The real problem is not the lack of space but the systematic chronical unability of the industry and users alike (but especially the industry) to properly manage their files.
Yes, there are some cases where 4TB truly isn't enough without the problem being poor data management (large datacenter, huge DVD-quality media collection, etc). But far too often we see the reason for more space being poorly managed mail servers, tons of WIP that has not been properly archived or disposed of, huge amounts of unhandled spam, work-related casual conversations that really don't need to be stored after the work they relate to has been completed, outdated and obsolete software not being uninstalled, inflated registry (or any other overhead data) that keeps being backed up and restored without any cleanup involved...
A lot of people, when challenged with the problem of this vast array of useless junk data will just respond "well we have space, and if we run out we can always buy more, and the purchase price is way cheaper than the manhours needed to clean up this mess, so why bother". Another common excuse is "it doesn't bother me, so why not keep it just in the potential case I'll ever need it again, even if the chance is extremely small".
It does not occur to these people that proper data management is extremely important procedure, and must be ingrained in the business process. Much the same way you clean up physical garbage, remove obsolete physical equipment, empty the contents of that blue recycle bin under your desk, and do it all on a regular basis to keep the garbage from getting out of hand. Trash not worth keeping in real life does not become valuable when stored online, even if it can be stored for free or cheaper than the disposal price.
Properly disposing data as a business process will take time, but this time will be saved many times over when people don't have to dig up through junk to find what they need, when important things are not buried in crap, when all data worth storing is clean and polished and free of rust, when your OS is not clobbered up by crap processes or temporary files, when your DBE doesn't have to go through zillions of crap stored in the database to find a single row, when you do the cleanup as-you-go, rather than waiting for things to be completely out of hand and then doing a half-assed job because by that point it is really hard to tell apart the good from the junk.
The problem is spiraling - the longer people don't properly clean up data, the harder it is to clean it, especially as files grow larger and more complex as hardware and applications evolve. In turn, it motivates people to just invest in extra drive space, processing power, memory, etc, because by that time it's cheaper than the cleanup. And of course, once the resources have been invested into, they are filled with even more crap until they are full too.
But the biggest problem of poor data management is actually not technical, it's business-related. As we are faced with an increasing information overload, it is very easy to make poor decisions based on data that is not necessarily wrong, but is outdated, matched with incompatible other data, or just not put in the right perspective. The whole "data warehousing" principle absolutely REQUIRES proper and timely maintenance and cleanup of data. This is so important that (and this has been proven over and over again) large corporations with proper data management gain a substantial strategic advantage over those who don't.
It's not just about a little slower response time, or some more work to find what you need on the server. It's about right business decisions vs. wrong business decisions. And it's also about not being taken advantage of - contractors and business partners can easily manipulate data to present it in the light favorable to them, and if you are a private business, this kind of crap can make you bankrupt. Of course, it happens day after day in the government with the taxpayers footing the bill, but that's another story altog
In response to a comment I can't seem to find anymore which says that the Russian mafia will go after any cash they can get and not just profits.
The smart mafia actually do limit themselves to profits. Unlike petty crime, their vision to racketeering is more long-term, and they understand that there is no point stealing so much from a business that it will go, well, out of business, because then they won't have a source of cash anymore.
One (not the only one, but an important one) of the reasons organized crime keeps flourishing in Russia is because it is tolerated by those who are racketeered as a "lesser of evils". The mafia is smart about the amount of money it taxes you, and always leaves you with enough so it's still profitable for you to operate and make a living, even if just barely. They also form pacts with other big mafia groups about the "turf" - each group only "milks" their own turf. And finally they, through use of force, protect businesses from petty non-mafia criminals, often with much better efficiency than police.
Faced on one side between a corrupt and inefficient police protection, the potential deadly hostility of the mafia, dirty (and violent) practices by competitors, and a huge amount of petty criminals who would tear your business apart if not controlled; and on the other side paying a large but still survivable "tax" to your "roof" in return for not only being left in peace by that mafia, but who (with lethal efficiency) keep petty criminals out, ensure neighboring mafia also leave you in piece as a respect for their neighbor's turf, businesses rationally choose the second option, since it is the only way they can survive. Heck, the mafia may even help you monopolize your market by putting YOUR competitor out of business as well.
This problem can only be solved on a national level by combating the highest echelons of crime, increasing police power and pay, seeding out corruption, and restoring faith in the government. That's what Putin has been doing for the last few years, which did greatly improve security in Russia (what we see now is peanuts compared to what it was in mid 90s), but of course the only think the West knows about Putin is his anti-liberal oppressive stance, abuse of power, and polonium-armed spies killing political enemies half-way across the globe. Well, I guess every politician is only remembered for the bad things they done.
People who are not idiots (well assuming there are any non-idiots that molest children in the first place) won't be dumb enough to record it on camera to begin with.
Last time I checked you can disable Clippy in 10 seconds from the Office Options menu, without the need to find the right line, remove it, and recompile. Anyone who is not capable of clicking Tools->Options and checking off a checkmark would not be capable of editing the code either.
