refrain from buying product X, or tweak my moral compass to make it seem OK.
How about another example - There's solid evidence that Giant Mining Corp (tm) is destroying the environment. You sell your shares and stop buying from them directly. That has no effect because hardly any of their other customers join in the boycott. Also the companies you buy products from are all customers of Giant Mining Corp, so you can't avoid indirectly sending them money.
I'd have no problem with your example, except that power-crazed governments (including ostensibly democratic ones like our own, here in the US) always seem to targeting everybody and everything except Giant Mining Corp (tm). It's almost as if Giant Mining Corp (tm) has figured out ways to influence the various regulatory agencies to its own ends, and used its considerable resources to make it happen.
My position is that far from being a small set of exceptions that can be addressed on a case-by-case basis, this sort of corruption and regulatory capture is a natural and inseparable part of any large bureaucracy. I don't have any good suggestions on where to go from here... but giving even more power to the government officials we have now, or to the morons on the street who keep electing them, cannot possibly be the answer.
If you're a US citizen, one estimate I've seen is that you're subject to 40,000+ pages of Federal, state, and local laws. You may absolutely rest assured that you have broken more than one of them today, probably before you even got out of bed this morning. As have I.
Now, who has "something to hide," and who doesn't?
Even with how little control we have over government, it's still more than we have over businesses.
How do you figure that? I can always refuse to do business with a given corporation. Try that with the government, and they will send men with guns after you.
The relativism on here is just dumbfounding, sometimes.
Cue the statists: "Don't like taxes? Move your business to Somalia! Hyuck, hyuck, derp.."
So what's his angle? Why is someone with that kind of reputation stooping to patent trolling? Do you think that's what Allen wants to be remembered for?
I don't disagree with you about his many positive contributions (and I believe I made that very clear), but this is like Bill Gates waking up one morning and deciding to go club seals with a video crew tagging along. Is it profitable? Not likely. Is it a good PR move? Of course not. Is it a masterstroke of respectable villainy, worthy of history's all-time great evil overlords? No. It just doesn't make any sense.
For one thing, if I were that wealthy and didn't care about my legacy or public image, I'd get more serious about my evil-doing. I wouldn't fart around with a bunch of chickenshit patent suits. I'd build a vast island fortress in the desert and staff it with robotic underage hookers or something.
Anything but engage in this sort of penny-ante legal lameness, which does nothing but tarnish my reputation among informed, technologically-literate people.
The Cinerama restoration and KEXP's migration beyond college radio come to mind. Other people would cite EMP, although I'm not a fan of that one. He has also funded some interesting (if abortive) scientific projects like the Allen Telescope Array.
I don't live there so I don't know anything about his various South Lake Union ventures and schemes, but I will say that my impression of Allen was generally positive prior to what he's doing now. Not that he gives much of a hoot what some random people on Slashdot think about him.
Paul Allen has done a lot of great stuff (and some not so great stuff) for the Seattle area, but on the whole he's definitely made a positive contribution. Now, at a time in his life when he might have looked to the Gates Foundation or other global interests to occupy his time, he decided instead to buy up a bunch of bullshit software patents and go trolling.
So fuck off, Paul. You could've made a difference, but you decided to enrich a gang of lawyers instead.
Why should I read it? The people who ultimately vote on it will not have read it.
That's the longest-winded rendition of "Sorry, you're right -- my bad" I've ever seen. Are you sure you're not a liberal arts major?
Of course, Foxconn's employee suicide rate is less than that of the rest of the Chinese population taken as a whole, but don't let that derail your derp.
How about someone comes up with something scientifically significant without proving to be in bed with one side or the other?
Scientists have tried very hard to do just that, and they have failed. You can't prove that something is "safe," but repeated studies have consistently shown no harm.
It's outrageous that unqualified pseudo-governmental bodies like this committee have so much power over the rest of us.
What about the fact that Microsoft shipped an OS that could be root kitted by a CD claiming to be red book audio?
I could tolchock you with a pipe wrench and steal your wallet, but the difference between me and Sony is that I won't.
Likewise, with Microsoft and the rootkit business.
Take a look at some of the cheaper FPGA boards out there, like the Nexys 2. I've used these to talk to 24-bit 2.5MSPS parts with no problem at all.
Basically they're a cheap way to get your hands on a CY68013 USB chip and enough glue logic to make it easy to hook up the ADC.
As someone mentioned above, the IBM T221s have offered similar pixel density for years, but at a staggering cost.
Someone sold a used one on eBay a few weeks ago for around $2000. Several more used T221s appeared right after that, so now might actually be a good time to buy one. They are ordinarily very rare.
I'm a little unclear on how authorizing on a per-application basis, using a hashed ID as the other user mentioned above, would open up a significant attack surface. I agree that UAC works, and that it isn't easily circumvented... but still, I should have the ability to disable it on a per-application basis, and optionally for any processes spawned by that application.
Obviously that''s an insecure practice on my part and should be done only with care, but turning UAC off entirely really does expose a huge attack surface, and that's what I'm doing now, along with a few million other Windows users who might or might not understand the implications of what they're doing.
it's that they never allow their computer to shut down and clear the RAM), etc
Uh
I guess it comes down to whether you believe that sustainability should be part of the definition of progress. I'm not a leftist or hardcore environmentalist in most respects but I would argue that it should be. In other words,if you're doing something that won't cultivate a healthy nation, society, and economy over the next 100 years, you're not being 'progressive.'
Dictators like Stalin and Mao no doubt thought of themselves as progressives, but IMHO only posterity can apply that label, and posterity says otherwise.
None of those companies deliberately included malware in a product I purchased from them.
Stalin brought more progress in shorter time to his nation than any leader throughout the twentieth century
Wow. Just... wow.
You've raised trolling to a whole new level of play. Even the East German judge seems impressed.
I am totally fed up with you anti-Sony people having a field day with this story. IT HAPPENED. It could have happened to your sacred Apple, Microsoft, or Nintendo
Says a lot when Sony's karma is in worse shape than Microsoft's.
As long as people are stupid enough to keep giving money to Sony, they have no real incentive to change.
A very large committee voted on your right to not be murdered. Continue cursing the voter and perhaps he'll vote that right away from you: let it be a need you decide for yourself and we'll see how well you do at defending it.
Ah, threats... how lovely. That must be part of this "social contract" thing I keep hearing so much about.
Going to have to call [citation needed] on that. Very few HP calculators, programmable or otherwise, had a conventional '=' key for use with infix expressions.
My comment was never intended to apply only to programmable calculators anyway; not sure where you got that.
not so. Give a 2nd grader 35 + 42 and see if they add them across using infix or stack the numbers up and use postfix.
Point being, we give second graders "35 + 42", not "35 42 +".
That's absolutely incorrect. Only a few of the earlier models made after 1977 offered both modes. You may be thinking of the 'anniversary edition' HP-35S, which worked like the original HP-35 but added an optional algebraic mode.
Countless engineering students have stories about someone asking to borrow their HP calculators, only to return it with a puzzled expression a few minutes later.