... is the one issue I've had with this election. Barack Obama raised over $639 million dollars, and spent over $573 million dollars throughout this election (source).
Yes, it's common for politicians to spend huge amounts of money on advertising for their Presidential elections, but in a time when the economy is going to hell and back... maybe a 30 minute TV commercial on the major TV stations in a prime-time slot was a bit... wasteful.
I'm not saying I don't like Obama - he's my favorite candidate, and I hope he's elected President, but the money he raised could be used a lot of different ways. Some of the things he used the money on really helped his campaign and was worth it, but some things were unnecessary...
Odd, yet another "x has been linked to y" report on CNN today, just saw another one that reports that "Teens that regularry watch sexually explicit material on TV" (I assume they mean something on prime time TV) "Have a higher risk of teenage pregnancies.
Pulling random stuatistics out of their asses for 2 subjects... gg CNN, gg!
Did you just copy/paste this entire post from Wikipedia's article about Slashdot???
Protip: Next time, actually type your redundant flames, rather than stealing them.
I'm not surprised they're doing this - they know people watch Viacom owned TV shows on YouTube, so here's a breakdown of their plans:
1. Launch a laggy, Web 2.0 music video site, covered with banner ads and siezure enducing Flash ads, with the same concepts as YouTube 2. Sue every video sharing site to remove every Viacom owned media file from said sites 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!?
Give it a few months and there will be nothing on that site except MTV's classic "Reality" shows, half of which are copies of previous reality shows with 1 thing changed. I'm just wondering how long it's going to take for them to drop the "M" from "MTV"...
I just hope the next President (Obama) can stop these stupid lawsuits and fix the broken legal system. It's pathedic, I could sue anyone for anything, regardless if their innocent or guilty!
Intellectual property laws make it much worse... the RIAA goes around suing innocent people for hundreds of thousands of dollars for dowloading a few music files from the Internet! WTF? Intellectual property == corrupt.
This pretty much ruined Ted's shot of being reelected, but will this hurt the image of political figures from Alaska? So close to election day, could this affect Sarah Palin's image? Morality? (Which has already been questioned).
When I turned on my Wii yesterday, I had a message from Nintendo describing the updates, and specifically stating that this update will block homebrew programs.
Although I was disappointed to see them block homebrew content, at least they specifically said that they were patching it, rather than not telling users, like Sony, or banning your Xbox/Xbox 360 from Xbox Live forever, like Microsoft...
Why is it that politicians don't give a damn about an issue even though millions of people protest it, speak out against it, etc, until they are affected? How long have we been saying the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 was evil? Since, I don't know, maybe 2000??? And did they ever care?
So politicians don't care, but the second a politician is affected by an injustice, they speak out about it, protest it, etc? Wow, talk about slow. Maybe if the politicians cared about these issues BEFORE the issues are written into injust laws, we wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
How many YouTube videos have been removed using the truly unjust DMCA Act? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Remember those anti-Scientology videos, that used free speech to get the message out about the (cult) of Scientology? The ones that got removed by the thousands because some guy filed 3,000 DMCA takedown notices?
And the politicians don't care about 3,000 protest videos being deleted from YouTube, but they sure as hell get their lawyers and press people to issue statements denouncing the DMCA Act due to a few removed campaign videos.
(I do at least give him credit for issuing a statement)
I was shocked to see this button on YouTube after reading that XKCD comic, but it doesn't work for me. It playes all my comments really fast so I can't understand it.
I made the mistake of buying a Games for Windows - LIVE game (Gears of War for PC). Hated it. It was just pathetic. Every time I would launch the damn game, I get nag screens saying "You can have cool features if you pay $50 and buy a Gold membership!!!". Laggy as hell. Reminded me to much of Xbox Live (Waste of money). It seemed like a dumbed down version of Xbox Live (how much dumber can it get)
My experience was so bad with GFWL that it made me vow never to buy another PC game with the "Games for Windows LIVE" logo on it. And I won't. Bought the PS3 version of GTA:IV months ago. Glad I did.