Not being anti-OOS in any way, and there are many instances when editing a few lines WOULD make a difference in the usefulness of software (Windows Firewall sure comes to mind), but this is not one of them. Sorry.
"one way to disable it is to go into the code and remove the offending portion."
Or take the even easier path and set up your firewall to block all packets from this application.
But neither of those options solve the underlying problem - the whole point of FLOSS is to prevent this from happening in the first place. If I have to take any extraordinary steps to secure myself against a free software application I'm using, if I have to go and turn an enemy into a friend through manual effort and each other user has to do the same thing (assuming they are even technically proficient enough to understand and modify the code), then that's a damn good sign it's time to fork the project and uproot the whole system once and for all.
The community deserves better than to be preyed upon. Community scrutiny is a critically important point in FLOSS. I want to get a piece of software and KNOW it's been thoroughly tested for safety and security and anything REMOTELY resembling a backdoor has been removed and verified that it's removed. Yes, I can go and analyze each bit of the code myself, but the whole beauty is that (unless I'm testing a beta) I don't have to, because it should have been done by thousands of others already.
Let's say I work as a police officer at the airport. I see some girl coming forward with this device with chips and wires which bears reasonable resemblance to a bomb.
It is either a bomb, or it is not.
I can either choose to take action, or not to.
If I choose not to take action, and it does happen to be a bomb, then innocent people will die, the world will be in chaos all over again, and I'll probably go to prison for dereliction of duty. If it is not a bomb, then at best nothing will happen, but much more likely I'll get at least a reprimand for negligence and at worst will lose my job for the same reason.
If I choose to take action, then at best I will prevent a major catastrophe, become famous for quickly and bravely acting, and in general be the hero of the day. And if it is not a bomb? Well then probably I'll be able to justify my actions anyways, on grounds of reasonable assumption and the surrounding situation where time can be critical. At the worst, all I'll get is some trolls flaming me on Slashdot.
"But use on a small group of people (and where the area is known to be cleared of other parties) probably would be acceptable."
Well, this is part of the problem. Small crowds clear of other parties are easy enough to manage without this device in the first place. It's the big mobs when you can potentially find this device useful. So the only case when this device would be useful is when it would be also unacceptably dangerous to use it.
And jokes aside, the risks are higher than just getting hurt a little.
1. 1/64th of an inch seems sufficient to cause serious and possibly permanent eye damage. This is an area-wide weapon, it is not selective about its targets or which body part it is targeting.
2. Exposure to extreme levels of pain (especially suddenly) can also lead to a seizure or heart attack. If the pain is extremely strong, it may incapacitate the target (ever hurt yourself so badly you can't do ANYTHING except perhaps scream?), meaning the people can't escape the target zone, exposing themselves to even more pain.
3. If the authorities decide to use the weapon against a crowd, it is natural to presume some have a higher pain tolerance then others, and if the weapons is used until all or the majority of the crowd is quelled, the weaker-tolerance people will be exposed to unnecessary (and with potential serious consequences) levels and duration of pain.
4. I'm not even going to the legal definitions of physical torture in and by itself...
I'm not saying it shouldn't be used under any circumstances whatsoever, but it seems that it should be classified as deadly or almost deadly force ("deadly" in most jurisdictions includes "capable of producing grievous bodily harm).
Even the story the other day about the use of a Taser (which is also an almost-deadly-force weapon, with documented fatalities) being used where the suspect posed absolutely no danger and could have been subdued without it). This device can lead to the same consequences of a Taser, but instead of being used on one person, it affects hundreds, with no way to observe the effects on each single person and adjust the device power accordingly.
Are there cases where use of this device is legitimate? Maybe, for example if you are rushed by an angry mob and you legitimately feel your life to be in danger if you don't take immediate action. But given our record for indiscriminate and excessive use of next-to-lethal force (rubber bullets, Tasers, etc.) against peaceful demonstrations, non-violent action, cases where safer alternatives are available, and with "just for kicks" being a legitimate reason, I certainly wouldn't bet on this device to be safe in the hands of those who use it. This device is NOT a valid substitute for a water cannon or tear gas, and if in a given situation you are not justified to use live firearms, you also shouldn't be justified to use something like this.
If (or, sadly speaking, when) it will be classified as a "safe, non-lethal" weapon (just as the Taser already has been) well, we will be one mile higher up Shit Creek.
OMGWTFBBQ iNnoCenT CusTomeRz ar3 bEinG sCrew3d over by eV1l cOrp0rAtionz!!11 THiNk oF t3h c0nsUmErs!!
Sigh...
1. If you don't like the service or the TOS that comes with it, don't use it. 2. If you are worried that a service you previously liked would change it TOS and make your data inaccessible should you refuse it, keep backup of the data. 3. If you are afraid of being led to a new TOS through vendor lock-in, take preventive measures to ensure a smooth rollover to another provided should something go wrong. 4. If you are worried a TOS may have something you are not willing to accept, actually take time to read it before clicking "Next". If you don't understand something, there are a lot of places online where you can discuss a TOS and get a legal-to-human translation of it, especially TOSs of big corporations. 5. If you don't follow any of the above points, only blame yourself when you get screwed over.
As much as companies want to, they can't (legally) FORCE you to allow them to use your data for anything if you didn't accept the TOS. Especially now that courts upheld the law that companies must obtain consent before continuing to provide service with a modified TOS. Companies can mislead you, try to mask the truth, entice you with BS offers, sweet-talk you, downplay the entire thing, block you from using their services (or even access to your data)... But they can't FORCE you to play by their rules.
As a consumer, you have the ultimate power to affect corporate decisions - either use their service or don't. Those who whine about how bad/unethical a particular service is, but keep using it, are hypocrites, not to mention stupid, and fully deserve whatever consequences they get from being sheep.
For the rest of us, there is a good amount of viable alternatives to be able to drop one provider for the favor of another at (almost) a moment's notice, but iff the basic rules above are being followed. If not, then, as I said, blame nobody but yourself when you have "no choice" but to be the company's data slave.
And can we, FFS, stop protecting the "innocent consumers" who get screwed over by evil corporations due to their stupidity? Seriously, this is worse than the "think of the children" mentality - at least you could argue that children are too young to think for themselves - but adults should really know better. Let people get what they deserve.
I keep seeing over and over posts that say that a "hardware" method would be the one that is totally secure, and the best example being a hammer.
You'd be surprised, however, how resistant drives can be do physical damage.
For those who know anything about hard drives (referring to regular platter drives, not solid state), you'd know that inside the rectangular case (made out of crappy soft aluminum) lie several plates connected to each other through a spinner in the middle, and they are made out of pretty strong steel.
When I took my data security course, we practiced destroying data physically. So I opened the hard drive, removed the platters and disconnected them. Then came the fun part, trying to destroy them.
First I tried several grades of sandpaper. All the lighter ones didn't leave a JACK SQUAT mark, no matter how hard I tried. The most heavy ones left _very_ small marks which were only visible in the direction of the strongest applied force. Sanding a whole drive this way would take days, and I wasn't sure it was strong enough to actually fully remove the magnetic cover. If anything, I damaged the sandpaper more than the drive.
Then I tried a metal file. The results were considerably better, with deep strong marks, but again, they only covered the path of the sharpest edge of the file, not the whole contact surface area. I filed away for 5 minutes straight, and I only managed to produce about 30% area of a single side of a single platter which I could say was destroyed with high probability of not being recoverable.
Finally, I tried a heavy hammer on another platter, having locked the platter in a vise. I wasn't impressed. The hammer, at best, produced bends across the drive. After another 5 minutes of hammering away, the drive was certainly not round anymore, but the total surface area actually destroyed by these bends was fairly minimal. Sure, it may prevent an easy automatic way of recovering data using regular means (spinning it against a magnetic reader the same way drives usually work), but I'd say at least 80% of that platter still had data on it. The manual work requiring to read the data piece by piece may indeed take weeks, but it would probably be possible, and having the mentality of "it'll take them too much work to read it" is akin to having the mentality of "nobody will hack me because I'm not a target of interest and they won't bother". From the point of view of a security specialist, it's wrong in principle.
The moral of the story is that hard drives are a pretty tough nut and not as easily physically destroyed as you may think. To all those rambling away about how unreliable hard drives are and how easy they break down, I'd say that in the vast, vast majority of cases what breaks down is the engine, the magnetic mechanism, or something else that would prevent the drive from being readable by tools built in the drive box, but not the platters with the data itself.
Another common myth is that you can easily and securely permanently wipe the data with a magnet. The forces required to near-instantly and irrecoverably overwrite the magnetic stripe of the disk are ENORMOUS. During regular usage, a relatively weak magnet is used to read and write on the disk, but it only operates on a minuscule area of the disk (trivially, by writing a bit on an 4 (double sided)-platter 500GB drive, the magnetic edge only operates on 1/500,000,000,000th area of the platter. Now use the denominator to figure out the magnetic intensity required to fully overwrite the whole disk at once. It ain't pretty. Industrial-grade degaussers may do the trick, but not your average home magnet (which, of course, doesn't mean the magnet is not good enough to randomly corrupt a small part of the data which will screw your partition table and make your OS refuse the read the drive anyways). But I somehow doubt the folks in the NSA use Windows XP Home Edition to investigate hard drives.
The "true" way to destroy hard drives is to completely melt them in an incinerator, and t
Umm, maybe the same one as when in the workplace you are given a corporate email?
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on/. Nobody is forcing students to use the mail/file system for their own private stuff. But just like in the workplace, where for official business you use corporate resources, in school you are given *for free* school resources to store your notes, homework, projects, or anything else school related.
Some advantages:
- Local storage means much faster access times than external provider - School bears responsibility for system upkeep - if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project that was stored or submitted there. - System can be integrated with class notes and announcements, and the calendar can be used as school agenda - student logs in, sees the courses he's taking, and sees the homework assigned to him in each course. - With login information tied to student IDs, it is much easier to track assignments and work going through the system for administration and teachers, you don't need to wonder who submitted the work coming from email s3xyb4b3@gmail.com.
And YES, you will get in trouble if you download pr0n or pirate music using the system... Just like you would at your workplace for doing the same thing using the corporate system. If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect it to be monitored by your employer.