My sister (who is obsessed with music) bought hundreds of dollars worth of music from Wal-Mart's music downloading service. Recently, her MP3 player started acting strange and refused to play any DRM songs, so I had to reformat the whole MP3 player and resync all of her music to it. (There was also serious filesystem corruption)
If Wal-Mart had ended their DRM support yesterday...
The fundamentally flawed "Password Recovery"...
on
Palin Email Hacker Found
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First off, I don't think this guy was really from "Anonymous" or anyone like that - I think he was just someone who wanted attention.
Quoting from TFA:
As detailed in the postings, the Palin hack didn't require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin's password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse -- the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.
This proves how fundamentally flawed the "Password Recovery" system, used by many websites, really is. Even if this had happened ot an average Joe guy, all one would have to do to get his security question answer is simply know the guy and his past. The questions are SO GENERIC that anyone could easily guess or find out the answer!
Like the common "Mother's maiden name". All you need to do is Google the target's full name! If the target or anyone remotely related to them ever made a family tree, you'll find the tree - including the target's mother's maiden name.
So if it's THAT EASY for an average guy, doing this for a politician whose ENTIRE LIFE STORY has been told countless times on TV, online, on the news, and on the radio, is as simple as one Google search.
I hope everyone running for President right now learns this, and, when someone becomes America's next President, has the sense to change this issue (cough)Obama(cough).
The whole "Security question" idea is a flawed way of providing security. A majority of websites use generic questions, like "What's your mother's maiden name", "What was the name of your first school teacher", "First pet's name?", etc.
If someone were to simply provide the REAL answer to these questions, it's remarkably easy to use social engineering to extract the information from someone. Anyone could find out your mother's maiden name! Public records! First teacher's name? Old yearbooks.
It's very easy to do this with an average person - but a politician whose entire life has been reported on, blogged about, and put under the public eye - makes it a whole lot easier. Her entire life story is on the Internet and on TV! All one has to do is do some Googleing... and the information is right there.
I heard this on the news today, Palin's campign reported they were "outratged by the blatent violation of privacy" when Anonymous hacked her e-mail (go Anon!). However, the government spys on EVERYONE on the Internet. They probaly have every e-mail Palin has ever sent.
So why should it be any different when her private e-mails are relased online? The government already invades her privacy...
If such a system were used, it would surely be abused. People could flag a website as "untrue", when in fact it is truthful, thus ruining the point of having truth raters.
Take this example: if this type of system were in place right now, what do you think the "truthness" rating of www.johnmccain.com would be? www.whitehouse.gov?
If the system is one of those handheld machines police use, wouldn't the "source code" be a very low-level language, like an assembly language (not like C/C++ or Java)?
How the hell are the defense going to explain an assembly language - a VERY low-level language - to the Jury? A jury that most likely consists of people who use their computers to check their E-mail, watch videos, and surf the web. It took me a LONG time to make any sense of assembly languages... I just wonder how long it will take the Jury... or the people teaching the Jury what every line of an assembly language does... on a device that probably contains thousands of lines of code. It would be a bit easier with a higher level language like C++, because that at least provides words that people could comprehend.
Seriously, this is just stupid and all, but what I'd really like to know is how much money of our taxes is going to this Copyright Czar project? And at a time when the economy is about to collapse...
(I'm sure this will be modded down) Seriously, what the fuck is everyone complaining about? Yes, Spore has DRM... but it's not at all as bad as everyone is making it! Yes, it's SecurROM. But what do average consumers have to worry about?
We have proven to EA that they HAVE to put this DRM stuff on their game. Someone fucked up and released Spore weeks early in Australia, and just a FUCKING DAY after the game comes out, there's already a shitload of torrents! Hello? If you want to bitch about the DRM, tell the people stealing the game to stop...
If anyone read about Spore's DRM, here's what it does: 1. Let's you install it 3 times and only 3 times. Yes, this is an annoyance, but it can easily be fixed by simply calling EA. If you ahve that much of a problem with this, get the crack. You bought the damn game...