It's very nice more schools are accepting the high-tech way of doing work. Not only it makes managing assignments much easier (meaning teachers can spend more time TEACHING and less time going through homework), but it trains children to real life, where high-tech work has already became a standard.
Of course you can, but the problem is that that's not what happened.
If you only took the hardware, completely erased all the software (up to OS, bootloader, whatever), and then installed something else from scratch, that'd be fine (at least I think so).
But the guy who hacked it used the existing iPhone OS built in on the device in order to operate the phone. Even if all his modifications were hardware-based, he still uses the OS (which now gets signals from a separate piece of hardware) to make calls, use iPhone features, etc. And I'm pretty damn sure that getting a singal from anyone but AT&T (or, more generally, getting any signal to the OS other than those provided by Apple hardware) violates the software license agreement, so you infringe copyright.
Now, you may have a very good case for an ANTITRUST suit (hardware and software are different domains, so Apple shouldn't be allowed to force people to use one only if they use the other), but that's something that has to be decided in court, and you can't "preemptively" violate copyright just because you think the license agreement violates antitrust law. Besides, OSX being forced upon Macs was around for a while, and nobody could do anything about it.
No, but it means that something else (of potential scientific or utilitarian use) will be left behind.
Saying a lightsaber doesn't add an extra cost to a shuttle is like saying you should ride the bus free because the bus is driving anyways, and 1 more person won't change the cost of paying for the gas or the driver's salary. But that either means someone else won't be able to get on, or the bus generates less revenue which will simply rollover to either less bus service in the future or higher ticket costs for the rest, to cover for that loss.
There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
Fail to see how this infringes on driver's privacy.
Do the cars belong to the drivers? No. They are the company's property.
Do the drivers drive them in their own free time? No. They are doing business work driving these cars and are paid for it.
Do companies have the right to keep track of how their assets are used? Absolutely.
For those who compare this to companies that put keyloggers on employee's computers - this is NOT the same. If companies were to install cameras inside cabs and watch the driver's behavior (something many bus companies actually do), or record the drivers voice, or even record driving manners by analyzing the car computer's data - you'd have a (somewhat) legitimate case of privacy invasion, since you'd monitor the driver himself.
The GPS however, only monitors the cab. In the worst case scenario (for privacy advocates) the data could be used to find drivers who just don't do their jobs, say those who say they are busy with a customer while the GPS indicates they are parked near a fast food restaurant. But companies do have the right to monitor the productivity of their workers to a certain degree.
This kind of monitoring would be equivalent to an IT company monitoring which workstations are turned on, how often does a particular person check in his source code, or even where is the current physical location of a business laptop given to an employee on a business trip and who has been told that the laptop is for official use only, and that he should use his personal laptop for any non work related activity or travel. This is fair business practice, not a privacy invasion. If the employee was stupid enough to take his WORK laptop to a nightclub, and/or even stupider to do it on his workshift, and then get tracked there, it's his own fault and he deserves to be fired - not for immoral behavior but for abuse of company resources and slacking off on the job. Had the employee taken his own personal laptop on his own free time, he would not have been monitored or caught.
Same story with the cabs - they are not personal vehicles - they are given to drivers for business use only, on paid business shifts only, and companies have the right to make sure the equipment is used as intended.
Besides, there are lots of other legimiate uses for GPS in cabs - such as improved computer-assisted dispatcher coordination, by automatically finding which cab is closest to a taxi request, or by providing interactive driving maps to drivers.
I'm all for privacy, and I hate when companies track the behavior of employees which is not related to business use or done on their own free time (such as firing someone because he visits a swinger's club or whatever). But if you do that on your workshift and using company resources, then it's your own stupid fault and you have every right to be fired.
If you are going to fly it in the US, just paint it sideways. The worst problem you'll then encounter is border patrol thinking its those illegal Mexican immigrants crossing by air.
Apparently telling people to "get the -facts-" has proved counterproductive for MS, so the plan B is "compare [what we tell you about us to what we tell you about them]". And unlike our last campaign, we won't let facts to get in our way this time!
When a genuinely new way of doing something is patented, I don't see much of a problem. Even if you don't agree with software patents in principle, patents that introduce a new technology tend to expire before the technology matures enough to become profitable. In that case, the patent filer gets the honestly deserved upper hand of having better in-house knowledge about the technology by the time it gets to production stage, instead of having the unfair advantage of forced monopoly over its production.
Some patents are harmful - such as those which either patent a well known technology they didn't really invent, or patentsquatting (patenting something with the only reason of preventing others from using this technology, even if you have no intention of using it yourself either), but it doesn't seem this was one of these cases.
If the copyright system worked like the patent system (requires novelty and expires in a reasonable amount of time (~5 years)) then we'd be living in a much better world.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem is not the lack of space but the systematic chronical unability of the industry and users alike (but especially the industry) to properly manage their files.
Yes, there are some cases where 4TB truly isn't enough without the problem being poor data management (large datacenter, huge DVD-quality media collection, etc). But far too often we see the reason for more space being poorly managed mail servers, tons of WIP that has not been properly archived or disposed of, huge amounts of unhandled spam, work-related casual conversations that really don't need to be stored after the work they relate to has been completed, outdated and obsolete software not being uninstalled, inflated registry (or any other overhead data) that keeps being backed up and restored without any cleanup involved...
A lot of people, when challenged with the problem of this vast array of useless junk data will just respond "well we have space, and if we run out we can always buy more, and the purchase price is way cheaper than the manhours needed to clean up this mess, so why bother". Another common excuse is "it doesn't bother me, so why not keep it just in the potential case I'll ever need it again, even if the chance is extremely small".
It does not occur to these people that proper data management is extremely important procedure, and must be ingrained in the business process. Much the same way you clean up physical garbage, remove obsolete physical equipment, empty the contents of that blue recycle bin under your desk, and do it all on a regular basis to keep the garbage from getting out of hand. Trash not worth keeping in real life does not become valuable when stored online, even if it can be stored for free or cheaper than the disposal price.
Properly disposing data as a business process will take time, but this time will be saved many times over when people don't have to dig up through junk to find what they need, when important things are not buried in crap, when all data worth storing is clean and polished and free of rust, when your OS is not clobbered up by crap processes or temporary files, when your DBE doesn't have to go through zillions of crap stored in the database to find a single row, when you do the cleanup as-you-go, rather than waiting for things to be completely out of hand and then doing a half-assed job because by that point it is really hard to tell apart the good from the junk.
The problem is spiraling - the longer people don't properly clean up data, the harder it is to clean it, especially as files grow larger and more complex as hardware and applications evolve. In turn, it motivates people to just invest in extra drive space, processing power, memory, etc, because by that time it's cheaper than the cleanup. And of course, once the resources have been invested into, they are filled with even more crap until they are full too.
But the biggest problem of poor data management is actually not technical, it's business-related. As we are faced with an increasing information overload, it is very easy to make poor decisions based on data that is not necessarily wrong, but is outdated, matched with incompatible other data, or just not put in the right perspective. The whole "data warehousing" principle absolutely REQUIRES proper and timely maintenance and cleanup of data. This is so important that (and this has been proven over and over again) large corporations with proper data management gain a substantial strategic advantage over those who don't.
It's not just about a little slower response time, or some more work to find what you need on the server. It's about right business decisions vs. wrong business decisions. And it's also about not being taken advantage of - contractors and business partners can easily manipulate data to present it in the light favorable to them, and if you are a private business, this kind of crap can make you bankrupt. Of course, it happens day after day in the government with the taxpayers footing the bill, but that's another story altog
In response to a comment I can't seem to find anymore which says that the Russian mafia will go after any cash they can get and not just profits.
The smart mafia actually do limit themselves to profits. Unlike petty crime, their vision to racketeering is more long-term, and they understand that there is no point stealing so much from a business that it will go, well, out of business, because then they won't have a source of cash anymore.
One (not the only one, but an important one) of the reasons organized crime keeps flourishing in Russia is because it is tolerated by those who are racketeered as a "lesser of evils". The mafia is smart about the amount of money it taxes you, and always leaves you with enough so it's still profitable for you to operate and make a living, even if just barely. They also form pacts with other big mafia groups about the "turf" - each group only "milks" their own turf. And finally they, through use of force, protect businesses from petty non-mafia criminals, often with much better efficiency than police.
Faced on one side between a corrupt and inefficient police protection, the potential deadly hostility of the mafia, dirty (and violent) practices by competitors, and a huge amount of petty criminals who would tear your business apart if not controlled; and on the other side paying a large but still survivable "tax" to your "roof" in return for not only being left in peace by that mafia, but who (with lethal efficiency) keep petty criminals out, ensure neighboring mafia also leave you in piece as a respect for their neighbor's turf, businesses rationally choose the second option, since it is the only way they can survive. Heck, the mafia may even help you monopolize your market by putting YOUR competitor out of business as well.
This problem can only be solved on a national level by combating the highest echelons of crime, increasing police power and pay, seeding out corruption, and restoring faith in the government. That's what Putin has been doing for the last few years, which did greatly improve security in Russia (what we see now is peanuts compared to what it was in mid 90s), but of course the only think the West knows about Putin is his anti-liberal oppressive stance, abuse of power, and polonium-armed spies killing political enemies half-way across the globe. Well, I guess every politician is only remembered for the bad things they done.
I wonder when I'll be able to buy the software that automatically unscrambles all the pixelated regions on my rather specific-content Japanese DVDs.
People who are not idiots (well assuming there are any non-idiots that molest children in the first place) won't be dumb enough to record it on camera to begin with.
The idiots will keep doing it regardless.
Status quo.
The Gay Bomb which induces enemies to engage in homosexual behavior.
I wonder how long before it becomes a political weapon of mass discreditation?
Yep, a paper clip is more important than a personal relationship. True sign of a CS guy: smart, experienced, and lonely.
Last time I checked you can disable Clippy in 10 seconds from the Office Options menu, without the need to find the right line, remove it, and recompile. Anyone who is not capable of clicking Tools->Options and checking off a checkmark would not be capable of editing the code either.