On the contrary, Spore's DRM is far less worse than even Steam. I don't need to be connected to the Internet to play my game. I tried it, it just says you just can't play online.
Again, people showed EA they need DRM, so stop complaining about it.
(Also I fully support downloading movies or music... but I draw the line at PC games.)
I recently went away on a 7 day cruise to Bermuda. The first thing I noticed is how outrageously expensive Internet access on the ship was.... like $50+ for 2 hours! So I had to stay off the Internet.
My mom always has to call our aunt every few days, since she's checking up on the house and getting our mail. So she made 3 phone calls... each about 10 minutes long while the ship was at sea. And guess what happened at the end of the month? They charged us $25 for each call we made. The total - for about 30 minutes of phone calls - was over $75 dollars!!! FOR 3 PHONE CALLS.
Some of the people we saw on the ship - especially younger people - were talking on cell phones almost the whole trip. If any of them had AT&T and didn't understand their service contracts....
By the time Comcast (aka Concast) actually gets the FCC to look into the matter or take a vote, Barack Obama will be President, which means more government regulation of big business! Hopefully he orders ISPs to abide by net neutrality, which he fully supports.
However, God help us if... McCain wins.
I bought a nVidia 8600GT in December 2007 - no issues here... it hasn't failed and I haven't seen one graphics related BSoD on Vista (seen several BSoDs due to other things, like a corrupted registry, but never anything relating to the graphics).
Does the failure suddenly appear, or is there any kind of early warning signs?
I play a LOT of Counter-Strike Source, Call of Duty 4, and many other PC games online... so... will this be an issue for me?
In addition to actually playing the games online, which uses a huge amount of data, I frequently have to download large mods, or extra content, from game servers using custom content....
I'm getting tired of some fucking moron capitalist telling me what I can and can't do on SERVICE I PAY FOR. Especially the Internet. There is NO PRACTICAL REASON for this, so I refuse to cut back on my data usage. If they call, I'll tell 'em to fuck off because I'm going to Verizon.
It's Comcasts own damn fault things can slow down due to one bandwidth "hog". They designed their system in a way that this happens.
Why not make comics that represent the sad, pathetic truth of the fucked up legal system and unconstitutionality by the RIAA and MPAA? Hell, just edit this one and add the truth to it, like change the police officer giving here the trial notice to a money-hungry lawyer in a suit and tie, with $ signs for eyes. And add in some details in the end, so it says "I say it's good I got caught because some people don't get caught, which means they are hurting the (take out music industry) the artists that make music, because now they won't be able to afford their 10th Lear jet or 4th luxury sports car or huge mansion because people are waking up and realizing that this is BS."
Oh, and add some stuff about how the RIAA are demanding 9,250 times the "damages" the poor girl caused, and have the RIAA lawyers say "We don't give a fuck it's unconstitutional or not. This is America god damn it, and in America, we have a truly fucked up legal system where we, the legal representatives to the few conglomerates that control the entire media in the United States like Commies, can sue innocent people for not doing exactly what a certain industry wants us to do!
This bitch should have realized that we make you PAY so much money for music for a reason, because we WANT $$$$$$$. And yet she chose to get in the way of our capitalist dream, so she must burn in Hell!!! (but since we can't go that far, let's just sue her for 9,250-20,000 times the value of the music she downloaded). I mean seriously, if the government didn't have a problem with us harassing Sweden to shut down ONE WEBSITE FOR A FEW DAYS just for hosting LINKS to copyrighted materials (The Pirate Bay), what makes you think they'll have a problem with this? "
And, with the eminent domain BS (isn't that a thing Republicans love to do), edit the section and have the mayor come down to the house, with police officers armed with AK-47s saying "Get the fuck out of this house, it's the city's now biach! We take this house under Eminent Domain, SO GET THE FUCK OUT"
So once we make these comics, distribute them to all the collage students that received the lying propaganda!
Slashdot Mirror
... is the one issue I've had with this election. Barack Obama raised over $639 million dollars, and spent over $573 million dollars throughout this election (source).