Not being anti-OOS in any way, and there are many instances when editing a few lines WOULD make a difference in the usefulness of software (Windows Firewall sure comes to mind), but this is not one of them. Sorry.
Communism will be an "extreme democracy" the day fascism will be a "benevolent dictatorship".
"one way to disable it is to go into the code and remove the offending portion."
Or take the even easier path and set up your firewall to block all packets from this application.
But neither of those options solve the underlying problem - the whole point of FLOSS is to prevent this from happening in the first place. If I have to take any extraordinary steps to secure myself against a free software application I'm using, if I have to go and turn an enemy into a friend through manual effort and each other user has to do the same thing (assuming they are even technically proficient enough to understand and modify the code), then that's a damn good sign it's time to fork the project and uproot the whole system once and for all.
The community deserves better than to be preyed upon. Community scrutiny is a critically important point in FLOSS. I want to get a piece of software and KNOW it's been thoroughly tested for safety and security and anything REMOTELY resembling a backdoor has been removed and verified that it's removed. Yes, I can go and analyze each bit of the code myself, but the whole beauty is that (unless I'm testing a beta) I don't have to, because it should have been done by thousands of others already.
Let's say I work as a police officer at the airport. I see some girl coming forward with this device with chips and wires which bears reasonable resemblance to a bomb.
It is either a bomb, or it is not.
I can either choose to take action, or not to.
If I choose not to take action, and it does happen to be a bomb, then innocent people will die, the world will be in chaos all over again, and I'll probably go to prison for dereliction of duty. If it is not a bomb, then at best nothing will happen, but much more likely I'll get at least a reprimand for negligence and at worst will lose my job for the same reason.
If I choose to take action, then at best I will prevent a major catastrophe, become famous for quickly and bravely acting, and in general be the hero of the day. And if it is not a bomb? Well then probably I'll be able to justify my actions anyways, on grounds of reasonable assumption and the surrounding situation where time can be critical. At the worst, all I'll get is some trolls flaming me on Slashdot.
I'll go with the second option, thank you.
"But use on a small group of people (and where the area is known to be cleared of other parties) probably would be acceptable." Well, this is part of the problem. Small crowds clear of other parties are easy enough to manage without this device in the first place. It's the big mobs when you can potentially find this device useful. So the only case when this device would be useful is when it would be also unacceptably dangerous to use it.
And jokes aside, the risks are higher than just getting hurt a little.
1. 1/64th of an inch seems sufficient to cause serious and possibly permanent eye damage. This is an area-wide weapon, it is not selective about its targets or which body part it is targeting.
2. Exposure to extreme levels of pain (especially suddenly) can also lead to a seizure or heart attack. If the pain is extremely strong, it may incapacitate the target (ever hurt yourself so badly you can't do ANYTHING except perhaps scream?), meaning the people can't escape the target zone, exposing themselves to even more pain.
3. If the authorities decide to use the weapon against a crowd, it is natural to presume some have a higher pain tolerance then others, and if the weapons is used until all or the majority of the crowd is quelled, the weaker-tolerance people will be exposed to unnecessary (and with potential serious consequences) levels and duration of pain.
4. I'm not even going to the legal definitions of physical torture in and by itself...
I'm not saying it shouldn't be used under any circumstances whatsoever, but it seems that it should be classified as deadly or almost deadly force ("deadly" in most jurisdictions includes "capable of producing grievous bodily harm).
Even the story the other day about the use of a Taser (which is also an almost-deadly-force weapon, with documented fatalities) being used where the suspect posed absolutely no danger and could have been subdued without it). This device can lead to the same consequences of a Taser, but instead of being used on one person, it affects hundreds, with no way to observe the effects on each single person and adjust the device power accordingly.
Are there cases where use of this device is legitimate? Maybe, for example if you are rushed by an angry mob and you legitimately feel your life to be in danger if you don't take immediate action. But given our record for indiscriminate and excessive use of next-to-lethal force (rubber bullets, Tasers, etc.) against peaceful demonstrations, non-violent action, cases where safer alternatives are available, and with "just for kicks" being a legitimate reason, I certainly wouldn't bet on this device to be safe in the hands of those who use it. This device is NOT a valid substitute for a water cannon or tear gas, and if in a given situation you are not justified to use live firearms, you also shouldn't be justified to use something like this.
If (or, sadly speaking, when) it will be classified as a "safe, non-lethal" weapon (just as the Taser already has been) well, we will be one mile higher up Shit Creek.
MS should sue these guys for trademark infringement...
WHERE?!?!?
OMGWTFBBQ iNnoCenT CusTomeRz ar3 bEinG sCrew3d over by eV1l cOrp0rAtionz!!11 THiNk oF t3h c0nsUmErs!!
Sigh...
1. If you don't like the service or the TOS that comes with it, don't use it.
2. If you are worried that a service you previously liked would change it TOS and make your data inaccessible should you refuse it, keep backup of the data.
3. If you are afraid of being led to a new TOS through vendor lock-in, take preventive measures to ensure a smooth rollover to another provided should something go wrong.
4. If you are worried a TOS may have something you are not willing to accept, actually take time to read it before clicking "Next". If you don't understand something, there are a lot of places online where you can discuss a TOS and get a legal-to-human translation of it, especially TOSs of big corporations.
5. If you don't follow any of the above points, only blame yourself when you get screwed over.
As much as companies want to, they can't (legally) FORCE you to allow them to use your data for anything if you didn't accept the TOS. Especially now that courts upheld the law that companies must obtain consent before continuing to provide service with a modified TOS. Companies can mislead you, try to mask the truth, entice you with BS offers, sweet-talk you, downplay the entire thing, block you from using their services (or even access to your data)... But they can't FORCE you to play by their rules.
As a consumer, you have the ultimate power to affect corporate decisions - either use their service or don't. Those who whine about how bad/unethical a particular service is, but keep using it, are hypocrites, not to mention stupid, and fully deserve whatever consequences they get from being sheep.
For the rest of us, there is a good amount of viable alternatives to be able to drop one provider for the favor of another at (almost) a moment's notice, but iff the basic rules above are being followed. If not, then, as I said, blame nobody but yourself when you have "no choice" but to be the company's data slave.
And can we, FFS, stop protecting the "innocent consumers" who get screwed over by evil corporations due to their stupidity? Seriously, this is worse than the "think of the children" mentality - at least you could argue that children are too young to think for themselves - but adults should really know better. Let people get what they deserve.
Well then the "common man" should get what he gets. It's not our job to babysit him.
I keep seeing over and over posts that say that a "hardware" method would be the one that is totally secure, and the best example being a hammer.
You'd be surprised, however, how resistant drives can be do physical damage.
For those who know anything about hard drives (referring to regular platter drives, not solid state), you'd know that inside the rectangular case (made out of crappy soft aluminum) lie several plates connected to each other through a spinner in the middle, and they are made out of pretty strong steel.
When I took my data security course, we practiced destroying data physically. So I opened the hard drive, removed the platters and disconnected them. Then came the fun part, trying to destroy them.
First I tried several grades of sandpaper. All the lighter ones didn't leave a JACK SQUAT mark, no matter how hard I tried. The most heavy ones left _very_ small marks which were only visible in the direction of the strongest applied force. Sanding a whole drive this way would take days, and I wasn't sure it was strong enough to actually fully remove the magnetic cover. If anything, I damaged the sandpaper more than the drive.
Then I tried a metal file. The results were considerably better, with deep strong marks, but again, they only covered the path of the sharpest edge of the file, not the whole contact surface area. I filed away for 5 minutes straight, and I only managed to produce about 30% area of a single side of a single platter which I could say was destroyed with high probability of not being recoverable.
Finally, I tried a heavy hammer on another platter, having locked the platter in a vise. I wasn't impressed. The hammer, at best, produced bends across the drive. After another 5 minutes of hammering away, the drive was certainly not round anymore, but the total surface area actually destroyed by these bends was fairly minimal. Sure, it may prevent an easy automatic way of recovering data using regular means (spinning it against a magnetic reader the same way drives usually work), but I'd say at least 80% of that platter still had data on it. The manual work requiring to read the data piece by piece may indeed take weeks, but it would probably be possible, and having the mentality of "it'll take them too much work to read it" is akin to having the mentality of "nobody will hack me because I'm not a target of interest and they won't bother". From the point of view of a security specialist, it's wrong in principle.
The moral of the story is that hard drives are a pretty tough nut and not as easily physically destroyed as you may think. To all those rambling away about how unreliable hard drives are and how easy they break down, I'd say that in the vast, vast majority of cases what breaks down is the engine, the magnetic mechanism, or something else that would prevent the drive from being readable by tools built in the drive box, but not the platters with the data itself.
Another common myth is that you can easily and securely permanently wipe the data with a magnet. The forces required to near-instantly and irrecoverably overwrite the magnetic stripe of the disk are ENORMOUS. During regular usage, a relatively weak magnet is used to read and write on the disk, but it only operates on a minuscule area of the disk (trivially, by writing a bit on an 4 (double sided)-platter 500GB drive, the magnetic edge only operates on 1/500,000,000,000th area of the platter. Now use the denominator to figure out the magnetic intensity required to fully overwrite the whole disk at once. It ain't pretty. Industrial-grade degaussers may do the trick, but not your average home magnet (which, of course, doesn't mean the magnet is not good enough to randomly corrupt a small part of the data which will screw your partition table and make your OS refuse the read the drive anyways). But I somehow doubt the folks in the NSA use Windows XP Home Edition to investigate hard drives.
The "true" way to destroy hard drives is to completely melt them in an incinerator, and t
Umm, maybe the same one as when in the workplace you are given a corporate email?
/. Nobody is forcing students to use the mail/file system for their own private stuff. But just like in the workplace, where for official business you use corporate resources, in school you are given *for free* school resources to store your notes, homework, projects, or anything else school related.
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on
Some advantages:
- Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
- School bears responsibility for system upkeep - if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project that was stored or submitted there.
- System can be integrated with class notes and announcements, and the calendar can be used as school agenda - student logs in, sees the courses he's taking, and sees the homework assigned to him in each course.