Yes, it's common for politicians to spend huge amounts of money on advertising for their Presidential elections, but in a time when the economy is going to hell and back... maybe a 30 minute TV commercial on the major TV stations in a prime-time slot was a bit... wasteful.
I'm not saying I don't like Obama - he's my favorite candidate, and I hope he's elected President, but the money he raised could be used a lot of different ways. Some of the things he used the money on really helped his campaign and was worth it, but some things were unnecessary...
Odd, yet another "x has been linked to y" report on CNN today, just saw another one that reports that "Teens that regularry watch sexually explicit material on TV" (I assume they mean something on prime time TV) "Have a higher risk of teenage pregnancies.
Pulling random stuatistics out of their asses for 2 subjects... gg CNN, gg!
Did you just copy/paste this entire post from Wikipedia's article about Slashdot??? Protip: Next time, actually type your redundant flames, rather than stealing them.
I'm not surprised they're doing this - they know people watch Viacom owned TV shows on YouTube, so here's a breakdown of their plans:
1. Launch a laggy, Web 2.0 music video site, covered with banner ads and siezure enducing Flash ads, with the same concepts as YouTube
2. Sue every video sharing site to remove every Viacom owned media file from said sites
3. ???
4. PROFIT!?
Give it a few months and there will be nothing on that site except MTV's classic "Reality" shows, half of which are copies of previous reality shows with 1 thing changed. I'm just wondering how long it's going to take for them to drop the "M" from "MTV"...
I just hope the next President (Obama) can stop these stupid lawsuits and fix the broken legal system. It's pathedic, I could sue anyone for anything, regardless if their innocent or guilty!
Intellectual property laws make it much worse... the RIAA goes around suing innocent people for hundreds of thousands of dollars for dowloading a few music files from the Internet! WTF? Intellectual property == corrupt.
This pretty much ruined Ted's shot of being reelected, but will this hurt the image of political figures from Alaska? So close to election day, could this affect Sarah Palin's image? Morality? (Which has already been questioned).
So what could this do to John McCain's campaign?
(Probably already missed first post)
When I turned on my Wii yesterday, I had a message from Nintendo describing the updates, and specifically stating that this update will block homebrew programs. Although I was disappointed to see them block homebrew content, at least they specifically said that they were patching it, rather than not telling users, like Sony, or banning your Xbox/Xbox 360 from Xbox Live forever, like Microsoft...
Why is it that politicians don't give a damn about an issue even though millions of people protest it, speak out against it, etc, until they are affected? How long have we been saying the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 was evil? Since, I don't know, maybe 2000??? And did they ever care?
So politicians don't care, but the second a politician is affected by an injustice, they speak out about it, protest it, etc? Wow, talk about slow. Maybe if the politicians cared about these issues BEFORE the issues are written into injust laws, we wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
How many YouTube videos have been removed using the truly unjust DMCA Act? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Remember those anti-Scientology videos, that used free speech to get the message out about the (cult) of Scientology? The ones that got removed by the thousands because some guy filed 3,000 DMCA takedown notices?
And the politicians don't care about 3,000 protest videos being deleted from YouTube, but they sure as hell get their lawyers and press people to issue statements denouncing the DMCA Act due to a few removed campaign videos.
(I do at least give him credit for issuing a statement)
I was shocked to see this button on YouTube after reading that XKCD comic, but it doesn't work for me. It playes all my comments really fast so I can't understand it.
How did anyone live back then without their lulz? And only 2 results for "Epic fail".
I made the mistake of buying a Games for Windows - LIVE game (Gears of War for PC). Hated it. It was just pathetic. Every time I would launch the damn game, I get nag screens saying "You can have cool features if you pay $50 and buy a Gold membership!!!". Laggy as hell. Reminded me to much of Xbox Live (Waste of money). It seemed like a dumbed down version of Xbox Live (how much dumber can it get)
My experience was so bad with GFWL that it made me vow never to buy another PC game with the "Games for Windows LIVE" logo on it. And I won't. Bought the PS3 version of GTA:IV months ago. Glad I did.
My sister (who is obsessed with music) bought hundreds of dollars worth of music from Wal-Mart's music downloading service. Recently, her MP3 player started acting strange and refused to play any DRM songs, so I had to reformat the whole MP3 player and resync all of her music to it. (There was also serious filesystem corruption)
If Wal-Mart had ended their DRM support yesterday...
First off, I don't think this guy was really from "Anonymous" or anyone like that - I think he was just someone who wanted attention.
Quoting from TFA:
As detailed in the postings, the Palin hack didn't require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin's password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse -- the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.
This proves how fundamentally flawed the "Password Recovery" system, used by many websites, really is. Even if this had happened ot an average Joe guy, all one would have to do to get his security question answer is simply know the guy and his past. The questions are SO GENERIC that anyone could easily guess or find out the answer!
Like the common "Mother's maiden name". All you need to do is Google the target's full name! If the target or anyone remotely related to them ever made a family tree, you'll find the tree - including the target's mother's maiden name.
So if it's THAT EASY for an average guy, doing this for a politician whose ENTIRE LIFE STORY has been told countless times on TV, online, on the news, and on the radio, is as simple as one Google search.
I hope everyone running for President right now learns this, and, when someone becomes America's next President, has the sense to change this issue (cough)Obama(cough).
The whole "Security question" idea is a flawed way of providing security. A majority of websites use generic questions, like "What's your mother's maiden name", "What was the name of your first school teacher", "First pet's name?", etc.
If someone were to simply provide the REAL answer to these questions, it's remarkably easy to use social engineering to extract the information from someone. Anyone could find out your mother's maiden name! Public records! First teacher's name? Old yearbooks.
It's very easy to do this with an average person - but a politician whose entire life has been reported on, blogged about, and put under the public eye - makes it a whole lot easier. Her entire life story is on the Internet and on TV! All one has to do is do some Googleing... and the information is right there.
I heard this on the news today, Palin's campign reported they were "outratged by the blatent violation of privacy" when Anonymous hacked her e-mail (go Anon!). However, the government spys on EVERYONE on the Internet. They probaly have every e-mail Palin has ever sent.
So why should it be any different when her private e-mails are relased online? The government already invades her privacy...
If such a system were used, it would surely be abused. People could flag a website as "untrue", when in fact it is truthful, thus ruining the point of having truth raters.
Take this example: if this type of system were in place right now, what do you think the "truthness" rating of www.johnmccain.com would be? www.whitehouse.gov?
If the system is one of those handheld machines police use, wouldn't the "source code" be a very low-level language, like an assembly language (not like C/C++ or Java)?
How the hell are the defense going to explain an assembly language - a VERY low-level language - to the Jury? A jury that most likely consists of people who use their computers to check their E-mail, watch videos, and surf the web. It took me a LONG time to make any sense of assembly languages... I just wonder how long it will take the Jury... or the people teaching the Jury what every line of an assembly language does... on a device that probably contains thousands of lines of code. It would be a bit easier with a higher level language like C++, because that at least provides words that people could comprehend.
Seriously, this is just stupid and all, but what I'd really like to know is how much money of our taxes is going to this Copyright Czar project? And at a time when the economy is about to collapse...
(I'm sure this will be modded down) Seriously, what the fuck is everyone complaining about? Yes, Spore has DRM... but it's not at all as bad as everyone is making it! Yes, it's SecurROM. But what do average consumers have to worry about?
We have proven to EA that they HAVE to put this DRM stuff on their game. Someone fucked up and released Spore weeks early in Australia, and just a FUCKING DAY after the game comes out, there's already a shitload of torrents! Hello? If you want to bitch about the DRM, tell the people stealing the game to stop...
If anyone read about Spore's DRM, here's what it does:
1. Let's you install it 3 times and only 3 times. Yes, this is an annoyance, but it can easily be fixed by simply calling EA. If you ahve that much of a problem with this, get the crack. You bought the damn game...
On the contrary, Spore's DRM is far less worse than even Steam. I don't need to be connected to the Internet to play my game. I tried it, it just says you just can't play online.