- With login information tied to student IDs, it is much easier to track assignments and work going through the system for administration and teachers, you don't need to wonder who submitted the work coming from email s3xyb4b3@gmail.com.
And YES, you will get in trouble if you download pr0n or pirate music using the system... Just like you would at your workplace for doing the same thing using the corporate system. If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect it to be monitored by your employer.
It's very nice more schools are accepting the high-tech way of doing work. Not only it makes managing assignments much easier (meaning teachers can spend more time TEACHING and less time going through homework), but it trains children to real life, where high-tech work has already became a standard.
Of course you can, but the problem is that that's not what happened.
If you only took the hardware, completely erased all the software (up to OS, bootloader, whatever), and then installed something else from scratch, that'd be fine (at least I think so).
But the guy who hacked it used the existing iPhone OS built in on the device in order to operate the phone. Even if all his modifications were hardware-based, he still uses the OS (which now gets signals from a separate piece of hardware) to make calls, use iPhone features, etc. And I'm pretty damn sure that getting a singal from anyone but AT&T (or, more generally, getting any signal to the OS other than those provided by Apple hardware) violates the software license agreement, so you infringe copyright.
Now, you may have a very good case for an ANTITRUST suit (hardware and software are different domains, so Apple shouldn't be allowed to force people to use one only if they use the other), but that's something that has to be decided in court, and you can't "preemptively" violate copyright just because you think the license agreement violates antitrust law. Besides, OSX being forced upon Macs was around for a while, and nobody could do anything about it.
No, but it means that something else (of potential scientific or utilitarian use) will be left behind.
Saying a lightsaber doesn't add an extra cost to a shuttle is like saying you should ride the bus free because the bus is driving anyways, and 1 more person won't change the cost of paying for the gas or the driver's salary. But that either means someone else won't be able to get on, or the bus generates less revenue which will simply rollover to either less bus service in the future or higher ticket costs for the rest, to cover for that loss.
There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
The technique was already invented by the Soviets in the '30s:
Before
After
Insignificant person removed.
Fail to see how this infringes on driver's privacy.
Do the cars belong to the drivers? No. They are the company's property.
Do the drivers drive them in their own free time? No. They are doing business work driving these cars and are paid for it.
Do companies have the right to keep track of how their assets are used? Absolutely.
For those who compare this to companies that put keyloggers on employee's computers - this is NOT the same. If companies were to install cameras inside cabs and watch the driver's behavior (something many bus companies actually do), or record the drivers voice, or even record driving manners by analyzing the car computer's data - you'd have a (somewhat) legitimate case of privacy invasion, since you'd monitor the driver himself.
The GPS however, only monitors the cab. In the worst case scenario (for privacy advocates) the data could be used to find drivers who just don't do their jobs, say those who say they are busy with a customer while the GPS indicates they are parked near a fast food restaurant. But companies do have the right to monitor the productivity of their workers to a certain degree.
This kind of monitoring would be equivalent to an IT company monitoring which workstations are turned on, how often does a particular person check in his source code, or even where is the current physical location of a business laptop given to an employee on a business trip and who has been told that the laptop is for official use only, and that he should use his personal laptop for any non work related activity or travel. This is fair business practice, not a privacy invasion. If the employee was stupid enough to take his WORK laptop to a nightclub, and/or even stupider to do it on his workshift, and then get tracked there, it's his own fault and he deserves to be fired - not for immoral behavior but for abuse of company resources and slacking off on the job. Had the employee taken his own personal laptop on his own free time, he would not have been monitored or caught.
Same story with the cabs - they are not personal vehicles - they are given to drivers for business use only, on paid business shifts only, and companies have the right to make sure the equipment is used as intended.
Besides, there are lots of other legimiate uses for GPS in cabs - such as improved computer-assisted dispatcher coordination, by automatically finding which cab is closest to a taxi request, or by providing interactive driving maps to drivers.
I'm all for privacy, and I hate when companies track the behavior of employees which is not related to business use or done on their own free time (such as firing someone because he visits a swinger's club or whatever). But if you do that on your workshift and using company resources, then it's your own stupid fault and you have every right to be fired.
...made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag
If you are going to fly it in the US, just paint it sideways. The worst problem you'll then encounter is border patrol thinking its those illegal Mexican immigrants crossing by air.
Apparently telling people to "get the -facts-" has proved counterproductive for MS, so the plan B is "compare [what we tell you about us to what we tell you about them]". And unlike our last campaign, we won't let facts to get in our way this time!
When a genuinely new way of doing something is patented, I don't see much of a problem. Even if you don't agree with software patents in principle, patents that introduce a new technology tend to expire before the technology matures enough to become profitable. In that case, the patent filer gets the honestly deserved upper hand of having better in-house knowledge about the technology by the time it gets to production stage, instead of having the unfair advantage of forced monopoly over its production.
Some patents are harmful - such as those which either patent a well known technology they didn't really invent, or patentsquatting (patenting something with the only reason of preventing others from using this technology, even if you have no intention of using it yourself either), but it doesn't seem this was one of these cases.
If the copyright system worked like the patent system (requires novelty and expires in a reasonable amount of time (~5 years)) then we'd be living in a much better world.