Again, people showed EA they need DRM, so stop complaining about it.
(Also I fully support downloading movies or music... but I draw the line at PC games.)
I recently went away on a 7 day cruise to Bermuda. The first thing I noticed is how outrageously expensive Internet access on the ship was.... like $50+ for 2 hours! So I had to stay off the Internet.
My mom always has to call our aunt every few days, since she's checking up on the house and getting our mail. So she made 3 phone calls... each about 10 minutes long while the ship was at sea. And guess what happened at the end of the month? They charged us $25 for each call we made. The total - for about 30 minutes of phone calls - was over $75 dollars!!! FOR 3 PHONE CALLS.
Some of the people we saw on the ship - especially younger people - were talking on cell phones almost the whole trip. If any of them had AT&T and didn't understand their service contracts....
It's plain stupid. $75 for 3 calls.
By the time Comcast (aka Concast) actually gets the FCC to look into the matter or take a vote, Barack Obama will be President, which means more government regulation of big business! Hopefully he orders ISPs to abide by net neutrality, which he fully supports. However, God help us if ... McCain wins.
On a gaming community forum, some kid posted this days ago and said "HA HA"... (on Facepunch, http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=603042). He also posted in game screenshots...
I, for one, can't wait for SPORE! :D
I bought a nVidia 8600GT in December 2007 - no issues here... it hasn't failed and I haven't seen one graphics related BSoD on Vista (seen several BSoDs due to other things, like a corrupted registry, but never anything relating to the graphics). Does the failure suddenly appear, or is there any kind of early warning signs?
I play a LOT of Counter-Strike Source, Call of Duty 4, and many other PC games online... so... will this be an issue for me?
In addition to actually playing the games online, which uses a huge amount of data, I frequently have to download large mods, or extra content, from game servers using custom content....
I'm getting tired of some fucking moron capitalist telling me what I can and can't do on SERVICE I PAY FOR. Especially the Internet. There is NO PRACTICAL REASON for this, so I refuse to cut back on my data usage. If they call, I'll tell 'em to fuck off because I'm going to Verizon.
It's Comcasts own damn fault things can slow down due to one bandwidth "hog". They designed their system in a way that this happens.
Why not make comics that represent the sad, pathetic truth of the fucked up legal system and unconstitutionality by the RIAA and MPAA? Hell, just edit this one and add the truth to it, like change the police officer giving here the trial notice to a money-hungry lawyer in a suit and tie, with $ signs for eyes. And add in some details in the end, so it says "I say it's good I got caught because some people don't get caught, which means they are hurting the (take out music industry) the artists that make music, because now they won't be able to afford their 10th Lear jet or 4th luxury sports car or huge mansion because people are waking up and realizing that this is BS."
Oh, and add some stuff about how the RIAA are demanding 9,250 times the "damages" the poor girl caused, and have the RIAA lawyers say "We don't give a fuck it's unconstitutional or not. This is America god damn it, and in America, we have a truly fucked up legal system where we, the legal representatives to the few conglomerates that control the entire media in the United States like Commies, can sue innocent people for not doing exactly what a certain industry wants us to do!
This bitch should have realized that we make you PAY so much money for music for a reason, because we WANT $$$$$$$. And yet she chose to get in the way of our capitalist dream, so she must burn in Hell!!! (but since we can't go that far, let's just sue her for 9,250-20,000 times the value of the music she downloaded). I mean seriously, if the government didn't have a problem with us harassing Sweden to shut down ONE WEBSITE FOR A FEW DAYS just for hosting LINKS to copyrighted materials (The Pirate Bay), what makes you think they'll have a problem with this? "
And, with the eminent domain BS (isn't that a thing Republicans love to do), edit the section and have the mayor come down to the house, with police officers armed with AK-47s saying "Get the fuck out of this house, it's the city's now biach! We take this house under Eminent Domain, SO GET THE FUCK OUT"
So once we make these comics, distribute them to all the collage students that received the lying propaganda!